People don't often ask President Richard Brodhead what the job of a university president really entails.
"It is a job of such spectacular randomness you can scarcely imagine," he said. "At bottom, what you're really trying to understand is, what are all this intelligence and all these resources for? What could it be for? And how can we make sure that we're making the best uses now to train people to be creative and productive in their future lives?"
In his three years as president, Brodhead has made it a priority to strengthen students' experiences and opportunities on campus as well as provide resources to engage and benefit the community in Durham and abroad.
It's at three years when university presidents can expect their transitional period to end-no matter how volatile their first years-and real implementation of their goals to begin.
In particular, Brodhead said he expects the next few years of his administration to center around the Campus Culture Initiative Steering Committee report, released this spring.
"We understood when [the CCI report] came out that some of those recommendations were just plain good ideas, some of them you could act on the first day, some of them would be very hard to translate into practice," Brodhead said. "For a lot of these projects, we understood we had to pass on from the phase of vision to the phase of implementation."
Brodhead's objectives are reflected in the University's five-year strategic plan: to deepen engagement, secure faculty, improve facilities, strengthen the arts and recommit to diversity and access. The Financial Aid Initiative, DukeEngage and the CCI were all implemented in conjunction with the plan's goals.
"Everything is themed at making the undergraduate experience rich, but it's also linked to a broader effort at Duke to make this place less about academic boxes and more about learning multiple skills to solve complicated problems," he said.
Brodhead, who was installed as Duke's ninth president Sept. 18, 2004, took his seat at the helm after a 32-year career at Yale University.
"There's something different about this place," Brodhead said. "There's a different character. It's much less traditional, in that there's a kind of flexibility here-a willingness for experimentalism."
He said he hopes this flexibility will help the University and its observers move on from the lacrosse case and refocus attention on Duke's goals. "The whole episode was so regrettable and so painful," he said. "But even on the worst day of that story, Duke was still a very great university."
Brodhead's first personal initiative as president was the Financial Aid Initiative, which recently crossed the $230 million mark-just $70 million short of its goal.
DukeEngage, a $30-million effort to provide funding and support for undergraduates to work with societal issues at home and internationally, is also about access and engagement.
Brodhead said the substantial changes proposed and the numerous goals on the University's plate are typical of any fine educational institution.
"As we look to the future our plan is not to just sit here and continue to be happy with how good we are-that's not the kind of place this is. We'll always have things that people know are great and fun here. We'll always have basketball. But all of our programs build from existing strengths-it's not that we're trying to create things that were never here before."
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