The institutional importance of the presidency is surpassed perhaps only by the Board of Trustees. I recently interviewed all the living presidents of Duke to help me understand the nuances of presidential leadership: Keith Brodie (1985-1993), Nan Keohane (1993-2004) and Richard Brodhead (2004-present). They represent fully one-third of those who have occupied that office since James B. Duke’s 1924 grant that transformed Trinity College into Duke University. Their time in office represents 26 years—which is longer than I’ve been alive.
University presidents have an incredibly wide portfolio. President Brodhead has, for example, hired both a head football coach and a dean of the chapel. Duke’s presidents are responsible for a multi-billion dollar health system. They must be the public face of the University. They must be able to set a strategic direction. When he comes to work, President Brodhead asks, “What’s there to be done?”
The answer: “There are the things you have to deal with, and there are the things you aspire to deal with. Every day is a different mix.”
President Brodie told me that a good president “knows the faculty, knows the students, throws him or herself into the life of the institution, understands the strengths and weaknesses of the place and knows how to use resources to grow it.” Duke’s president must be a jack of all trades. To be good at the job, he said, “you have to have the skills necessary to run a board meeting, to fundraise [and] to be able to fire people who aren’t living up to standards.”
President Keohane also gave me a long list of skills necessary in a good president: “First of all, good judgment, which includes the abilities to foresee problems and figure out how to solve them; to appoint good people; and [to] make timely and wise decisions. Then, experience in and respect for the scholarly enterprise... [and] good communications skills, so you can make the case for the University to potential supporters (including donors) and also potential critics.”
President Brodie believes presidents need passion, humility, and energy. President Keohane added courage, stamina and a sense of humor to the list. President Brodhead said that “the first skill you have to have as a university president is the willingness to listen and learn... you have to figure out how you can put together the aspirations of the place into some form you can follow through with. [A president should] think not only about what higher education is today, but also about what people are going to wish it was tomorrow.” A love of learning doesn’t hurt either.
As for leadership in particular, the University requires a special kind. President Brodhead told me that a president must “have some skill for playing with others—university leadership is not a command and control kind of leadership.”
Now assuming you’ve got the myriad of skills that might make you a good president of Duke, how should you use them? Knowing what to do is only half the battle. Doing it is far more challenging for the president.
President Brodie cited his commitment to increase the presence of black students and faculty on campus as a test of his leadership ability. He realized that in 1985 the undergraduate population was only about 3 percent black. For President Brodie, “that was unacceptable. We are in a community over 40 percent African American and in the South. Duke offered a tremendous set of opportunities to those who studied here. To deprive a subset of the population of that was not a good thing.” So he hired a new dean of admissions and a recruiter who targeted black high school students. He began our inaugural Black Faculty Initiative and set up the Reginaldo Howard scholarship program for black students. At the end of President Brodie’s tenure as president, the number of black students at Duke had tripled.
President Keohane thought that breaking down the barriers that traditionally separated academic departments and schools was the biggest challenge of being Duke’s president. She noted that a key aspect of her job was “bringing together leaders from the different schools and constituencies to focus on ‘One Duke,’ working together to realize the amazing potential of this university through inter-school collaboration and interdisciplinary and international projects.” The provost and the deans were key partners in her efforts.
Like those of Presidents Brodie and Keohane, President Brodhead’s signature initiatives also require collaboration and mobilization across the University. We can’t achieve our potential on fronts like internationalization (“the meaning of internationalization is only beginning to be understood in American universities”) and knowledge in service of society (“training people as problem-solvers rather than as experts in fixed disciplines”) by presidential fiat only.
A good president builds a team and sets a direction. In President Brodhead’s words, “the whole point of being president of Duke is to ask where did we say we were going to go, how far did we get and where do we go now?”
I won’t be so arrogant as to ascribe success or failure to any Duke presidency. One thing is clear though: To students it matters a great deal who sits in that chair on the second floor of the Allen Building. President Brodhead notes that “you’ve got to realize that it’s endless work; nothing that you want to accomplish can be accomplished once and for all. You’ve just always got to make progress on it.”
Gregory Morrison is a Trinity senior and the former Executive Vice President of DSG. His column runs every Monday.
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