For the third time in just over a year, President Richard Brodhead is orchestrating a major shake-up in the Allen Building. Two weeks ago, Brodhead announced that he is spinning off a large chunk of Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations John Burness' job into a new position, which will be called the vice president for Durham and regional affairs. By focusing exclusively on Duke's community outreach programs and regional collaborations, the new VP will be tasked with rehabilitating our deeply dysfunctional relationship with the Bull City.
That won't be easy. But Brodhead has found the right man for the job in Phail Wynn, outgoing president of Durham Technical Community College. Wynn used his 30 years at Durham Tech to build the institution into a regional and national standout, and it is now one of the best community colleges in the state. Between his proven administrative skills, local contacts and community-wide respect, if anyone can save Duke's relationship with Durham, it's Phail Wynn.
Unfortunately, his appointment has already been marred by an above-average level of incompetence from the Allen Building. Consider administrators' decision to release this story to The Raleigh News & Observer and The Durham Herald-Sun for publication on May 2. Because May 2 fell in the middle of undergraduates' exam week, the announcement could not immediately be printed in The Chronicle, which had suspended publication just two days earlier.
Given that less than 20 percent of the Duke community subscribes to either The N&O or The Herald-Sun, the timing of this announcement virtually ensures that only a small fraction of our campus will know we have a new vice president when classes resume next fall.
Equally bizarre is administrators' perplexing (some would call it maddening) reluctance to be honest about how, when and why this position was created. When speaking to The N&O, Burness noted that Wynn's position was "established as part of a five-year plan Duke officials put into place last year to look at growth in Durham and the region." Burness later clarified to me that this "five-year plan" is actually the University's strategic plan, "Making a Difference."
But I've read "Making a Difference" front to back, and I can assure you that nowhere does the report call for the appointment of a new vice president. The closest the report comes is where it acknowledges a generic need to "reconceptualize our approach and organize ourselves administratively... to take best advantages of opportunities in a deliberate and effective manner." This is a far cry from endorsing a vice presidential appointment.
Why is this important? For one thing, citing phantom rationales like this one has become a nasty habit for too many Duke administrators. We saw this same subterfuge in March, when officials insinuated the new dean for undergraduate education position "flowed from" the Campus Culture Initiative. Similarly, Provost Peter Lange mistakenly ascribed Duke's admissions quota for students from North and South Carolina to James B. Duke's original Indenture of Trust last fall.
Of course, the CCI never endorsed a new dean and the Indenture doesn't even come close to requiring that 15 percent of Dukies hail from the Carolinas. But claiming otherwise saves administrators from having to share the real justifications for their decisions, which often aren't as compelling.
In Wynn's case, I suspect that the less glamorous truth may be this: President Brodhead has been looking to increase diversity among senior administrators since last May's Bowen-Chambers Report, which studied the administration's response to the lacrosse case. That report noted that early meetings of Brodhead's lacrosse crisis group included just five white males.
With the need for what Bowen and Chambers called a "wider array of life histories and perspectives" in mind, administrators must have jumped at the opportunity to hire Wynn, a black man who adds welcome diversity along with his urgently needed expertise. In fact, Wynn's appointment was so spur of the moment that Burness said the University invoked special "provisions for making appointments without a search if a qualified person exists"-another reason to doubt this appointment dates back to "Making a Difference."
These twin gaffes are forgivable, and they'll probably be forgotten before long. What is entirely unacceptable, though, is officials' third sin: the decision to withhold Wynn's salary information. As administrators are well aware, tax laws dictate that this information eventually be made public in 2009. But they also know that important questions have been raised about the compensation of Vice President for Institutional Equity Benjamin Reese, who is paid $35,000 less than any other vice president and makes just 72 percent of what Larry Moneta (tied for the third lowest-paid VP) does.
Given those questions, Wynn's compensation should not remain "private" for another year and a half. Public universities routinely release this information without injury, and it would be really nice to know (sooner rather than later) whether Brodhead shortchanges all of his senior black administrators, or just some of them.
And whatever Duke is paying Wynn, I sure hope it's a lot. We've set some miserable precedents to overcome. Recall that just within the last 12 months, Duke paid (read: bribed) Durham officials $2 million for municipal considerations that should have been free. Administrators then sold out future students' needs by agreeing to unreasonable limits on retail space for the new Central Campus.
More spectacularly, Duke officials openly tolerated the Durham Police Department's stated policy of encouraging officers to "arrest students and take them to jail, rather than issue warnings and tickets, because experience showed lesser measures lacked deterrent value." That's unconstitutional.
Now I could probably go on and on (we haven't even gotten to the lacrosse case yet), but the point is this: If in the past some Durhamites have had unrealistic expectations about how they can treat Duke University and its students, it is now up to Wynn to end that. Some have worried that Wynn may spend his time glad-handing at the Rotary Club, ignoring the real issues.
But I have faith that someone, somewhere in the Brodhead Administration will someday care about students' needs and rights. Let's all hope that Phail Wynn is our man.
Kristin Butler is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday during the summer.
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