Duke’s Transformative Ideas program provides an intellectual community for sophomores to engage in interdisciplinary conversations and explore life’s big questions and universal truths.
Launched by Jed Atkins, E. Blake Byrne associate professor of classical studies and faculty director of Transformative Ideas, and Dean of Humanities William Johnson in 2021, the program under the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences offers multidisciplinary courses spanning areas from religion to medicine and co-curricular activities that foster faculty-student interaction. This semester, 279 students are participating in the program.
The novelty of the program lies in its incorporation of resources from Duke's professional schools within an undergraduate context. In alignment with Duke’s commitment to liberal arts education, Transformative Ideas teams up faculty members from Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke Divinity School, Duke Law School and Duke Medical School.
“We are going to have a course with a professor from the law school teaming up with a professor who does bioethics,” Atkins said. “Duke has amazing resources, and I think this connection has been underutilized until now.”
Transformative Ideas offers a diverse range of nine courses that cover topics from philosophical perspectives on happiness to the ethics of doctor-patient relationships, the intersection of science and religion and the challenges posed by digital technology. The program invites students from all backgrounds to freely converse about enduring questions regarding the meaning, value and goal of a human life.
“One of the things that we’re trying to help students do is try to model civil discourse, respectful disagreement, while at the same time trying to illuminate the things that maybe we ourselves don’t quite understand,” Atkins said. “I think where we’re at our best is to hold out these questions of human flourishing that are going to help our students succeed, to live well-lived lives, to live flourishing lives, meaningful lives, lives of purpose in whatever professions they may end up being involved in.”
While there are ample opportunities such as FOCUS and What Now? that enable first-year students to dive into cross-disciplinary fields and cultivate relationships with professors, mentors and classmates in a small-class seminar setting, few opportunities are open to sophomores.
“I think that as you move up, Duke becomes more and more pre-professional, and the culture surrounding that becomes more pervasive,” sophomore Chloe Field said.
For Atkins, Transformative Ideas bridges the gap for students who are undecided about their future pathway and seek the opportunity to reflect on their life and time at Duke.
In his course The Good Life, Atkins encourages students to step away from the “pressure to perform” and “be present with each other in this intellectual community.” The goal of Transformative Ideas is to allow students to “step off of the treadmill” that is life at Duke to “give them agency” and “empower them to think” about the future direction of their lives.
Every semester, students in Transformative Ideas unwind from academic pressure by spending a weekend in a meditative retreat in the mountains. Students immerse themselves in nature and embrace each other’s presence through group activities such as archery, pickleball, rock climbing and canoeing. The trips culminate in an intimate campfire, where students gather around to roast s’mores, sing and stargaze.
Field, along with more than 150 students in Transformative Ideas, enjoyed a “refreshing weekend” at a summer camp in Black Mountain just three weeks into the fall semester.
“I think that it really acted as a retreat from the difficult parts of being in college and Duke and the stresses of work,” Field said. “It’s been a really nice reminder to everyone… that there’s more to life than just school.”
Starting this fall, students in the Transformative Ideas program can choose to live together in a residential community. In addition to providing a comfortable space for students to express their opinions after class, the new Living Learning Community facilitates greater bonding among students.
Sophomores Jason Murray Jr. and Luca Adamo are both Transformative Ideas fellows in the LLC who host weekly events and dinners to engage in open discussions among classmates and with guest speakers. In the near future, Murray Jr. and Adamo are looking to start a book club and organize a house course, a half-credit course led by undergraduate student instructors.
“It is unfortunately very easy to read something from a class and then the second you’re done and you’ve written your assignment, you’re just like ‘forget it,’” Adamo said. “What Transformative Ideas does is it carves out a space for you to allow you to let those concepts sink in.”
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Lucas Lin is a Trinity first-year and a university news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.