An Arts and Sciences Development Office idea to find potential donors to the FOCUS program is not working out as hoped, and for some professors has raised questions about how active they should be in the fundraising process.
Earlier this month, the development office and Susan Berndt, associate director of development for arts and sciences, sent an e-mail to FOCUS professors inviting them to a set of three meetings, where they were eventually asked to identify FOCUS students whose enthusiasm indicated that their parents might donate to the program.
FOCUS program director Seymour Mauskopf said the success of FOCUS has led the University to try to endow the programs-which offer interdisciplinary sets of courses for freshmen. The endowment effort was spurred last month by a $5 million matching gift. FOCUS and development officials must first find 20 other gifts of at least $250,000 in order to receive all the money as a match.
"As you may have read, the Bass family has generously made a $5 million challenge grant for FOCUS to Duke," reads the e-mail, which was confidential until it was obtained by The Chronicle this week. "We look forward over the next few years to seeing the program fully endowed. Arts and Sciences Development is asking for your help in identifying families who may be interested in assisting Duke in this manner."
Professors' objections were first raised publicly at the Feb. 8 meeting of the Arts and Sciences Council, prompting the development office to abandon the idea of distributing to professors a list of potential donor families, from which they were supposed to choose. The meetings were still held, however, and were more explicit than the e-mail in soliciting professors' direct help in identifying FOCUS students whose parents could be targeted as contributors.
But that plan has been tabled because of the objections that identifying students might strain the integrity of the professor-student relationship.
"What came out of these meetings was: How do we work with the development office to endow the FOCUS programs without straining our relationships with students.... I think these meetings have been more explorations," said Mauskopf, also a professor of history, who attended two of the meetings.
Requesting students' names from the faculty as a means of gaining such donations went too far, said William Chafe, vice provost for undergraduate education and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.
"In this instance regarding the FOCUS program, we made a mistake when it was suggested that students could be used as a vehicle for identifying potential donors," Chafe wrote in an e-mail. "My belief had been that the development office was simply trying to find enthusiastic advocates for the FOCUS program."
Berndt declined to comment.
It is not clear whether or not this development plan signals a more wide-spread problem with contacting professors, but most administrators and professors recognize the need for a working relationship between the two groups.
"We don't really know what Duke needs unless we talk to Duke faculty members. That's our basic relationship, but I also think that professors shouldn't do what they don't see as appropriate," said Peter Vaughn, communications director for University Development. Vaughn said there are currently no guidelines for his office's interaction with the faculty. "That's left to the individual discretion of our development officers to decide."
Chafe agreed that some faculty interaction is important to the development process. "Faculty frequently are involved in discussions with donors, often about programs that are very popular with students. Faculty members know more about their own programs than anyone else, and often encounter potential donors who ask about their work," wrote Chafe. "For example, people in Markets and Management talk with executives who come to lecture in the program, or contribute financially to such programs as Values and Ethics in the Marketplace."
But Mauskopf said that what FOCUS professors were asked to do was unusual. "The issue faculty must face is that this level of outreach by the development office is very unprecedented," he said.
FOCUS professors' reactions to the development office's efforts seem to range widely from those strongly opposed to some who felt comfortable with the plan.
"I see basically no problem in what the development office proposed originally. If someone asked me to take a list of FOCUS students and point out people who reacted more positively, I wouldn't see any problem with that," Mauskopf said. "The issue comes in when the development office asks more probing questions. The faculty-student relationship is not supposed to be contextualized by the socioeconomic background of our students. Exactly how this will work out is uncertain."
Peter McIsaac, assistant professor of German Languages and Literature, and other professors expressed reservations about what they might be asked to say about students. "I thought that picking out students would threaten academic integrity, and I think most professors would agree," McIsaac said. "I'm not supportive of this project development has. I wouldn't want my going to this meeting to be considered as my being in support of the project."
Considering the wide-range of faculty opinions, a final consensus on professor-development interaction may be difficult to reach. The recent situation may be the beginning of the conversation.
"The faculty is trying to grapple with this because we realize that a faculty-student relationship, especially in FOCUS, is a very intense one. We do not want in any way to put stress on that," Mauskopf said. "We're all facing this issue of how to do it. We're feeling out ways. Nothing is off the table."
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