The Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy is set to undergo consolidation and possibly major restructuring, following conversations about a 2000 external review.
The discussions, now being held by a special committee appointed by the provost, have centered around the department's administrative structure, which is split between Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine. They are expected to conclude by the end of the summer.
BAA Chair Richard Kay said the department has two viable options other than the status quo: Move entirely to Arts and Sciences or divide the department, moving anatomy to the medical school and keeping biological anthropology in Arts and Sciences.
Kay said he favored consolidating the entire department within Arts and Sciences.
"I think the department fits intellectually quite well into Arts and Sciences," he said. "At the same time, it's pretty important for the medical school to cover its needs on its own medical student teaching, so that's the push and pull." Even though some professors in the department teach anatomy instead of undergraduate courses, BAA Director of Undergraduate Studies Steven Churchill said most of the research is similar. Many BAA faculty receive their funding from the National Science Foundation, not the National Institutes of Health like many Medical Center researchers.
Part of the discussions include a proposed medical curriculum change that would stretch anatomy education over the academic year. Faculty would then spend a couple of hours teaching anatomy throughout the year rather than for entire days.
Nationally, most biological anthropology units fall within an anthropology department, as Duke had until 1988, or are tucked into biological sciences departments. But Provost Peter Lange said he felt Duke's biological anthropology component could easily stand on its own.
"That would be one approach," Lange said. "In the long-term, [the Medical Center] will have to assume anatomy, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you have to fold biological anthropology into another department."
If the department were to move entirely to Arts and Sciences, it is unclear who would support faculty who teach anatomy for the medical school.
"[BAA] is probably inefficient administratively," said former BAA faculty member Kathleen Smith, now interim-chair of the biology department. "However, because the units [are] parts of two different schools, the mechanisms of consolidation are difficult, [like] who pays for space, who gets overhead and so forth."
Dr. Sandy Williams, dean of the School of Medicine, and Dr. Russel Kaufman, the medical school's vice dean for education and academic affairs, were not available for comment.
The two-year-old external review also recommended that the department be consolidated physically. Currently, there are faculty in the Sands Building on Research Drive, the Biological Sciences Building on Science Drive and the Primate Center.
"I think that everybody agrees that we'd be a lot better off if we were in common space," said Churchill, an assistant professor of BAA. He said that although the undergraduate program is healthy and attracts about 80 students, undergraduates suffer because they do not get to interact with Medical Center BAA faculty.
William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said the completion of the new $80 million Multidisciplinary Sciences Building would be the first opportunity to consolidate the department. "I think it's a very big space issue involved," Chafe said. "It's hard to create space out of nothing."
The review also recommended hiring more tenure-track faculty and taking a stronger role in the genomics initiative. And it discussed the Primate Center, which had previously undergone an internal review. Last summer, BAA Professor William Hylander replaced Kenneth Glander as the center's director and has since tried to shift its perspective away from conservation and toward research.
Hylander said the center has already requested a genomics researcher.
"There's nobody in our department because we haven't hired anybody," he said. "That's not the kind of stuff you just start doing and drop everything else, [but] this is something that could help the Primate Center out a lot."
Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School, said the center could be a tremendous bank of genetic data of organisms that can provide insights into human evolution.
"If you take biological anthropology in its larger context," he said, "there is an opportunity to do things that are much more interesting to people than the aspects of lemur behavior."
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