Valerie Ashby's appointment as the new dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences this July will cap off a year of significant administrative turnover.
Following a nationwide search, Ashby was selected in May six months after previous dean Laurie Patton was named the next president of Middlebury College. When Ashby officially takes over July 1, it will mark exactly one year since Provost Sally Kornbluth replaced Peter Lange, who had served for 15 years. Other key administrators introduced this past year include Dr. A. Eugene Washington, the new chancellor for health affairs and president and CEO of Duke University Health System, and James Dobbins, the associate vice provost and director of the Duke Kunshan University Program Office. Despite these changes, administrators emphasized continuity during a time of transition.
“The University is a pretty stable place,” Kornbluth said. “One of the hallmarks of a really good place is that when new people take jobs, they honor the commitments of their predecessors, and they try to sustain all of the good things that their predecessors started.”
Changes in leadership do shift the direction of certain policies and strategies, but that typically takes a few years to develop, Joshua Socolar, chair of the Academic Council, wrote in an email. He added that new administrators tend to spend the transition period learning about the school and formulating their long-term plans.
“There is no immediate, major shift,” Socolar wrote. “Faculty are, however, aware that for long-range planning purposes we need to re-articulate our own ideas about priorities for hiring, research and teaching, as well as our thoughts about the broader academic environment at Duke.”
For Ashby, the transition period is unusually short—when she becomes dean of Trinity July 1, it will have been seven weeks since the announcement of her selection. But Kornbluth said she feels confident that Ashby has the tools to succeed in the face of a “steep learning curve.”
“She has a deep knowledge of issues in academia, she has had great administrative experience and she is an excellent scholar,” Kornbluth said of Ashby. “There was a great rapport and a clear vision.”
Ashby is in a particular position to succeed, Kornbluth noted, because she is coming from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and can avoid many of the distractions that normally accompany relocation. Instead of needing to move across the country, Ashby will only need to move down Tobacco Road.
The selection process
Ashby was selected from a pool of candidates that at one point numbered more than 200. Three finalists were eventually nominated by a search committee led by Angela O’Rand, professor of sociology. The finalists were then interviewed by Kornbluth and President Richard Brodhead, who made the final decision.
Duke’s status as a desirable destination for leaders at other universities led to the large number of candidates for the position, O’Rand said.
“It’s a young university that has been very upwardly mobile by taking chances and by creating new ways of teaching and doing research," she said. "It’s got a nimbleness that seems appealing to a lot of people who may be in a more stodgy place, or in a place where disciplines don’t interact as much as they do at Duke.”
The appointments of Kornbluth, the James B. Duke professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, and Ashby, the outgoing chair of the UNC chemistry department, are indicative of the continued growth of women in science.
Last year, Kornbluth became the first woman in Duke history to serve as provost. Ashby is the third woman to serve as dean of arts and sciences, following Patton and Ernestine Friedl. They are also joined by the two newly elected chairs of the Academic Council and the Arts and Sciences Council—Nan Jokerst, J.A. Jones professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Anita Layton, Robert R. and Katherine B. Penn associate professor of mathematics, respectively.
“There’s been a kind of cohort phenomenon across the disciplines,” O’Rand said. “Women who are arriving in these positions, they haven’t been in before are the women who got their degrees in the 70s and early 80s. That’s when the numbers began to grow in any serious way.”
O’Rand noted that the pool of candidates from which Ashby was selected was balanced between men and women and between different disciplines.
Curricular update
One of the most important initiatives started during Patton’s tenure was the ongoing curricular review. The current curriculum has been in place since 2000, although there have been changes made along the way.
In 2014, Patton proposed a three-year review of the existing curriculum that would ultimately update it to match the growing diversity of educational experiences offered at Duke. It would also reflect the increased role of digital learning. The review—which is the first since 1999—will likely be the focus of multiple meetings of the Arts and Sciences Council this year, in addition to revising the DKU curriculum and the DukeImmerse programs, Layton said.
“The direction of the curriculum review is to find ways to encourage Duke students to explore more,” Layton said. “We have a liberal arts education and want to make sure when students graduate they are well-educated, well-rounded citizens of society.”
Patton’s departure comes after the first year of the review, but faculty and administrators expect it will continue to be a central issue for the next few years.
“The curriculum really belongs to the faculty,” O’Rand said. “It comes from the people who teach in the classroom.”
The collaborative, faculty-driven nature of the review suggests that the change in deanship will not cause any drastic changes in Trinity’s curricular vision. In fact, because the review is still in its early stages, the timing of Ashby’s arrival is actually quite good, O’Rand said.
“We’re going to have a number of meetings with the full council where people can voice their opinions,” Layton said. “We’ll get a lot of feedback and then see what about the proposed curriculum needs to be changed, reflect on what the faculty want, and improve it very iteratively. Hopefully the third year we can converge on something that will be really wonderful for undergraduate education.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.