As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Cheryl Foster found herself at a crossroads. She’d 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.
Foster took the scholarship and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, to pursue a master’s in English. She joined a theater workshop facilitating stripped down performance projects— radical theater, letting the disenfranchised tell their own stories. She studied the philosophy of beauty and aesthetics.
When Foster transferred into Edinburgh’s 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’s original distance-learning models: flexible learning of the highest standards for adults, the working class, those with disabilities— anyone at all. She loved the idea of education as democratizer. That idea brought her to URI in 1992.
Foster says teaching at URI 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 URI teaching and advising awards, Foster says, “I 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.”
And why philosophy? “Philosophy is a gift to people in that it liberates them to think for themselves, to have an inner life. That’s why I’m a believer in the discipline,” Foster says. “How I came to teach was something of an accident; why I’m still doing it is because it’s transformative.”
Marybeth Reilly-McGreen