In his first state of the University address Tuesday night, President Richard Brodhead told a joint meeting of Duke Student Government and the Graduate and Professional Student Council that he wants to know it all.
In his first state of the University address Tuesday night, President Richard Brodhead told a joint meeting of Duke Student Government and the Graduate and Professional Student Council that he wants to know it all. “I aspire someday to know the answer to every question you could ask me,” he said.
As of right now, however, Brodhead acknowledged he is still getting his bearings within a new campus and in a new community. Rather than outlying his goals for the University in the traditional format for such an address, he referred those concerned with a larger agenda to his inaugural address Saturday and spent close to an hour fielding questions from Duke’s student leaders.
Brodhead expressed enthusiasm for his interaction with students in the first month of his presidency and mentioned his weekly office hours as one of the avenues for connecting on campus issues.
“I don’t like presidents who have abstract views of what is good for a place,” he said.
In the question-and-answer session, Brodhead addressed concerns over a litany of issues: graduate student unionization, campus safety, town-gown relationships, selective living and the quad model, fundraising, the Women’s Initiative, a graduate student center, academic departments and the status of international students.
Brodhead deftly maneuvered between questions, producing laughter to even the most divisive inquiries regarding graduate and professional students’ stipends and unionization. Joking with a graduate student concerned about reductions from stipends, he asked, “Did you ever have a job? Because sometimes the same thing happens.” Brodhead then proceeded to sympathize and explain the complexity of the graduate funding situation.
But Brodhead’s larger fiscal concern regards Duke’s financial aid program, which he said in his inauguration speech “will be a project especially close to my heart.” Tuesday, he told DSG and GPSC about his plans to separate the financial aid budget from the larger University budget so as not to jeopardize any other fiscal distribution. And despite the recent close of the Campaign for Duke, Brodhead promised that fundraising will continue. “The modern university is a place of aspiration,” he said. “Every new thing comes from new funding.”
With such a large undertaking already on his mind, Brodhead highlighted one area he hopes to eliminate from his agenda by acting on it as a top priority now. “I’m going to aspire to a day when I don’t have to list security as one of them,” said Brodhead, who sees the University’s campus safety problems as equivalent to those of any city university. But “Duke is paradoxical,” he said, because Duke’s campus is offset from more typically urban parts of Durham. Brodhead mentioned that both the areas of policing and communication need to be in focus within the security realm.
The relationship between Duke and Durham piqued Brodhead’s interest, as he noted community service projects such as the downtown revitalization that the University has already undertaken, and proposed that Duke continue to work with the city to improve planning and continuity. Brodhead mentioned his experience with town-gown relations as a Yale University administrator, where he said he realized that “for people to fight on a sinking ship does no one any good.”
When asked about selective living groups and the quad model, Brodhead allayed fears that living groups might be on a sinking ship as well. He described himself as “somewhat ambivalent” concerning the role of fraternities on campus, but said of selectives, “I will never be an opponent of these things in a simple-minded or knee-jerk manner.”
Brodhead said that while he does not find fraternities to be “an adequate model for the social life of a university,” he also could not imagine presiding over a school without selectives. Brodhead explained his conflicting sentiments over the merits of fraternities, reflecting on their ability to result in both “homogenization of small groups of people” and their ability to fulfill the “human desire” for a smaller group within a larger one.
Throughout the night, he frequently referred back to his years spent as a graduate student, professor and administrator at Yale, where he shaped his understanding of many of last night’s concerns and those to come. But he also noted his outsider’s perspective on issues like the continuing Women’s Initiative and his continuing immersion in the Duke community.
“The day may come that I will be more diplomatic with my answers,” Brodhead said after his remarks, “but I’d rather answer honestly and take my chances with that.”
Junior Russ Ferguson, DSG president pro tempore, supported Brodhead’s candor. “I thought it was spectacular. I thought his answers were exactly on target. He answered honestly. He didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear, he told us what we need to hear,” Ferguson said. “I get the feeling that he’s kind of formulating his own agenda right now by talking to us.... To formulate an agenda as he walks around Duke is a much better way of doing things.”
Jennifer Yang contributed to this story.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.