Alex Roland and Richard Kohn have been friends and colleagues for years. The two are military historians, experts in an area of history that, though small, is unique enough to be a significant subfield.
When Kohn came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991, it only made sense that he would seek out his counterpart Roland at Duke.
In fact, the two rapidly began planning the possibility of collaboration between the two military history groups at Duke and UNC.
So when Kohn had an extra ticket to a Duke-UNC basketball game in 1992, he invited Roland along to sketch out the final proposal at the Dean Smith Center.
"We sat up in the rafters behind one of the goals, and I think Duke was undefeated, and Carolina had a very good team that year," Kohn says. "It was a relative war down there on the court. Neither Alex nor I was noticing what was going on until about three-quarters through the game."
Although the eventual national champions dropped the game by two points to North Carolina, both Duke and UNC won something more important than a basketball game, Kohn says--a joint military history graduate program that is among the field's best.
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Graduate students in the program take classes at UNC and at Duke. Kohn says that in most cases, faculty from both schools sit on a student's dissertation committee, and often students spend much time between the two schools working with faculty in both. Although the program does not coordinate admissions--the ultimate expression of school sovereignty--Roland says he encourages prospective applicants to seek admission into both schools because the programs are virtually the same.
The joint program is just one example of several dozen programs and grants that Duke and UNC faculty share, and a prime example of what administrators at both schools hope to see flourish in the future.
Historically, the two schools have always been tied together, and not just through their Atlantic Coast Conference basketball rivalry. For decades, the two schools have virtually combined the services of their libraries--UNC's Davis Library is one of the premier libraries on the East Coast. Students at both institutions, undergraduates and graduates alike, can take courses at each school. Members of both communities regularly mingle at speeches or events on both campuses and socialize at the same locations from Franklin Street to Ninth Street.
The joint military history degree program is not alone in boasting about its success, from recruiting faculty to attracting graduate students. James Siedow, Duke's vice provost for research, has gathered data that show that the nearly 60 Duke-UNC grants per year, including both University and Medical Center research, have a higher approval rate--at 73 percent--than other grants.
"We haven't looked for trends so much--right now we're looking at aggregate numbers," Siedow says. "People want some sense of what we're doing. We wanted to see if numbers were big enough to worry about, and the answer is yes."
Siedow's analysis, which is not quite complete, will be part of an annual report to the Board of Trustees next month. He says that over the past five years, he believes Duke-UNC collaboration has increased, and that there is every indication collaboration will continue.
Fundamentally, Duke and UNC are only among a handful of top schools in a position to collaborate so extensively. In fact, only three sets of schools--Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--are as geographically well positioned to work so closely together.
Both sets of California schools are hampered by slow traffic problems. Administrators also point to the difference between Harvard's liberal arts mission and MIT's technical school mission and whisper about old-fashioned Ivy snobbery. That leaves Duke and UNC with the most pronounced advantage in an atmosphere where resources are limited across higher education.
Duke Provost Peter Lange and his UNC counterpart, Robert Shelton, determined to make the most of that advantage. Lange says the two officers, along with North Carolina State University Provost Stuart Cooper, meet about once a month, usually in a "neutral" location somewhere in Research Triangle Park.
"With all due respect to N.C. State, we have a lot more collaboration with Duke," Shelton says. "Maybe it's because we're a little closer, maybe it's because we do a lot of health sciences."
Maybe it's also because of Duke's endowment.
For public schools like UNC, resources are often stretched because of state legislatures and budget concerns, and for schools without the resources that Duke has, new programs are difficult to justify at a time when schools are cutting jobs instead of adding them. Collaboration for UNC becomes even more attractive, given budgetary constraints and Duke's extra resources.
Likewise, because Duke is comparatively limited in size, the extra breadth of UNC's massive campus provides opportunities that a small private university cannot manage. Lange says one of the less visible but nevertheless important ways in which the two schools interact is through the purchase of large, expensive, cutting-edge equipment, such as brain imaging machines to share between the two universities' medical centers.
Indeed, with the strength and attractiveness of many collaborative efforts--from military history, to the Center for Latin American Studies, to the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, a consortium of social scientists from Duke, UNC and N.C. State--it is difficult to understand why there is so little collaboration.
Barriers, however, do exist. In addition to the fact that UNC is a public school with different funding mechanisms from Duke's, the length of each school's semester varies and does not always align. Class scheduling is often a nightmare. Grading scales are often different as well. For many faculty, it is simply easier or more comfortable to conduct research at Duke by themselves.
Additionally, faculty often need a specific reason to collaborate, be it a personal relationship or an intriguing research puzzle.
"It depends on the chemistry between the people and their professional and personal relationships," Kohn says. "I think, second of all, it depends too on the opportunity and necessity of collaboration."
The main barrier, however, is a predictable one.
"Parking!" says Peter Feaver, associate professor of political science and TISS director. "It's the number one barrier. And it's getting worse. Both places."
Adds Roland, "It's the one overwhelmingly important problem. It sounds trivial but it is very serious." He says many classes in military history are held at night to avoid those issues.
Last year, as part of the new Robertson Scholars program--a new undergraduate scholarship for Duke and UNC students that mandates students take classes in both institutions--a new 30-minute bus service was established between Duke's West Campus and UNC. Most administrators and faculty report that the bus makes transportation easier.
"The bus isn't just for the 30 scholars," says Eric Mlyn, who directs the Robertson Scholars program from UNC. "We'd buy them cars for less money."
Mlyn reported that traffic has been slow over the first year, but that it is picking up--the biggest problem is that people don't realize that anyone can use the service. "The numbers are very low. You could count them on your fingertips," he says.
Mlyn also hopes the Robertson scholars program will spur more undergraduate interaction between Durham and Chapel Hill.
Undergraduates, who are often overwhelmed by their options on one campus, are simply overloaded with the idea of choosing from options on two, he adds. Furthermore, there are sometimes problems with lining up courses in the correct curriculum designations or coordinating student schedules.
But Lange says he sees no major administrative pushes in the near future for collaboration efforts. One thing he may consider over the next year is adding collaboration oversight to the duties of his vice provost. Another consideration that he, President Nan Keohane and others have discussed is the possibility of more closely linking departmental searches to those at UNC, specifically looking at the strengths and weaknesses not just of a department at Duke, but of its counterpart at UNC as well. Essentially, Duke and UNC departments could balance their areas of expertise and thus create a loose supra-department that spans more territory.
"This is a fairly new idea that Peter [Lange] floated the last time the three provosts met," Shelton says. "He mentioned that President Keohane had this under discussion for a senior retreat for senior officers. I would like to pursue it."
Nowhere would this be more relevant than to medium-sized Arts and Sciences departments like religion. An external review from 2001 suggested--like many external reviews do--that the department increase its collaboration with UNC. In religion, for example, one school might specialize in Buddhism, the other in Islam, and each department could draw on the other--an especially attractive offer for graduate students.
"We're always aware of that," says Wesley Kort, professor and chair of Duke's religion department. "Does UNC have someone in this area? And indeed, people from UNC participate with us in searches. We have a member of the UNC faculty on our search committees now."
Collaboration was also a suggestion in the Germanic Languages and Literature Department's external review, in this case because Duke's German studies department was heavily interdisciplinary and UNC's was more traditionally focused.
Wholesale collaboration is trickier in the sciences, which has fewer subfields and necessarily requires experts across the board. A school could not, for example, specialize in organic chemistry to the exclusion of physical chemistry.
"The ranking of chemistry departments is based in being strong in all areas, so you cut your own throat a bit if you narrow down too much," Shelton says.
Over the coming years, administrators on both sides of Tobacco Road will look for ways to take advantage of the talents both schools have to offer without undermining their own strengths. As new catalysts such as the Robertson Scholars bus service become more familiar, the goal is for students and faculty to have greater opportunities to link up with colleagues across universities.
The landscape of Duke-UNC interaction is broad. As Duke administrators look to fulfill the goals of their long-term strategic plan and UNC administrators look to avoid more funding setbacks, both schools have found that working together can not only be beneficial, but may also be vital for the futures of both.
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