David Rubenstein, chair of the Board of Trustees, visited campus this weekend for the Board's final meeting of the calendar year. Rubenstein, Trinity '70, also addressed the Academic Council for the first time—only the second time that the chair of the Board has done so. The Chronicle's Emma Baccellieri sat down with Rubenstein to discuss his vision for the University, at home and abroad.
The Chronicle: The candor you showed at Academic Council seemed to be something appreciated by a lot of the faculty members, and you also had the Town Hall with President Richard Brodhead in October. Are you interested making a concentrated effort to increase transparency?
David Rubenstein: I can't say that I have asked for the invitations, they came to me so I'm happy to respond—but I do think that we should remove any mystique or mystery that revolves around the Board of Trustees and its members.
TC: On that note, would you ever entertain the idea of returning to opening the Board meetings to media, as was done under President Terry Sanford?
DR: I don't think that's a great idea, because I think people like to talk confidentially about certain things. You're dealing with personnel information, you're dealing with confidential financial data, and to have it disclosed to the public might put Duke at a competitive disadvantage, so I don't think that's a good things. If there are any particular issues or secrets that people feel they really need to know more about, Brodhead and I are very accessible, so I think that a Board meeting that would be open would not be that productive, honestly.
TC: With the University currently in the process of determining its next strategic plan, are there any specific areas you'd like to see us focus on?
DR: I would like the University to have the best possible student body, so I would like ultimately to make sure that we have a student body that's as good as any student body. I'd like also to make sure that the faculty's as good as any faculty. We need to finish the buildings that we have underway now, we need to finish the capital campaign, and we have to deal with some personnel issues—a chancellor has to be selected for the health system—some things like that, but I think generally the University is in a pretty good position.
TC: The capital campaign has been said to be going well so far—
DR: Its goal was $3.25 billion, I think we've raised about $2.3 billion.
TC: And still with two years to go on that. $3.25 billion is the largest goal Duke's ever had, but some have critiqued that as modest.
DR: Well, Harvard is raising a $6.5 billion capital campaign, yes, but you also have to think about the capital campaign relative to the size of the alumni base. We have 160,000 alums, Harvard has 350,000—with your student body, your current endowment, you have to be realistic. $3.25 would be much bigger than everything we've ever been raised, and it's possible we'll do even better than that, but I think we're in pretty good shape.
TC: With Duke Kunshan University operating after so much planning and so much pushback, what do you say to the critiques so many faculty put forth over the past few years?
DR: Duke Kunshan is not that big a financial drain, we're not putting that much money into it. I think we put in for construction about $14.5 million, and for operations about $5 million so far, and it was projected that we were going to put in over five years about $40 million. So we're not really off the projections very much, and what we're going to get is a university in China that's going to get an enormous amount of attention, draw a lot of students, increase our brand in China—which is maybe the most important country outside the United States to do this kind of thing in—so I think it's well worth the effort.
Now, was it easy to get there? No. Was it more aggravation than many people wanted? Yes. Did we have more faculty and student questioning than we thought? Probably yes. But anything worth doing in life has always got challenges, so I'm happy with where we are.
TC: In terms of the opening—
DR: The opening went quite well, but openings always go well, openings rarely don't go well. So the opening went well, people were happy, but the trick is not to have a good opening—and we did have a good one—but it's what we do in the next one, two, three and four years, and I think we're in good shape. We have a terrific leader there, and [Brodhead] has put a lot of time and attention into it, so I'm pretty happy with it.
TC: As for athletics, with the NCAA beginning to consider different autonomy proposals—some of which involve divorcing the roles of student and athlete a little bit more—how do you see Duke moving forward?
DR: We're in a difficult situation, because we want to have athletes who are truly students, and we're not really interested in some of the kinds of things that would destroy that student-athlete mindset, so we'll just have to see. I think Stanford and Duke and similar schools—Northwestern, Rice—want to make sure that we are not doing anything that destroys the kind of student requirements that we have now for all students, and we'll just have to see where things go. But there's no doubt that the world is changing, and it's too early to predict what will happen five years from now. But clearly the world of money has become even bigger with respect to college sports, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon.
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