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William Chafe: The Pursuit of Excellence in a Time of Transition

In his last year as arts and sciences dean, Chafe says he'll focus on assessing curriculum and improving residential life and intellectual vitality

 

The following address was delivered Sept. 11 by William Chafe, dean of the arts and sciences faculty, to the Arts and Sciences Faculty Council.

 

In this, my last address to the Arts and Sciences Council, I want to take the opportunity to look back over the past eight years at the major issues that have dominated my deanship, and then to look ahead to the challenges and opportunities that face us in the coming months with regard to these same issues. This has been an exciting time for me, and a time of significant change for Arts and Sciences at Duke. We have, I believe, established a record of bold innovation in curriculum, residential life, and intellectual programming that has helped Duke rise from being the top regional institution in the South to become one of the top six universities in the nation. Young, feisty, and forward-looking, we have the opportunity to advance even further. But to do so will require the same kind of candor, imagination, openness to change and willingness to make hard decisions that has brought us to where we are now.

Let me begin by sharing with you my assessment of the most important areas where I think we have made significant progress in recent years, combined with my judgment of what we need to do now to meet the challenges that still exist

The first of these is our new curriculum -- a curriculum that is providing a spur for our peer institutions throughout the country to re-consider their own course offerings. The central purpose of the new curriculum was to deepen and intensify student opportunities for research and writing, within a framework that provided a breadth of exposure to the fundamental disciplines of a liberal arts education. By asking all students to engage the basic areas of knowledge, learn about cultures other than their own, and explore the ethical dimensions of human experience, we sought to create a foundation from which students could then pursue in-depth exposure to their major area of study.

Now we need to assess and modify this curriculum in order to make it even more effective. Bob Thompson and his staff have done a wonderful job of developing and instituting processes for evaluating the impact of the curriculum. Many of their findings testify to the stunning success of the writing program, the acclaim given our new emphasis on intensive undergraduate research, and the increased intellectual stimulation perceived by our students in some of the new requirements they have had to meet, particularly in courses that focus on ethical inquiry. But we are also aware of the concerns, especially expressed by students and faculty in the natural sciences, about the difficulty of meeting all their major requirements -- especially if they double major -- and at the same time fulfill the demands of the curriculum.

To accomplish the task of reviewing the curriculum, and bring suggestions for modification to this Council, I have asked a committee, chaired by Steve Nowicki from Biology, and including strong representation from each division, to address areas of the curriculum where greater flexibility is needed, particularly with relation to the sciences and courses that can satisfy the language requirements. I hope that, where appropriate, recommendations can be implemented so that even current students can benefit from this assessment process.

A second area of progress that is a source of particular pride to me is the new residential life system we have implemented, with all sophomores residing on West campus, and independent or linked dormitories dominating the main corridor on West. Our goal in proposing these changes was to eliminate the inequity in housing that had previously forced one quarter of the independents in the sophomore class to live in Trent. All too often this created a sense of marginalization for those assigned to Trent, and resulted in a disproportionate number of minority students living on Central or in Trent rather than on West.

By having all sophomores assigned to West, with a new system of linked and independent residence halls, we sought to even the playing field and provide the foundation for creating the same type of community that has developed in the all first year East Campus.

There is little question that the new West-Edens-Link residence hall has been a success, its 24-hour diner and Starbucks coffee shop providing a new social environment where students can gather at all hours. But creating the foundation for a more inclusive campus climate is not the same thing as achieving that goal. The challenge of making our residential life an active, dynamic, and culturally vibrant living space continues to call for creative imagination and effort from all of us -- student life staff, faculty, academic deans and students alike.

A third goal of our administration was to improve the intellectual vitality of our campus and student body. Two years ago we introduced Aintellectual engagement@ as an additional criterion for admission to Duke, at the same time focusing new attention on the undergraduate research opportunities that make studying at Duke an attractive option for prospective applicants. We are pleased with the results we have seen so far. Our applicant pool grew to 16,700 this year -- 2,000 more than just two years ago -- and the number of students ranked in the top tier more than doubled. Our yield rate based on head on head competition with our peer schools has also improved.

But here too we must redouble our efforts to stay on message about the intellectual advantages Duke offers, and especially our commitment to need-blind admissions and an economically diverse student body, if we are to continue the improvements that have occurred.

Let me now turn to the intellectual agenda we have sought to advance. In the Arts and Sciences strategic plan, we set a series of goals, including new programs in genomics and nanoscience; efforts to make Duke a center for research and teaching on social policy, including health policy, and child and family policy; improvement of interdisciplinary facilities in the humanities and social sciences; and the strengthening of our programs and facilities in the arts.

Here too solid progress has occurred. Genomics has become a vehicle for active cooperation across the sciences and among different schools, including medicine and engineering. And it has also become a major presence in the social sciences with the creation of the new Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy associated with the Sanford Institute. We have made two major hires in Physics in nanoscience and have developed close cooperation with engineering in the materials science area, focusing on our shared use of clean room facilities in the new CIEMAS building. Child and Family Policy has become one of the most successful initiatives of the Sanford Institute, joining health policy as a major focus of our efforts in social policy. The John Hope Franklin Center is one of the most successful examples in the nation of a campus-based research and teaching center for humanities and interpretive social sciences, and this fall, a new group of political scientists, sociologists, economists and psychologists will launch the Social Science Research Institute in Trent Hall (a wonderful use of that old dormitory space). We will begin construction this winter on renovating the Smith Warehouses for new arts space, including room for computer assisted music composition, graphic design, painting and sculpture.

In all of this we have strengthened significantly Duke's intellectual signature as an exemplar of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. The FOCUS program remains one of our most widely praised and popular initiatives for first year students. The John Hope Franklin Center is a beehive of cross-pollination between disciplines, as Duke scholars and visitors come together in the seminars we have funded through the New Beginnings program and the regular Franklin Institute seminars to reconceptualize Americas Studies, or look at the intersection of race, monument and memory.

Yet we also face the ongoing challenge of how to strike the correct balance between Duke's historical commitment to interdisciplinarity on the one hand, and the need to nourish and sustain a strong disciplinary culture on the other. In fact, these two are mutually dependent. The best interdisciplinary programs are rooted in robust departmental cultures, and in an ideal world, a positive dialectical relationship exists between the two. A faculty member who joins a cross-disciplinary seminar at the Franklin Institute or the new Social Science Research Institute should flourish amidst the intellectual challenges provided by scholars in other fields who bring to bear their wisdom, methodologies and insights on a problem that is of concern to all. These scholars, in turn, should return to their departments inspired to share their new perspectives with their colleagues.

The risk is that the energy flows only one way, and that a negative tension develops between a departmental home base, with its needs and requirements, and interdisciplinary programs that at times may seem to be draining resources from departments. The key is to find institutionalized ways of encouraging productive synergies and sustaining a healthy balance between the old and the new so that Duke's openness to interdisciplinary research and teaching can be seen as a complement to, and a source of strength for, the disciplinary homes that are the foundation of the university.

Let me now turn to the central strength of Arts and Sciences, its developing faculty. Helped by an extraordinarily successful fund-raising campaign -- by the end of December Duke will have exceeded its goal of raising $2 billion, and Arts and Sciences will have exceeded its goal of $400 million -- we have strengthened significantly our intellectual resources. Our faculty is stronger, better, and substantially larger than ever before. In the last eight years, our numbers have grown from 536 to 600 -- an increase of 64, or almost 12 percent. The new faculty joining us this year represent the cream of the crop, both among the junior people we have recruited from some of the best institutions in the nation, and a record number of senior leaders we have attracted -- stellar new hires who will substantially strengthen our programs in Sociology, Economics, English, Physics, Art and Art History, Political Science, History, Public Policy, Psychology: SHS and Education. This new leadership will spearhead Duke's strategic planning initiatives and give us a strength in these disciplines that represent a real breakthrough,

We have also continued to make significant progress in diversifying our faculty. Although we still have a long way to go in addressing issues of gender imbalance, nearly half of our new faculty members are women, including three in the sciences; and the number of African American scholars on our faculty has increased by six, each of whom promises to strengthen significantly the departments to which they have been recruited. I am proud of the fact that in the last eight years the overall number of African American scholars on our faculty has grown by nearly 150 percent.

Yet sustaining faculty excellence must now occur within a context of increased budgetary constraints. As you know from the Cook Task Force report, last year we anticipated a shortfall of almost $6 million in the out years, starting in 05-06. Much of this emanated from new infrastructure costs for all the buildings that are now being constructed, and some of it is due to the space, research and teaching needs of new faculty. In response to those predictions, we successfully put into place a plan to stabilize the budget situation -- a 5.3 percent tuition increase that will produce $1.3 million in new revenues; expansion of the Pratt student body by 200, which will bring in an additional $2 million in tuition payments for the 50 percent of their courses that Pratt students take in Arts and Sciences; a projected increase in Indirect Cost Recoveries of $1-1.5 million, with last year's 20 percent increase in external grant activity a strong indication that we are well on the way to that target. Thus we believed that a solid plan existed for handling successfully the budgetary problems anticipated by the Cook Task Force.

Then, last spring, we became aware of a burgeoning -- and hitherto unanticipated -- increase in financial aid demand. This is due to many factors: a stagnant economy, a reduction in governmental support for financial aid, an increase in the number of students applying to Duke who need financial aid, and a significant number of students already enrolled at Duke whose parents have suffered a reduction in income, with the result that they are now eligible for financial aid. When the average financial aid grant is $20,000, the addition of 60 new financial aid recipient means an increase in costs of more than $1 million.

The result is that instead of financial aid costs growing at approximately the same rate as tuition -- which has been true for the past five years -- we now project an increase in financial aid costs at double the rate of tuition increases. All in all, this could mean an added $1.5 million per year to the budget, or a total over 4 years of $6 million.

In approaching this new problem, two primary considerations have guided our thinking. First, we need to protect the core of the progress we have achieved; and second, we must assure that our successors in Arts and Sciences administration will not have their hands tied by having to deal with this shortfall. Within these parameters, the Provost and I have developed the following strategy, which I believe provides an effective way of sustaining our fundamental strength and at the same time assures a new Dean adequate flexibility for new initiatives.

First, the Provost has agreed to cap the responsibility Arts and Sciences must bear for financial aid increases. As a result, we will pay additional financial aid costs up to 1.5 times the increased rate of tuition, and the central administration will assume responsibility for the rest. Thus, if tuition went up $1 million, and financial aid costs $2 million, the Provost would pay for the last $500 thousand of the financial aid increase.

Second, with the cooperation of Executive Vice-President Tallman Trask, administration and service costs will be sharply curtailed, reducing the rate of anticipated increases in the Arts and Sciences budget.

Third, and most important for us in the short term, we have decided to reduce the number of searches we will undertake this year for new faculty. You will recall that the Cook Task Force saw a decline in faculty size as one way of dealing with the budgetary shortfall. Now, having looked carefully at the number of faculty members that can be supported in terms of research space, equipment and start-up support, the Provost and I have concluded that a faculty size of 580 is an appropriate target to aim for. This means a reduction of 20 from the all-time high of 600 that occurred this year. But, it is important to note, the figure of 580 faculty is still 44 more than in 1995 when I became dean, or a growth of 8 percent rather than 12 percent.

This target figure will be reached essentially through attrition. By reducing the number of authorized searches for next year from 32 to 20, the major cuts can happen while I am still dean, thereby providing my successor greater flexibility. If we assume a success rate of 75 percent on our searches -- the norm -- that will mean 15 new faculty next fall. If we also assume faculty turnover of 30 B again, the norm -- through deaths, retirements, tenure decisions, or a move to another institution, that will mean a reduction in faculty size from 600 to 585, or only 5 more than the targeted goal of 580.

I believe that this strategy ensures a bright future for Arts and Sciences. Budgetary stability will enable a return to a regular search pattern two years from now. We will continue to attract top notch scholars at both the junior and senior ranks. And our long-range strategic initiatives will prosper, helping us retain the momentum that has carried us forward during the last decade. To place all this in some perspective, I am reminded that in my second year as dean, a similar financial crunch forced us to do only 17 searches -- three less than we are doing this year. But we came back from that adjustment and prospered, as I believe we will from this adjustment.

I ask now for your support in making this plan work. Tightening our belts this year -- with collective support from central administration as well as within Arts and Sciences -- will ensure a sustained upward trajectory in the future for our commitment to excellence.

This new situation does require that we be ready to make hard choices, and make our choices based on rigorous attention to our strategic priorities. Take the issue of diversity, for example. As I suggested earlier, we have come a long way, statistically and demographically, toward maximizing the pool of candidates from whom we draw our faculty and students. Yet we are only at the beginning of the process of creating a truly diverse community where we can take advantage of the difference that difference makes in the way we see the world, interact with each other, and conduct our scholarship. Now, more than ever, we need to recognize that excellence and diversity are complementary, not in opposition to each other.

Clearly, this requires leadership from above, as reflected in the Provost's task force on diversity and on Women's faculty development that has helped bring us to a new conceptualization of the issue. Under that initiative, we will target those areas where particular minorities are under-represented, whether these be women, African Americans, Latinos or Asian Americans that are now not present in various departments. But success in pursuing diversity within a context of limits will also require leadership from faculty, staff, and students as we think about how to use constrained resources to maximize the quality -- and heterogeneity -- of our colleagues. As in so many other areas, the good news about our progress in developing new facilities for Duke also creates challenges for us to navigate. The extraordinary success of the Campaign for Duke has made possible long-deferred construction of critically needed new academic buildings. The French Science Center, a new wing in the Sanford Institute, the shared materials space in CIEMAS, the Nasher Art Museum, new Theater Studies space in the Bryan Center, an expanded library, and the soon to be renovated Arts warehouse B all of this construction will redound to the benefit of Arts and Sciences, and our ability to hire the best faculty and to offer faculty the best conditions under which to teach and do their research. It reflects the planning and follow-through of the past decade in preparing Duke for an even better future. But changes in space allocation, while bringing significant overall improvement, also involve difficult decisions, with some departments and faculty being asked to move from quarters they have long cherished to new space they are not yet familiar with. It is critical that faculty be involved in determining the criteria for these decisions. Hence I have asked Al Crumbliss to reconvene the space planning committee that we had put on hold last January when it was not yet fully clear what final construction plans would be. The Crumbliss Committee will develop the standards and criteria, intellectual as well as programmatic, that can serve as guidelines for making the decisions on where different departments may move. I am particularly concerned that in our future plans for space, we retain our commitment to have each campus represent a variety of disciplines. In a similar way, I remain concerned that faculty members from all three divisions, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences, understand that we are committed to excellence in all three divisions. While strategic priorities may shape specific faculty search decisions, we are committed to sustaining our strength in all divisions, and to ensure that each division and department is consulted and involved in charting the course before us. That is why we have balanced the searches we are doing this year among all three divisions, and why we will continue to support the drive toward excellence in all three. These have been exciting years, as I hope this brief review has suggested. I have spoken today of curriculum, residential life, improvements in our student body, new interdisciplinary programs, a substantial surge forward in the quality of those we have been able to recruit to our faculty, and in our ability to retain those who are tempted to move elsewhere. The gains we have made in diversity, new facilities, and collaboration across school and department lines -- all of these have helped define the contours of Duke's reputation as bold, innovative and dedicated to making a difference. I am proud of how far we have come and of the changes we have succeeded in achieving in all of these areas. I am also confident that the plans we have put in place for ensuring financial stability over the next five years will provide a solid foundation possible for sustaining our momentum forward. But I recognize the enormity of the challenges we face, and above all, I recognize the degree to which our success is based on our ability to unite behind a common sense of where we are going. Working together, there is no level of excellence we cannot achieve. I ask for your help in this last year of our administration as we make the hard choices before us. And I am confident that with your support, and that of department leaders, we will not only sustain our quest for excellence during this time of transition, but also put in place a firm foundation for our successors to build on.