July-August 2006

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From the Editor: Difficult Dialogues

Paula M. Krebs

This month’s issue of Academe was compiled and edited by Robert M. O’Neil, a leading authority on the First Amendment, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, and former president of the University of Virginia. It features articles that grew out of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative, as O’Neil explains in his introduction on pages 29–30.

Leslie Harris writes about the ways in which the Emory community realized that it had to come to terms with the university’s past in order to move ahead on issues of race. Its Transforming Community Project draws on the memories and experiences of staff members at Emory in addition to faculty and students, and the project is going a long way toward healing racial divisions and deepening the university’s commitment to addressing issues of race.

The University of California, Irvine, is using its Difficult Dialogues project to air controversial views on topics such as religious diversity and Middle Eastern politics in a way that allows for passionate debate andmutual respect, as Manuel Gómez explains in his article. Janet Jakobsen tackles the issue of religion in America in her description of the Barnard College Difficult Dialogues project. Barnard investigated and explored theconjunction between questions of religious freedom and questions of identityin its project, which involves a faculty seminar, an undergraduate seminar,and a role-playing program. Religion is also the focus of the Universityof Michigan’s project, as reported by Matthew Kaplan, who explains how asecular state university critically examines issues of religion and religiouspluralism on campus.

Interactive theater helps to transform campus culture at Portland Community College. Jeannie LaFrance and Jan Abu Shakrah give the details of their Illumination Project, based in the tenets of the “theater of the oppressed” movement. A similar focus, on empathy as the key to overcomingprejudice, features in Kristen Renwick Monroe’s teaching at California, Irvine. She describes the role of her course in Irvine’s Difficult Dialogues project.

Judith Welch Wegner tells us about a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill project that addresses underlying tensions that sometimes result in conflict when religious conviction meets intellectual inquiry. Wegner explains the ways the UNC community “named” and “framed” issues about belief and intellectual inquiry in the context of a state university whose students generally hold religious beliefs to be fundamentally important to their lives.

Finally, Janet Winston describes the work of the four-college Difficult Dialogues project that explores the ways higher education institutions in Virginia are grappling with sexuality issues. Winston’s project, like the others in the Difficult Dialogues effort, turns long-term silence on controversial issues into lively and productive conversation.

Lively and productive conversation is what we aim for in Academe as well. Write for us, and tell us about what you’re doing on your campus. My e-mail address is pkrebs@wheatoncollege.edu. And check out our blog, Talk About Academe, at http://academeonline.blogspot.com/.