Despite the "cozy" setting--nine people hidden away in an unoccupied room in Perkins Library--the ongoing controversy over academic freedom flared up again Tuesday night as the administration took on the Duke Conservative Union, College Republicans and Duke Democrats for an hour and a half of debate.
Senior Madison Kitchens, DCU executive director, and Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College, dominated much of the debate, which the Duke Student Government sponsored.
Thompson dismissed the most significant complaint DCU has issued to date--primarily in an open letter to President Nan Keohane last month decrying the disparity between numbers of registered Democrat and Republican professors-- the possibility that such a concentration of Democrats could lead partisan ideology to determine the nature of coursework and class discussion sufficiently to intimidate dissenting student voices into silence for fear of receiving a lower grade.
"The reason I find that [risk] hard to believe is that the whole life of the faculty member is to learn how to engage in this debate," Thompson said. "That's how they got into this field. That's normative. What would be so insulting as to provoke a negative or punitive response?"
Thompson said the process of simply choosing a small number of course texts from an overwhelming array of options represents an inherent and significant bias. As a result, he said he finds the notion of an "unbalanced" course ultimately meaningless.
"I don't give any credibility to that argument," Thompson said. "Now if a course is comparative, then you have to compare a perspective to something. But if it's not, it's to teach something, then you don't need balance.... All opinions are not equal. So while we want to protect the right to all opinions, once [an opinion] is expressed, I don't always see it as useful. We want informed opinions." Kitchens countered that Thompson underestimates the extent of political influence in the Duke classroom.
"I'm in the economics department," Kitchens said. "I know that if I were in the cultural anthropology department representing my viewpoints, there's no way I'd have the GPA I have today.... If you want to have a class called 'Liberal Perspectives on Inequality,' that's fine. But don't have a course taught by leftist professors using only leftist writers and call it 'Inequalities.'"
Kitchens and Daniel Kennedy, DCU vice president, presented the preponderance of Democrat professors as a problem affecting Democrat and liberal students as much as, if not more than, Republican and conservative students.
"It's ironic that the school is interested in diversity in areas like race and gender, but not intellectual diversity," said Kennedy, who added that he changed his major from history--a department with 32 registered Democrats, four unaffiliated members, and no Republicans--to the more conservative political science department in efforts to find a group more hospitable toward his views.
"If there were 32 white people and only four of a different race in a department, there'd be a much bigger outcry," he said. "I think if I were in Duke Democrats I'd be worried about not being challenged [intellectually]."
Junior Evan Burness, publicity chair for the Duke Democrats, questioned DCU's charge for systematic top-down reform, offering instead that students might do well to take their professors' positions with a grain of salt.
"Don't take it in a vacuum," Burness said. "The teacher is not God. They don't expect you to think that."
The notion of bias in the determination of course offerings proved a point of bitter contestation at times throughout the night. When Kitchens suggested that the literature department's Marxism and Society certificate program relies on an angle "that has been pretty much obliterated in theory and in practice," Thompson pointed as analogy to the continued usefulness of Freudian thought in academics despite the psychology field's general departure from the area.
"There were reasons that psychology moved away from it," Thompson said. "But I'm not going to deny another field the opportunity to build on those concepts."
Thompson also discussed an "ebb and flow" of thought, suggesting that once antiquated viewpoints may prove of interest once again.
Junior Karan Maheshwari, an unaffiliated panelist hailing from Bombay, provided a thought-provoking look at student comfort levels in the classroom--another key topic--with the assertion that, for many international students, fitting in comes before making a point.
"I grew up in a school where there was no debate," Maheshwari said. "It was God's gospel or it was not. It took me a year and a half to make a presentation, even when I was supposed to.... You have a culture shock. It's so hard to get out and meet people, you don't want to have a [political] argument with your roommate."
Burness suggested that, in the rare event a student feels he has been graded unfairly due to a professor's political bias, he could easily rectify the problem by bringing the assignment to the department head or another faculty member.
Junior Lauren Carpenter, vice chair of the College Republicans, said that students who feel uncomfortable sharing a viewpoint in the classroom will likely be even more fearful of escalating tensions with a circumventory meeting with the department head. A more effective solution, she said, would be to allot specific amounts of time to a given position.
"You could structure the class in such a way that everyone has the chance to offer an opinion--you have four days, two for one side, two for another," Carpenter said.
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