William Chafe: Reflections as a Dean

Arts and Sciences Dean William Chafe is stepping down June 30 from the post he has held since 1995. Below is his "farewell" address as arts and sciences dean to the Arts and Sciences Council on April 8.

Thank you for this opportunity to reflect back on these last nine years. It has been an honor to be part of this engaged, energetic, and bold enterprise that we call Duke University -- and you are the heart of it. The faculty is the lifeblood of every great educational institution. You accomplish our most important mission: teaching the next generation. You do the research, the discovery, the imaginative and creative thinking that has made possible this university's meteoric rise over the past decades.

With this recognition as a starting point, let me comment on a few themes that have come to mind as I look back over my deanship, and share with you some of the issues and challenges I have cared about most, and that remain with us.

First, I have been thrilled to learn as much as I have, both about the disciplines you practice, and about you as the individuals who practice them. I will never be a physicist, a psychologist, or a scholar of Germanic studies. But, what a joy to be introduced to this world of learning that a previously uninformed historian never dreamed of encountering. It has been an exciting journey to discover so much I had not previously even been aware of. And better than that, it has been extraordinarily rewarding to get to know most of you as individuals. Reading your dossiers, spending time with you, struggling with our common problems - all this is what the job of dean is really about: leading, exploring, and working cooperatively (most of the time) with faculty members as individuals.

Second, I believe it is particularly important that we in the administration spend as much time as we can with our junior faculty. You are the future. You have issues of mentorship: preparing for tenure, dealing with difficulties in the classroom - and we need to listen to you more, engage your concerns, and work with you to provide the best environment possible within which you can pursue your future as scholars and teachers.

Third, I have deeply appreciated the way in which the faculty, and the chairs of departments, have responded to the various crises we have faced over this last decade. Most of these have been budgetary, but some have involved political issues of academic freedom, or the cultural and social anxieties that accompanied 9/11. On at least two occasions, I have shared with you the details of budgetary shortfalls that have resulted in sharply curtailed search plans. And you have responded to our candor with both understanding and confidence, both of which have made it possible for us to move beyond these moments of crisis to a larger picture of growth, progress and success, exemplified by the more than 10 percent increase in the size of our faculty during this last decade, and the multiple new programs we have established.

The fourth, and perhaps most important theme I want to focus on, is the degree to which all we do is part of a team effort. I feel particularly blessed (and I use that word with some care, and sense of its religious significance) to have been able to work with such a terrific group of department chairs, and with such a talented group of deans. Karla Holloway, Bob Thompson and Berndt Mueller are brilliant individuals. Their expertise makes them ideal colleagues in spearheading their particular areas of responsibility. But more than that, they are dedicated to the kind of teamwork, shared engagement with difficult issues, and willingness to struggle through to the best solutions possible that makes possible a better and more responsive administration. We do not always agree with each other, and you do not always agree with what we do, but having this team in place is really what has made being dean the most rewarding part of my now three decades of service at Duke. Just as important - indeed in some ways even more important - are the critical contributions of those in the dean's office who sometimes you do not see but who make it all happen and do their best to make it happen well: Lee Willard, Chuck Byrd, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Tom Mann, Bob Barkhau, Melissa Mills, the Trinity College deans, and all their staffs. No one could hope for a better group of colleagues to work with.

There are countless things that go on in any given year at a place like Duke, and it would be easy to get lost in all the details of day to day management. But we have also had a gyroscope to guide us, a set of priorities that have helped give direction to what we do and have done. Four of these have been especially important to me in shaping the agenda we have pursued. Perhaps not surprisingly, they tend to interact with each other, and hopefully, to create some kind of whole, or holistic, vision of what I think we have been about.

The first of these is how to make better the education and undergraduate experience of those who come to Duke. Ultimately, nothing is more important. And here, I hope we have made a difference. Curriculum 2000, devised by a superb committee chaired by Peter Lange, and passed by the faculty after lengthy and thoughtful discussion, has deepened Duke's commitment to academic rigor and made us known throughout the nation for our excellent writing program, our dedication to cross cultural inquiry, to ethical inquiry, and to thorough exposure to all the liberal arts. Recently revised and improved by another superb committee chaired by Steve Nowicki and passed unanimously by the Arts and Sciences Council, Duke's curriculum, I believe, now sets the standard for excellence in liberal arts curricula throughout the country, and warrants our attracting the best students in the country to come to study with us. When they get here, they will also find an undergraduate living situation that has put in place the foundations for integrating social, cultural and academic life. By developing a West Campus where all sophomores live, and whose climate and main corridors are hospitable to women and minorities, we have made at least a start toward a community that can aspire to mutual respect and education across the barriers of race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.

This, in turn, is part and parcel of the second priority that has helped guide us over these years - a commitment to making Duke a more diverse place to live and teach. There have been many debates about diversity: is it consistent with excellence, does it interfere with equal protection of those citizens not seen as part of what the popular culture calls "diversity" - namely white males like me. To these questions, I say that all of us participate in diversity, that each of us is distinctive, but that some people who belong to groups that have historically been denied access to the resources of our society need to be singled out so that all of us can benefit from the riches and talent that come from a multi-racial, multi-cultural world. We celebrate Duke's policy of need-blind admissions because it allows us to take advantage of all the talent that is out there regardless of ability to pay. This commitment to economic diversity goes hand in hand with our commitment to racial, ethnic and gender diversity - critical bellwethers of the degree to which we are fulfilling the vision of our founders, and of our potential to become a model for others to follow. I am proud of the degree to which we have made some progress in this area by more than doubling our African American faculty, by working to increase the numbers of women we hire in the sciences, and by growing the diversity of our undergraduate population to more than one third the entire entering classes of last year and this. The goal of achieving the reality of an inclusive academic community instead of just the appearance of one remains elusive and challenging. But to not have the goal is to forsake one of the qualities that has made Duke what it is today.

The third priority that has guided us is to highlight interdisciplinarity as the intellectual signature of this university. By exploring and exploiting the wisdom that comes from seeing how different disciplines illuminate a common problem, we enhance both our scholarship and our teaching. That is why the FOCUS program at Duke is so successful - identified by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education as one of the boldest innovations in first year education anywhere in the country - and why it is critical to continue to develop new curricula as well as new research enterprises through our collaboration across disciplinary lines. In the humanities and interpretive social sciences, we are proud of having made the John Hope Franklin Center a model for cross-disciplinary thinking. We are about do the same with the new Social Science Research Institute headed by John Aldrich, and we hope to pursue similar lines of cross-disciplinary initiatives through Photonics and materials science in the new CIEMAS building, and new interactions between Physcis, Chemistry and Biology in the new French Science Center. Nothing is more important to Duke's continued ascendancy as a premier research and teaching institution than sustaining this commitment to interdisciplinary thinking.

The fourth and final priority that has shaped our administration has been a desire to engage the world around us, both in the arenas of research and policy and in teaching. Our internship opportunities, exemplified by the Hart Leadership Program, offer students a chance to make a difference in our society even while they are in college. Similarly, our Service-Based Learning initiative seeks to harness real world experience in Durham with academic research to create a series of courses that make the university relevant to the community. We have created the Center for Child and Family Policy, which has become in a few short years a model for the country; added a focus on Health Inequalities that focuses on AIDS to the ongoing work of the Center for Health Policy, Law and Management; helped support the genomics initiative, with a special emphasis on Genome Ethics, Law and Policy; launched a new program in U.S. Studies that recognizes and celebrates the multiple cultural influences that shape America; expanded our commitment, in conjunction with the Nicholas School, and the Law School, to environmental planning; and initiated just this year a new program on race, ethnicity and gender in policy studies. Each of these programs already has or soon will have a curricular component. And each, as well, has the potential for making Duke a major voice in trying to address the social, political and health issues that are most central to our future well-being.

None of these priorities should obscure the challenges that lie before us - how to translate our commitment to excellence in undergraduate education into a thriving, robust, intellectually engaged student body; how to make diversity a reality in our lives with each other rather than a demographic statistic; how to make interdisciplinary learning an experience that enriches the traditional departments of, say, classics, and chemistry as well as feeds the frontiers of new, theoretically groundbreaking areas of inquiry; and above all, how to make our engagement with contemporary social issues a reflection of our understanding of the past.

All of this is what we are challenged to accomplish. And all of this is what has made being part of the leadership of Arts and Sciences such a rewarding experience. For all you have done to make this experience so enriching, I thank you.