Discussions about the undergraduate experience served as bookends for a Board of Trustees meeting that included brainstorming about the future of Central Campus and the benefits of a residential-based education.
Discussions about the undergraduate experience served as bookends for a Board of Trustees meeting that included brainstorming about the future of Central Campus and the benefits of a residential-based education.
Although President Richard Brodhead said discussions touched on academic, social, extracurricular and residential aspects of undergraduate life, he underscored that the distinctions were not absolute.
“You can break out the parts of an undergraduate experience for administrative purposes, but they all work together, or they don’t work at all,” he said.
Dreaming about the conceptual goals of the undergraduate experience was overlaid with the Trustees’ first official discussions about Central Campus. Brodhead and Peter Nicholas, chair of the Board of Trustees, said the Board was articulating the goals of the undergraduate experience in order to contextualize discussions about the actual structure of Central.
So far, the University has done studies to discover what kind of buildings might be possible to build on the 278 acres between East and West campuses, but it has made no decision about what the structures’ functions will be or what kind of activities will be housed on the campus.
“We were committed at this meeting to ask the right question first, and the right question isn’t, ‘What should the buildings be on Central Campus?’ The right question is, ‘What opportunities are there to enrich student life at Duke and what needs are there to be met?’” Brodhead said.
The University has not established how it will pay for the massive construction project that will ultimately connect East Campus, West Campus and the Duke University Medical Center. Complete development is expected to take 25 to 75 years, and Nicholas said resources will likely dictate the pace of construction.
Over the next few months, the University will establish several committees to gather input before development begins. Brodhead noted that any plans would include wide consultation with members of the community and would take into account development plans for the city of Durham.
He said graduate students and their needs would be accounted for on Central, but the emphasis on the residential component of undergraduate education—and Central’s potential to alter residential life—made an analysis of the undergraduate experience particularly relevant.
As the planning for Central proceeds from the nascent stages, Nicholas said the Board of Trustees’ role will be similar to the one it played 10 years ago when the University revamped its long-range Master Plan for the rest of campus.
“That form of governance has now created a comfort level that when we think about using space that is precious, we use it in the best way,” Nicholas said. “How we actually do that is not really the Board’s decision.”
In other business:
The newly built Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences has been renamed the Fitzpatrick Center after alumni and major donors Michael and Patricia Fitzpatrick.
The School of Nursing gained approval for a new Ph.D. program and a new $17.6 million building, to be built on Trent Drive behind the current school.
Construction of the 56,000 square-foot building is scheduled to begin in January and will allow the accelerated nursing bachelor’s program to grow from 50 to 80 students. It will also create space for the four to five doctoral students expected to matriculate in Fall 2006, just after the building’s scheduled completion date.
The Trustees also approved the creation of master’s and Ph.D. programs in medical physics, which will begin in Fall 2005.
The Fuqua School of Business gained preliminary approval to plan a 85,000 square-foot building for classrooms and a 15,000 square-foot book depository.
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