Laurie Patton leaving behind a more interdisciplinary and diverse Duke

| Chronicle File Photo

Ongoing efforts to improve interdisciplinarity and diversity mark Laurie Patton’s four-year tenure as dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

Patton—who leaves Duke to become president of Middlebury College, effective July 1—emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary efforts within Trinity and oversaw the school during a period of increasing connectivity for the University as a whole. Within Trinity, she approved the creation of three new interdisciplinary certificates, including Civic Engagement and Social Change, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Decision Science, as well as an interdisciplinary co-major in global health.

The University also received a $50 million grant to create the interdisciplinary Bass Connections program during Patton’s tenure. This initiative, which launched in Fall 2013, allows teams of faculty and students across different schools to tackle complex global challenges.

"No question about it—interdisciplinarity has been and will continue to be a large focus," said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education. "Laurie Patton played a very important role in facilitating a broader university picture as opposed to having individual schools be silos."

Nowicki said interdisciplinarity—which was first pushed by former Provost Peter Lange 10 years ago—has become a poorly understood buzzword that often fails to capture the essence of its underlying concept.

“The BASS Connections program captures the broader idea best—it’s not just about crossing two disciplines, but also about applying knowledge to questions that can’t be studied any other way and integrating knowledge vertically across students and faculty," Nowicki said.

Addressing how to integrate programs such as Bass Connections in an interdisciplinary education will be one focus of the ongoing, faculty-led review of Trinity's curriculum.

The review of Curriculum 2000—which was created in 2000 and last modified in 2004—started in Fall 2014 and is scheduled to last three years. In an email, Patton wrote that she was "thrilled" with the review committee's progress thus far—noting that the faculty has focused on "self-authorship in education and students becoming more intentional and responsible for their own pathways."

"I think they will come up with some great proposals that move beyond a 'credentializing culture' and encourage student creativity,” she wrote. "We need to make sure our curriculum really makes students think, and allows them more ownership in and reflection about their own education."

Nowicki also spoke on the "credentializing culture" Patton referenced—noting that he has seen many students more concerned with collecting degree elements than they should or need to be.

“Students should be driving course choice by what they’re really interested in, not what they feel like they should have to take,” he said.

Efforts to improve diversity and inclusivity

Another point Patton has emphasized since her first year at Duke—when a controversial Duke study suggested disproportionate numbers of black students switched into stereotypically easy majors—is the importance of fostering sustained dialogue on diversity and inclusion.

She wrote that strides have been made in terms of increasing diversity in the sciences—noting that "key hires of women and minorities" have been made in mathematics, statistics, biology, computer science, physics and most dramatically, chemistry.

She suggested that conversations about diversity should be intergenerational, noting that we are seeing "real generational differences in our midst about what the right approaches are to inclusivity."

With the Office for Institutional Equity, Trinity has created a faculty training series for inclusivity in the classroom that focuses on unconscious bias and micro-aggression, Patton wrote. She explained that the program has been used in three departments, and that she hopes it will expand to all departments in coming years.

Nowicki, too, said faculty training must be a priority—describing "a remarkable inertia" in some faculty members who have been at Duke for more than a decade and have failed to recognize the University's changing student demographics.

"The University is the most diverse that it's been, and professors need to recognize that, to understand hidden bias," Nowicki said.

He also emphasized the necessity of inclusion—pointing out that although Duke is more diverse than most of its peer institutions, diversity is virtually meaningless without inclusion.

"Inclusion cannot just mean conformity—people need to feel comfortable expressing who they are,” he said.

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