On every college campus, there are professors whose reputation extends far beyond their department.

At Duke, that professor was Evan Charny, 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 who 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 Charnie, 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 Charny, 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. 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.

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.

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.

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