D E F I N I N G
F R E E D O M
03
A place for them to practice
conservative student announces to the class that his experience during his first semester in Duke’s Visions of Freedom Focus program dispelled prior concerns that he would be ostracized by his fellow students and penalized by his professors on account of his political beliefs. Instead of condemnation, he encountered spirited debate within an intellectually diverse community of friends. A political progressive visiting Duke for Parents’ Weekend shares how her son’s coursework on the history of ideas of liberty and equality enriched their family’s conversations and enabled her for the first time to understand some of the reasons for the political positions of those who disagreed with her. Two students who differed in many ways—gender, religious identification, ethnicity, politics—spent a class dinner arguing about a contentious political question. Though they passionately held different views, at the end of the dinner they hugged and remained friends throughout the semester. These anecdotes reflect some fruits of my efforts to make my classrooms into places where the free, open, and frank discussion of ideas thrives. In the process of working with my students to achieve such a vision, I have learned some valuable lessons about cultivating intellectual freedom in the classroom. Intellectual freedom does not simply consist of the right to say whatever you want. Freedom in the classroom is not what political theorists call negative liberty, the absence of external interference. A course where students were merely left alone to say what was on their minds without interference would not be worth
10 www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine
Tim Ogline
A
By Jed W. Atkins
