{"id":1016,"date":"2019-03-21T12:09:24","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T16:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=1016"},"modified":"2019-03-26T22:47:20","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T02:47:20","slug":"freedom-of-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/spring-2019\/freedom-of-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom of Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Freedom of Thought<\/h1>

Philosophy is a gift to people in that it liberates them to think for themselves, to have an inner life.<\/p><\/div><\/div>

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\nCheryl Foster, Professor of Philosophy<\/p>\n
Photo: Nora Lewis<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Cheryl Foster found herself at a crossroads. She\u2019d decided to take a leave of absence from her graduate program at the University of Chicago, but for what? Dramaturge for a local theater? A Marshall Scholarship? A career at PBS? More than options, two were offers and the third was being pushed by her boss, a respected Chicago journalist.<\/p>\n

Foster took the scholarship and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, to pursue a master\u2019s in English. She joined a theater workshop facilitating stripped down performance projects\u2014 radical theater, letting the disenfranchised tell their own stories. She studied the philosophy of beauty and aesthetics.<\/p>\n

When Foster transferred into Edinburgh\u2019s philosophy Ph.D. program, she unexpectedly found she could apply her prior experiences as a journalist and a director to teaching first-year moral philosophy. Additional teaching gigs in philosophy as well as her specialty, aesthetics, materialized at the Open University, which created one of the world\u2019s original distance-learning models: flexible learning of the highest standards for adults, the working class, those with disabilities\u2014 anyone at all. She loved the idea of education as democratizer. That idea brought her to 911±¬ΑΟ in 1992.<\/p>\n

Foster says teaching at 911±¬ΑΟ enables her to honor her commitment to public service while practicing her discipline. A 2013 Kennedy Center\/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher, and the recipient of numerous 911±¬ΑΟ teaching and advising awards, Foster says, \u201cI have a whole box of notes from students who have written to me over the years. I have kept them all. On my hard days, I go look at some of them and they remind me why I do what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

And why philosophy? \u201cPhilosophy is a gift to people in that it liberates them to think for themselves, to have an inner life. That\u2019s why I\u2019m a believer in the discipline,\u201d Foster says. \u201cHow I came to teach was something of an accident; why I\u2019m still doing it is because it\u2019s transformative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marybeth Reilly-McGreen<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Cheryl Foster found herself at a crossroads. She\u2019d decided to take a leave of absence from her graduate program at the University of Chicago, but for what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-2019","architecture-why-i-teach"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}