In 2019, after nearly two decades at Duke University, one of its most popular—and controversial—professors was abruptly ousted. For the first time, Evan Charney reveals the untold story behind his departure. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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On every college campus, there are professors whose reputation extends far beyond their department. At Duke, that professor was Evan Charney, a fixture in the public policy department for nearly two decades. He was something of an academic celebrity at a school that typically reserves worship for its basketball stars. Friends who took his class couldn't stop talking about it.
His class makes you think differently, they'd say. Naturally, I had to see what all the fuss was about. But, just as I was about to enroll, I heard the news. Evan Charney was being pushed out. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the story of Evan Charney and what it says about the future of academic freedom in higher education. When you were a kid, what did you imagine becoming?
An astronaut? A soccer player? A rock star? Personally, I wanted to be a famous chef. Evan Charney? His childhood dream was a bit more unconventional. He wanted to be an ethologist. That's a zoologist who studies animal behavior in the wild. I had to look it up.
I was a very strange child, but I was always an intellectual in the good sense of the term. And I think I always knew I was going to PhD from the time I was a child.
Once Charney entered academia, he never looked back. He earned his undergraduate degree from Hunter College, then went on to get a doctorate and a master's degree from Harvard University, before joining Duke's faculty in 1999.
And it wasn't until I actually started teaching as a professor that I discovered just how much I loved teaching, how exhilarating I found it, and how much I loved working with young people. And how there's a certain high that comes with teaching, especially when teaching goes well, that is just incomparable.
The first course he taught, Policy Choices Value Conflict, was the undergraduate ethics course for all public policy majors. It was an introduction to moral philosophy and its application to some of the greatest contemporary moral dilemmas, issues ranging from abortion to seatbelt laws to physicians' assisted suicide to hate speech.
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