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Reese Ritter

Teaching on Purpose Alum Wins Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching

Posted on by Reese Ritter

Kenan program alum Claire Rostov recently received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from Duke Graduate School. A Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Duke University who will graduate this spring, Rostov’s research centers around religion, media, consumption, and waste in the United States.

Rostov credits her involvement in many teaching programs, including Teaching on Purpose, in shaping her teaching style. Teaching on Purpose is a fellowship program that encourages doctoral students to reflect on their own professional identities — not only as scholars, but also as educators — and how their discipline connects to questions of meaning and purpose. It is part of The Purpose Project at Duke, a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School, and the Office of the Provost, which is funded by The Duke Endowment.

Teaching on Purpose doesn’t just equip Ph.D. students to teach in the classroom. Fellows learn how to incorporate interdisciplinary themes, practice communicating with other graduate students and faculty outside of their departments, and learn how to respond to students’ nonacademic as well as academic needs. 

In this interview, Rostov talks about how she learned to prioritize her students’ curiosity by guiding them to develop their own relationship with the material. She discusses how the fellowship challenged her to relinquish control of the classroom and connect abstract concepts to her students’ daily lives. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Reese Ritter: Why did you choose to participate in the Teaching on Purpose Fellowship?

Claire Rostov: There’s lots of really practical parts of teaching, like “How do you make a syllabus?” and stuff like that, but I was excited to think a little bit more about the big picture: what are the big questions and the ways in which we are teaching in a broader college context. I know a lot of Ph.D. students don’t get that opportunity, and I think Duke is especially good at trying to help us be better teachers coming out of grad school.

RR: What were the biggest things that you took away from the fellowship?

CR: Teaching on Purpose really helps you think about how your role teaching your one class is such a small part of the just bigger institutional context, and also all of the things happening in students’ lives that really extend beyond your class that you’re teaching. Thinking more broadly about all the things that students are involved in, and all the classes they’re taking, and how those sort of mesh in that bigger context was helpful.

We spent a lot of time in Teaching on Purpose thinking about how to connect the course content that we’re teaching with questions and interests students have: how do we ask questions and make connections between the content we’re teaching and students’ lived experiences and things they care about. I’m in Religious Studies, so sometimes the things I’m teaching feel really relevant and timely, and other times we’re talking about 18th century sermons, and it’s like, how does this matter to a Duke student in 2026. Thinking about how to make those connections relevant was helpful.

RR: What was it like to work with Ph.D. students from other departments?

CR: As you get further and further on in graduate school, you get way more stuck in your little world, and so even students in your department are doing really different things. You just have way fewer opportunities to interact with other students. Teaching on Purpose is a good way to meet other Ph.D. students across the university and think about the sorts of questions and concerns that they are thinking about in the classes they’re teaching. Sometimes those are really similar across, for example, humanities and sciences. But sometimes those are really different.

RR: How did you feel when you found out that you received the award?

CR: It was really touching to receive the award. A lot of the course evaluations that students wrote were, I think, a big reason I got the award. Most of the students have graduated now, so it felt like a very sweet end; but also a little sad to not be able to share it with them.

So much of teaching is just experimenting. You try something in the classroom, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s some value in just continuing to experiment and try new things in the classroom. It was nice to just get the award and have that be acknowledged.

“Teaching on Purpose inspired the confidence to just try some things, and to do something experimental or new. That made for a much better classroom experience and a better learning environment.”

— Claire Rostov

RR: How did Teaching on Purpose change your approach to teaching?

CR: If a class is an hour and 15 minutes, and you show up with an hour and 15 minutes of lecture notes, you know exactly how the class is going to go, and that’s easy in a lot of ways. It takes off the stress of the unknown. It’s much harder to relinquish that control and do interactive activities and group discussions, because you don’t actually know how it’s going to go. You don’t know if you’re going to have too much stuff or too little stuff until you’re doing it. Teaching on Purpose gave me the confidence to just try some things, and to do something experimental and new. That made for a much better classroom experience and a better learning environment. No one needs to hear me talk for an hour and 15 minutes; that’s not very exciting.

In Teaching on Purpose, we talked about having questions that help relate the course content to students’ own lived experiences and lives. Each day in my class, there was a question on the syllabus and students were discussion leaders to start class off, so for the first 10 minutes, different students would run discussion on those questions. Across the board, that was what students liked most about class — this moment in which their classmates were getting to run the discussion. That’s such a good example of ‘you don’t need to hear me talk for an hour and 15 minutes.’ That was what I took directly from something we’d done in Teaching on Purpose, having these questions that would relate the content to students’ lives.

I’d recommend Teaching on Purpose to any Ph.D. student, that’s for sure. I think it’s a good experience, and I think it’s helpful.

To read more about Claire Rostov’s teaching award, visit the Duke Graduate School website . For more information about the Teaching on Purpose Fellowship, see the program webpage.

How Duke Engineers are Building Character from Day One

Posted on by Reese Ritter
A professor reviews a student's work
Professor Michael Rizk (left) works with a student on a project in the Duke Design POD, a designated makerspace for first-year students. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

Engineering courses are notoriously challenging, but what if they also challenged students to become better people? In Engineering 101, an introductory course for first-years that focuses on design and technical communication, professors Michael Rizk and Ann Saterbak challenge students not only to develop their STEM skills, but also their character. 

This course is part of Character Forward, a partnership between Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and The Purpose Project at Duke, a collaboration between the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School, and the Office of the Provost. Character Forward seeks to integrate purpose and integrity into the engineering curriculum.

Dr. Rizk says that he saw this course as an opportunity “to be a part of students’ lives as they figure out what they want to do in life and what’s important to them.” In addition to helping them develop good habits as engineers, he hopes to help them shape their values and aspirations in everyday life. 

Rizk worked with the Character Forward team to emphasize valuable character traits during each stage of course projects, such as team formation, ideation, prototyping, testing and result-sharing. For example, team formation requires respect, especially when students come from different backgrounds or have different lived experiences. The instructors gave examples of how teams could foster respect before the phase even began. Students later created video reflections to share what they learned throughout their projects and how it applied to their personal lives.

A Kenan Institute for Ethics assessment team found that 80% of students had a positive view of the focus on character in their course. One student, Daniel Matten E’28, said that the character exercises were instrumental in bringing his group together.

Two students work together on a project in the Design Cube
Two engineering students work together on a project in the Design Cube. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

“Although I knew we were all smart people, I was initially concerned about the group dynamics given our various backgrounds and leadership styles,” he said. “The character reflections encouraged by the instructors and TAs sparked the conversations that we needed to have as a group and pulled us much closer together.” 

Other students echoed that the communication and teamwork skills that they learned in the course would stay with them long after they received their final grade.

Rizk says that the Pratt School of Engineering is defined by the kind of people it sends out into the world. He is proud of the work he has done with the Character Forward Initiative and optimistic about the future of his Engineering 101 students.

Read the full story by Mahi Patel on the Pratt School of Engineering website here.

How Split-Second Decisions Lead to Gun Violence — and How We Can Stop It

Posted on by Reese Ritter

Imagine getting the chance to fix your biggest mistake. All you need is ten minutes of your life back.

Jens Ludwig says that 80% of the people incarcerated for gun violence would not be in prison if they had that chance.

Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. His research shows that most deadly shootings in the U.S. aren’t premeditated acts of murder —  instead, they’re due to conflicts escalating in the moment.

A man speaks onstage with a woman looking at him
At the Ethics of Now event at the Durham County Main Library, Ludwig recounts being in the passenger seat of a cop car for his crime research. He remembers the adrenaline of zooming through red lights with the siren blaring. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg.

As part of the Ethics of Now, an event series from the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Ludwig visited Duke University and Durham, North Carolina to talk about how he analyzes gun violence through the lens of behavioral economics, a branch of economics that seeks to better understand human decision-making. He spoke to students at Duke Law School and the Department of Economics before joining Ethics of Now host, history professor Adriane Lentz-Smith, for a public event at the Durham County Main Library on the evening of January 23.

In his book, “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence,” Ludwig writes about two Chicago neighborhoods, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore. These communities are right next to each other. They are indistinguishable in terms of demographics and economic conditions. Yet, despite their proximity, Greater Grand Crossing has twice as many shootings as South Shore. Why?

Located by Lake Michigan, South Shore has more commercial development, which means there’s more foot traffic and what Ludwig calls “eyes on the street.” Since most shootings are the result of split-second decisions in moments of high stress, Ludwig says, bystanders have a deescalating effect. 

Additionally, according to research from the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago, which Ludwig directs, neighborhoods plagued by gun violence keep losing residents, because they leave to find safer places to live. So the cycle of violence deepens and the problem only gets worse. 

Ludwig discussed his research with a group of Duke undergraduates in the Social Sciences building — the same building where he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Duke Graduate School over 30 years ago. 

Man speaks to students at a table
Students listen to Dr. Jens Ludwig discuss his research into gun violence and behavioral economics in the Ethics of Now student conversation. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg

Ludwig said that while the gun violence problem is much bigger and more complex than national policy would have you assume, there are much less costly solutions than what is proposed. 

Since 90% of shooters and 80% of victims have prior records, Ludwig said, training detention guards to teach behavioral intervention methods is an effective way to curb violent crimes. Empowering high-risk people to make smarter decisions instead of escalating conflict to the point of no return is an inexpensive but practical solution.

“As we learn more about how the world works, it turns out that you can really reduce violence without having to incarcerate lots of people,” Ludwig said.

When a student asked whether these interventions would have similar outcomes in different regions, Ludwig said yes. “Policy-makers assume absolutely nothing generalizes,” he said, but “the things that work are much less context-specific than policy-makers assume.”

Man stands up in a crowd of people seated
A Community Violence Intervention (CVI) worker asks Ludwig about the efficacy of CVI’s work in mediating gun violence. Photo credit: Summer Steenberg

Ludwig later visited the Durham County Main Library to speak to the Durham community about gun violence. He reiterated his point about the importance of behavioral interventions while diving deeper into the psychological mechanisms of these life-altering decisions.

When the brain is under stress, like the stress of intense interpersonal conflict, Ludwig says that deliberate “System 2” thinking turns off and automatic “System 1” thinking takes over. 

“System 1 is designed to be very fast…choosing between two options: ‘fine’ and the ‘end of the world,’” Ludwig explained. These instant decisions can lead to the heat-of-the-moment violence, especially in vulnerable communities. 

“There is a second group of people that is often engaging in high-stakes situations where misconstrual and catastrophizing also turns out to be important, which is law enforcement,” Ludwig said. 

He described how a University of Chicago research colleague delivered behavioral training to a thousand Chicago police officers, “then looked at their administrative activity data six months later.” In comparison with a control group that didn’t receive the training, there were reductions in their “use of force, low public safety value arrests, and black-white disparities in low public safety value arrests as well.”

In the Q&A session, Durham County Commissioner Michelle Burton asked for practical steps that she and her fellow policymakers in Durham could take to fight gun violence. Ludwig mentioned training detention guards to provide behavioral intervention education, but also focusing on city planning. Creating vibrant neighborhoods entices people to go for a walk or drive around the block, which decreases the likelihood of violent crime by 30%.

Other questioners led Ludwig to emphasize the importance of a good social safety net, education, and a variety of policies that can target different aspects of the gun violence problem.

Teaching Engineering Students to Navigate the “Gray”: Robotics Course Focuses on Ethical Decision-Making

Posted on by Reese Ritter
A woman gestures in a seminar
Professor Oca participates in a Character Forward seminar focused on how engineering faculty could incorporate character education into their courses. Photo credit: Alex Sanchez.

Professor Siobhan Oca teaches Duke engineering students that they will sometimes face moments when there’s not a clear way forward.

Through her Ethics in Robotics and Automation course at Duke, Oca dives into the ethical implications of engineering. She walks students through real-life examples, such as the Boeing 737 MAX crisis and hiring algorithm biases. Much like the engineers and executives of Boeing deciding whether or not to pull the planes after the two consecutive crashes, students are thrown into tricky situations where they must decide how to proceed.

Oca’s course asks students to rate themselves on virtues like trust and fairness, and consider how these virtues tie into the real-life decisions that engineers face. Engineering is not just about doing things perfectly, Oca says, but doing things responsibly —which means taking time to understand the ethical implications of their decision-making.

“Engineers want to work with facts and clear ideas. But the world is not binary. Teaching students to reason in the gray, together and across different backgrounds, may be the most technical thing we do.”

—Siobhan Oca

Oca’s work is part of the Character Forward, a partnership between Duke Engineering and The Purpose Project at Duke that seeks to incorporate ethics into the engineering curriculum. Funded by The Duke Endowment, The Purpose Project at Duke is a collaboration of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke Divinity School, and the Office of the Provost.

Read the full article on the Pratt School of Engineering website.

Showcasing American Indian Cultures through Comic Books

Posted on by Reese Ritter
woman poses as superhero in front of graphic art poster
Courtney Lewis poses superhero-style at the “American Indians Go Graphic” exhibit. Photo credit: Jared Lazarus/Duke University.

Located near the entrance of Perkins Library on Duke University’s West Campus, the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery features a new exhibit each semester. This fall, that exhibit is “American Indians Go Graphic,” which features a collection of graphic art and comic books.

Along with Lee Francis, a fellow Ph.D. and comic book enthusiast, Courtney Lewis curated the exhibit to showcase works by American Indians about American Indians.

Lewis, Crandall Family Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, launched the Native American Studies Initiative soon after arriving at Duke in 2023. In 2025, she expanded that initiative into a research program called RISE-US, or Research for Indigenous Studies and Engagement in the United States, at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. 

Lewis says that “American Indians Go Graphic” shows that American Indian cultures are not simply a historical phenomenon — they are a vibrant and current way of life.

“One of the most important elements of comic books is that they inherently humanize American Indian peoples. This is incredibly important because American Indians are often portrayed only in the past, as if we are not active players in today’s society. Bridging this gap greatly increases the discussions we can have about American Indian lives and impacts on society, from economics to community responsibility.”

— Courtney Lewis

Lewis says she hopes that visitors will get a glimpse of Native cultures, heroism, and humor through this exhibit. On November 14–16, she is also excited for Duke to host IndigiPopX, an Indigenous pop culture convention featuring Indigenous celebrities, chefs, filmmakers, comic artists, game developers, fashion designers and performers. 

To read Professor Lewis’s full interview about this exhibit and her work at Duke as a whole, visit Duke Today here.

Why Michael Sandel Thinks Universities Should Change Their Admissions Models

Posted on by Reese Ritter

On October 7, a crowd of Duke students, faculty, and community members filled the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center to the brim to hear from Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University. 

In an event organized by the Department of Political Science and co-sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry, and Belonging, Sandel spoke about “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” — his 2020 bestseller in which he offers different ways of thinking about success and who deserves it.

A seated young woman reads a copy of The Tyranny of Merit
A student looks at a copy of Sandel’s book, “The Tyranny of Merit,” before the event’s start. Free copies of the book were available for undergraduate students. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.

Sandel opened by explaining what he means by the “tyranny” of merit. He agrees that there is a level of merit necessary for a surgeon to successfully perform an operation on a patient. However, he argues that this merit doesn’t belong to the surgeon alone, but also to the many community members, mentors, and others who supported the surgeon along the way.

This runs counter to many of our popular assumptions about what merit means.

“An ethic of hard work and personal responsibility leads us to see ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, which, after all, is a persistent temptation that’s in our common culture,” Sandel said.

According to Sandel, “a fully realized meritocracy is corrosive to the common good because it leads to hubris among the winners and to humiliation for those who lose out.”

In other words, so-called “winners” see themselves as deserving while looking down on those who they view as less successful. Perceiving this attitude, lower-income Americans feel resentful, deepening the social and political divide between the two groups.

A man in a dark blue suit speaks at a podium
Michael Sandel speaks at the event. Sandel was recently awarded the Berggrauen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.

One of the biggest contributors to this divide, according to Sandel, is higher education.

“In the age of meritocracy, colleges and universities have come to be central institutions in the public culture,” Sandel said, “because they are the institutions that define the merit and confer the credentials that a market-driven meritocratic society honors and rewards.”

Sandel describes college as an elevator that higher-income people enter from the top floors, noting that higher-income applicants have much stronger chances of being accepted into the top twenty universities in the United States. However, despite these advantages, admission is still not guaranteed, so privileged kids are pushed to achieve high grades and test scores and participate in extracurricular activities to better their chances. Sandel said this dynamic creates “wounded winners” — privileged young people suffering from stress and burnout — while top colleges continue to be inaccessible to many lower-income students. Both end up harmed in the process.

Sandel then proposed a lottery system for college admissions. After narrowing candidates down to a pool of qualified applicants, students would be selected at random to receive offers of admission. 

Some might argue that this makes the process overly reliant on luck. But Sandel says that luck already plays a big role in the admissions process — for example, a student born into a family with wealth and resources has a clear advantage going in. 

The lottery system distributes luck in a more egalitarian way. It also makes it more visible. Since admitted students know that luck played a role in their admission, they don’t assume that they got in simply because they were better than the candidates who didn’t. 

According to Sandel, this system benefits lower-income students by taking legacy admissions and expensive extracurricular activities out of the equation, while also removing some of the pressure for wealthy students to overcommit and overachieve.

A large crowd fills an event space
Due to the large amount of interest in the event, the room was “standing-room only.” Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.

Along with Sandel, the event featured two respondents: Duke Professor of Law Jedediah Purdy and Danielle Sassoon, the former U.S. Attorney in the Southern New York district — who came to prominence recently due to her resignation from the high-profile Eric Adams case amid political pressure to drop the charges. 

Sassoon came to the podium to offer a response based on her experiences. She said that her maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews who came to America as refugees after surviving the Holocaust. Her grandfather provided for the family by working in a factory, where he was promoted to manager. Sassoon said that despite the many challenges he faced, his hard work helped her believe in the meritocratic system in America.

Although she agreed with several flaws in the college admissions system that Sandel highlighted in his opening remarks, including legacy admissions, Sassoon said she is not ready to abandon meritocracy. She pointed to the erosion of national unity and civic duty as the root cause of the divisions Sandel described.

In Purdy’s response to Sassoon, he discussed her role in the Eric Adams case. When Sassoon faced political pressure to drop the charges, she refused and resigned. Purdy complimented Sassoon for her actions. He connected this to the debate on meritocracy, arguing that her merit and sense of responsibility were not rewarded — instead, she was shunned by powerful institutions that opposed her decision.

Purdy also responded to one of the major points in Sandel’s book, which is that meritocracy obscures how globalization has led to widening wealth inequality, leaving many Americans behind. Sandel had earlier said that meritocracy provides “the rationale [and] specifications for the inequalities that photoshop [neoliberal] policies.”

Purdy agreed that meritocracy has brought us to a place which it is now difficult to untangle ourselves from. He concluded by emphasizing the need for cohesion and solidarity that reaches across class differences.

A group of standing people chat with each other
The speakers — Danielle Sasson, Michael Sandel, and Jed Purdy (right) — chat following the event. Photo credit: John West/Trinity Communications.