What Students Should Know About Duke's Strategic Plans

At Duke as at many universities, the President checks you in when you arrive, addressing you on your first day as freshmen, and the President chucks you out when you depart, giving the baccalaureate talk at Commencement. But this President wants to have something to do with you while you're actually here, so I've had the idea to talk with you from time to time on matters of shared concern, then to hear your thoughts and questions. Last year at this time, and many of you will remember the life-altering effect of this occasion, I told you how to get the most from the opportunities of Duke, urging you to a life of initiative and engagement. This time I want to lift the veil on our plans for Duke's future, especially as it relates to student experience.

You don't need me to teach you the special wonders of this place--its community of smart and lively people; the coexistence of unpretentious human warmth with ambition and high achievement; Duke's balancing of seriousness and play; a climate that lends itself to tenting. But it might not have occurred to you that planning is another thing your university has been supremely good at. You're aware I'm sure of the many new things that have sprouted up in our midst--the soon-to-be-opened French Science Center; in the humanities, the John Hope Franklin Center; in engineering, the Fitzpatrick Center (CIEMAS); in divinity, the Westbrook Building and Goodson Chapel; in the Sanford Institute, the new Rubenstein building; for everybody, the Nasher Museum, Bostock Library and Von der Heyden Pavilion. It's been a delight to see each of these facilities, from the day its doors open, immediately incorporated into the lives of students and faculty, stimulating new energies of activity and interaction. At the library, new spaces have created a newly intense use of Duke's information resources and a new pleasure in study itself. Visits to the library have increased by an astonishing 40 percent since Bostock opened in November.

You know these changes: you've lived them. But what might not be obvious is that all of them are the products of planning conducted some years back. Taken together, these changes have taught me that this is a university unusually strong at defining strategic goals; quite inventive in visualizing the steps that would take us there; and amazingly good at actually making them happen, summoning the will and resources to turn envisioned things into realities.

There was a time, I confess, when the phrase "strategic planning" didn't particularly arouse me. In my unenlightened state, this seemed like a bureaucratic exercise doomed to produce recommendations that would gather dust while the status quo continued on its merry way. But at Duke, strategic planning is exciting because it actually does make a difference--improves the quality of what we do and produces real transformation in the university's capacities and directions. Having realized many of the ambitions hatched in the last planning period, the time arrives for us to plan the next phase of Duke's evolution. So the question arises, if we really are capable of making a difference, what are the most valuable differences we could seek to make?

It might seem that the next move is to begin drawing up a wish list, a kind of letter to Santa listing all the things Duke would like to have and do. But we'll need to make choices among our desires, and to make the choices that will do the most good, we need to think about what differences most fundamentally matter. What are we really trying to build here? What is a university at its best? I'd reply, a great gathering of intelligence: a place where issues of great human consequence are addressed with profundity and creativity, where every question it's interesting to ask is being answered in interesting ways. Students too should be players in this exploration, with self-enlarging results. The poet Yeats said that education is not the filling of the bucket but the lighting of a fire. If that's so, a great university is a scene of constant combustion, where energies of intelligence and creativity are released in a bonfire no marshall could hope to contain.

If I'm right so far, then the most strategic moves a university can make will be the ones that most further the goals of stimulating inquiry and enlivening education. But in our time, those processes are clearly not static. They are changing in response to a variety of new challenges and forces, and the university that will best serve these ends going forward is one that will best anticipate and accommodate these changes starting now.

To be more particular, universities as we know them are organized around a model of knowledge-production and knowledge-transmission that was consolidated in the 19th century and perfected in the 20th. This model is based on the logic of specialization, the development of powerfully disciplined expertise within tightly bounded areas of inquiry. The logic of specialization gave us not just the great intellectual breakthroughs of the last century but the academic landscape as we know it: the familiar map of academic departments, specialized graduate programs and professional schools, the undergraduate major in a single discipline, and so on. We are clearly not at the end of the day of specialization. To arrive at the point of where we can join in the creation of new knowledge we still have to travel deep into the territory of specialized expertise. But we've come to a time when the limits of this system have become more apparent, and the need for new forms of knowledge increasingly clear.

In our world, where information circulates so rapidly without restrictions of time or space, where virtually every point on the planet has been incorporated into these global networks, and where understanding is continually metamorphosing through this process of exchange, no single body of learning is likely to supply the enduringly adequate base for a whole career, as was imagined in the not-so-distant past. In this new order, the complexity of problems and the interinvolved nature of their many dimensions will be increasingly apparent (as we already begin to understand that every health issue has both a pathological and a genetic and an environmental dimension--not to mention a psychological, a sociological and a spiritual one as well; and that health care is a problem at once medical, cultural, economic, and policy-dependent in its solution). In a world where challenges take this form, an educated person will need to be able to pull together and integrate disparate bodies of knowledge, and to do so not by some fixed formula teachable in advance but improvisationally, opportunistically, in response to changing circumstances and arrays of resources.

To develop the skills of problem-solving in many-sided and rapidly changing situations, the abstract mental exercises that have formed the staple of education as we've known it will need to be supplemented with the chance to encounter problems in their unabstracted, real-world forms, where the plurality of their dimensions and the specificity of their challenges can be fully grasped. Further, though mental independence and solitary reflection will be as important as ever, many issues will require the sharing or pooling of understanding, the bringing together of bodies of knowledge that no one person could possess alone. Working in teams will be as characteristic of the integrative regime of knowledge as working alone was of the regime of specialization; and learning how to supplement our understanding with that of others with different mental horizons will be an increasingly essential skill.

If I'm right about the change that's on its way, then many newish things you're already familiar with in the university can be understood not as the separate, add-on developments they first appear but as manifestations of new ways of using and training the mind. Read in this light, interdisciplinary programs can be seen not as some hot and/or marginal suburb springing up mysteriously around the standard curriculum but as new-model learning based on the merging, not separation, of intellectual fields. The culture of diversity in universities, the promotion of inclusiveness, cooperation, and respect across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, religion, and national culture, originated as (and is still meaningful as ) a quest for social justice. But if this value will be more, not less, important in the future, and I believe it will, it's because it also promotes the collaboration across horizons that will be the precondition for mental breakthroughs in times to come. There's probably no single greater change in selective American universities in the last thirty years than the explosion of organized extracurricular activities. Some analysts--David Brooks in his essay "The Organization Kid," for instance--have suggested that your extracurricular mania is a desire to experience even in youth the overworked, hyperscheduled joys you look forward to in your successful middle age. But this phenomenon makes a different sense if we recognize that the extra-curriculum has become a prime site for the teaching and learning of the new curriculum, the curriculum of improvisational, team-based, problem-solving education. When the students of Wilson came together to produce the fabulous film that won Froshflicks competition three or four weeks ago, these former strangers were patching together skills they had acquired separately and with no thought of this project to create something none of them could have made alone.

If we're in a transition between one model of knowledge and another, then we have to keep this fact clearly in mind as we plan for the university's future. Duke needs to be strong in every traditional way, but Duke won't realize its potential simply by building to a traditional model of the university. For the good of faculty and students alike, we need to support the enduringly essential aspects of specialization-based research, teaching and learning even as we build new versions of those activities based on integration, collaboration, and reconnecting knowledge to real-world problems. Duke has special advantages in meeting this challenge--not least its relatively weak addiction to the status quo. But the measures we choose for the future can't just be cool things we can do and build. Our plans will be strategic in proportion as they help us accommodate this deep change in the university's fundamental mission.

I've given a long preface, but I've done so in the belief that you'll want to know not just the content of our plans but the thinking that has guided us to these choices. But having delayed you at unmerciful length, I'll now give a very rapid glimpse--a kind of flasher's peek--of our emerging plan, which has benefited from student input at a variety of points.

Now as always, the university's first obligation is to attract faculty of the highest excellence, where excellence is understood to include both powerful intellectual creativity and the eagerness to stimulate and support the creativity of students. In the coming years Duke will be looking for ways to accelerate the hiring of such faculty across the university. Many of these positions will be in fields that already exist, but we'll also be supplying resources to enable hiring in areas that cross the bounds of departments and schools. These include areas where Duke-generated knowledge can be of dramatic benefit to humanity--areas like global health, a new program that will draw together faculty in medicine, nursing, law, business, public policy, and ethics, among other fields, or the environment, which will pool the knowledge of scientists, engineers, economists, policy analysts, and (more unexpectedly perhaps) faculty in divinity. We'll also be building in areas where understanding is rapidly advancing through the conjunction of disciplines, like the study of the brain, which draws on neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. To support such inquiry, we'll be looking to strengthen such vibrant cross-disciplinary contact points as the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy and the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. Since the Sanford Institute is one of Duke's special resources for linking pure analysis with the knowledge learned through policy application, we'll also want to give Sanford the ability to meet its full potential in the university at large.

These moves will dramatically strengthen Duke's ability to promote collaborative exploration and link of research inquiry to real-world application. But it's our emphatic belief that these benefits shouldn't be confined to the faculty alone. In an equally important part of the plan, we're eager to carry training in these new forms of knowledge all through the education of our students. Interdisciplinarity thrives at Duke in the freshman FOCUS program and our certificate programs and--in the professional schools--in Duke's many cross-school joint degree programs, and Duke can be proud of its leadership in bending the traditional curriculum to accommodate a more integrative style of learning. But that's a place to start, not to stop. We now need to put the pressure on to thoughtfully balance the claims of specialization with the enlargement of horizons both in individual courses and within the whole of a department's offerings. And we need to give students as thoughtful a way to construct the map of their education in their later years as we now give them in their freshman year.

You know my enthusiasm for the way Duke allows students to link academic training with extra-academic experience related to that training. Here are my latest finds. I was recently visited by the ringleaders of the group Engineers Without Borders. In Indonesia last year, these students were able to restore a shrimp fishery devastated by the tsunami and so to help revive a local economy by rigging up an aeration system on the coast of Sumatra. I loved this because it showed students taking design knowhow they had been taught in class but adapting it in ways they never could have learned in class to do a real-world service, bringing knowledge and ingenuity to a scene of extraordinary need. At the opening of the Conjuring Bearden show at the NasherMuseum two weeks ago, I fell into conversation with a gang of students who had helped Art and Art History Professor Rick Powell design and execute that stunning exhibit. This was not Engineers Without Borders but it was not totally dissimilar, since here again, students took what they'd learned in formal coursework and used it to negotiate a host of real-world problems: getting access to an artist's archive (where they found works exhibited here for the first time), designing the visual layout, writing the catalog essays, and so on.

In my first Duke days I thought of such episodes as a charming peculiarity of this place. I still do, but I've also come to see them as a highly valuable form of education--one that teaches students how to build on academic lessons and to redeploy and recombine them in independent ways to negotiate challenges far outside of class. I'm not keen for Duke students to put "hands on" before their minds have learned something the hand can valuably apply. But learning of this sort not only makes academic study more real and consequential to students; it also connects formal study to their emerging sense of personal agency and power, instead of isolating it in a separate intellectual realm. In the next phase of Duke history, we want to multiply the chances for education in this more integrative form, and to help students be more intentional in seeking these opportunities by clarifying their meaning and power. (If you want a tip for the summer, go to the Duke University Marine Lab at Beaufort, where you can study marine conservation and global climate change in a place where the academic and "real" world are literally indistinguishable.)

It's no accident that one of my examples just now involved Indonesia. In recent years, international exposure has become an increasingly central part of education, supplying first-hand knowledge of the cultural differences that shape our world and also our increasingly inevitable interconnection. Time abroad can also supply a particularly potent way to integrate academic and experiential learning. Go to the Build Your Own Duke website and read about Nicholas Shungu's study of the anthropology of medical care in Senegal and South Africa last summer. Go to the Study Abroad website and read the postcards from Duke students working in Kenya, or Lebanon, or Costa Rica. These students couldn't get the value of these experiences if they didn't come equipped with things they learned here in courses about foreign cultures and economies and medical systems. But living in foreign places gave a reality to that learning it could never have had if it stayed in textbook form, and opened new questions that had likely never occurred to them before.

Duke has been a leader in many aspects of internationalization. In the years since the last strategic plan, we've won federal support for more international area study centers than any other American university; and a higher percentage of Duke students study abroad than at many comparable schools. But again, this is a place to start, not to stop. Now we need to ensure that students are getting the most educational version of experience abroad, not just credit-bearing touristic travel at parental expense. We're eager to help students make international study a more thoughtful part of their personal educational plan, something they prepare for by taking relevant coursework in advance, and something they capitalize on through relevant coursework when they return. New creations like the Global Health program will create powerful educational experiences for both undergraduates and professional students in foreign countries--and in settings in this country that will prove no less foreign to many. By increasing the financial aid available for non-American students to come to Duke, we'll help this place give a more international education while students are still here on campus.

Another goal of the new strategic plan will be to strengthen the campus presence of the arts. The new NasherMuseum, where I have run into so many of you, has revealed both a profound appetite for the arts on this campus and the many forms of pleasure the arts supply. (If you want another personal tip, let me recommend the jazz combo of Professor John Brown, Lord of Belltower Hall.) All artistic pleasure is a form of education, a training of our powers of seeing, hearing, and imagination. But the chance to create and perform yields a further education, a lesson in what humans can make happen by working (singing, playing, acting, dancing) in collaboration. For this reason, we want to increase the chances for all of us to enjoy artistic performance of the highest order, and we want to give new visibility to opportunities for artistic creation, including chances to integrate contemporary media and to work with distinguished practitioners.

Duke's last strategic plan produced many new buildings. Building a building can never be a goal in a university: facilities projects must be governed by a strong concept of what they are meant to facilitate. But when an intellectual goal is realized in a building, the result can be truly strategic--as the FitzpatrickCenter has created integrative collaborations across the engineering, computational, and medical fields and a free-form faculty-student interaction that runs from labs through the cafe and up and down the atrium, new learning styles enabled by new learning spaces.

In the next plan, there will inevitably be more building, and I want to say a word about a project that's especially crucial to our plan: Central Campus. When I tell students that Central must be torn down, I detect recognition of the inevitability of this development, but also a faint air of regret, even a premonition of nostalgia. Since three seniors were kind enough to invite me to their apartment this fall, I know what's at risk. Though impermanent (not to say cheesy) in their design, there is something communal about those buildings, and something pleasantly non-dormitorial as well.

It's our intention to build something on this site that has never existed to date: a part of this campus that's as permanent and purposeful as the East and West Campus were when they were built. It's our further hope that this new campus will draw the East and West Campus closer together, rather than, as now, marking the empty space between them. But as we build a new and improved Central, we want to protect the functions Central currently performs. In particular, we're eager to have it become an anchor for community, a place where upperclassmen who now can't be housed on the main campus can continue to live in the company of their classmates. If senior undergraduates elect to live off campus, that's fine with me, but I don't want a single Duke student to move off campus for the reason that there was no housing available "on." The greatest luxury college affords is easy and daily access to all those smart, lively people who are your contemporaries. When you leave, you'll learn how hard it is to reconstitute that resource outside the university, and how little you should rush to subtract yourself from it while it's still in place.

Further, we're eager for the new Central to recognize the developmental stage you'll have reached toward the end of your undergraduate years. We want to build a space that's less dormitory-like, more like the loft or apartment spaces you'll be moving to when you're done with college. This place will contain services appropriate to students at the older end of their student careers, for instance the career center, and also amenities for students at this stage, like appropriate entertainment venues.

So far so good. But what will make the new Central strategic, rather than merely necessary, is the way it will speak to the model of education I started out discussing. Though we must put many beds on Central, we are determined not to build a bedroom suburb. Instead of detaching residence from the rest of student life, we want to make Central an integrative space, one that draws the separate aspects of your experience into an interactive, interanimating whole. Residence spaces will share the site with academic spaces, including department offices and classrooms. International student activities and study abroad functions will be relocated here, where they can support the thoughtful integration of experience abroad with academic study after you return. Since the NasherMuseum will be a near neighbor, the arts--especially the visual arts--should have a powerful presence on Central, with living spaces, studio and performance spaces, and spaces for the study of the arts making a continuous, mutually enriching whole. In a further integration, graduate and professional students will be housed on the new campus from the first, enabling interactions between older undergraduates and those not much their seniors who might share clues to that greatest of all mysteries: what actually happens after college.

I'll say in passing that as we think about Central, we are not unmindful of the rest of this campus. Already we begin to think how strategic West Campus renovations could support an emerging model of education by creating new kinds of learning spaces, making more room for extracurricular activity, and improving spaces for communal interaction. Give me another hour and I'll tell you all about it. Instead, I'll close with this.

It's exciting to be part of making a great school better. It's exciting to plan here because, given Duke's history, we'll probably actually accomplish most of what we propose. But the university's planning requires something reciprocal from you. Unless you actively seek the self-expanding, many-sided education I've been visualizing, Duke's great plans will build a more elaborate setting around you, but they won't make the difference they intend. On the other hand, if you're already seeking all the forms of challenge and involvement I'm describing, you won't need to wait for our plan to be done to get the benefits it seeks: you're getting them every day. The time is always right to begin planning more strategically for your time at Duke. As I say, it can be fun.

I'll take your questions and comments, but first I want to show some preliminary drawings of Central, at least of the first phase of its construction.