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Nannerl O. Keohane: Taking Care of Unfinished Business

Saying she feels re-energized by her announcement that she will leave in 2004, President Keohane plots out priorities for the rest of her term

Dialogue: A day after your public announcement, how do you feel about it?  

Keohane: I feel very warmly supported. There have been so many people in the community who have contacted me by e-mail and phone or with hugs and handshakes as I walked around campus today. I feel both supported and cherished and also liberated. I'm ready for the change and I feel, interestingly enough, re-energized because having announced this decision and ending all the uncertainty and indefiniteness, I can focus on these remaining months and use them as wisely as I can. I see these 16 months as a very precious time when I'm going to be working full strength to accomplish a lot of good things for Duke.

Dialogue: One of your priorities is completing the campaign. What is going to be the focus there in its last months?

 

Keohane: Our main goal is to focus on those high priorities that are still unmet. There are still some buckets in the campaign that aren't full. They include scholarships - graduate fellowships, professorships, the library - and some facilities goals.

We're very optimistic that we'll be able to fill all of these before the campaign ends, even though the economy is slow. Despite the economy, the campaign itself isn't really lagging, but we're finding people who want to be somewhat more cautious in their pledge time periods or who are less willing to make a multi-year pledge. They say, "Yes, I want to give a gift to Duke and I feel comfortable committing this amount for this year, but I don't feel comfortable making a multi-year pledge because I've no idea where I'll be economically this time next year." So, it's more a question of the sequencing and the timing of people's gifts than of donors drying up.

Dialogue: Another priority is the women's initiative, which is also wrapping up its work. What do you expect to come out of this?

Keohane: The Women's Initiative Steering Committee and the many other groups who have been involved in this effort have done a fabulous job collecting a lot of interesting information from a large variety of sources. I expect the steering committee will review a draft report in May and June, with the report being fine-tuned over the summer and made ready for public presentation to the full campus in September.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted to accomplish three goals. One was to gather a lot of data about the experiences of women at Duke, and try to draw from the data observations that we could use as a basis for thinking about policy. The second goal was to begin to think about some policy changes on issues such as child care.

And the third goal was to produce a report that would document all our findings and recommend a number of policy reforms and revisions. Many of these recommendations we expect to be able to implement immediately, but others we expect to lay out for the future, some for next year, some for the longer term when more resources become available. Yet even for these, even when we know we won't be able to implement some of the recommendations immediately, we want the report to go on record in favor of them, to say these are things we should do when we can afford it.

Right now, one of our focuses is on areas where data are telling us that we have a problem, but the pathway for a solution is not completely clear. One area I find myself thinking about a lot is undergraduate women. I feel like I've learned much about the lives of undergraduate women and the aspects of undergraduate life that are unrewarding for them. These issues have turned out to be even more complex than we had expected, and the sense that there might be one to two relatively easy interventions is gone.

Dialogue: You've said that the women's initiative has already been valuable in getting a conversation going about women's lives at Duke, about lifting the silence on the subject. Could you talk about that?

 

Keohane: One of our hopes in doing this was just to get this topic on the agenda for the university. And I think that has definitely been accomplished. The process of getting people to talk about the broad important issue of the lives of women at Duke and encouraging people to describe their own experiences has already changed the university. At every level of the university, whether it's students, faculty, staff or trustees, people are now saying things that weren't said before. If we're talking about hiring issues or retention issues, people are saying things like "Don't forget, more support for women is one of our objectives here." This is something that in the past would have been very unusual to hear.

I believe that's related to the sort of permission you get from having the president say the woman's initiative is important. When you hear the president speaking out on it, nobody can say, "It doesn't matter at Duke."

Dialogue: Both you and Dr. Snyderman are committed to looking at the structure of the health system before the two of you leave in June 2004. What are your goals here?

Keohane: Over the past year, I've done with the health system what I did last year with the women's initiative: A series of one-on-one conversations with people to find out how they felt the current structure of the health system is working. The health system was set up as a hybrid system, partially within the university and partially independent of it. It's five years old now, and I thought it was a good time to review its structure, just as we review senior administrators after five years.

The tentative conclusion of these conversations is that the hybrid structure serves us well. Nobody's arguing either that the hospitals should be spun off completely, or brought back entirely under the university fold. That was good to hear since it wasn't necessarily an expected fact.

On the other hand, it's clear there are a number of ways in which the structure might be modified or improved or clarified. There are aspects of this structure that are obscure, even puzzling, and sometimes trying to get answers as to who has authority for a project or who allocates the money is frustrating. By the time my successor arrives, there should be a clearer structure in place so that these fuzzy areas at the margin are resolved. I would like to use the next few months to work with the Board of Trustees and folks in the health system to get better answers to some of those questions.

Dialogue: This is not a new initiative but undergraduate education is undergoing some bold thinking. Where would you like to be on that in June 2004?

Keohane: One of the things that the provost and I have talked about for several years is spending some time during the summer -- working in consultation with Larry Moneta, Bill Chafe and others who are involved in undergraduate education - to craft an overview of what we're trying to accomplish and what we think is important in our vision for undergraduate life at Duke. There are a lot of rumors out there about what we're trying to do, and I think the rumors are there partly because we have not made a clear statement of our goals.

It's not hard to imagine what that would look like. There are many pieces of the plan already out there. I don't think the answers are going to surprise anybody, but we haven't put it together in a kind of manifesto or vision statement. It's important to step back and make sure the pieces fit together, make sure we thought about admissions implications, make sure we've thought about the implications for faculty time and energy, for residential life. We've looked at all of these kinds of questions previously, but mostly in isolation.

Dialogue: You're also hoping to move forward with implementing some recommendations about recruitment and retention of minority administrators.

Keohane: Tallman Trask and Allison Haltom led a task force on the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Administrators that I charged last year to come up with recommendations on the subject. I was worried about the stagnation of the number of minority senior leaders at Duke. And by senior here, I don't just mean vice presidents. I mean people who are in positions of significant management responsibility. I'm worried that we don't seem to be making progress in recruiting more minority administrators, and we don't seem to be doing as well as we should in retaining the ones we have.

The bottom line in our report is that changing this situation will require a long-term commitment from all senior officers. It must be implemented through holding hiring managers responsible for achieving a more diverse workforce. One of the things I'm worried about is while diversity issues often get attention, there is a sense that there's no teeth behind the initiatives. I don't want that to happen here. We expect to make recommendations about some very specific practices very soon, and when we do we will be making a public commitment to these goals and expect to be held accountable to them.

Dialogue: Another initiative that will get some attention is the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. How would you like to focus your energies in this area over the next year?

Keohane: The Neighborhood Partnership is one of the programs - the Robertson Scholars and the Kenan Ethics Institute are a couple of others - that I've been especially connected to and enthusiastic about. And before I leave, I want to make sure they are on as firm financial footing as possible.

I think the Neighborhood Partnership has been a very important step for Duke and for Durham, and I think it's made a real difference, but it still faces some funding challenges and questions of how one keeps the enthusiasm for it alive. I want to do whatever I can to help address those problems and ensure that the Neighborhood Partnership continues to move from strength to strength before I step down.

That means helping raise additional funds to support the program, and it means working more closely with new leadership in the city and county. We want those people to be familiar with the Neighborhood Partnership and the ways we're trying support city and county leaders in their work.

We have an enormous interest and stake in the health of our city. We want to partner with city and county officials around things such as schools and tackling crime and gangs. We want to be a helpful partner in that without being the big buddy that solves all the problems.

Dialogue: There has been speculation in the media about the timing of your announcement, coming as it did on the heels of some critical publicity for the university. But you've been thinking about this for a long time now. Keohane: I've planned this for months and months. Last summer, when I began thinking about team-teaching a course with Peter Euben, was when it really began to crystallize for me. I felt I needed to provide a specific endpoint to this administrative commitment so that I could then have a period that I could look forward to where I'd be going back to faculty life. So basically, by last fall, I had pretty much made the decision. In some ways, I thought it would be great to stay around until spring 2005 and see some of these projects I've worked on come to fruition, but as I thought about it more, my desire to return to faculty life outweighed any other consideration. Now that I've made the announcement, I feel like I'm ready to move forward. I'm very keen on doing everything I can on making these last 16 months really powerful ones.