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John Rose, associate director of the Arete Initiative at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, joined us on our latest podcast to discuss his recent Wall Street Journal column about how he nurtures true civil discourse in his classroom and what he has learned from the experience. While helping to coordinate Arete’s programming, Rose teaches courses in happiness and human flourishing, Christian ethics, conservatism, and political polarization. He was interviewed by Lawrence Haas, a board member of Princetonians for Free Speech.
Rose revealed that he learned – from speaking with students privately in one-on-one settings – that many of them wanted to engage in honest debate, to explore all sides of complicated issues, but were afraid to do so. When he surveyed 110 students anonymously this spring, 68 percent of them revealed that they censor themselves on certain political topics, even with good friends. Nevertheless, Rose found a way to nurture honest debate in his classroom. After establishing rules that, among other things, allowed for the airing of differing opinions and assumed good will on all sides, he watched his students “flourish,” as he put it. They discussed such hot-button issues as critical race theory and abortion. But, as he acknowledges, whether other teachers, at Duke and on other campuses, try to follow his lead remains very much an open question.
Cynthia Torres
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: The 13 University affiliates arrested at Clio Hall during pro-Palestine protests last spring are scheduled to go to trial starting on April 14, almost one year after the Clio Hall sit-in. The latest development at a hearing on Tuesday followed months of court proceedings and came after the collapse of yet another plea deal that would have allowed 12 of the arrested protesters to walk away with community service while singling out the other.
All the arrestees are charged with defiant criminal trespassing, a petty offense in the state of New Jersey. The defense attorney for those arrested in the spring, Aymen Aboushi, claimed that a change to a new agreement with the municipal prosecutor, Christopher Koutsouris, had been made in the days before the 14th.
By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
Last year, for a comedy show on campus, I wrote a sketch about the fictional Society to Lessen Unamerican Teaching (note the acronym), a group that wants to rewrite history textbooks in Florida. In the skit, the characters pitch ridiculous falsehoods about American history (e.g., Hillary Clinton wrote the Communist Manifesto and also brought smallpox to the New World). My intention was to satirize classroom censorship of historical injustice and expose the absurdity of legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which shapes curricula in a politically-pointed way.
Olivia Sanchez and Annie Rupertus
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: In interviews with the ‘Prince,’ six students subject to University disciplinary proceedings described a tangled process that appeared fixated on searching for protest leaders to blame and employed tactics they described as invasive. The students were all investigated for supposed participation in pro-Palestine disruptions last spring.
Their accounts, corroborated by dozens of documents reviewed by the ‘Prince,’ including emails and investigation records, provide a rare glance behind the scenes of the University’s investigative apparatus.
