Reynolds Price, John Hope Franklin, Dr. Nancy Allen, Stanley Hauerwas and Mike Krzyzewski reflect on Duke�s unique character.
Discussions of their own illustrious pasts turned straight to the future for the four five-star panelists that moderator and famed author Reynolds Price said were “picked for distinction in a place which specializes in it.” Speaking in Griffith Film Theater Saturday before several hundred attendees—including President Richard Brodhead himself—for the last of the festivities preceding Brodhead’s inauguration ceremony, the group charted a broad vision for the University spliced with humor and advice.
The panel, a collection of some of Duke’s most renowned leaders entitled “Duke University Past, Present and Future,” had the credentials to back up its message, bringing together definitive African-American history scholar John Hope Franklin, Academic Council Chair Dr. Nancy Allen, top theologian Stanley Hauerwas and men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski.
“Fate has smiled on us with unmatched generosity. Of Duke’s future, one can hardly avoid predicting a bright one,” Franklin said. “It would appear that every physical need has been met, given the resources this university now holds. The time is fast approaching when this university will be able to summon any scholar that it wishes, and she or he will answer the cordial invitation to join this magnificent enterprise.”
Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History, said his ties to Duke stretch long past the 22 years he has spent on the faculty and closed his remarks by recounting a dream in which students held an all-night vigil to convince a biology professor to turn down a department chair at Oxford University. The reference, of course, was to Krzyzewski’s flirtation with the Los Angeles Lakers and an ensuing vigil this summer.
The coach stood for his portion of the discussion, urging Brodhead and the rest of the school to look back on Duke’s past with mutual assurance but to forge ahead as a team. Krzyzewski held up a Duke basketball jersey and passed on a tenet he tells the men’s basketball team: to play for the name on the front of the jersey, not on the back.
“You need to look at that jersey and say, ‘When they talk about the No. 1 team in the country, then maybe they’ll talk about the fact that we have the No. 1 medical school in the country, maybe we’ll talk about what’s happening in our English department,’” he said. “What intercollegiate athletics does is like the window-dressing to a store. And it’s so good, and then when you walk in, you get the real deal.”
Hauerwas, who joined Duke’s faculty in 1984 and serves as Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School, considered the role of a university as a place. And while he touched on everything from not forgetting the history of slavery to the importance of Duke’s trees, the Duke Chapel and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Hauerwas emphasized tempering vision with reality.
“It’ll always be a tension between the purpose of a university and the way that the purpose might be enacted,” he said. “Roses cannot be beautiful, but a rose can be.”
Since 1978, Allen has had a strong presence both through her work with the Academic Council and from her professorship of medicine, rheumatology and immunology at the Duke University Medical Center. But even she admitted her own prominence in a field and a branch of the University “sometimes thought to be a foreign place here,” and she focused her talk on the importance of the people operating inside Duke.
Referencing Brodhead’s new book, The Good of This Place, which was oft-quoted by the group, Allen said, “With the good of this place—Duke University—and all of its people and all of its parts, coupled with our youthfulness, vision, creativity, flexibility and so on, the possibilities are endless.”
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