The Keohane Era

 

  President Nan Keohane is wearing a hard hat. She has done it before, and her collection of ceremonial protective head gear sits precariously stacked on her office windowsill as evidence. She chose today's hat carefully so that it would not say "Nicholas School of the Environment" or "Pratt School of Engineering" on the front. She was disappointed and surpised that she could not find a hard hat that said "Duke" in the bold, blue letters that have become one of the school's trademarks.

 

  But now she is distracted as she wanders through the construction site that will become the addition to the Divinity School. She gazes at the several people out front engaged in complicated chizling of rock. "Look at that!" she exclaims with a southern tilt in her voice. "They're actually making Duke stone." She walks across the site, her worn-out flats carefully negotiating the puddles of rainwater and mud. Keohane has not been through this site in several months, she says to the foreman leading her. There is some disbelief in her expression at the complexity of the building and the extent of the construction on campus.

 

  "I didn't even realize how much we had built until people started adding it up recently," says Keohane, who will step down as the eighth president of Duke this July. The exact total is debated because some projects are not yet finished and others were already begun when Keohane ascended to her post in 1993, but the general consensus hovers around 40 buildings. And that is only the beginning of the Duke that Nan built over the last decade.

 

  Remember Duke before those 40 buildings? Before the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, before the West-Edens Link or before Duke had a proper student recreational athletic facility? Remember back when there was a bar on campus that never carded; when a quarter of students lived on North Campus where Trent now sits relatively empty; when there were kegs on the quad? When the Medical Center was just a hospital and a school? When Duke had one good basketball team but was behind in the facilities arms race? Remember before freshmen lived on East and students filled out Curriculum 2000 matrixes? Before every computer could connect to the internet and DukeCards controlled life? Before diversity and interdisciplinary were everybody's buzzwords? Before "Building on Excellence"?

 

  When Keohane took Duke's reins, many people were unsure of her. She came from the presidency of Wellesley College, a notoriously liberal women's college. Although she was recognized throughout academia as being remarkably gifted, she had no experience with big-time athletics or professional schools, not to mention world-renowned medical centers. At that time, only one major research institution, the University of Chicago, had a female president. To say the least, some people were wary.

 

  But the search committee that chose Keohane never had doubts. She was being courted for the presidencies of several other institutions, including Yale. "She very quickly emerged as the leading candidate," says President Emeritus of Williams College John Chandler, who served as chair of Duke's search committee. "We were racing against the Ivies to find a president--and we won."

 

  The University she inherited was strapped for cash. Keith Brodie, Duke's previous president, had disliked fundraising and public appearances. He also had a difficult time dealing with conflict within and outside of the University. He developed the humanities and to a lesser extent the social sciences into strong departments, and he set the stage for Duke to increase its national and international reputation. However, it was Keohane's job to take Duke there.

She set to work.

 

  Within days of her appointment, Keohane had met with Durham leaders, University leaders and students. She was on a quest to discover as much information about the school as she could. Every time she weighed in on a decision, she did it with characteristic eloquence and depth of thought.

 

  "She was clearly a president from the very beginning," says John Burness, senior vice president of public affairs and government relations. He praises Keohane at every opportunity, especially noting her eloquence. "Even people who may not agree with her positions end up respecting her and supporting her and her positions."

 

  Keohane began to forge ties in all aspects of the University. Ten years ago, Duke had a notoriously tense internal climate. Most departments were marked by acrimony and several departments--notably psychology, biology and the English and literature departments--had long-running feuds within the faculty. Keohane immediately set up an open-door policy between the administration and the faculty. Now, few professors report a lack of faith in the promises or commitment of the administration. Faculty praise her ability to maintain the strength of Duke's programs throughout the ninties. Several departments--especially in the political science, economics and other social sciences--saw substantial improvement in their scholarship.

 

  Duke also had a long history of breaking its promises to the community and doing very little to support Durham. She formed individual relationships to improve trust. This served as the foundation of the Neighborhood Partnership Initiative--a concentrated program, which has become a model for town-gown relations.

 

  It is around broad values like these that Keohane has built her Duke: quality relationships; trust; collaboration; and equality broadly applied. Keohane, however, is as much task oriented as she is principled; she insists upon focused discussion and always wants to know every possible option. She asks questions and demands data about each decision--sometimes an obsessive amount, some high-ranking administrators say. No one criticizes Keohane for dragging her feet on decisions, but no one accuses her of rushing into them either.

 

  In 1993 when she arrived at Duke, she had big decisions to make right away. Various people had talked about making East Campus an all-freshman haven and people were up in arms on both sides of the issue. "Everyone was basically lobbying me to either do it or not do it," Keohane says. "I said, 'Look, I need to know a lot more about this before I make that decision, so I'm not going to make a decision my first year.'"

 

  A decade later, she sits in a chair in her office and remembers that first big decision of her presidency with typical poise, laying out all her points and making it clear that her thought is complete even before she begins. "East Campus was really without an identity," she says. The dorms by Ninth Street had no community that could overcome the "magnetism of the Gothic West." Making East a freshman campus was not just a social engineering experiment though. Duke wanted to be ahead of the curve as one of the first universities to recognize that the freshman experience is improved when the whole class spends time living together.

 

  The campus was wildly divided about an all-freshman East--which has become one of Duke's selling points to incoming students. But from the moment that Keohane made her decision, it was final. She announced the move in the spring of 1994 and by 1995, all Duke students spent their first year on the other side of Campus Drive.

 

  Although defining the identity of East did not go off without a hitch, after that initial decision, the problems were the responsibility of the staff, not the president. Three weeks before freshman orientation, the renovations to East Campus were $4 million over budget and Randolph and Blackwell--new dorms constructed to accommodate all the freshmen--were still not completed. Keohane stayed calm. Tallman Trask, who was set to take on the position of executive vice president in a few weeks, got a call from Keohane. "Go fix it," she said. So the man who became Keohane's arm in most business matters at the University began work a little early.

 

  All the tales of "how X came to be at Duke" during Keohane's era bear the mark of the same author. You can recognize Duke stories the same way you can Aesop's fables. The particulars are different, but the story is universal. Someone brings up the issue; it gets casually discussed for a few months; a committee officially begins examining the options; recommendations come through; and a year later, the recommendations happen. It doesn't matter whether the topic is sweatshop labor or residential housing--the path is the same.

 

  Outside of official initiatives, Keohane leads very much through one-on-one conferences. At times this has been a disadvantage as some people are missing from issue discussions who could have added depth to solutions, say some administrators and faculty. But Keohane's style has allowed her to establish relationships with her deans and to build a unique level of trust between her and them.

 

  When she is in her office, she seeks and gives input often. She, Trask and Provost Peter Lange wander back and forth among each other's offices on the second floor of the Allen Building--sometimes as often as a dozen times a day. They consult in the hallways and playfully taunt each other. Even though staff members say Keohane rarely uses humor to defuse tense situations and tells jokes even less frequently, she takes teasing well. She also knows when to stand up for her subordinates.

When a residential life task force presented its plan to move all sophomores to West Campus in 2001, most observers expected the Board of Trustees to resist displacing fraternities and other selective living groups from the locations on West they had called home for so long. The committee went into the meeting ready to fight for its plan, says Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William Chafe, who chaired the committee. Surprisingly, the Board supported the plan of quad-based housing for upperclassmen and their concern was that the reshuffling of living space was not extensive enough to support the reforms. "In fact, some people on the Board wanted to know why we didn't go still farther," Chafe says. When a member asked why the changes were limited, Chafe says he was silent for a moment and then glanced at Keohane. The president quietly told the Board of Trustees that the committee had not been authorized to move greeks any farther off the main campus than the reforms proposed. "She has a good sense of how much change the Trustees can handle and how much the University can handle," says Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta, who--at the time of the housing reforms' implementation--became the first student affairs administrator in the senior staff.

 

  Part of the strength of Keohane's leadership has been knowing when to step back and stay out of the way. Keohane surrounded herself with experts in all areas of the University: the Medical Center; the finance concerns; the law school; the business school; and the academic realm. Then she let them do their jobs. "She really had to develop a level of trust so that she knows things are going the way they ought to be done," says Dr. Ralph Snyderman, chancellor and CEO of the Duke University Health System. Because Keohane has chosen people she respects so much, she only sets the general agenda and values, and lets other people implement it.

 

  The deans and administrators of the University have done such a good job of following her value system that even the professional schools are in closer contact with the main body of the University. There are joint appointments in psychology, the School of Law and Fuqua; four undergraduate degrees in environment and earth sciences are run entirely by the Nicholas School; the plethora of multidisciplinary centers assures links between schools will last beyond individual collaboration.

 

  Of course, all of these accomplishments do not exclusively belong to Keohane. She set the priorities, but ultimately it is the large group of people who are second and third in command who have taken her vague instruction--"let's be more interdisciplinary"--and developed programs.

 

  There is a long list of ways the University has grown while Keohane has been president that was only minimally involved with, which merely transpired "on her watch", including the expansion of the Atlantic Coast Conference--which she opposed--and the fluctuating quality of the humanities departments. The athletic program built the Wilson Recreational Center, the Schwartz-Butters Building and the Yoh Football Center; Fuqua developed a strong international presence, particularly in Singapore; the School of Medicine and Trinity College both pioneered new curriculums. Many University leaders worked together to develop interdisciplinary certificates and programs.

 

  Keohane's staff members say that even though they operate with much autonomy, she has never abandoned them when they need support. At times she has spent as much as a third of her time outside of the office--and she does not return e-mail when she is away--but when she is there, she replies extensively and personally to all her e-mail, administrators say. "She reads in almost annoying detail," says Lange, without hiding the admiration in his voice.

 

  In 1999, when the University was constructing "Building on Excellence," the strategic plan that outlined the major priorities of the University for five years, Keohane left most of the work up to the committee. She participated in discussions and merely directed the plan's authors to commit resources to every aspect outlined in it. Keohane says now that she was "very much a part of its development" but mostly behind the scenes. She asks questions that lead other people to answers, but she rarely answers them herself. Her style is to ask everyone else's opinion first, then offer direction only if other people are not coming to consensus on their own. She steps in most actively when she feels the University has a moral responsibility. She is continually concerned with how decisions affect people. Many of her very public, tough decisions have been guided by her commitment to equality and defense of what she believes to be fundamentally right.

These values go back to her history. "We all reflect who we are," says Trask. Keohane is an Arkansas preacher's kid who went to Wellesley on a full scholarship. She earned a Marshall Scholarship to graduate school at Oxford University. Then she earned her doctorate from Yale in the 1967. Keohane taught at Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University in the '70s, surrounded by advocates of social change and a climate that encouraged everyone to rebel. She is a feminist and an expert in political philosophy. In her time at Duke, she has used the University as a bully pulpit to speak out about sweatshops and engage in regulation of worker conditions on farms. She has spoken out in Washington against cuts in government funding for research and scholarship. In highly controversial moves, she opened the chapel at Duke to same-sex marriages and offered health benefits to University employees' domestic partners. She has been a firm advocate of financial aid and has worked to keep tuition down, occasionally even at the expense of academic growth. She also was fundamental in the creation of the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Some of these actions have gained her an impressive reputation in academia, but she has always maintained an indefinable modesty that pervades her leadership. This is part of why she has been able to smooth relationships throughout so many areas of the University and Durham communities. "She never got impressed with her position," says Mike Israel, former CEO of Duke University Hospital. "She was always Nan."

 

  The projects where Keohane has perhaps remained most true to her values and her passions are the Women's Initiative and diversity encouragement. She came from Wellesley a feminist; then for years at Duke she did little publicly to improve the situation of women. Several faculty members criticize her for this, but others say she merely had to wait until she had developed her reputation as a balanced leader before she could address women in particular. "When I came I wanted people to be sure to know that women's issues were not my only issues," she says, "and I did think it would be a mistake to say, 'Women's issues are my highest priority.'"

 

  When she did decide to deal with women's concerns, it suddenly became a top priority in all areas. "It went from 0 to 60 overnight," says Moneta. Only after the steering committee, which Keohane chaired, was weeks into its work did many staff members discover that Keohane had been privately talking to women from all facets of the University for months. From the beginning of her tenure, she had been having conversations over coffee, at fundraising events and in small social groups. It only became public when she realized that it was time to act before leaving.

 

  The diversity concerns, on the other hand, are something that she has dealt with since she first stepped on campus. She immediately began to address a failed initiative to increase black faculty members and developed the Black Faculty Initiative, which was successful. She has worked hard to recruit non-white students and integrate race throughout the campus. She is the person who inspired the entire school to think about race relations and diversity on campus. Although the results have so far been limited, many community members say that if Duke eventually becomes a model of diversity, it will be because of Keohane's attention.

 

  These values have pervaded all areas of campus and arms of the University. "Diversity" is as central a concern in Fuqua as it is in freshman dorms. The only place that has remained aloof to these values is perhaps the Medical Center where employees say race problems receive little attention and most senior administrators are white. But several insiders there say Keohane has fought for equality in Duke University Health System as much as anywhere else.

 

  To hear most people in the Medical Center tell the story, all interactions in health care are purely business--none more so than the creation of the Health System itself in the mid-'90s. Every major hospital was expanding into a system and with the changes gripping health care in the mid-'90s, most medical administrators agreed that it was a bad idea for local hospitals, such as Durham Regional, to be owned by anyone other than Duke. From a financial perspective, transforming Duke University Hospital to Duke University Health System was a no-brainer. Even though there were hundreds of organizational details to work through to complete the growth, all the University president really needed to do was rubber stamp the decision.

 

  As anyone who knows Nan will tell you, President Keohane rarely rubber stamps anything. She recognized her lack of expertise about the business aspects of running a university, but she wanted to be integrally involved. Keohane brought to light the ethical issues of the business move. She made sure that as Duke prepared to monopolize the hospitals in Durham, it would continue to serve the citizens. She advocated hiring policies that would buttress the city's economy and she made sure that individuals were taken into account. "A lot of what she did was focused on making sure that we were a good citizen to Durham," says Israel.

 

  Keohane's ethical commitment was relevant again in the late-'90s when efforts to unionize the Hospital gained momentum. For many reasons, some related to the particular union that was trying to organize and others related to financial motives or quality of patient care, no one wanted Duke University Hospital to unionize. However, officials involved in the process now admit that "we did have issues" the unions helped bring to the forefront. The only thing Keohane told the administrators dealing with the union during that time was "Be fair." "I took that to mean be fair to the employees, be fair to the unions and be fair to Duke," says one senior Medical Center administrator who was involved. He said he never once felt pressure from her to forbid union formation.

 

  Nobody remembers being pressured by Keohane, and everyone hesitates when asked about her weaknesses as a president. After the question, there is a standard moment of silence while people reach into the depths of their memories for a persistent fault or even an occasional misstep. But nearly everyone comes up empty and instead laments the lack of personal contact with the woman. I would have loved more of her time. I wish she had been around more. She could have been warmer.

 

  "Presidents are tested so thoroughly that weaknesses they themselves don't know they have are exposed," Chandler says. "With Nan, it's been the opposite. Strengths that she didn't know were there surfaced."

 

  She has, however, occasionally drawn criticism for the projects she chose to champion. Keohane devoted much of her attention in the first two-thirds of her tenure to reforming student life and other non-academic pursuits. Over the time Keohane has led Duke, most of its schools have held constant in national rankings--with none of them dropping far below the top ten or rising about the top five. "There was a bit of wailing in the academic community that the tail was beginning to wag the dog," says her predecessor Brodie.

 

  Keohane is not perfect, and she is the first to admit that. Given the wisdom of additional years' experience, she says she would not make all the same decisions or make them the same way. Although she does not reveal precisely which situations she would handle differently, many people close to the president say the Medical Center is a place that took her a long time to understand.

 

  And for good reason--the Medical Center is easily the most complicated piece of the University. During much of her tenure, Keohane spent between a third and half of her time dealing with the Health System and its issues. In many ways, it is more fiscally vulnerable than other pieces of campus, and even though it is a teaching facility and not-for-profit, it does have to be financially viable. When mistakes are made, they are made with people's lives. Running DUMC requires a precarious balance between covering costs, fostering medical discovery and protecting the institution from harm. Keohane has a Ph.D., not an M.D. or an M.B.A.

 

  Before Keohane took over as president, she concentrated on understanding the Medical Center. Snyderman was her primary teacher during that time. She went on patient rounds with him and medical students to have at least a vague idea of both the Hospital and the way medicine is taught. "We gave her a white coat and she stood with the other students," says Snyderman. He's bemused, as he is most of the time he talks about Keohane. Many people in both the University and the Medical Center say the relationship between the two of them is marked by power tensions. Snyderman is privately known in many circles as difficult to deal with and officials who have worked closely with him say he has never fully respected Keohane's authority or supported her agenda of diversity and equality. Both Snyderman and Keohane say they are close and have a strong working relationship, but even in Snyderman's stories about Keohane's role in the Medical Center, a hint of rivalry shows through.

 

  Historically there have always been substantial tensions between the University--including the graduate and professional schools--and the Medical Center. Many individuals in the health care business resent being controlled by academics. "When you're in an environment with people's lives in your hands, you can't have philosophical debate," says one high-ranking DUH administrator. On the other side, many top University officials resent being kept at arm's length from the issues in the Medical Center. Although Snyderman is consulted on many University decisions by virtue of his presence in senior staff meetings where major University changes are discussed, top academic administrators are never invited to senior meetings in the health system. This gulf between the University and the Medical Center is something Keohane never really addressed. In fact, many people say the distance between the two branches of Duke is even more pronounced than it was when Keohane took office.

 

  Part of the split has come from the dual hierarchies in which Snyderman operates as chancellor of health affairs and CEO of the health system. For part of his job, he reports directly to the University president; for the financial part--the CEO part--he reports to the health system board of trustees, of which the president is one member. The separate board was created at the time the health system was developed to shelter the larger University from anything that might potentially go wrong in DUHS. The financial stakes in health care are so much higher than in academia that it made sense to protect the English budget, for example, from being used to cover a lawsuit that resulted from a Medical Center tragedy. The system works for this purpose; however, it also creates a small loophole for the person running the health system to circumvent the president's approval.

As she prepares to step down, Keohane has realized some of the dangers of allowing the Medical Center so much autonomy. In the job description for the next chancellor of the health system, it is very clear that the position will report to the University president for all matters. She has also set a clear agenda for the next few years that the search committee for the next president took into account when hiring Richard Brodhead as her successor. Many of these priorities, such as the emphasis on internationalization, the building up of the sciences and the focus on interdisciplinary collaboration have been universal goals that key players at Duke have set together. "Very few really big ideas are ones that the president hatches up in the secrecy of her own mind," Keohane says. To her, this is obvious but at other universities and even in other eras of Duke's history, big ideas have been generated while thinking at the dinner table or in the shower. Once upon a time, legendary president Terry Sanford began a capital campaign by announcing it in his commencement address. The campaign eventually was successful, but the way it began left many people scrambling to set up the infrastructure necessary to raise funds at that level.

The fundraising campaign that has become the footnote to Keohane's introduction and the hallmark of her tenure could not have begun in a more different way. It began as a universally recognized need for money and evolved into the fifth most extensive fundraising campaign in the history of academia.

 

  Before goals were set, Duke figured out about how much money it could raise--and how much it could aspire to raise. "I remember early on big discussions about the 'B word,'" says Chafe. For a southern university to even attempt that level in a campaign was unprecedented. Keohane and Duke, however, were so successful at articulating their vision for the University and garnering funds to support it that they raised the goal from $1.5 billion to $2 billion. Then they exceeded even that target, bringing in a total of $2.36 billion over eight years.

 

  Keohane herself raised a substantial portion of the money through relationships that she started developing as soon as she became president and some that began before that. She never asked for money from anyone without a personal investment in the school and she only solicited from people with whom she had relationships. For as much as Keohane has fundraised, she is still shy to talk about it. "The money is crucial," she says, "but money isn't the only thing on the table."

Although Keohane's legacy will extend far beyond her acumen for raising money, that money will nourish the University she has redefined--a University characterized by a commitment to supporting women and minorities; top-notch departments in the humanities, sciences and social sciences; internationally recognized graduate and professional programs; and comprehensive undergraduate life.

 

  And that is the Duke that Nan built.