At the Pope Center’s Spirit of Inquiry Award dinner on October 22, Jane S. Shaw opened her remarks by saying that people often forget to say “thank you” for others’ good deeds. The awards dinner was a small step to remedy that problem by thanking some of North Carolina’s best professors.
For the second year, the Pope Center’s Spirit of Inquiry Award honored faculty at North Carolina universities whose courses were ranked by a distinguished panel as the best in the state. The award is named the “Spirit of Inquiry” to express what the Pope Center believes college courses should do—reflect a spirit of open-minded exploration within the guidelines of an academic discipline. In addition to their commitment to open-minded inquiry, the winning courses must also be interesting, rigorous, and unbiased.
Brandon Turner, who currently teaches in the Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, won first place for his class “American Political Thought,” which he taught last year as a visiting professor at Wake Forest University. He was nominated by Jared Fuller, a sophomore in political science and president of the Young Americans for Liberty chapter at Wake Forest University.
In making his nomination, Jared Fuller described Turner as “the epitome of a scholar, a professor and a friend. His willingness to engage his students beyond superficial textual discussions is key to his teaching methods. Not only do we discuss how American political philosophers thought, acted, and studied, we also discussed if their conclusions were veritable; he was, all the while, refusing to take a side in any discussion. His method of consistently questioning our beliefs on a certain work or thinker promoted lively, healthy classroom dialogue which engaged the entire class.”
Peter Feaver, the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University, won second place for his class “American Grand Strategy after 9/11.” His course is part of a larger Duke program in American Grand Strategy, which blends teaching and research on peacetime and wartime tactics, operations, and policies. Feaver is also director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. From June 2005 to July 2007, Feaver was on leave from Duke, serving as the special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff at the White House.
John Bailey, a 2009 Duke graduate, called Feaver’s class “the best and most enjoyable class I have taken in college. I have never been in a class that broadened my perspective of the way security strategy is formulated as much as this class did . . . . While the class may or may not have changed the opinion of students on the strategy and foreign policy of the Bush administration, it certainly changed and clarified why they held those opinions in a way I have never seen in another class.”
John Stevens, associate professor in classical studies, and John Given, associate professor and director of classical studies, both at East Carolina University, won third place for their jointly taught seminar “Ancient Philosophical Literature in Classical Studies.” They were nominated by two students: Ashton Pace and James Duffy, both currently enrolled at ECU.
When nominating Given and Stevens, Pace described the class as “worth taking not only for its rare student-teacher ratio, but also for the enriching development contrived as the student interaction engaged in the process of inquiry.” On his website, Given explains his teaching philosophy. “My mantra in teaching is that the self-reflective student is the best student. It is vitally important to learning that a student at any level understand not only what he or she learns, but also how and why he or she learns.”
Fifty-six students at eight universities nominated professors for this year’s contest. A panel of judges looked at course descriptions, answers to survey questions, student testimonials, and course syllabi to choose the winners from among seven finalists.
The judges were Anne Neal, president of American Council of Trustees and Alumni; John Allison, former BB&T chairman and CEO, who is now a distinguished professor of practice at Wake Forest University School of Business; Edgar Broyhill, president and managing director of the Broyhill Group in Winston-Salem; James Martin, former North Carolina governor; and George Leef, director of research at the Pope Center.
At the dinner, the Pope Center also recognized professors whose general education courses at UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University were selected by students as the best. Because students can choose from a broad number of courses, often with little information about them, the Pope Center polled students in order to discover the best courses and to recommend them to other students.