Brodhead reflects on Friday’s open forum, action items

<p>President Richard Brodhead was one of three administrators present at Friday’s open forum in Page Auditorium.</p>

President Richard Brodhead was one of three administrators present at Friday’s open forum in Page Auditorium.

Following Friday’s community forum in Page Auditorium, The Chronicle’s Amrith Ramkumar spoke with President Richard Brodhead about the event and his response to recent incidents on campus. 

The Chronicle: What were your main takeaways from what students said about their personal experiences? Were you surprised by any of them?

Richard Brodhead: No, not especially. I went there to hear what people wanted to say. It was certainly going to be an event where people spoke about their concerns. I go to a lot of places where people are telling me what they love about Duke. I take both of these things to be true, but I didn’t expect today to be about the good side of things. I heard things that were new to me, but I heard things that I’ve also heard. An event like that can make it look like none of us ever talked to a student or learned what a student thought until Friday, but actually that’s not true. 

We’re all in communication all the time. I know that there’s a world which appears that there are some people who are called administrators with a capital “A” who are completely separate from other people, but actually there’s another sense in which we all live in this community together, that we enjoy each other’s company. 

TC: There were so many issues brought up, from faculty diversity to mental health. How do you aggregate those and tackle those problems?

RB: We’ll sit down and say to ourselves, “Of the things we’ve heard, which are the things that have to be acted on most quickly and which are the ones that are going to take a longer time?” Maybe part of what we need to do is to inform people better. It’s hard, because you can’t just send out a list of good things you’re doing. But if you don’t do that, then no one knows the good things you’re doing. And then when you tell people, they go, “Well, none of us knew that.” That’s alright, we just all need to be in more communication about these issues and the degree of priority they have for this university.

TC: What are some of the ways that this communication could be improved?

RB: I think the best one is just having people out and about. Emails from the president—people don’t sit down, thoughtfully digest them and then commit them to memory. And that’s one of the troubles. If I send out an email every day about something that’s happening on campus, the only assured outcome is that no one would ever read a single one. So you have to choose your moments. We just have to use every such occasion to speak about these topics.

TC: Could you clarify some of the new initiatives that you and the other administrators brought up?

RB: I said three things. One, in imitation of what was done with the sexual misconduct task force, that we’d be having a significantly beefed up task force on all issues of bias and hate. 

Two, that we would be revisiting and reconsidering the question of whether our disciplinary rules should have specific mention of bias and hate and specific weighting of penalties for those things, or whether existing rules are adequate. None of these things are easy questions. That’s why I didn’t announce a new rule today. If the great majority of universities in America don’t have that kind of regulation, it isn’t because they don’t care about these things. It’s because there are complications in administering that have to be worked through, but I’m as happy as anyone to see, does someone have a version of this that is working well for them that would work well for us? If so, I would be very happy to adopt it. 

The third one was greater transparency about the handling of issues that could be put in the bias and hate category. There’s some degree of visibility that’s not sufficient, because some people know about it and most people don’t. And I think that’s an easy one to do. I’m not going to roll out the specifics of these things [yet], but these are commitments we’ve made, and I expect to have this work.

TC: [Black Student Alliance President] Henry Washington raised concerns during the forum about incident report forms. Can you explain how such a form would be different from what currently exists?

RB: Some people say there’s no ability to file such a thing. Some people say that it already exists. Guess what? That tells you that at the very least you have a communication problem, so we would need to look and see where are the improvements that can be made in the transparency of communication.

TC: Communication has been on the minds of many students, especially regarding the lag time between when the incidents occur and when the administration responds. What has to be done on the administrative end before an email can be sent out to students?

RB: Different instances have different facts, different shapes, different gravities, so you can’t have a cookbook formula for how to communicate about them. There certainly have been ones in my lifetime that were not at all correctly understood on the first instance, so if you communicate too broadly about it, you can actually create broad misunderstanding of the issue. Certainly it’s a challenge to all of us to think harder about all this, but the truth is the communication has to be appropriate. There’s just no escaping that fact.

TC: This week for a lot of people has been a whirlwind. What has it been like for you as a president of a university?

RB: These events on our campus have been concerning. But...a student who I met at a meeting with [LGBTQ students] was exactly right: there’s a way in which it’s all about the events, and there’s a way in which it’s not at all about the events. That’s very important. There’s a way in which we’re talking about this like it’s a “this week crisis issue” and there’s another way in which we are talking about a year-after-year continuing effort on the part of this university to transform itself. 

When everyone who came to the University came from the same school and had the same income, guess what? You actually didn’t have to mediate these kinds of group [conflicts] because you didn’t have different groups. The openness of a great university to all the talent of the country and the world—I regard that as the greatest privilege of a university. And if that means there’s new work you have to do on underlying issues, most of them arising from a social dimension, structural social issues or historical, cultural issues, then let’s get busy and do the work.

TC: How did the events around the nation, at Missouri and Yale, impact the planning of this forum?

RB: Each event on every campus carries heightened charge that comes from national things. So of course there was some input from other universities, but this was a Duke event. This was a Duke gathering.

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