Brodhead to Duke: 'I do'

The following are excerpts from President Richard Brodhead’s inaugural remarks.

Distinguished guests, colleagues, students, friends, I thank you for joining me on this great day. Never having been inaugurated before, I didn’t know exactly what I was in for, but a stray remark gave me a clue. As you may know, I had a deep attachment to my former school, having spent my whole adult life there, and when the news broke that I was leaving, not everyone took it well. A student I knew put her dismay this way: “See, it was like Dean Brodhead was married to Yale-and now we learn that he’s leaving us for someone younger and more athletic.” To this I could only reply, Well, these things happen! And by the logic of her analogy, today we solemnize my new union. Let’s do it right. Do I, Richard, take you, Duke, to be my chosen life? I didn’t think it was right to laugh at a wedding. I do. Forsaking all others, will I do everything in my power to further the aims of this great university? I will. As we pursue these goals, will I work to promote the welfare of every member of the Duke community-every faculty member, student, librarian, lab or office worker, food server, every maintenance worker, every chaplain, every coach—every single person whose labor and devotion make this place thrive? Yes I will. Your people will be my people, and they already are. I’m grateful for your welcome and will do my part with energy, dedication and joy....

Duke could have gone onto any number of inertial orbits but it never did. Instead, from generation to generation, it has been driven by the desire to be more than it has so far succeeded in becoming and to push toward the limit of what a great school could be. President Few and Mr. Duke produced a high point in this history but the story did not end there. Each of my predecessors has presided over a raising of the sights. I come to this university in the conviction that, in Thoreau’s words, there is more day to dawn. I take this office with the idea that, together, we will write the next chapter in this school’s rise....

I was lured here by the spectacle of a school that has established itself at the top rank of research universities and professional schools but that habitually connects the pursuit of knowledge with the search for the social good. It’s my guess that our country is going to want schools, perhaps even require schools to have a character more like this in the future. If the public is to continue to fund inquiries largely unintelligible to the common understanding, and the progress of knowledge in our time would grind nearly to a halt if this support were lost, universities are going to need to become far less self-enclosed and self-absorbed, are going to need to take far greater pains to demonstrate the value of advanced research for men’s and women’s lives. As I assume the presidency of a school with this inspiring character, my role will be to build on its special strengths....

Going to such a college is one of the most valuable privileges our society affords. For that reason, as we strengthen this already-strong place, another part of our work must be to assure that this university stays wide open to every young person with the requisite talent and commitment. It was not so long ago that schools and universities (the best not least) played a role in reinforcing received social hierarchies, assuring that to those who had, much was given, and to those who didn’t have was denied the best means to advancement, a first-class education. The namesakes of this school were far more enlightened than many of their time, but Duke remained racially segregated until the 1960s, and the first African-American undergraduates and medical students at Duke (I’ve met representatives of both groups) are people my exact age. (I myself attended a college that excluded women until 1969.) Through the work of men and women, many of them still alive, the high places of American education have been reconstructed from sites of exclusion and inequality into scenes of access and opportunity, and it is not time to stop that labor now. We need to make the whole of Duke, every school and every department and every office, a place of real and substantive opportunity—and as we do so, we need to make this a place not just of numerical demographic inclusiveness but of real mutual engagement, a community in which each of us will educate and be educated by every other.....

My predecessors at Duke did not complete the work, and neither will I. But like them, I will embrace the work that awaits me here. This is the work of a great university: the struggle to expand the domain of human knowledge; the struggle to share that knowledge through education; and the struggle to put that knowledge to profound human use. On this the day of our union, I know that whatever I will achieve will be accomplished only with your partnership and help. Others have given us this great place. Let’s see what we can build.