Humanities Express

Humanities Spotlight:

Dean's Forum Focuses on Civil Discourse

The largest audience to date attended the 2005 edition of the College of Humanities Dean’s Forum, hosted by Dean John W. Roberts on April 27. Entitled "Keeping It Civil—Or Not: Public Discourse and the Humanities," the Forum began with a presentation by Karla Holloway, the William Rand Kenan Professor of English at Duke University, who provided a rousing analysis of academic freedom and the rights of professors to claim authority over their subject matter. She was followed by Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, whose inspiring talk teased out relationships among civil discourse, civic responsibility, and academic freedom. "If we demand an arena of academic freedom from the pressures of the wider society," she argued, "then we must enact the community of judgment, a civil community, that is the premise of academic freedom." Finally, Eric Alterman, media columnist for the Nation, explored two contrasting ideals of democracy and the role of citizens and the media in both.

The Dean's Forum was established in 2002 by then-Dean of Humanities Michael Hogan as a way to encourage dialogue and stimulate reflection on issues involving history, thought, languages, and literatures. In four years, the Forum has grown from a College-wide event focused on globalization to a highly visible community affair, featuring national speakers who have addressed topics such as higher education and national security policy. As Dean Roberts suggested in his opening remarks for this year’s Forum, the topic of civil discourse was chosen because of its timeliness: "What," he asked, "are the ethics of communication at a time when our national dialogue is so conflicted? What are the responsibilities of speaking in civic spaces at a time when those spaces are more and more permeable?" Appropriately, then, the panelists ranged over a wide terrain which frequently brought them back to the role of the humanities, or of academia more generally, in modeling civility, which Yu defined as "a precondition not just of academic freedom but of civic discourse itself."

Look for a more extensive overview of the presentations given at this year’s Forum in the next issue of the Humanities Exchange, the annual news magazine of the College of Humanities.