Amid recent discussions of cutting up to two-thirds of the faculty positions in the Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, scholars across the nation agreed this week that Duke's research in the field is top-notch and they expressed shock at the planned downsizing.
"Duke has probably one of the top three or four strongest programs, in terms of its strength in BAA," said Frederick Grine, chair and professor of the anthropology department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, itself a top program.
"I saw [an] article [about BAA] in The Chronicle yesterday," Grine added. "I was flabbergasted when I saw it, because Duke has one of the strongest programs in anthropology in the nation. If it had been any other university in the nation, it wouldn't faze me. This was ridiculous."
Tab Rasmussen, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, noted that Duke's strength in BAA comes from its expertise in several areas - including research at Duke's Primate Center, tropical ecology and its collection and research of early fossils.
"One of the reasons you get to be a top-ranked program is you do more than one thing," Rasmussen said. "That's one very important aspect about the Duke BAA research group and the Primate Center research group."
The BAA department's December 2000 external review found that to be the case as well.
"BAA continues to attract the finest applicants in the field and has produced some of the brightest and most productive young scholars in the business," the reviewers wrote. "It is singularly the case that Duke has enjoyed historically - for at least two decades - a position of leadership in biological anthropology. The names of Cartmill, Glander, Kay, Hylander, Simons and van Schaik are recognized internationally and this consortium of diverse interests... has contributed major advances in our understanding of the organismal biology and evolution of primates."
Anne Yoder, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, earned her doctorate from Duke and recently was asked to vie for a faculty position here as well.
"Obviously I'm going to have a bias because I come from the program," Yoder said. "But I'd say their reputation is absolutely tops in physical biology. I don't think there's any that's better."
Yoder, who said her emphasis has shifted more toward biology than anthropology at Yale, noted the field of anthropology is alive and well.
"I have recently participated in a couple of workshops at the National Science Foundation where there's been a lot of excitement and a lot of energy going into thinking about human origins and approaching human origins from all the various elements of human biology," she said. "I do think there's going to be quite a renaissance for physical anthropology in particular."
Grine said that the relation of evolution to genomics is one of the most en vogue topics of contemporary research, but that the desire for knowledge about human origins would forever be compelling.
"People are naturally interested in where we came from and who we are," he said. "In that sense, it plays a vitally important role because there aren't too many places that are asking questions at the same level that the people at Duke are.... [Duke's BAA department does not] have the genetics component that is stronger at some [schools], but then you can't do everything."
Rasmussen said that in the future, collections of fossils, such as the one built at Duke by Elwyn Simons, James B. Duke professor of BAA, may take on contextual importance as scientists begin to glean information from the human genome.
"Sometimes you'll hear people say, 'Now that we've got the genes, we don't need the fossils,'" Rasmussen said. "But even if you've got the gene, it doesn't tell you what ancestors looked like, where they lived and what they ate."
While Rasmussen noted the future importance of Duke's fossils, Grime pointed to the Primate Center's unique research role for anthropologists worldwide.
"It's remarkable to me, because this is a world-renowned institution and it has some of the best people in the world working in the field, and a facility that is utilized not only by the people at Duke, but other primatologists and biological anthropologists," he said. "To see these things either downsized or potentially lost would be a tremendous blow in the field to this country."
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