Durham, NC - Clint Twaddell, sophomore: What role will the quad system play in the next few years at Duke, and what's your stance on the future of fraternity life here?

RHB: Those are two pretty easy questions. Let me first take the quad system, which at Duke is a new invention. If you'd come here five years ago, I believe you would not have found the quad system. ... There's a reason you chose to come to a place with 5,000 undergraduates instead of a place with 500. Nevertheless, it's nice to have smaller worlds within bigger worlds in a university. The quad was an effort to create a "community within a community" in which we could provide a variety of kinds of support [and] in which a certain kind of community life could be maintained.

The experiment is too early for us to know what the quads will eventually become here. The idea of linking them to specific dorms was not an unreasonable experiment, but if the results of that aren't altogether desirable, I like a school that's willing to go back and try a different experiment. That seems to be part of what's healthy about the attitude of this place, that it doesn't assume that because something was found desirable in 1922, we should preserve it until the crack of doom.

I love it when I come in and see somebody wearing a Kilgo sweatshirt or something like that. What I love about it is that these are your own inventions. The quad system is the best example of [this]. The administration can devise something and call it the quad system but that has no ability to take on real life unless students embrace it and come forward and try to make something real of these places. One of the interesting powers that's in your hands during this time ... is to try to figure out what the quads could be. What's something that would be good if we had it at Duke? How could the quad supply that? And then we'll see if we can supply that. I learned a great saying at one of my meetings in the medical school this year: People support what they create. If you create the quads, you will support the quads. They'll come into reality just to that extent.

[Your second question] was about the role of fraternities and sororities. I don't think you're going to visit any academic setting in America in which you're not going to find fraternities, sororities or things that are functionally interchangeable with them. I was not in a fraternity but my father was, my mother was, my brother was. Not only that, I spent time in my brother's fraternity house -- that was eye-opening. I would say, too, I come from a school that has a residential college system and is thought not to have fraternities. In fact, that school has many fraternities that people don't know about and some people do. And also that school has a system of senior societies which are pretty much like fraternities except they're formed at the end rather than the beginning of the experience.

My interest in this is partly sociological. When I look around, I take this as evidence that there's something that people of a certain age like, which is, you like to be part of a big community and maybe even a middle-size community like a quad. But people want a more intense bonding than that. And so people find it through fraternities or sororities or, at Duke, through many things that don't have the formal names of fraternities or sororities that are your own inventions. I love them the more for that.

Do I believe for one second that any version of Duke that I will ever preside over will not have fraternities and sororities? I don't believe it, and I would not seek to create it. Above all, I would not seek to create it in confidence that the minute I exterminated them, they would come back to life in some new form. OK? Now the truth is, if people are troubled, if people raise this as an anxious subject, one knows why. I'm not saying this from Duke, but from the world. One knows there are places where fraternities are mostly associated with alcoholism and almost nothing else. ... You know what? People can form really bad habits that start in the fun you do in your youth. It's important to stop and think about these things occasionally. If that's all a fraternity system was, you may be sure I would have no enthusiasm for it.

[Traditionally,] one of the functions of fraternities was to exclude people; it's one of the byproducts inevitably. Whether one likes it or not, fraternities tend to be associated with more homogeneous groups of students than are found in the student body at large. I believe this is self-impoverishment. If all your friends were people just like you, you have missed the boat about coming to a place like this. I don't say these things as dire criticisms; they're just facts. The burden will always be on fraternities and sororities to make the best version of what they could be and to take responsibility for not making the worst version of what they can be. Any system that will do that will have my cooperation all along.

Joe Rodriguez, junior: In my time here, I've seen my social life kicked off-campus to my social life put back on campus. If you had a choice, where would you rather see social life in the future, on campus or off campus? How does the future role of Central play in this?

RHB: I'm glad you asked this question. It's one that's discussed pretty often.

Is it really true that there is no social life that takes place at this campus? Last year, I was coming down here three days a week, and I was told by so many students that this place was dead as a doornail. And then I'd walk around, and it seemed to me to have a little life in it. So partly, one needs to figure out if this is a kind of rhetoric that corresponds to a certain history that hangs over our heads. What are the realities? I know there are things that used to be done on this campus, as they used to be done on many American campuses. [But] universities have to set limits on things. One wishes it weren't true, but Duke is one of a not inconsiderable list of schools that has had a student die at a party within the last five years. A school like that can't have that happen a second time. I wasn't here for it, but I'm sure it wasn't a "killjoy attitude" as such that made people want to put restraints on these things.

So then what happens? People move off-campus to do the things they can no longer do on campus, introducing a new and even more undesirable element, namely driving. When you know me better, I'll tell you some experiences about this. You see a person who knows the horrors of this pretty well. I'd have to say, if I had my absolute choice, if behavior's going to happen anyway, I actually would rather have it "on" than "off."

The other thing is that, to some extent, I want to resist the question. In truth, I don't see why one couldn't have a huge amount of fun in college without engaging in any of the kinds of behavior that would make the administration come in and break things up.

Somebody's got to take responsibility for behavior as it approaches a certain limit. I would a thousand times rather that students take that responsibility. I have no desire to take it or for anyone on my staff to take it. People will only if it is forfeited by those who ought to have taken the responsibility in the first place.

[It's] like you wrote papers [about] in high school on these ponderous literary themes. It turns out that these things are real. There are things you have to live your way into and, of course, it's all an experiment. No one becomes responsible in five minutes. Many a person has become responsible through the use and abuse of freedom who didn't become responsible directly.

Here's another line from Blake. (You know I'm an English teacher.) "If a fool will persist in his folly, he will become wise." This is a saying that I have found true in my life.

Carlos Briseno, sophomore: You mentioned the importance of creating a Duke experience that promotes growth for its students. With that said, how do you plan to integrate multicultural exposure and experience inside and outside the classroom as to prepare its future leaders? And how does your Central Campus planning fit into your vision of multiculturalism?

RHB: You know what? Multiculturalism is a word that came into existence during my adult life. It's not a word that has been an eternal part of our vocabulary. It's just a reality in the modern world. As history shows, it was never really true that homogeneous communities lived in isolation from one another. Even to the extent that used to be true, it's just not anymore. The world we live in is a world of the exchanges and migrations and interactions and collisions of people. Therefore, you said it right, which is that multiculturalism isn't just a way to engage in nicey-nice behavior when you're in school. Multiculturalism is about training for life, learning how, learning the kind of social skills that will enable a mixed group of people to get the best out of themselves rather than the worst, which is equally possible.

So I take it to be quite serious. It's one of the reasons why [I raise the] issue of people falling into homogeneous social patterns. There are many reasons to do that but think that's one of them. The point of my talk was that the kind of limits to experience at a place like this are always more likely to be self-limits. Breaking out of the comfort of one's like is a very kind of purge to risk at place like this.

When Central comes into existence, we're not going to require students to live on Central the way we require them to live on East as freshmen. It's quite appropriate to make a decision like that for people in their first year in college. In the later years, I believe they should have that freedom. If students want to live off campus, they're very welcome to, but I don't want any of the students to live off campus for the sole reason that they would have preferred to live on campus but there was no appropriate place for them to do it. If we can construct [such] a place, seniors will live there, because the form of housing will be so desirable that they'll wish to do the thing we will therefore not have to require of them.

One of the things I love about the idea of Central Campus is that while you're still here, while you still have easy access to all the multiplicity of the people who are your contemporaries, you'll still live close enough together to continue to bump into each other and have the kind of random encounters that so much education comes from. It's not the main purpose of Central, but I do believe it will be a very important byproduct.

Elaine Leddy, sophomore: Race at Duke is a very hot-button issue. It's been my experience that the heart hardens with a narrow set of experiences. How do you plan on broadening our experiences with cultural competency and race dialogue?

RHB: If race is a hot issue at Duke, it's not because of anything at Duke, it's because of something in the world. The only difference, it seems to me, is that a college campus is a place where there's a potential to discuss these things more intelligently and reflectively.

It's not that you don't have all the same tensions that are always present everywhere, it's just that you have the capacity to have those tensions become objects of reflections and chosen action instead of instinct and blind passion. Therefore, I think that's an important obligation in schools.

Frankly, there's only so much you can do. There's a certain kind of thing that we do during freshman orientation, and it's quite appropriate. You know what I mean, where one talks about these issues in an abstract way or something of that sort. As you know from your own experience, that's not really the way you learn how to behave toward others, by attending freshman orientation. That was meant to be the beginning of a dialogue. For each person, it will have a different day. All of a sudden, in the middle of some day that you weren't thinking about this at all, something happens and your relation to somebody else has become polarized over an issue of race. You've had this happen. I have. That's the moment when education takes place or where the potential for education arises. There's no way this thing can be taught abstractly as a subject. It has to be lived. But I think [that] to be in an environment where there are resources to help one think about these things is a good thing.

There were episodes this year when it seemed there was the possibility of conflict arising at Duke between African-American and Jewish students. I like the fact that at that point, both groups of students took the responsibility to sit down with one another and talk about what was going on and find some way to come out in a good way. If you can learn how to do that in a university, you have a great skill to take into the world.

Malik Burnett, sophomore: You have a track record of ending diversity-hosting weekends at previous institutions. Rumor has it you plan to implement these same actions here at Duke. If this is the case, do you realize this may drastically alter the make-up of the student body here at the university, making it less diverse?

RHB: I'm perfectly happy to be asked such questions and I hope that anyone who has a parallel question will feel the confidence to ask it. I thank you for asking it.

You said that I have a track record of breaking up diversity-hosting weekends as a recruitment device at my former school. I'll tell you the truth of that. There was a time at Yale when African-American students came completely separately to look at the campus and Hispanic students came separately to look at the campus. The consequence was that, therefore, others came separately to look at the campus.

There was much discussion of this when it was changed. It was indeed changed. It wasn't changed altogether through an idea of mine [although] all along I felt this had a pretty serious limit. On the one hand, it was meant to give people the sense that there was a community that they could feel a part of on campus. On the other hand, it gave them quite a misleading idea of what the university was they would attend. Where was everybody else? It wasn't just that minority students did not see non-minority students when they came here. It was that it had the consequence of making non-minority students come to look at a school like Duke and not see minority students.

People want to see the whole human populations they're going to interact with. It goes back to the question I was asked a minute ago. At Yale, it was absolutely not true that we did away with diversity hosting weekends. We did away with exclusive diversity hosting weekends and created a whole "everybody comes together" weekend in which there were very vigorous programs done at the African-American cultural center, the Hispanic cultural center, Asian-American events and all of those things. To tell you the truth, although I was assured by some students that this would have the effect of reducing the number of students who came to that school, it had absolutely no such effect. Two years after that change was made, students themselves thought of it as the perfectly normal and desirable order of things.

This won't happen according to my edict alone. But I'm just going to tell you, it's an important subject and I recognize the sincerity of the people who hold your view about it. Mine is based on a certain experience, too, which is I think it's very hard to strike a balance between making people recognize they'll have a base of cultural support somewhere and giving them a sense of what the whole human spectrum will be that they'll be part of. Whatever community you come from, you've got to venture out of that or you're not getting the good of a university.

Matt Gillum, senior: I know there's been success at MIT, notably with a program where they implemented open access to course materials on the internet. I was wondering what your feeling was.

RHB: I knew the question would come that I wanted to duck. Open access is a very complicated issue. There are very interesting arguments about it. One of the greatest experts advocating a legal theory of open source access to all such things is at the law school here -- Jamie Boyle. People on the other side can also be found on the faculty here. I'm not going to stand up here out of my own head and say what I think Duke's answer to this should be. You know, one of the troubles is, these things sound so good in reality. You may know that at Stanford, it used to be the case that lectures would be available online as well as lived. People who didn't want to be troubled to attend the class at the time it met could attend it at two in the morning or some other time or possibly two hours before the final exam.

They set a rule, namely, if attendance in the actual classroom ever dropped to 30 percent or less, the online version would be discontinued. You know what? I've been a teacher all my life. I've taught in rooms like this. Do you have any idea what it's like to have even 30 percent of your students missing from your class? I'm not going to say to myself, "Oh, these empty seats make me so pleased because I'm sure they're watching me online!" You know that I'll say, "I must be the biggest dud in the history of the world." It has a huge effect on the amount you prepare, on the energy with which you teach, to do things like this. So these things look like magical solutions but there turns out to be a little more complexity.

Quang Pham, freshman: I was wondering if you would address the question in the back, the one behind you [referring to protest banner being held up on the stage].

RHB: Yes, I'd be happy to, and I've been waiting to do so. Angelica is a laundry. Duke University used to own a laundry and sold that business to a company named Angelica. There have been complaints lodged to the NLRB during the time that there was a unionization movement abroad and at Angelica.

I'm aware of those complaints. I don't take them lightly, and I don't take them trivially, but I also don't regard the filing of an accusation as the same thing as a conviction. There is a body that adjudicates such things and finds their truth or falsity, and it's for them and not for me. I don't have the equipment to validate these things. I will say I take these issues seriously....

I am someone who worked pretty hard and pretty quickly after I got here to do something about the wage of the actual people who work at this university. People have different claims on one's conscience but the people who work directly for you are the ones who have the most direct claim and that's where I started my efforts.

David Rademeyer, freshman: Are you giving any thought to introductory courses in the natural sciences for humanities majors? There's a variety of seminars up on the physics department, but it's my feeling and the feeling of other students I've spoken to that these courses aim more to appeal to humanities students by dumbing down the content rather than actually engaging the content in a different manner.

RHB: My dear sir, I have spent the last 11 years of my life before I came here in charge of an undergraduate school whose name you may know at which the gravest issue was the dichotomy between science classes for people who were pre-professional scientists and then the other classes that were open for the sake of liberal education except that they had, for the most part, taken on names like "Physics for Poets" and "Rocks for Jocks." There was a dichotomy between courses you took and felt dumb about being enrolled in and courses you took but felt dumb because you weren't the kind of person this course was meant for.

I worked pretty hard there to try to create an incentive system for a different kind of course that would be appropriately rigorous but appropriately pitched for its audience.

Now I'm not the person to say where the state of [this] is in the Duke curriculum. George McLendon, who was just here, is the dean of Arts & Sciences; Bob Thompson is the dean of Trinity College. They'll know much more about this. I don't have that job anymore.

But I want to say that I regard this as a pretty grave issue. It arises, of course, not from any ill will but from the highly specialized stage to which science has advanced in our time. People who do it professionally tend not to be naturally interested in imagining how to open these subjects more broadly. You probably saw the announcement that Duke's first Nobel laureate will be coming here, Peter Agre, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for finding the mechanism by which cells take water in or control the motion of water in and out of the cell. When he and I spoke, I said, "I'd love it if you'd do some undergraduate teaching." And he said, "What I'd really like to teach is freshmen."

Sachin Bansal, senior: I was wondering if there was a safe but fun way for us, as a university, to celebrate the men's basketball team winning a major game. I know this is the least serious question that's been asked, but our permit for our bonfires got taken away and we're fortunate enough to be moving in on the national championship. I'm assuming people like [Duke Student Government president] Pasha Majdi will organize something fun for the university?

RHB: Yes, maybe a large Scrabble tournament or something like that.

SB: I know we did a foam party before you were here and before I was even here.

RHB: As many of you know, I attended the bonfire. I mean I was photographed by all the residents of Tent 13 and Tent 87 and everybody else, so this is a documented fact. I'd have to say, I wasn't where I could see what was being put into the fire.

It would be possible to build a fire that would be excessive and dangerous. It happened at Texas A&M, and a lot of people were killed as a result. When people take precautions like this, it always seems that they're being so stupid until the consequence is visited and then you say, "My God, why did they let us do that?" It falls in the category of what we were talking about before. The reason college should be fun is not just because you know it's going to be fun anyway whether we want it to be or not. It's because fun is part of the spirited milieu in which education takes place. Everything spirited makes everything else happen better. But the question with fun is, "How can fun be fun without becoming dangerous?" My hope is that we could find the system of self-patrolling of the limits of the bonfire that would enable the bonfire to be restored.

I don't know what will happen, but I know that the fire commissioner left open that door, and we will see what happens. There is one precondition to this massive fire, or the two massive fires, or the two massive potential fires, or the two potential massive fires -- namely that we win the NCAA men's and the NCAA women's basketball games. Let's hope we have this problem.

Thanks very much.