Former President Nan Keohane and her husband Robert, James B. Duke professor of political science, will resign their positions in 2005 and take up professorships in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Former President Nan Keohane and her husband Robert, James B. Duke professor of political science, will leave Duke’s faculty to take academic jobs at Princeton University. The Keohanes, who are currently on leave from the University, will resign their positions in 2005 and will take up professorships in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Robert Keohane, one of Duke’s “celebrity professors” during his tenure here, said although a Princeton offer was on the table as early as last April, he and his wife only finalized their decision Wednesday morning.
Although the Keohanes left the option of returning to Duke open when they went on leave following the end of Nan Keohane’s presidency, many speculated they would continue their careers elsewhere. They entertained offers from a number of other institutions, including Harvard University and Yale University.
Duke went to great lengths to retain the two scholars, as several top administrators reached out to them during the summer and fall and met with them during President Richard Brodhead’s inauguration weekend. Robert Keohane wrote many of the official e-mails sent to their colleagues and friends at the University.
“It involved a chance to have some more direct involvement with policy issues, and they also have a number of first-rate people,” Robert Keohane said, noting that the Woodrow Wilson School, where he will be a professor of international affairs, is one of the top two schools of public policy in the nation. “For me it was the extraordinary opportunity—once in a decade—to join a really vibrant and large and well respected group of international relations and world politics specialists.”
The Keohanes will assume their roles at Princeton after completing a year-long sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif. The switch to a new university will give Robert Keohane, who often stood in his wife’s shadow while she was Duke’s president, a chance to shine as an expert in the field of international relations while she reacquaints herself with scholarship and teaching.
“We discussed the possibility of them returning to Duke and what we might do to make that attractive to them in the past few months, but especially for Bob, I think the Princeton position was extremely attractive,” Provost Peter Lange said.
Although the former president does not have many loose ends left at Duke, having stepped aside as Brodhead took the reins this summer, her husband is still advising about seven or eight graduate students. Robert Keohane, who formerly served as the department’s director of graduate studies, said he would continue to work with students who have completed their dissertation consultations, but he will refrain from joining dissertation committees for students whose work has not yet reached that stage.
As Nan Keohane returns to academia after more than two decades as an administrator, she said she looks forward to spending time on her scholarship and visiting their grandchildren, who all live on the East Coast. At Princeton she will be the Laurance Rockefeller distinguished visiting professor in public affairs and the Center for Human Values, and in the near future she plans to compile a book of the speeches and papers she wrote as president and contribute to another book currently in the works from Duke’s political science department.
“I hope I’ll have some wise things to say that may even be wiser from having spent some time in administration,” she said. “It’ll be hard to top being president of Duke. That’s the best job in the country in university administration.”
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