The rapidly approaching end to classes presents an opportunity for the Duke community to reflect on a year that at different times attracted desirable and unwanted national attention. In the same year that a PowerPoint raised questions of what values define student culture, the University received the largest donation in its history— an $80 million gift that will allow Duke to overhaul central gathering areas for students. The Chronicle’s Julian Spector sat down with President Richard Brodhead Thursday, focusing in particular on his role in helping students shape campus culture.
The Chronicle: There’s been a lot of talk this year about campus culture and redefining campus culture. How would you define campus culture as it is currently?
Richard Brodhead: Let me take a step back. Duke is peculiarly a school that loves itself. People at Duke love Duke to a degree that’s quite remarkable among universities. At the same time, people at Duke also sometimes love to criticize Duke, and especially the culture of Duke. The things that are criticized here are really not that peculiar to Duke. If we talk about alcohol issues, if we talk about gender issues and even issues of sexual harassment and sexual abuse, many of these questions came up this past year, but you know these are not questions peculiar to Duke in any way. But Duke takes them as if they were.
I thought what was so useful about this past year was the extent to which students understood that rather than just grumbling about campus culture and wondering why administrators don’t change it, students understood that campus culture is student culture and the ones who will make it will be students in significant part, with our support to be sure. And I thought there was lots of evidence this year of people stepping forward to become the creators of campus culture.
TC: What specifically stood out to you?
RB: I thought that the Greek Women’s Initiative was a very striking fact. I thought the Duke Student Government took a very proactive role this year on questions of campus culture—the night I went to the forum, the very high level of discussion that was already going on in a pretty intense way.
TC: If you were a student at Duke now, what steps would you take to address campus culture?
RB: That would depend on what student I was. The best culture for Duke or any school would be the one that gives the fullest outlet for student energies and creativity and friendship. Why are residential universities so supremely valuable is because academic study isn’t broken off from all those other dimensions of engagement and creativity. So I would like this to be a place that people just experience as a place of infinite opportunity to do all kinds of things—anything that would cross your mind, you would find a way to do here. Sometimes when people talk about campus culture, the idea is, well there are only some kinds of things to do here and not other kinds of things to do. Would you say that’s an accurate statement? There are a lot of things to do. And if anybody thinks that some of those things are understated or undervalued, well, get out there and push them forward would be what I would say.
The University is actually amazingly eager—very, very willing and eager to help students carry forward the things that give student creativity full outlets. This is a school full of dancing. We know there’s not adequate space for dancing on campus, but we’re trying to figure it out. And I use that just as one of a million examples. Even with this business about the intramural fields. It’s funny, Duke is so well known for athletics, but Duke isn’t overstocked with athletic facilities for ordinary students. It will soon have a lot more of them, as over time, it will soon have a lot more practice space for student artists. It already has ample research space for student scientists and everybody else.
TC: In your email in the Fall about campus culture, you addressed the need for students to lead the change. As president, you are charged with providing the vision and guiding the University, but you also have the desire for the students to lead the change. How do you find the line between you providing the vision and letting the students lead it?
RB: Not an easy thing. I’ve been very articulate on this campus about the dominant value I see for students in their education, and the word I have found above all for it is “engagement.” I don’t want people to just take courses. I want students to be intellectually engaged. I want their curiosity and creativity to be the driver of their education. I don’t want students to just enroll in extracurricular activities. That does not impress me at all. I want students to feel driven to do all the wonderful things that bring students together and open possibilities on this campus. Just for that reason, we also need to understand students are the age where they are now the responsible agents of their life. It would be neither practicable nor desirable for the adults at the University to set the social life of the University. What you want to say is, let’s try to remember what the sort of dominant values are here, and then you go figure out the best way to live out those values. That’s what I would say.
TC: So is your role in that process as a facilitator of discussion?
RB: I think so. I think it is partly to challenge people and partly to provide support for people in their many efforts. You see things as facts that actually represent collaborations between students and the University. I’ll give you one small example. An event I always very much enjoy is the library party.... Well, the library party was dreamed up by students..... Look at the party this year. The party this year was not an administration creation. It was created by the [Duke Marketing Club], and all the cool stuff that was there from the history of advertising collections, that was all brought out by students. The whole thing was staged by students with the cooperation of the university. Why? Because it represented the bringing the whole university together kind of event, the demonstration that socializing can be both totally fun and not debauched. Those seemed the values to support.
TC: Looking back over this year, it’s hard to do that without certain names coming to mind—Karen Owen, Anil Potti and others. They brought scrutiny from the outside world but also a chance for us to look in at ourselves. How do you think we as a university learned from the scandals of the past year?
RB: Every university has its scandals, and every university thinks its own are the worst scandals in the world. But other people don’t always care about them to the same extent.
In the case of the PowerPoint thing, I was sorry for all the national attention that got. It seemed to me a relatively freaky thing and just the kind of thing the American public loves to drool over. As a reflection of Duke, let me just ask you: Do you regard that as a reflection of daily life at Duke? So why were people here so quick to accept that as if it were an index of Duke? Because they recognized grains of things in it that not everyone is comfortable with. And that led to the whole culture discussion, which I think will have many positive outcomes.
As for Dr. Potti, there it seems to me that the main takeaway is the problems of Dr. Potti’s work derive form a new phase in the history of medicine. The attempt to take genomic work into practice in new therapies introduces complexities people haven’t typically dealt with before. The computational complexities aren’t within the skills of many well-trained scientists. I think that the lesson of the Potti thing is just we and every university need to take a big step back and figure out what kind of oversight and regulation needs to be done A for the science and B for the clinical implementation of the science of this new work with this far higher degree of computational complexity.
TC: And with Tailgate?
RB: Well, Tailgate was a custom loved by many and abused by some. I never heard anyone tell me otherwise. Some of the facts that came together this Fall just made it inevitable that we couldn’t continue to have Tailgate in that form. You could minimize it, but the danger to life that we saw staring us in the face just meant you couldn’t have this continue in this form. I have to believe that students as ingenious and sociable as Duke students can dream up forms of fun that will be highly communal and highly delightful and avoid the excesses of Tailgate.
It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? But every year is quite a year!
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