Q&A: New Trinity Dean Ashby discusses A&S goals

<p>Trinity Dean Valerie Ashby is prioritizing efficient use of resources, faculty leadership opportunities and increasing diversity in her first year on the job.</p>

Trinity Dean Valerie Ashby is prioritizing efficient use of resources, faculty leadership opportunities and increasing diversity in her first year on the job.

Valerie Ashby became dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences this summer after a nationwide search to replace outgoing dean Laurie Patton, now president of Middlebury College. Prior to Ashby’s appointment, she served as chair of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Chronicle’s Ryan Zhang spoke with her about her goals for Trinity and why she chose to come to Duke.

The Chronicle: How has the transition to Durham been for you so far?

Valerie Ashby: I’ve been a resident of Durham! My first academic job was at Iowa State, in the Midwest. I left Iowa State in 2003 and moved to UNC-Chapel Hill, but I lived in Durham. I love living in Durham. It’s actually quite nice—I just drive 15 miles in the other direction now. Actually, all of my activities, other than when I was working at UNC, are pretty much in Durham—friends, church, social things. I love DPAC.

TC: What brought you to Duke? Why did you decide to come here?

VA: I decided to come to Duke for many of the reasons I’ve decided to go everywhere. Great faculty—I always want to work with collaborative faculty who are great scholars and great teachers. And I will go anywhere for great students. I really love teaching—I usually teach undergraduate organic chemistry and graduate courses in materials chemistry. And, by the way, it matters that you have great leadership. Dick [Brodhead] and Sally [Kornbluth] are pretty special and have similar values around education and trying to deliver the absolute best experience for the faculty and the students. All of that feels very comfortable to me.

TC: Let’s talk about some of your main goals both in the short term and the long term. What are you most excited about?

VA: We have three places where we are going to begin. One is considering this idea of how we can increase the excellence in research and teaching in our departments without significant growth of the faculty. We grew the faculty significantly about a decade ago without changing the size of the student body, so the faculty-to-student ratio is pretty doggone good now. So it’s not a question of necessarily adding a lot more people, but really making sure that we excel with what we have, and when we do actually hire people, that we really hire the very best people who are going to be great teachers and great scholars overall. We don’t see those as two separate things. You can’t be a great scholar without working on your teaching and getting the benefits of interacting with students—your scholarship gets better when you do that.

The second area is really working on faculty leadership. We need leaders all over the College of Arts and Sciences, whether that’s for student initiatives or research teams or centers or institutes or department chairs—everything requires great leadership. We have been really blessed that we have good leaders. But we haven’t really had leadership training and leadership support. The question is how much better could we be doing if we supported and developed our leaders more. We’re really talking about using all of the talent that Duke has and making sure that we identify all of it and then support it. The staff leadership training is great, but there hasn’t been a significant effort around faculty leadership training.

The third is around issues of inequality and diversity. Again, the question for me is what is it that Duke has that we are not maximizing? We have a really unique position in that Duke is the only top institution in the South. That context of living of the South affects all issues of inequality, gender, economics, race, sexuality—you name it. There’s something about the context of being in the southeastern part of the United States that changes all of those discussions. We are in the city of Durham, which is also an interesting context. It has a lot of history around all of these topics.

We have scholars who are experts in all of these areas, not just in Trinity but all over campus. Public policy, law—we have a brain trust around these issues. What we haven’t done is try and codify something that we deliver to the students around these issues. There are workshops here and there, there are classes here and there, but we would like for every student to have experienced thinking of issues of inequality. Our students will go out into the world to be of service in various ways, and they’re going to interact with people who are very different. It’s just a diverse world.

This is a major issue nationally and internationally—everywhere. Almost every issue in some way is tied to this. So if our students really want to make an impact, then are we fully equipping them to do that? I think we may be doing that here and there, but we’re not maximizing what we could be doing. There is so much brilliance on campus around these issues. We need to engage in a consistent way these topics and conversations that are sometimes challenging and uncomfortable, more than when there’s an issue, more than when something comes up and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, and then two months later nobody’s talking about it. We ought to have a consistent approach that’s part of the Duke student’s experience.

TC: How do you see that sort of consistent conversation happening?

VA: Of all the three topics, this is the one that is going to take the most work to develop. I really feel strongly that the faculty need to own this conversation for it to be sustainable. Students are going to come and go, right? You can have a really zealous student, and then they graduate. But if the University—via the faculty—owns that this is who we want to be, then that’s a sustainable thing. So we will start by engaging faculty, some key people in different areas, and start to think about what Duke could uniquely do around this topic that would be of the highest impact to the most students. And I don’t actually want to prescribe what that is, because I think the brilliance in the room is going to come up with something that is even better than anything I have thought of doing.

And once we have some ideas on the table, then we are definitely going to engage with staff and students, because this is an issue that is not just about faculty. It’s about faculty, staff and students. Everybody that steps on this campus is affected. So this will be a process that will happen over several months of conversations. Whatever we decide to do will be finite, meaning we won’t have 12 initiatives. We will try to pick the two or three things that we’re going to start doing that could mean the most.

Rather than having to respond or react to some event or some horrible something, we’re actually saying, let’s decide how we’re going to talk about this, what we’re going to do, how we’re going to educate our students and ourselves. We don’t assume that the faculty are holding all the knowledge on all this—that is not the case.

TC: Have you been able to look at the curriculum review process? That was a big priority under Laurie Patton—what directions do you see that going?

VA: The first year was thinking about all of the details of the process. The second year has kind of been vetting it through a number of different constituencies and having lots of different people weigh in. We’ll start to get the framework so we can start to talk about more of the specifics. We’re just early on in the process.

I do know that thematically what we are trying to do is make this curriculum simpler—easier for students to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. If it’s too complicated, you spend all your time trying to get it right. Somewhere between no structure and over-structure is something that might be more meaningful to you, might take less time for you to understand and might be more effective in getting you where you’re trying to go. But I have no idea what the end product is going to look like yet.

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