The Academic Council discussed the Campus Culture Initiative and the future of the Athletic Council at its meeting Thursday.
President Richard Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange spoke to the council on the CCI's suggestions to improve campus culture and the process by which those suggestions will be discussed and potentially implemented.
"We have an excellent report which sets a powerful agenda for us with a set of recommendations that need to be taken with the greatest seriousness," Lange said.
He added, however, that further reflection on the recommendations and increased engagement with the Duke community must occur before anything is implemented.
"There always was going to need to be another phase after the report came out," Brodhead said.
Lange said some of the CCI's recommendations have already been implemented, pointing to DukeEngage as an example. But those recommendations that haven't been implemented will be referred to existing committees or will "require extensive engagement of students and faculty," he said.
Lange added that the biggest challenge facing discussions on the CCI is to "go beyond the 'usual suspects.'"
"How do we talk to the people who don't show up at the meetings, who don't show up at the open forums? That can be not only students, [but] can also be faculty," Lange said. "We've started a process which is designed to show everybody we're dead serious."
Engaging faculty who "care about the culture of the campus but don't show up at any of the meetings" will be a goal for the CCI, he said. Administrators will meet with the representative bodies of the faculty in order to discuss the CCI.
Lange added that over the summer "nothing controversial" will be implemented. By the end of the fall, specific recommendations will be presented to Brodhead for implementation at his direction, he said.
Following the speeches, council members discussed the role of alcohol in Duke's social life and the CCI's recommendations regarding alcohol. Brodhead said more social outlets need to be available to students in order to de-emphasize alcohol as the focus of social life.
"The more options we create for people to do other things than drink themselves into oblivion... the better off we will all be and the better off our campus will be," Lange said.
Brodhead also proposed revisions to the Athletic Council, including expanding faculty representation and appointing a faculty member to chair the council.
These revisions are intended to make the council's work more substantive, to clarify its chain of command and to disassociate the role of its leadership from the role of the faculty athletic representative, he said.
"This is deep bureaucracy," Brodhead said. "At the same time, sometimes you go into deep bureaucracy in order to lay the administrative foundations for really important things and I think this will be quite important."
In other business:
Brodhead announced the creation of the new dean of undergraduate education position.
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