Put your seersuckers back in the closet and unlace your boat shoes. Bust out your beakers and navy blues. The exhilarating and sometimes gawky years of Duke's dramatic ascent to national prominence have concluded, and we now brace for the first year of the New Era.
Helming the ship (or is it yacht?) is the distinguished, erudite Richard Brodhead. He is a Yalie through and through, with all the traditional scholarship, wry genius and supreme confidence that implies.
As his blessing or curse, he starts with one of the blankest slates Duke has had in years. So many long-term projects--the fundraising Campaign for Duke, the diversifying Black Faculty Strategic Initiative, the illuminating Women's Initiative report--are done. Major new buildings are near completion. And after a flood of senior-level departures, the only major, strong-willed incumbent figures with whom Brodhead will have to reconcile his views are Provost Peter Lange, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask and a few academic deans. Everyone else is either new or basically OK with what comes down the pipeline.
So what should we expect in this New Era, besides the somewhat astonishing resurgence of the mustache as a viable fashion statement among senior administrators?
First, we should soon be able to ascertain where Brodhead stands on the rising costs of a Duke education. Trask, Lange and Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations John Burness have expressed varying views on this important matter, and a major drag on rising costs--former President Nan Keohane--is gone.
If Brodhead subscribes more or less to the school of "We're doing a heck of a lot already to stem the rising costs," we will likely see more of the same trends.
Undergraduate tuition, already tops among Duke's peer schools, will probably continue to approach the threshold of diminishing returns.
But if Brodhead instead seriously heeds Keohane's urgent call in last year's address to the faculty to "do more" to confront costs, we might see a gradual reduction of offerings here at Duke, with alternatives sprouting up at Carolina or N.C. State. This process of strategically supporting programs could free up funds for a freeze or--dare to say it?--reduction in tuition rates. Will Brodhead "reimagine the enterprise," as Keohane implored, or stay the course? His decision will have huge reverberations.
The question of diversity is another perennial one, and particularly delicate for Duke administrators because they fear the University's embarrassing history as a bastion of racist Southern provincialism. Despite possessing a starry-eyed reverence for diversity that borders on obsequiousness, the faculty and student diversity initiatives of the last 20 years have been well advised and appear to have been successful.
However, at some point in the New Era, intelligent people--not just reactionaries--will begin to sound the "enough is enough" horn and call for new diversity policies. Brodhead's response cannot be predicted. Perhaps he will be a proponent of a radical Keohanian vision of equality; perhaps he will abandon minority-increasing initiatives too early. Whatever his decision, we are now moving into a period in the University's evolution where reasonable opinions will diverge. Brodhead should navigate these potentially choppy waters with care.
Opinions are even more fragmented, if less vituperative, on the subject of academic development. I'm sure Brodhead would like to give money away like Santa Claus (the real one, not the comparatively frugal Bill Chafe), but money is a very limited resource at any university, especially one with an abbreviated endowment.
Brodhead's background as a scholar of Great Works of English may offer some clues as to where his heart lies. Certainly, no matter how much pressure he feels to boost science and engineering, he will never abandon the bedrock humanities that rooted an "arts and letters" educational institution like Yale in bygone times, and serve as some of Duke's core strengths today.
The arts--in the form of the Nasher Museum of Art, a new warehouse and a possible "arts corridor"--have gotten a running start but have lost one of their greatest advocates in Chafe, the former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. If no one picks up his slack, this recent flurry of arts activity could again give way to the neglect and disrepair Duke arts fell into in the 1990s.
Then there is science, where the administration must be flexible and bold if Duke is to keep the pace. Our interdisciplinary initiatives are crucial because the fields have enormous growth potential, but some of Duke's programs--like material science and nanoscience--have been lagging.
Clearly, Duke is not destined to become an elite school for chemistry or physics. But if senior administrators can let brave, imaginative minds strike in new fields while other universities slumber, Duke can get a leg up in what seems to be the science of the future.
On all these issues and more, Brodhead is uniquely positioned to paint a masterpiece upon a slate that has been largely wiped clean. The fortunate truth is that on the subject of most profound importance, moral leadership, Brodhead seems cut from the same cloth as his predecessor. That's a big reason why he is president now.
Moral leadership, after all, is the true secret ingredient to Duke's rise over the last decade, as well as its key to a bright future. As long as Brodhead keeps steadfast in the principles that have made him so beloved at Yale and now at Duke, the fabulous House that Nan Built will stand tall and proud under his watch.
Andrew Collins is a Trinity senior and former University Editor of The Chronicle.
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