NC State and Duke University have joined forces to host a yearlong seminar series that will explore how the humanities inform academic freedom and support democratic life within the university and beyond.
The series — supported by a grant from the AndrewW. Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program — will use interdisciplinary perspectives and regional case studies to understand how different institutions approach contemporary challenges to democracy, academic freedom, and open inquiry, and how they might adapt teaching strategies to address those challenges. “Sharing Ground: Humanities, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the University” will bring together prominent scholars of academic freedom and university administrators grappling with these issues.
The collaborative, inter-institutional project kicks off in April with a foundational symposium at the Penn Pavilion at Duke University, followed by the yearlong seminar series starting in September 2026 and running through May 2027 at NC State and Duke. The co-principal investigators of Sharing Ground are James Mulholland, English professor and associate dean of academic and student affairs at NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS), and Charlotte Sussman, English professor and chair of the Department of English at Duke University.
“We wanted to bring humanistic methods — textual interpretation, ethical debate, criticism and artistic expression — into conversations about the future of academic freedom,” said Mulholland. “At a moment of heightened concern about what constitutes free expression and who decides what is civil dialogue, Sharing Ground shows that the humanities still offer the essential tools for sustaining pluralistic inquiry.”
At its core, the series emphasizes the broader importance of academic freedom as a human-centered principle influencing education and civic life. This philosophy is fundamental to CHASS as a college that examines the world and strives to improve it.
“It’s not just there as a ‘perk’ for instructors or faculty; it’s the bedrock for our student-driven mission,” Mulholland said. “When we focus on our strengths in shaping academic freedom and civic discourse within the university, we also point our students toward a future they will inherit and shape for themselves with the ideas and tools we teach them.”
That perspective is strengthened through the collaboration between NC State and Duke. By pairing a major public research university with a leading private institution, the seminar examines how academic freedom operates across different structures while identifying shared values.
Identifying what is shared across these institutions and across the humanities, and where we disagree, is the point of thinking about academic freedom, Mulholland said. “A motive of the seminar is to get students and faculty from these two institutions talking to each other and ‘sharing ground,’ sharing the same space,” he said.
Sussman added: “This distinction offers an important opportunity to explore how academic freedom is experienced and understood across different higher-education environments, especially within a state like North Carolina where public and private institutions share overlapping intellectual communities.”
The April 17 kickoff symposium will feature a prominent academic freedom scholar, Michael Bérubé, professor of literature at Penn State College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author of It’s Not Free Speech and The Humanities, Higher Education and Academic Freedom. Belle Boggs, English professor, will participate with other symposium attendees in a moderated conversation with Bérubé on academic freedom that follows his presentation. If you are an NC State faculty or graduate student who is interested in attending the symposium, please register at this link.
“We’ll have lots of opportunity for proper argument and debate, humanities-style,” Mulholland said of the symposium. “It will also gather together the area’s participants and allow them to share some ideas and get started together. We expect this to be a long-term journey.”
The journey will continue with the seminar series during the fall and spring semesters of the 2026-27 academic year. Sharing Ground will be organized around three themes:
- Understanding Imagination as Democratic Practice.
- Moving Beyond Speech: Analyzing the Role of Non-Verbal Expression in Democratic Practice.
- What Are Universities For? Academic Freedom, Humanistic Inquiry, and the Democratic Project.
“Sharing Ground shows that the humanities still offer the essential tools for sustaining pluralistic inquiry.”
Each theme deepens understanding of the university’s role in democracy and emphasizes questions related to humanistic approaches to academic freedom.
The series will also produce several tangible outcomes:
- A Duke University course on academic freedom and the humanities that will be open to NC State students.
- New curricular approaches will be connected to NC State’s Foundations of American Democracy program.
- A public archival project on the history of academic freedom in Triangle universities.
- A team of students, led by a “Humanist-in-Residence,” will spend a year exploring archival materials, policy debates and lived university experiences.
“We’re also bringing in some of the nation’s leading scholars on academic freedom to share their wisdom and their arguments with our participants,” said Mulholland.
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program, started in 1994, provides funding to institutions for comparative research on the historical and cultural factors in current affairs. The theme of academic freedom and democracy highlights the program’s goal of promoting critical scholarship and reflects the foundation’s commitment to supporting work that deepens understanding of American history and culture.
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