The University's Board of Trustees meeting at the end of September will be the first to take place under a new structure designed to streamline and focus the board's decision-making process.
For more than a year, administrators and members of the board have been discussing how the body's organization could be altered to make its operation more efficient and more effective. During their last three quarterly meetings, the trustees have taken action to formally implement certain changes.
John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs, said that the board has traditionally been involved in making decisions that could more easily be handled by University administrators.
With this reorganization, trustees should instead be able to concentrate more on major policy issues, he said. "It is an issue of finding the appropriate way to capitalize on the board members' expertise."
Restructuring the board should help it to focus more on strategic planning in dealing with changes in higher education, said Board Chair John Koskinen in a statement.
"We have great confidence in President Keohane and her administrative team and want to be sure the administration has the flexibility to make appropriate management decisions with regular reports to the board while the trustees concentrate on the broad strategic issues that will help ensure the future academic and financial strength of the University," Koskinen said.
As another result of trustees' concerns with efficiency, members of the media will no longer be admitted at any point during board committee meetings. Under the previous structure, reporters were permitted to attend all meetings with the exception of periods of executive session, during which confidential matters were discussed.
Reporters will still be allowed to attend the general session of the board, when reports from individual committee chairs will be discussed. Koskinen and Keohane also will be made available for a short period following the general session to answer questions from the media.
A major part of the reorganization plan focuses on changing the structure of standing committees. In December, the board approved the creation of a committee that will deal with the Duke University Health System. This new committee will be charged specifically with helping Medical Center administrators deal with the challenges that a change to managed care has introduced.
The Institutional Advancement Committee, which has been responsible for dealing with both fund raising and public affairs issues, will no longer convene. Instead, many of its key functions will now be absorbed by the Executive Committee.
In an effort to clean up the agendas of both the Buildings and Grounds Committee and the Business and Finance Committee, the board has given Executive Vice President Tallman Trask more authority to approve certain expenditures previously handled by those committees. Trask said that while the change was not terribly dramatic in terms of University spending-his cap has been shifted from $250,000 to $1 million-it should remove more mundane business items from the trustees' agenda.
"The change should create space on the agenda for more substantive discussions," Trask said. "It is an attempt to focus away from the trivial and focus on the bigger policy issues."
A logistical alteration that calls for certain committee meetings to meet sequentially instead of concurrently is designed to allow key administrators to attend all relevant meetings. The Academic Affairs and Student Affairs committees will meet at staggered times so that Provost John Strohbehn can attend both, and the Buildings and Grounds and Business and Finance committees will follow the same pattern so that Trask may attend both.
Trask said that under the new structure he will no longer have to check committee agendas and run back and forth between the two meetings, as he had to do previously.
In an overall effort to keep trustee meetings more cohesive, general focus topics will be set for each quarterly meeting. "It is possible that three or four committees could discuss the same issue from very different perspectives," Burness said. He added that all of those perspectives would then be addressed by the entire board during the general session.
While the press has enjoyed nearly full access to the board's meetings in the past, the practice of excluding the press from trustee meetings is not uncommon among private institutions.
At both Harvard University and Princeton University, for example, trustee meetings are completely closed to the media. Todd Braunstein, editor of the Harvard Crimson, said that The Corporation, which serves as Harvard's governing body, meets entirely in closed session and is generally inaccessible to reporters.
Burness said that even with the new restrictions on the media, Duke's practice of holding open general board meetings is rare. "To my knowledge, there are very few private institutions that make their board meetings open to the press."
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