Spring Semester Roundup
Primary sources & student-identified projects
Note: This essay does not represent the views of Duke University, but are instead my personal views, offered under academic freedom.
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I just finished up grading for my Intro to the Ethics of Public Policy, PPS 302D class, a required core course for the public policy major in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. A few highlights of things that worked and did not, from the perspective of the old guy teaching (this concluded my 29th year on faculty at Duke).
The use of primary sources in teaching is a practice that is crucial, especially when discussing difficult topics that are standard for a survey course in ethics of any type. Having students view a report from the 1950s on campus crime that noted “homosexuality” along with “theft” and “intoxication” is a vivid way to demonstrate change on campus and to use that as a way to discuss whether and how ‘moral progress’ is possible, or if there are timeless standards of what is right and wrong.
I assigned a semester-long project that had students pick either a family-specific research project that had a genealogical component, or a Duke University-specific history that got students using the University Archives. This was a difficult project methodologically for many students, and emotionally for some. I am amazed at the depth of discovery that some managed in 90 days, in several instances facilitating family discussions of difficult topics that has only been whispered. And some students uncovered artifacts of Duke’s history hiding in the wide open of the Archives, all along that often made the understanding of reality more complicated. The joy of discovery when a student finds something that is new, at least to them, was meaningful. This project was also the most time-consuming type of teaching that I have ever done in the form of written feedback on numerous iterations of 51 projects. I had three amazing TAs who graded the weekly assignments, and the group projects, but I alone did so for the individual projects.
The idiosyncratic nature of these individual projects while students completed more standard assignments based on Russ Shafer-Landau’s The Fundamentals of Ethics made this almost like two courses. The two mantra’s of the course were a standing question that I illustrated in a 90 second vignette from my personal research career before most of the classes—how much evidence is enough to change your mind? I provided examples of published papers and described how a negative finding or a statistically significant one was linked to me changing my mind or not in those things in which I care most about. The point that I hope they remember is nothing more than “the professor who was an expert in health policy for the elderly changed his mind based on evidence” so I need to think about what evidence would be enough for me to change my mind about the myriad topics of modern life.
The second mantra that I tried to consistently bring into the class was humility, especially when looking at the past. I had a phrase that I used a lot: “we are looking back to understand the past and what that may mean for us today, understanding that people we will never meet will someday judge the lives we are living.” A common task of weekly assignments was looking at a primary source, assessing it via a particular theory of ethical judgement to assess it in ethical terms, but to also have students imagine their own lives through the eyes of the future. Maybe this helps to turn down the impulse to so quickly judge others while exempting ourselves.
Finally, I assigned several assignments in which the point was the assessment of evidence. Is it a primary source, secondary or tertiary? What are the reasons to take the source at face value v. understanding what type of bias it may contain. This requirement was a key part of the individual project as well, and several projects really hinged on the difference between “what everyone in the family knows” as compared to what some new evidence, often found family interviews, produced. Or a student found a memo in the Duke Archives that shed a new light on an old issue. In this way the class was helping students learn how to analyze context and to wade into ambiguity in a way that provides an evidentiary basis of some sort to make a decision. This may be the most important thing that a researcher could teach to undergraduates at a place like Duke.
We used powerpoint for very little save taking of attendance via QR code. That is a solid choice. The students remain guarded in discussion of many topics, especially those that could result in someone saying they were anti-semitic or anti-muslim (this group was pretty sick of talking about Israel/Gaza/ME but reading UN Resolution 181 was something most had not done, even if they had strong feelings).
Finally, we used AI in a variety of contexts. Some weekly assignments explicitly required it, some provided something written by AI and asked the students to think about what they could (and could not) do better, and sone of the individual research projects were helpful. For example, several students used AI to read cursive letters either of family members, or in the Archives and the capability of the tools for such has rapidly expanded. In my own archival research I have seen this.
I have now taught this class five times in the past 6 years, and have changed how it is structured quite a lot. Things are simply changing too much to remain static, and it is always a challenge to get the attention of students in required courses. For the academic year 2026-27 I have two interesting teaching challenges. In the fall, I will teach a course solely for freshman students for the first time since year 2001, and I am creating the course de novo: Freedom of Speech at Duke University. This is a part of one of the so-called “Constellations” at Duke in which students take first year courses with a cohort of students. I am super exicted to do this. Then in the Spring I will teach the monster—PPS 155, Introduction to Public Policy, again. I taught this in the 2000-08 time period, and then again in 2022 as an ‘emergency’ due to faculty changes. Most interestingly, the professor who taught in during Spring 2026 created an old-school course pack and did not use Canvas at all. The two folks teaching this in academic year 2026-27 are meeting with him soon to discuss this experience, because when you teach a 150 person class that is the gateway for the major you are taking on a great deal of responsibility to the other faculty and students. Interestingly enough, two students wrote about this course in the Duke Chronicle this past semester (here and here). I’ve only read and not digested what they wrote but to say that it is a time of change in higher education is an understatement.
Onward.