Gautam Chebrolu

What role does a liberal arts education play in creating a full life? Duke senior Kimberly Perez and UNC-Chapel Hill senior Adesh Ranganna provide answers in their Kenan Moral Purpose Award-winning essays, given to the best student papers on the topic from the two schools. In her essay, “Knowledge is Power,” Perez reflected on how her coursework at Duke led her to both dig deeper into and reconsider questions of faith and religious belonging. Ranganna used his essay, “What Ignorance Reveals,” to explore how studying Rawls’ philosophy of justice changed his perspective on what makes public health interventions just and fair.

Kimberly Perez, T’19 (Major in International Comparative Studies with Minors in Chemistry and Global Health), “Knowledge is Power”

Adesh Ranganna, UNC ’19 (Majors in Nutrition and Public Policy with a Minor in Chemistry), “What Ignorance Reveals”

The annual Kenan Moral Purpose Award is given for the best undergraduate student essay on the role a liberal arts education plays in students’ exploration of the personal and social purposes by which to orient their future and the intellectual, emotional, and moral commitments that make for a full life. Established in honor of the Institute’s 15th anniversary at Duke and subsequently expanded, the award represents a partnership with the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with one winner selected from each school. 

Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics Walter Sinnott-Armstrong recently penned an essay in Aeon. Following up on some of the points he put forward in his most recent book Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, he talks about how easy it is to develop extremist points of views and hide in echo chambers and provides four steps in combating political polarization.

The Religions and Public Life program at the Kenan Institute co-sponsored a two-day symposium on Arabic medicine in the medieval period that began with a tour of Duke University Libraries’ collection of medical books from the period and was followed by a keynote address by noted scholar of Medieval Islamic medicine, Cristina Álvarez Millán (UNED, Madrid). 

Dr. Millán emphasized the role of Muslim scholars and practitioners of medicine played in organizing and elaborating on the Greek and Roman medical knowledge that had passed down from Antiquity.  In so doing, Dr. Millán argues, Islamic societies bequeathed essential resources to Western centers of medical knowledge, like Montpellier in France, that established the Western tradition of medicine.

Dr. Millán’s talk provided an overview of medical advances and innovations in the medieval Muslim world from the 10^th century to the 14^th century, a period dominated by rival Muslim dynasties in al-Andalus (modern day Spain and Portugal), North Africa, and the area around Iraq and Iran.  One great strength of Islamic societies in this period was that, in their bid for political prestige, political rivals in these regions patronized scientific production and vibrant collaborative traditions among medical philosophers and practitioners that saw knowledge about human health transmitted across trading networks from East to West.

Some of the knowledge about medicine exchanged in this way would be familiar to people today: surgical charts, new drug treatments based on plant extracts, and treatment protocols for vulnerable populations (the poor and migrants).  Some Muslim scholars, like Averroes of al-Andalus, were more interested in theoretical aspects of wellness, while others, like Abu Bakr al-Razi of Baghdad, became famous for their clinical practice.  Indeed, Dr. Millán made clear throughout her talk that Arabic medical practitioners cared deeply about their patients: adhering to the principles of the Hippocratic oath and adjusting drug treatments so that they tasted and smelled better.

Throughout the talk and discussion period, Dr. Millán acknowledged the difficulties of studying the evolution of medical practice and theory during this period.  Not many case studies exist from which to accurately pinpoint medieval diseases and those records we do have come from a group of well-known physicians who tended to the political elite of the time.  Thus, a fuller understanding of the social history of medicine (doctor-patient relations, for example) elude us especially with regard to middle-class and poorer groups in society.

“We cannot preserve a tradition, but we can preserve the knowledge of a tradition.”

For Sangjie Zhaxi, being at Duke has meant going to the other side of the world, both literally and figuratively. The style and rhythms of life he experiences here are a far cry from his childhood in the eastern edge of Tibet. Moving between such vastly different environments has been difficult going at times, but Sangjie finds purpose in bridging and connecting his experiences. He hopes to make a home for himself in the United States without ever leaving Tibet altogether.

“I did not realize how different my childhood was before I lived in mainland China, and later in the US,” Sangjie says. Born and raised in the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province, Sangjie’s early experiences were not dissimilar from those of generations of his family before him. He looked after yaks, sheep, and horses, moving with the seasons. But increasing development in China’s interior meant that Sangjie did not stay to herd with his family. Instead, he went to school and learned Chinese and eventually English. A scholarship to attend Duke brought him away from everything he had known thus far.

At the same time, Sangjie found that Duke offered a wealth of opportunities to continue to study issues about which he cared deeply. In his first two years, he took courses on religious studies and Chinese language, subjects that formed the core of what educated people in his region were expected to know. Moreover, he found a new lens for understanding his community and its stories in cultural anthropology.

After his first year at Duke, Sangjie went back to Tibet to research Buddhist rituals and to teach English in the rural communities in which he was raised. The nomadic lifestyle of many people on the Tibetan Plateau makes formal schooling difficult, and so many of Sangjie’s peers do not speak or read Chinese, nor do they speak English.

Being back in Tibet also drove home some of the changes that have been occurring in the region. Infrastructure projects like electrification and road improvements are changing the landscape, while government policies are pushing previously itinerant people to towards permanently settling in more urban areas. He thinks communities like his will mostly be resettled in a matter of years, not decades.

In the spring of his sophomore year, Sangjie enrolled in the Kenan Purpose Program. His coursework elicited reflections on the two sides of his life. He hoped to reconcile his desire to be connected to his homeland, a place that is changing rapidly in response to more concentrated development in western China, and his desire to grow as a scholar and continue to put down roots in the West. The following summer, Sangjie worked with Ganglha, an NGO focusing on cultural and environmental preservation in Tibet, to collect oral histories of elders his home region while it was still possible to do so. He hoped he would like this work, but he wasn’t sure. He is both of this place but also apart from it now, and he found that he was treated accordingly.

For Sangjie, the way forward is to continue to be connected and yet somewhat apart from eastern Tibet. Documenting the language, culture, and ways of life of families like his before they dissolve in the face of development is naturally very personal; it has become perhaps professional as well. “We cannot always preserve traditions,” he notes, “but we can preserve the knowledge of those traditions for future generations.” In order to do that, he needs to be far away for a while, developing his skills as an anthropologist and documentarian. He has some time left at Duke, but he is currently planning to pursue a PhD in cultural anthropology.