President Richard Brodhead reflects on challenges, goals for final year

<p>Isaacson, Miller will serve as the search firm in the process of finding a successor for President Brodhead, who announced in April his plans to retire.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

Isaacson, Miller will serve as the search firm in the process of finding a successor for President Brodhead, who announced in April his plans to retire.  

President Richard Brodhead announced Thursday that he will step down from his position in June 2017 and will return to teaching and writing after a year’s sabbatical. The Chronicle’s Claire Ballentine and Abby Xie sat down with Brodhead to discuss the challenges that he and the University face and his plans for his final year as president.

The Chronicle: Why did you decide now to announce that you would be stepping down?

Richard Brodhead: Well, I think that it’s been in my mind for quite a while that this would be the appropriate time. I have three terms as president, the last term runs through 2017, and I thought that why not just use that to decide for us. The best president of the United States, their term ends when their term ends. The worst president of the United States, their term ends when their term ends. So I thought that sounds like a good date. I will have been president for 13 years—that’s a long time. And there are a lot of things that will come to fruition this year and next—the construction, the [Duke Forward] campaign, Phase 2 of the China project and so it just seemed to me like a good time.

TC: What will your role be in the search process for the new president?

RB: My role will be to answer any questions that anyone wants, but other than that I won’t play a role in choosing the next president. I think this is the first secret of good management, for people not to pick their own successors.

TC: What are your goals for the next year, both broadly for the University and more specifically with the changes you hope to institute?

RB: The important things that are accomplished at a university aren’t done in a week or a month. They take a long time because you have to harvest the thinking of many people. So I would say the things I hope and expect to see completed are four principal things. First, the Duke Forward fundraising campaign. We’re at $3.15 billion so we’ll actually reach the goal [of $3.25 billion] this summer, but we’ll run the campaign for another full year because obviously the goal wasn't really the goal. Once you reach the goal, the goal will become the springboard on which to go further. Also, the very intense wave of campus construction will very largely be done. The library finished this year, the Chapel will be finished in a week or so, West Union will open this summer and the arts building will be substantially done. Third, Duke Kunshan University has been open now for a year and a half, but there is a plan for a second phase, and next year will be the year that the faculty and Trustees decide how they want to proceed. And fourth, there are a number of projects underway that have to do with the issues of diversity and inclusion on campus, and I think that a lot of work was done this year and a lot of progress will be made in the next year. The faculty diversity committee will be done. I’ll be receiving the report from the task force on bias and hate issues within the week, and I think that both of those efforts will help us figure out how to take practical steps to keep this place moving forward in such a way as to guarantee that everyone who comes here has the opportunity to have the same excellent experience. The most important things a president does are never accomplished in a year, in a sense they’re never accomplished. 

TC: What worries you the most about where Duke is right now?

RB: I’ve never regarded the existence of conflict or debate as a sign of un-health in a university. I actually regard it as a sign of health in a university. That’s what they’re for, for the issues of the world to be articulated and for people to try to educate each other. My deepest worry about Duke is that it would stop trying to become better. That's the history of this place. If you looked at this place in 1970, you would not recognize the place this school has become, in really every respect.

TC: Given recent protests and issues of discrimination on campus, how do you see the University getting better?

RB: The task force will be bringing in some specific recommendations. In the faculty world, the diversity report was a truly excellent piece of work. It reminds us the importance of the continuing effort to make sure that every position that’s ever filled at the University gives the chance for talent to be identified and to guarantee that when people join this community, they join it as equals of anybody else and have the chance to have the same good experience. Duke has made extraordinary progress, but the more progress you make, the more you realize that there’s still places we haven't reached. I think we have a pretty good record of identifying things and saying here’s what we’re doing about this. I gave my faculty address the year of the 50th anniversary of integration at Duke on the subject of race in the history of Duke, and I identified one thing that I thought had conspicuously not been accomplished and that had to do with the diversification of the senior leadership of the University. And even though I gave that talk only three years ago, between then and now, we have the first African-American chancellor of the health system, the first woman provost, the first African-American dean of arts and sciences and the first South Asian dean of engineering. And all of this going by the very best candidate we can find. So I think that Duke’s record shows that excellence and diversity are compatible goals.

TC: How were you affected by the recent protests?

RB: I’ve lived in universities since I was 17 years old. I’ve never lived anywhere but universities. This is not the first protest I ever saw, and it will not be the last. I respect the rights and the history of protest. I think that we attempted to engage in conversation, and when it was clear that was going nowhere, we did what we thought was right to do.

TC: You recently visited Duke Kunshan University. What has progress been like with Kunshan recently and how do you hope to see it progress in the next year?

RB: Universities are complicated things. They’re not created in a day or a year. I would say, when I go now and see that the school that has been open for 18 months—and has already been selected by the World Health Organization as its Asia research site and is already landing grants in environmental research from Chinese provinces and governments—I feel great about it. The faculty and students I spoke to there were very excited about their experience. But we know it’s still the very early days. Compared to the history of some universities that now seem like they must always have been just like how they are, this place is off to quite a good start. A very important difference is that now we have 50 or 60 Duke faculty that have been over there and can actually testify to what Kunshan is like.

TC: What do you think is the most defining moment of your presidency?

RB: There’s so many that stick out in my mind. Was it thrilling to win national basketball championships? Of course. I would say the moment that The Duke Endowment gave the challenge grant to launch the financial aid initiative was to me one of the most deeply satisfying moments of my life. That’s the first thing I made an issue of when I came to Duke. Duke has great financial aid policies—older schools have big endowments for financial aid, Duke had a very small one, so I’ve tried to build resources to sustain forever the financial aid commitments of this school. And so that day, I was given basically a $75 million check with which we raised $300 million, and I felt a lot of satisfaction.

TC: What would you say your biggest regret is?

RB: I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about regrets.

TC: Perhaps your most challenging moment as president?

RB: Well my most challenging moment was certainly the lacrosse incident. The main thing to regret about that is that it ever happened at all. If untruths could be known to be untrue when they’re spoken—that event would’ve been over in an hour.

TC: You announced you’re planning on going back to teaching. Why did you decide that and how do you think that transition will be?

RB: I’m a person who only ever wanted to be one thing in my whole life. I regard every job I’ve had as building on my original ambition, my original passion, which is the love of teaching. I will have been president for 13 years. I was dean at Yale for 11 years—I will have had 24 years of extraordinarily varied and demanding days. I would think a good idea for me would be to take a little time to just be free. To just ask, what in fact do I want to do next? I never spend any time thinking about that. I haven’t made any plans for my post-presidential life. I don't doubt that I’ll come up with some good ones.

TC: Where do you plan on doing the teaching? Would it be Yale, would it be Duke? You’ve previously mentioned you’d like to be a guest lecturer at DKU.

RB: I don’t have any answers at all for anybody about my post-presidential life. The first thing I would like is to have a little freedom to stop and recalculate. I taught at Yale for many, many years. I lived in Connecticut my whole life before I came to North Carolina. Since I came to Duke, I consider myself a complete native of this place. I hope people have some sense of how much I love this place. But as for what I’ll teach—I have no idea what the answer is. All in good time. I still have a day job.

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