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- [00:04]
Margo Gray
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. I know this because I was a student at Duke from 2016 to 2020. Friends 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.
- [01:34]
Evan Charney
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.
- [01:44]
Margo Gray
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.
- [02:00]
Evan Charney
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.
- [02:19]
Margo Gray
The first course he taught was 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. The class was designed to give students the tools to make coherent and consistent arguments on multiple sides of any issue.
- [02:51]
Evan Charney
Over time, as the course progressed, my sense of what my mission was grew. I realized that, and I mean this quite seriously, that when students come to class, young adults, 18, 19, they feel they know what is right and what is wrong. They feel they know all the answers. And my first mission as a teacher was to show them that they didn't know anything.
- [03:23]
Margo Gray
Charney believes that when most students entered his classroom, they had never really been challenged on their foundational moral beliefs. They were in what he liked to call a dogmatic slumber. The objective of his course was to wake them up.
- [03:39]
Evan Charney
I would say to them, look, Socratic wisdom begins with a sense of your own ignorance, with an awareness that you do not know what you thought, you know. So it's going to be one of my central tasks in this class to relentlessly attack your deepest hell convictions and cherished ideals. And I am going to point out to you that your beliefs are unfounded or contradictory. As students learn very quickly. This was done, believe it or not, in a spirit of respect and empathy and fellow feeling. And I made clear to the students that if I can go after you, you can go after me. In fact, I encourage you to do this.
- [04:34]
Margo Gray
Charney insists that he poked holes in students arguments not for the sake of belittling them and their opinions, but for the sake of teaching them how to think critically, how to justify their beliefs, and how to identify the flaws and contradictions in their own arguments.
- [04:52]
Evan Charney
One of the best topics that I dealt with in terms of trying to lead students into a state of aporia, that is, a state where they did not know what to say was when I did, bestiality, people having sex with animals. So I would start by saying, okay, I'm going to give the following arguments against homosexuality. And I said, you know, I think it's unnatural. You know, when students would say, what are you talking about? You know, it occurs in nature. And I say, yes, but it doesn't lead to procreation. And the students, you know, they were being indulgent because they knew I was being stupid for some reason. And then I'd say, okay, how about this? And then I would show them a video. Now, the video was not of people having sex with animals, but it was a video by someone who was promoting what adherents of this like to call zoophilia. And the first thing students would start to say is, oh, well, that's unnatural. And I'd say, what did you just say? I said, you can't say it's unnatural. I just said something was unnatural and you laughed at me. You tore me apart. Students did not know what to say. They were completely and totally lost.
- [06:14]
Margo Gray
The success of the course depended upon students not knowing where Charney stood on any given issue. Students inevitably spent the semester trying to pin down his politics, which is why he'd re registered as an independent voter early on in his teaching career. One class, he would argue passionately and convincingly for the redistribution of wealth. Only to argue exactly the opposite stance the following class.
- [06:43]
Evan Charney
And I told them, I am not going to give you the answers to controversial questions. I am going to give you the tools to come up with reasonable defenses of different sides of any given issue. But I don't want you to believe in the right answer, because it's the answer I believe in. The success of the class also depended upon there being a plurality of different points of view. So one of the ways in which I would address this was I would ask the question, how many of you believe that women should have a right to have an abortion? And everyone would raise their hands and I'd say, okay, bullshit. I do not believe that everyone in this class has the same point of view. I do not believe there is a uniformity of opinion in this class. And then I would tell them, if those who held conservative views were going to engage in self censorship, then it would spell the death of the class, because this class is about, above all, being intellectually challenged.
- [07:56]
Margo Gray
Charney cites his willingness to challenge students as the reason that he was repeatedly recognized as one of the university's three most popular professors, that he received above average student teaching evaluations, and that he was the recipient of multiple teaching awards.
- [08:12]
Evan Charney
I mean, what was so sad is that there was such a hunger amongst the students for what I did, because I did things that no one else would do, and I challenged them in ways that no one else would challenge them.
- [08:30]
Margo Gray
So you can imagine Charney's surprise when, in April 2018, he got the news his contract would not be renewed. In effect, he was fired. Charney wasn't sure why he was being let go, but he had a theory.
- [08:52]
Soraya
Some people play it safe, but that's never been my style. I'm Soraya, and this is Rule breakers, the podcast where we celebrate the rebels, the misfits, and the ones who make their own way. Every week, I sit down with athletes, entertainers, and industry disruptors who don't just push the boundaries now, they shatter them. We talk about the wildest risk they've taken, the lessons they've learned, and the moments that made them who they are. No fillers, no bs, Just real talk of people who refuse to follow the script. And we don't just talk about breaking the rules now. We prove it. Think dog shot collars, bug trivia, blindfold tattoos, and text roulette. The stakes are high and the chaos is real. So if you've ever been told to stay in your lane, this show is for you. Follow and listen to Rule breakers with Soraya, an Odyssey podcast, available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [09:59]
Margo Gray
Evan Charney got to know Duke in a way few professors or administrators ever do. He had insight into the kinds of things that you can't find in university pamphlets, the kinds of student dynamics, politics, and gossip that are known only to students on campus.
- [10:17]
Evan Charney
I had a very close relationship with a lot of my students, and I enjoyed talking at length with the students. Sometimes we'd often just get together for coffee, and we would talk for hours, and I would ask them questions about not just their hopes and aspirations, but about campus life, because I tried as far as I could to relate some of the topics that I was dealing with to students own personal moral dilemmas and life experiences. So, for example, I spent a lot of time talking about chauvinism on the Duke campus. And it was extraordinary the extent to which I was able to show students that so much of Greek life, of nightlife, of campus culture, was dictated by men and was designed for the sexual gratification of men and so forth.
- [11:15]
Margo Gray
On more than one occasion, while discussing the issue of wealth stratification, Charney singled out a student wearing sorority or fraternity insignia and asked how many members of their chapter classified as below middle class.
- [11:31]
Evan Charney
I always felt that to be an effective teacher, it was important that I know what students were experiencing on a daily basis, the pressures, their emotions, their fears. I showed a lot of genuine care and affection toward my students and concern. And, you know, students would come to me when they were having emotional problems. I mean, I was quite moved by that. I love my students. I don't know how many faculty could.
- [12:00]
Margo Gray
Say that by virtue of spending so much time with his students outside of class, Charney had his finger on the pulse of his classroom environment. And around 2009, about a decade into teaching the same course at Duke, Charney began to sense a shift in his classroom.
- [12:19]
Evan Charney
The use of the term harm expanded to such an extent that it encompassed or came to encompass points of view that people were opposed to or that they found disagreeable. And the extent to which students would react as if I had done something to them grew and grew.
- [12:51]
Margo Gray
Charney remembers one of the first times a student told him they'd been harmed by his language. He was catching up with a student over coffee after class.
- [13:01]
Evan Charney
I think I used the term political correctness, but by the way, I was always careful to say that there is political correctness on the left and there is political correctness on the right. No ideology has a monopoly on political correctness. But she said, you know, it hurts me every time someone uses the term political correctness. And I said, did you see this scar? I said, that hurt. Don't tell me that hearing the term political correctness hurts you. Well, she, like, went back in her chair, like, slammed back and was stupefied because she thought she had a trump card that was going to shut me up. It wasn't because of what I said, per se. It was because, you know, I didn't fall at her feet and beg for forgiveness and sort of reinforce the perverse ways in which students understand that they can exercise control over their professors. That was the beginning of something really important for me.
- [14:08]
Margo Gray
Charney was noticing a phenomenon that wouldn't be fully articulated or discussed for about another decade when Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published their best selling book, the Coddling of the American How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. The authors argued that in the pursuit of creating safe academic environments, students are losing the ability to distinguish between personal attacks and the promotion of ideas that they find objectionable.
- [14:39]
Chuck Grassley
As students head back to class, a new book challenges colleges to better prepare young people for life after they graduate.
- [14:46]
Margo Gray
Should American colleges try to protect students from anything, words, books, even ideas, simply because it might upset them?
- [14:54]
Evan Charney
Over time, I started realizing that students had lost sight or no longer were able to comprehend the distinction between, say, discussing the use of offensive speech, say, in a law case, and using an offensive epithet directed at someone with the intent of making them upset. So we started reaching a point where it was becoming harder and harder for me to discuss the topic of speech, which was increasingly becoming, and that's no coincidence, the most important topic on college campuses in this country. And I could so easily have left out that topic, and I refused to do it.
- [15:50]
Margo Gray
Charney believes many professors adjusted their courses to comply with college administrators. Newmandate to create campuses in which students would never feel uncomfortable or offended.
- [16:02]
Evan Charney
It always surprised me when students would say, especially when I would deal with issues of race, that they never talked about that in any other class. Like, they never talked about it their whole time at Duke. And I would say to them, are you kidding? And they were serious. And of course, this was part of the culture. The part of the culture was that professors, faculty were so afraid of offending their students, so afraid of making their students upset, and so afraid of facing potentially negative consequences for that that they avoided controversial subjects. Of course, I refuse to be intimidated by any of that.
- [16:45]
Margo Gray
According to the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the number of attempts to Sanction university professors has risen dramatically in the past two two decades. In 2000, there were four attempts made to sanction university professors. By 2022, that number had climbed to 145.
- [17:07]
Evan Charney
I remember expressing surprise that I had not gotten into trouble already. I'm sure things got back to the faculty of the administration, but I did not get into trouble until I did.
- [17:22]
Margo Gray
It's important to note that Charney wasn't tenured. He has health issues that had made it impossible to meet the research and publication requirements. Still, for years, his contract renewals were routine, never in doubt. But in April 2018, just before his 20th anniversary at Duke, he was told his five year contract would not be renewed. Charney says it was the first time he'd heard any concerns about his performance. And when he asked why the Sanford School of Public Policy offered no clear reason and refused to release documents related to his dismissal.
- [18:01]
Evan Charney
And they never told me about this. The determinative factor I found out from other faculty.
- [18:09]
Margo Gray
Months passed before Charney discovered what had happened.
- [18:13]
Evan Charney
There was a sit in on campus about race. And of course, at first, people were unwilling to open their mouths. So here we have a sit in on campus, this issue which is roiling the college community, and students are unwilling to talk about it. So as usual, I said, I am not going to accept this. So we were having this debate. We had passed through microaggression, and there was a girl who was speaking out. She happened to be the poorest student in the class, and she was saying something. And a black student said, well, I don't have to listen to anything you say because she was white. And I said, you know, what you just did to her is you discounted her as a person on the basis of her skin color. I said, and that's a microaggression. He reacted in a way I have never seen a student react. And I actually went to talk to him after class to ask if everything was okay. And he said it was. But that's what did me in.
- [19:31]
Margo Gray
When I questioned Charney on whether he'd crossed a line or on whether he had any right to accuse a black student of making a microaggression, he doubled down.
- [19:42]
Evan Charney
I went out of my way to treat everyone equal in class. And under certain circumstances, that meant not avoiding saying things because people were members of a certain ethnicity or a certain religion. That became a real problem.
- [19:58]
Margo Gray
Charney filed a complaint with Duke's Faculty Hearing Committee, a group consisting of professors from a range of departments whose job was to hear faculty complaints on issues like Tenure and contract renewal. The members of the group said in a written report that they were disappointed with the school's handling of Charney's reappointment, writing that he was, quote, a highly rated, decorated, and for many, many students, beloved, informative professor. He was an asset to Duke, but the committee concluded that it had no jurisdiction over the decision.
- [20:34]
Evan Charney
Students wrote like five page letters. Hundreds of students wrote like five page letters to the administration saying that my class changed their lives. It changed their ways of thinking about the world.
- [20:49]
Margo Gray
The most clarity Charney ever got from the Sanford school about the non renewal of his contract was a statement saying that he had a tendency to provoke negative reactions and perhaps harm some of the students in his classroom. Charney was assigned to teach two more semesters of his ethics course in his final year at Duke.
- [21:09]
Evan Charney
I said if they really believed their own rhetoric, they would be guilty of willfully endangering students.
- [21:16]
Margo Gray
Charney changed nothing about his course that final year. Besides a handful of additional rants on the state of higher education, he taught his final class in May of 2019. I first met Evan Charney in the fall of 2019. At the time I was a senior at Duke, Charney was no longer a Duke professor. We convened at a table on the basement floor of the cafeteria, intentionally tucked away from the rush hour crowd. Ever since being let go, Charney was something of a pariah among Duke professors. Even as he spoke to me, his head was on a swivel, scanning the room to make sure an ex colleague hadn't spotted him. Okay, so I think it would be great if you could just start by giving, like, a brief history of your professorship at Duke. I was interviewing Charney that afternoon as part of a final paper I was writing for my journalism seminar. The topic of the paper was civic discourse on campus. I thought Charney's perspective would be informative given everything I'd heard about his course, but also because I figured he could speak to the experience of being a conservative professor on Duke's campus. I assumed Charney was conservative because the only people who had come to his defense, apart from former students, were conservatives.
- [22:50]
Evan Charney
People having their careers torn asunder, illegitimately having done nothing wrong, in fact, in many cases, having done everything right. Which brings us to the case of Evan Charney.
- [23:03]
Margo Gray
Senator Chuck Grassley wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal denouncing Charney's expulsion and accusing universities like Duke of being quote, dominated by groups of angry students with closed minds and the administrators who kowtowed to them, unquote, Fox News. Tucker Carlson extended an open invitation for Charney to come on his show. Charney declined.
- [23:28]
Evan Charney
The only people who reached out to me were conservatives. They identified with me and maybe probably didn't fully realize where I was coming from, that I was not coming from this. As a conservative, I could play my little game and say, well, you'll never know, but I'm going to tell you the truth. I am a far left liberal. I'm also a liberal who believes in the unfettered right to free speech.
- [23:56]
Margo Gray
In recent years, conservatives have railed against liberal leaning universities for squashing freedom of speech and preventing students from challenging liberal ideology. In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order designed to protect free inquiry on college campuses.
- [24:14]
Chuck Grassley
Today, we're delivering a clear message to the professors and power structures trying to suppress dissent and keep young Americans from challenging rigid far left ideology. People who are confident in their beliefs do not censor others.
- [24:32]
Evan Charney
The hypocrisy is none of those people are really champions of free speech. What they want is to diminish the influence of liberal speech and replace it with conservative speech. They want the power hierarchies that exist on some college campuses to be reversed. What they don't want is an open field for debate and contestation, where all these different ideas can be expressed freely and openly. Toleration in respect to free speech is one of the hardest things to do, which is why, probably for the most part, people are not willing to do it.
- [25:18]
Margo Gray
As for Evan Charney, he's now living in Durham, no more than a 15 minute drive from Duke's campus.
- [25:25]
Evan Charney
Those who would get gratification out of knowing that they've harmed me, they should go celebrate because of two things. Number one, when I say I love my students, I really did. I had a family of like hundreds, and it was like losing my extended family. And I felt that it was going to be very hard for me to get another job. I didn't realize that it was going to be absolutely impossible. It took me years to get a job, any job, really. I'm a science editor at Northwestern, which every other day basically say, I don't want to do this anymore, to be perfectly honest. And I still miss teaching.
- [26:13]
Margo Gray
Charney says he was reluctant to talk to me because the whole episode still feels raw. It's not something that he's gotten over.
- [26:21]
Evan Charney
I chose to tell my story, to add a voice, a voice of warning and a plea.
- [26:31]
Margo Gray
Charney fears that institutions of higher learning are failing students by not challenging them and therefore not equipping them with the tools to come up with their own opinions about what matters in the world.
- [26:44]
Evan Charney
I would say the greatest danger to universities now is suppressing speech out of the misguided idea that that the point of a college or university is to make students feel comfortable. Like, if you want to do that, open up a resort on Miami beach, okay, and invite them there for the summer. As far as I'm concerned, that's a total degradation and destruction of the educational mission of a university.
- [27:19]
Margo Gray
Earlier, Czarney mentioned that his teaching philosophy was rooted in the Socratic method. Socrates, the most famous philosopher of ancient Athens, believed that true learning was an active process, not the passive acceptance of information. Everything should be questioned, even the ideas that seemed beyond reproach. He encouraged his students to challenge societal norms. This did not go over well with athenian authorities. In 399 BCE, Athens buzzed with anticipation as Socrates stood trial on charges of corrupting the youth and disrespecting the gods. During his trial, Socrates did what he did. He defended his principles and engaged in rigorous questioning. He famously told the crowd, the unexamined life is not worth living. In the end, the jury found him guilty. Socrates was sentenced to death and given a lethal dose of hemlock. Campus Files Is an Odyssey Original Podcast this episode was written and reported by Margo Gray. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont Eliot Adler and me, Margo Gray. Our executive producers and story editors are Maddie Sprunkheiser and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel and Andy Jaskowitz. Special thanks to Jenna Weiss Berman, J.D. crowley, Leah Rees, Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Schuff, Sean Cherry, Laura Berman and Hilary Van Ornam. Original theme music by James Waterman and Davey Sumner. If you have tips or story ideas, write to us@campusfilespodmail.com.
- [29:27]
Jordan Robinson
I'm Jordan Robinson, host of the new podcast the Women's Hoop Show. We're here for you every step of the way through the May Ham of March Madness. Each episode I'll be joined by a rotating group of women's basketball experts to talk you through how your brackets looking and which rising women's hoop stars to look out for in every game. Listen to and follow the Women's Hoop show and Odyssey Podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts.