How to Get Fired at Duke Publishing fake history is fine, but don’t make students feel uncomfortable. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633
Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.
After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.
This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:
Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.Not that the Faculty Hearing Committee agreed with the decision to let him go, adding:
The members of the panel were disappointed with Sanford’s handling of Professor Charney’s reappointment. Professor Charney was, for many years at Duke, a highly-rated, University-decorated, and—for many, many students—beloved and formative professor. He was an asset to Duke.
But perhaps the committee was not disappointed enough to save his job. The committee either could not or would not overturn the decision of Duke’s Sanford school. Mr. Charney adds another curious detail:
Last April, I was informed that my contract would expire in one year—and was then assigned to teach two classes of the very same required Sanford course, one in the fall and one this spring, in which I supposedly had a tendency to harm students. If Sanford actually believed their own rhetoric, they would be guilty of knowingly endangering their students.
So why did he lose his job? Without clear and specific allegations, Mr. Charney is left to opine:
The answer, I believe, is twofold: First, the complaint of a handful of students concerning the events of a single class in which we discussed racism at Duke; second, an administration willing to give this complaint absolute credence and greater weight than a record of 20 years as an outstanding teacher, and to distort that record to ensure a negative vote of the faculty.
Mr. Charney clearly has the support of many students from various backgrounds. Dozens of them signed a letter published in the student newspaper which noted:
His courses undertake the difficult challenge of exposing students to viewpoints that conflict with how they think and what they value—and although many students find this teaching style uncomfortable, this is both welcomed and desired. In this Socratic format, the professor leans into student discomfort in order to encourage self-examination and critical inquiry.
Because of this, Professor Charney often takes on positions that are not his own in order to illustrate perspectives from across the spectrum… His rationale is clear: without confronting new ideas, students go through Duke unchallenged and are unable to evaluate the merits of competing claims.
Mr. Charney links to various other letters from students, including this one:
As a woman of color, I write to bring attention to an aspect of Charney’s teaching that will be as missed as much as it is needed in today’s political climate…The climate at Duke reflects the polarization of the country at large. Conversations are halted before they can even begin. Instead of listening, instead of understanding or trying to understand, people on both sides are combative and dismissive…Charney taught us how to have those conversations, how to navigate race relations, how to empathize.
Perhaps Mr. Charney’s problem was not the fact that he addressed sensitive topics related to race. He seems to have concluded that his offense involved challenging a particular point of view. He writes:
The complaint of a group of conservative students who felt singled out or disrespected or uncomfortable in class would be taken far less seriously. I have been on the receiving end of faculty emails making light of just such complaints.
Nor would a complaint by religious students that God and Christianity were mocked by their professor have much purchase. And I have never heard that Sanford’s “safe space” is a welcome refuge for the (generally reviled) minority of “open” Trump supporters on campus, nor have I heard of “trigger warnings” for depictions of disrespect to the American flag or harm to the unborn.
There’s a particular irony if Duke is sacking Mr. Charney for offending some students by addressing a topic related to race. Regular readers may recall that this is the same university that employs Nancy MacLean, who published the bogus claim that the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who contributed to an anti-segregationist newspaper, was the author of a “diabolical” plan to favor rich white people. One of her own colleagues on the Duke faculty called her book containing this smear “a work of speculative historical fiction.”
But Ms. MacLean doesn’t just enjoy smearing late, great economists. An editorial last year in the Duke student newspaper carried the headline, “Shame on Nancy MacLean.” According to the editorial board of the Chronicle:
In a talk given two weeks ago about her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Duke history professor Nancy MacLean controversially postulated a link between libertarianism and autism, claiming that many of the ideology’s leaders “seem to be on the autism spectrum.”
Ms. MacLean apologized for the remark, and according to the university’s website she continues to occupy an endowed chair in “history” and public policy at Duke.
Meanwhile, the school has decided it can no longer tolerate Mr. Charney. Details on his case are few, but so far there is nothing in the public record to suggest his offenses rival those of Ms. MacLean. It seems that at Duke nobody gets fired for insensitive comments or even fake history as long as those offended are non-leftists.
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