{"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 º¬Ð߲ݴ«Ã½ in 1992.<\/p>\n

Foster says teaching at º¬Ð߲ݴ«Ã½ 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 º¬Ð߲ݴ«Ã½ 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}]}}