When this body met in late September, you gave approval to the new strategic plan, which has since been approved by the trustees. As I said then, such planning is crucial work. Unless Duke is to advance simply through a momentum of inertia or along an incoherent set of uncoordinated trajectories, we need to envision the deep goals the university must strive toward in coming years and begin to take the steps now that will enable us to reach those goals down the road.
If the faculty approved the final draft of Making a Difference, it's not surprising. Faculty in every school participated in the overall planning exercise. Faculty temporarily deployed to administrative billets drafted the text. Faculty then reviewed the drafts and critiqued them, and reviewed the revisions and critiqued them again. And when the report's fairly general goals are enacted in practice, as I'm confident they will, it will be with the ongoing engagement of faculty in every school.
I begin by thanking you for this effort, which to my mind shows faculty governance at its best. The faculty has a role as jealous watchdog, and I accept both the necessity and the value of that. (I really do.) But the faculty has another role it can play, and we've just seen a great performance of it: the role of taking the measure of this institution's challenges and taking responsibility for setting its direction.
In fact there is one enabling condition for this or any other worthwhile plan, something we wholly depend on to realize our mission: I mean the work of the faculty. Since we can tend to take this for granted, I thought I might say some words about it today. My design here is first to appall you, then to reassure you: I want to speak to the work of the faculty and how it may be growing, and how Duke can help support its emerging forms.
What are faculty for in a school of Duke's character and ambitions? The answer has many parts but a single core: the faculty are the bearers of expert knowledge and the drivers of continuing inquiry. Great universities don't hire faculty to fill the local zones in some fixed mapping of intellectual domain, though it can seem that way from without. They hire faculty for the power and individuality of their intelligence: for the passion that drives them to engage one subject rather than another, for the creativity that makes them see links that were not evident before, and for the mental dynamism by which each answered question discloses the next new question to be asked and pursued in turn.
Also at the annual meeting, Academic Council Chair Paul Haagen reviewed the council's work
So if someone asks what is the first obligation of a faculty member, I would reply (stealing a phrase from the novelist Henry James) that it's to have the courage of your curiosity: to follow the trajectory of your personal intelligence with maximum vigor in asking consequential questions. As all in this room know, that will never be an easy expectation to have to live with. (More than once I have remembered what Emerson once said: "Oh that my genius were a little more of a genius!") And it's virtually certain that in future, scholarly careers will add new difficulties to this perennial one: among them, the need to keep retraining and retooling in mid-career. If our strategic plan is right, the intellectual landscape of the future will be one of ongoing disciplinary revisions, recombinations and collaborations that will require a highly flexible, improvisational cast of mind. I agree, it sounds like fun—but it will take work to stay ahead of this curve.
Teaching, sharing our knowledge and enabling the mental growth of others, is the generous face of scholarship, and in my view, the great universities of the future will require their faculty more than ever to be devoted teachers. In the last forty years we saw the move to free advanced research from the encumbrance of teaching, and as a veteran of the old-style three-three teaching load, I know why this was needed. But we've also seen the costs when this is carried too far. We can't expect the educated public to know or care about our subjects if those who understand them don't take the trouble to communicate their interest and importance. As for attracting advanced students and sustaining their commitment to their careers, it matters whether faculty mentors do or don't take time and trouble on behalf of others. So there's more work, and this too may become more challenging with time (it already has): as less passive styles of learning require more faculty engagement, as new technologies make us have to revise our teaching methods, and as the dynamics of disciplinary evolution require endless updates in our preparation.
Teaching and scholarship are fundamental expectations, but my list is only just beginning. A university whose faculty only did what was in their job descriptions would be a sorry and impoverished place. Beyond such formal requirements, we need faculty to do a hundred further things, often without being asked. Talk about making a difference! It makes a difference when faculty go the extra mile to enliven the mental life of this place: when Priscilla Wald drew together the science and cultural history of contemporary projects to study the biology of race, or when Robert Bryant reflected on the historical conditions for creativity in music and mathematics, as both did at the public panels Sy Mauskopf has been hosting, I and every other person in the room had my mind expanded and my reflection permanently deepened, by someone who had no obligation to take on this task.
Outside our walls, it makes a difference when faculty go beyond the call to contribute to the life of this city and region. The recent debate over early decision programs has tended to mask the fact that the great disequalizer in American education is not really college admissions protocols but the profoundly unequal quality of education at earlier levels of instruction. If we left those broken rungs on the ladder unaddressed as we proceeded with so-called "higher" education, Duke would indeed be an island of privileged self-absorption. So I've been proud to see the work Duke faculty do in collaboration with the Durham public schools: Charles Payne's weekend academy to spur academic achievement for minority high school students, Gary Ybarra's teaching of science and engineering principles in local elementary schools, and fifty or sixty further examples that I know and salute.
Further afield, Duke has announced its intention to be a global educational player and a partner in the solution of global problems. But though we have offices to assist with these ventures, the truth is, the enterprise and commitment of individual faculty form the base of every substantive engagement Duke has around the world. It makes a difference when faculty take the trouble, as those in Fuqua and Pratt have, to host training programs for women entrepreneurs from across the Arab world and train women engineers in Saudi Arabia. It makes a difference when faculty spend their vacations, as Duke Divinity faculty have, working on reconciliation projects in Rwanda, South Africa, and the Sudan. When I was in Asia this summer and visited the extraordinary cancer center established by former Duke medical professors in Taiwan, I walked past a room from which a melodious voice with a North Carolina accent was issuing—a faculty member from the Duke School of Nursing helping Taiwanese partners envision how the role of nurse practitioner could be implemented there.
All this makes a difference—and it makes a difference when, closer to home, faculty engage with the moral and social difficulties that inevitably visit this place. During the Palestinian Solidarity Conference in my first months on duty, when it was essential for the university to protect the space of free expression and education through discussion and debate, no job description required a single faculty member to come forward to guard this value as observers at the public sessions. But individual Duke faculty saw this opportunity and came forward, and they did a work of incalculable value.
In last spring's time of troubles, the numbers of you who took time to engage students in small groups outside of class to work through the hard questions we were living through gave an education at least as enduring as anything in your course syllabus. It made a difference that faculty were willing to give time and thoughtfulness to the independent commissions chaired by Jim Coleman of the Law School and Prasad Kasibhatla of the Nicholas School last April. It makes a difference that faculty are continuing to work on the Campus Culture Initiative, a service opportunity not a single person could have wished to have descend on them. It's already clear that one thing this campus can use in future is closer and more varied interaction between undergraduates and people beyond the age of twenty-one or twenty-two—not because we need more policing, but because it's natural and interesting for mature people to have the company of more mature people, as they do in the outside world. This will make more work for faculty—and no doubt, some cadre of you will be willing to do it.
It's no joke, the range of duties that fall to the faculty, and the way they continue to grow is still less of a joke. But pardon me if I say it: there's no way for us to make this problem artificially easy. The university can't not expect these things of its faculty without diminishing the service this place renders and the quality of experience we provide. Nevertheless, if we can't spare you responsibilities that only you can perform, we can think how to support the faculty so it can do its work to fullest advantage. As the Provost and deans have recognized, building such support must be an integral part of our strategic plan.
Since we must ask much of you, the university must do everything it can to save time that faculty could spend on higher-order tasks: among other things, this is why the commitment to technology upgrades and tech support is so important. Since we need you to continue your mental growth, the university must do everything it can to support research and to build spaces where faculty can provoke and stimulate each other within and across disciplinary lines.
But quite as important as these external supports, the university needs to do everything it can to recognize the work in the faculty, in the double sense of both celebrating or rewarding it and making it institutionally visible. For one thing, if high scholarly attainment will continue to be requisite in the research faculty ranks, and it can't be our plan to lower this standard, appointments and promotion committees must also know to measure the whole of a faculty member's contributions, not that one in isolation. We've all met annoying students who keep asking "will it be on the test?," so as not to do any mental work that won't be formally rewarded. But truth to tell, if the test we set for our colleagues never makes more than a perfunctory nod to non-scholarly accomplishments, how can we be surprised if faculty form the impression that only one part of their effort really matters?
We also know that certain burdens of university service fall on the faculty in highly uneven ways. The main reason Duke is committed to continuing our efforts to increase the presence of African-American and other minority faculty in all fields, and of women in the important fields where they are underrepresented, is that we want to draw on the full array of talent and intelligence in our culture. That would be reason enough; but second and not inconsiderable reason is so students will take the right message from their education. I've never met a student who wanted to have only teachers like themselves in gender or ethnicity. But when a student never encounters a person "like" them in the faculty ranks, it powerfully discourages their sense of belonging and legitimate aspiration. Further, a third reason to keep pressing for inclusiveness on the faculty is so that burdens will fall more equally. As we know from the campus faculty survey and other sources, women and minority faculty bear a heavier advising and mentoring burden in proportion as they are underrepresented. Here as elsewhere, Duke must be grateful to every person who goes the extra mile, but it's unfair to accept the benefits of such work without finding ways to recognize it. I know it's a matter of deep concern to the Provost to find fuller and fairer ways to register the whole of faculty labor—and in addition, to help all faculty to both do their work and have a life.
None of these challenges are simple of solution. But just for that reason, it's important that we give them our most creative attention. This university has to ask a lot of its faculty, and in doing so, we rely on a single great truth: that people only go into careers like ours because they love the work of inquiry and of enabling younger minds. In my experience, if the typical faculty member wants one thing, it's to have the chance to do full justice to the many challenges of our positions. I thank you for the work you do in the name of this university—and I pledge to work with you to make this task doable as we go forward.