Serving as counsel to top University officials, Dr. Sanders Williams will have the whole world in his hands.
As Duke's first senior adviser for international strategy, Williams, Medicine '74 and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs for Duke Medicine, will advise the University on international ventures and make recommendations to President Richard Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange on global academic issues, Brodhead announced Sept. 5.
"Duke has expanded its international reach dramatically in the last decade," Brodhead said in a statement. "Building on this base, we now seek to create partnerships to share the benefits of Duke's teaching and research around the world. There is no one more knowledgeable about Duke's opportunities than Sandy, and he will be a critically important adviser as we identify and assess the choices that will best advance us toward this goal."
Chief among Williams's responsibilities in the newly created role will be informing and coordinating the moves of the University's graduate and professional schools as they scout the globe for prime sites for expansion.
Each of the graduate and professional schools is cultivating ties abroad. In particular, the Fuqua School of Business has two overseas outposts in the works-one probably in the Chinese city of Shanghai and the other at an undetermined location in India-that will house students in the Cross Continent MBA program for two-week stints, Vice Provost for International Affairs Gilbert Merkx told The Chronicle in June. It now falls to Williams to set these blueprints in stone, Lange explained.
"Getting these initiatives launched in the next few years will be critical," he said.
Williams said although time is of the essence, the University is taking care to forge lasting bonds with overseas partners.
"We don't want Duke engagements abroad to be small, isolated arrangements," he said. "It would be far better if when Fuqua has an outpost in Shanghai there is leverage between that operation and something that the engineering school might do. All parts of Duke should know what the others are doing and draw strength from that. Each individual project in a specific academic area will reinforce the others."
As the founding dean of the School of Medicine's expansion in coordination with the National University of Singapore, Williams is no stranger to the challenges individual schools face when expanding their reach abroad. He will spend October in Singapore, negotiating an extension of the University's partnership and welcoming the institution's second graduating class of students to campus.
"I went from being a skeptic about the Singapore project to thinking that this might not be a good idea for Duke to being a key person," he said. "We knew [the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School] had real potential to be a really big deal, a statement of Duke's truly global reach. We also felt we could learn from the experience in ways that could help us succeed in other ventures."
Williams added that he had derived several "cardinal rules" from the Singapore partnership that he will follow when mapping the University's global outposts to come. As in its domestic endeavors, the University must consider the needs of its partners and harness faculty enthusiasm for the projects-while being careful not to make promises it cannot keep.
"[The project] may be serving Duke's goals just fine, but if it's not serving our partners' goals it won't last," he said. "For an enterprise to succeed, there has to be a member of our faculty who really believes in this project and is willing to put their career on the line to make it work.... The final part is that we must be sure Duke can deliver its end of the bargain."
Dr. Victor Dzau, chancellor for health affairs and president and chief executive officer of the Duke University Health System, said Williams's leadership on the Singapore venture has demonstrated his fitness for the new position. But he said that although Williams now has a world of responsibility, the Duke medical school will remain his top commitment.
"We were very careful to make sure this is his primary role," Dzau said. "[The position of senior adviser for international strategy] is a part-time job."
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