State of the University

Let’s talk about the landscape of higher education. What are its values? How do you think higher education is likely to be changed and influenced by its challenges?

The fundamental drama of higher education just isn’t likely to change. What is it? It’s about talented people being brought together in ways that make them strike sparks off each other and surrounded by opportunities and challenges that make them discover their own powers and interests in unanticipated ways.

For me higher education isn’t about offering courses, it isn’t about offering programs—all of those are examples of the kind of world of opportunities in which people realize themselves.  And of course you only really realize yourself by actively investing in things.

And, not everything you invest yourself in turns out to be you, in the long run. But that’s a revelation as well.

So I see the world of—you come to college, you meet all your clever contemporaries, all the self-discovery that takes place—I don’t see that changing. I see it as being continually enriched.

But there are ways in which I think higher education is likely to change. Everybody’s heard me say it a million times: I think that the formal model of higher education has been quite abstract—a rather artificial exercise that the point of the exercise was to develop powers that exceed the exercise. I think we’re coming to a very interesting time where that boundary begins to be blurred.

You’ve mentioned that you view this culture of  building up opportunities that are seemingly outside the formal academic experience as enriching education. At what point does it become a distraction, or how do you strike some balance?

There’s something like 18 million people who are students in higher education at this time. And you have to realize, that that’s many different categories of people who are seeking many different things. It seems to me perfectly natural that Duke would have its own market. There’s a kind of education that we’re extraordinarily well-equipped to offer and there’s a kind of education that other places are better equipped to offer than us, and I think that’s the way it should be.

And I don’t think it would be helpful to try to do things it’s not going to be good at. But I do think it would be helpful for us to ask ourselves what are we good at, and how do we do that in the best way we can.

And what do you see Duke as being best at?

What do I see Duke as being best at? Well, let’s remember Duke has all its graduate and professional schools as well as its undergraduate schools. Duke is a selective university, let’s be frank.

There are students who are mentally very active, students who are just going to eat the place alive, students who—you know there’s a phrase, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. That’s the kind of students you want at a place like this, and that’s the kind of students who we are privileged to attract here. Students who do what is required of them, but where that is optimally the beginning of a sort of larger advantage of education and making something of it. I think in all of our schools, students have the academic gifts that they would have anywhere but there is a very obvious passion here for wanting to use knowledge to do things in the world. And so I think that the faculty has that character as well.

So if you put yourself in the shoes of one of the prospective students on campus on Blue Devil Days today, what would be going through your mind, if you saw this university with fresh eyes?

But don’t forget I see it with fresh eyes, because I speak at Blue Devil Days and when I do, I really take some trouble to try to imagine where people are who are very bright students but still of high school age. Because don’t forget how extraordinarily foreign college is even to the most knowing high school student.

What would they see? I’m not sure I could pretend to say. Don’t forget Duke is way bigger than anybody’s high school—in that sense it may be intimidating. It’s very beautiful, and very mysterious. Every smart high school student knows you’re supposed to go to college, but what exactly college is is something you’re never going to learn until you’re in it.

So I don’t know, I only like to give people a sense that the point of college isn’t to go do well all over again—you’ve already had to grind your way through this in high school. The point of it is to enter into a space of discovery. In all of its meanings—its curricular, its extracurricular, its social—its every aspect.

I think when students come here, the main response I get is they pick up on the fact that this place is not only friendly, it is humming. That’s a pretty good message for someone to get.

I think that in my experience, one of the things that students find very hard to understand is that a place can be competitive—that is in the sense that everybody is trying really hard to do things really well, but that doesn’t mean that people are trying to climb over each other’s back in some sort of Darwinian way. 

You talk a lot about the purpose of education to equip students to discover themselves, but it seems like Duke—a school younger than its peers—is also discovering itself. What are you discovering about the challenges for Duke in the next five or 10 years? I mean strategically and in a long-term way, beyond the usual refrain about the economy.

The truth is, I don’t begin by thinking about the economy. For the following reason: the trick isn’t to try to get a lot money and then see how you can spend it. The trick is to figure out what is interesting to do in the world of research and education and then use your resources to accomplish that means. The best universities are the ones that are even more imaginative in scarce times than in posh times. We’ve just lived through a very posh period, and it’s wonderful. We could build the Nasher and the Bostock and French Family Science Center and all those other things. It’s wonderful that DukeEngage could have been founded. But I’ll tell you: I believe that this University is doing things programmatically in every one of its schools at the level of education that will be as valuable in the long term as any building we have built. I think of the founding of the Global Health Certificate. Four years ago there was no such program. There was no way to connect the fields of study to the actual social mission of bringing trained intelligence to all the health challenges of this country and the world. Now there’s a hundred students in this program.

Instead of acting as if the fields of study were all described long ago and now we just put students into those boxes, this is a place that understands that fields of study are always emerging and we’re trying to get out there and capture them as they emerge for the benefit of our students. We expect both students and faculty to be active and imaginative in creating the educational landscape.

You just returned from the National Championship in Indianapolis—in some ways, this moment highlighted how athletics can bring out the best qualities of a university. But what do you think the future of athletics is at this place and perhaps elsewhere?

Now that I have seen my team win a national championship, I see that that is even harder than I thought. There were many really good teams in that Tournament who did not get anywhere near the Final Four. So you have to be better than good to win that Tournament. And I’ll tell you the longer I watch, the more I admire the traits that are needed, the sort of deep character traits that are needed in adversity, to be resourceful in adversity.

I myself was not a varsity athlete—this is probably widely suspected—I was a very intellectual type of student. But I will say I have come to have a very full appreciation of athletics as a means of education. Because it trains things that you need to be effective in later life.

How in the face of challenge and adversity do you reach deeper down to find the will and the talent to succeed at that moment? How do you work in teams not only by working in set plays but by a group of people improvising intuitively in face of emerging challenges? They’re extraordinarily important skills that are learned through athletics. Even, you know, it’s a cliché but all clichés are true, that to go through moments of humiliating defeat and still have to get up and do it all over again rather than just boo-hoo. My own understanding of the way higher education is going—will make athletics more relevant to the rest of higher education and not less so.

I think we understand how these sort of deep arts of self-discipline, of improvisational teamwork, it’s not just metaphorical to say that they will be parts of the skills that people need. They literally are skills that people will need.

I see how that’s useful to those student-athletes, but how do you respond to people at this place or elsewhere who say that athletics doesn’t deserve such a prominent role or shouldn’t siphon money from the academic business of the university?

To that I would say, everyone is entitled to his or her own view. I certainly know people who think that, I have spent time in their company, and I have spent time arguing with them. My own understanding is, American higher education at its best is matched by nothing in the world. There’s nothing like it. And you will not go anywhere where people won’t acknowledge that fact. But it is not the narrowly academic part that makes American higher education so unique. It’s understanding that a mix of things that it’s quite hard to explain their relationship at a conceptual level, but it’s easy enough to understand at an experiential level. You know, the Sorbonne does not have athletic teams. There’s something about education that is practiced at the Sorbonne that extraordinarily limited, very narrow, compared to what you get here. And so I’ve long since not only come to understand but really celebrate the fact that the pieces we have on the table are all part of the game, or to use another metaphor that I like, higher education is like a stew. You put lots of things into it and they together become something none of them could be on their own.

A lot of attention had been paid to the universities in the championship—both Duke and Butler. We talk about the “brand” of Duke, and in some ways this national scene highlights the brand. How do you think that is part of “moving” a university, of making it better or improving its national reputation?

I’m very interested in history—you know this. One of my favorite figures in the history of Duke is the person named John Franklin Crowell, from whom Crowell Quad is named. After the Civil War and during the Reconstruction, Trinity College was just about at death’s door. There was a period when they could not make the faculty payroll for almost two complete years, and no one was willing to be the president. They went and hired a graduate student who had not finished his degree to come and be the president. That person revived the school, he found donors for the school, he moved the school to Durham and he introduced varsity athletics to Trinity College. And then he left after six or seven years, finished his dissertation and he was a historian of child labor—he worked for the Labor Department later in his life.

So I’ve got that as one little historical point, and then I’ve got another one.

When William Preston Few had the vision of making a university out of this place, he had all the parts in mind: you need a beautiful campus, because great universities have beautiful campuses. You know what I mean? This place had a beautiful campus, so it started from the outside in, in a way. You needed a medical school.  Bingo—they went to Johns Hopkins and hired the doctors and then you had a medical school. And, at that time, President Few also understood that if you want to take a respected regional liberal arts college and give it national visibility as a university, athletics was a means.

Wallace Wade was the first building on West Campus that was complete and Duke went and got the football coach from Alabama, then a great football powerhouse, and that’s how Duke became known. You can say, “Gee, wasn’t that overweighting of athletics?” but the truth is all the academic parts of Duke benefited from the attention that was brought in in the first instance through athletics. It remains true.

Now Duke is better known for a wider range of things.

What do you think is bringing attention to the University now? Or what do you hope it’s being recognized for?

Duke is known to be one of the world’s great universities. So now you want to be working on the fundamental quality of all the schools, of the faculty you hire, of the attention they give to students and the experience that students have when they come here.

I think at the moment—I say this with some immodesty—that the sort of dramatic emphasis that Duke has put on the relation of theory and practice, the relation of academic learning and activity in the world is our visible signature at the moment, and of course it cuts across all the schools.

That, and the sort of visible and somewhat aggressive internationalization that Duke is engaged in—I think those are probably our biggest new signatures at this time.

So, in speaking of signatures, what do you hope yours to be? What do you envision as your legacy?

I am at heart a modest person, and this place is far greater than me. But after all, there will be things that will be associated with my presidency, and I’ll tell you what I hope some of them will be.

One will be the Financial Aid Initiative, and in the first instance having made the issue of access and affordability a dramatic commitment on the part of this place. The second is the whole emphasis on knowledge in the service of society, of opening the doors between academic work and experience in the world, especially in the areas that need intelligence to solve human problems.

Obviously it’s nothing I dreamed up on my own but it certainly is my vision for this university. And where would you see it? You’d see it in DukeEngage, in Global Health, in Sanford being elevated to a school, you’d see it in our international programs, which are really very largely based on trying to bring high-level cross-disciplinary problem solving into places in the world that have deep need of that.

And if I could say it, plus everything else as well.