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Goodwin: Reinventing the University

Economist addresses annual Founders' Day ceremony

Duke faculty members enter Duke Chapel as part of the annual Founders' Day ceremony.

President Brodhead, Provost Lange, members of the Board of Trustees, honorees, colleagues, students, friends. Good afternoon. I am honored to be speaking to you today. I arrived on this campus a little more than half a century ago, a graduate of a university in Montreal that was, superficially at least, a lot like Duke. But in fact it was quite different. The university I left, faced with challenges, sought mainly to preserve what had been achieved. Duke, by contrast, saw the New South as presenting opportunities to grow and to lead. From that day to this an optimistic and creative response to change has characterized Duke and has set it apart from its peers.

The challenges Duke University has met successfully in its short life have been remarkable. In less than a century, following instructions of the founder, it has created within itself an excellent undergraduate college, a magnificent library, exceptional professional schools of Divinity, Law, Medicine, Engineering and Business, and a first-class school of post-graduate studies. The only directive of the founder that has been ignored is to establish a "school for training teachers," and that is a shame. However, all the units of the university that were created after the foundation have been admirably consistent with Mr. Duke's commitment to scholarship and public service: notably the schools of nursing, the environment, and soon-to-be public policy.

 

But all this was according to the plans of the Founder, the original architect. There have also been responses to meet challenges that were not anticipated in 1924. The first was to correct injustices in the university related to race, gender, ethnicity, and other human characteristics. Although we still have a way to go on that front we have made remarkable progress there too. A second challenge has been to internationalize the university. This began in the 1950s with establishment of some of the strongest foreign area studies programs in the nation, and has continued with recruitment of faculty and students from every country in the world. Close university links were established with peer institutions abroad and overall the university's global reputation increased steadily. Indeed, when I was introduced to the President of Lithuania in the 1990s he said to me "How is Coach K?"

The question remains, why has Duke been able to accomplish so much, and to reinvent itself successfully so many times? These are my thoughts on the matter. First, we have had remarkable leaders, from President Few to the present day, and not only at the top but among provosts, vice-presidents, deans, and department chairs. And I include here very prominently the founding family. We have been immensely privileged to have had the vision, support and leadership of the descendents of Benjamin and James B. Duke, and most of all the presence in our midst over all this time of our beloved Mary Semans.

 

Second, our alumni have been exceptionally dedicated to this university and have served us magnificently with their labor, their resources, and their good judgment. No universities anywhere in the world have developed the close and constructive relationships with their alumni that we have in the United States. When we think in our own case of the Bass, Bostock, French, McClendon, Lilly, Nasher, Nicholas, and Pratt families as examples, all alumni from my own time and even my own classroom, we realize that we could not have done it without them. In a university that is constantly reevaluating and reimagining its role these are truly latter-day founders.

Third, we have now in place an excellent system of governance that engages effectively trustees, faculty, administrators and students. This evolved from the 1950s through the 1980s and while invisible much of the time it is especially valuable at moments of crisis.

 

Fourth, we have been able to attract extremely talented and creative faculty, staff, and students to Duke. I am not sure why this is so, but I think it may be because they discerned, as I did in the 1950s, that Duke is a place of exciting possibility, that it is not afraid to change when necessary to move forward.

Finally we must recognize the role in our achievements of the region in which we are fortunate to live. If there ever was a New South it is surely right here, in the Research Triangle, with this concentration of universities, and a hive of entrepreneurs all around us.

 

But adaptation in response to challenge must never stop. Undoubtedly you all have your own ideas about where we should direct our efforts next, but I get to tell you mine. I am convinced that the greatest danger to our university today comes from powerful forces that threaten the survival of liberal education: education to free the mind, rather than to prepare for a career. We are being pushed constantly toward vocational training and thus far we have done little to resist. The threats come from two places, ironically both within the institution. On the one hand our students and their parents push to make education job-related. Why, they ask, should we waste time on anything that will not facilitate the job search or at the very least admission to the next level of higher education? Tuition, they claim, is an investment and it must yield a visible payoff. The other threat comes from faculty who accept the notion that preparation for graduate and professional school should be the primary concern of our best undergraduate students, and they encourage pre-law, pre-medicine, pre-business and pre-PhD curricula that constrain the free  choice that students should have in their undergraduate years. These faculty seem not to accept that the best undergraduate education is "pre-life." A result of these pressures is that the university has become unbalanced. My own department of Economics serves one fifth of the majors in Trinity College. I would like to think that this is because of the excitement of our field and our brilliant teaching. But I know that, to the contrary, this is because economics sounds most like a way station to Wall Street. I don't think this imbalance is good for the college, my department, or the student majors themselves.

In the years ahead our graduates will have more and more of their time free to enrich their lives and their communities. For life outside their jobs a broad liberal education will be their best guide and best resource. James B. Duke understood this well when he stated in the Indenture that education is "next to religion, the greatest civilizing influence". He did not say "the best way to get an MBA or a position at Goldman Sachs."

 

So how do we reform the university today to meet the threats to liberal education? Obviously we can push back against these threats. But let us think more positively. I suggest that the best approach is to integrate the fine arts and the humanities throughout all of the fields and disciplines. I do not mean simply strengthening the arts and humanities departments though that is a good thing and happily has been a university priority in recent years. Nor do I mean more innovations like courses in legal and business ethics that may discourage future graduates from cheating their clients. I call rather for bold experimentation with new forms of engagement that will stimulate our community to explore big ideas, open our minds and make us genuine intellectuals. For too long most of the university community have thought of the humanities and the arts as relatively isolated units that, except for occasional provision of entertainment, do what they do unconnected to the rest of the institution. They should be thought of instead as purveyors of enlightenment for scholars at all levels and relevant to fields from mathematics to public policy, from law to engineering. There need not be two cultures.

When I began at Duke the social sciences were much as the humanities and the arts are today -- good but nearly invisible to the rest of the university, doing their thing in their two buildings on the south side of the main quad. Since then, economics, which I know best, has appeared almost everywhere around the university from neuroscience to the English Department. This has been good for economics and good for the university. I would like to see a similar extension of the humanities and the arts. We can point to examples where this integration has worked well at Duke already; a serendipitous partnership between an economist and an art historian that has reformed our understanding of art markets, and a design studio that brought together artists and biologists in the old department of Zoology. But there is so much more that we could do with the courage and imagination that we have shown in our past re-inventions. One of my favorite suggestions is to re-introduce story-telling to the social sciences, not for entertainment but as the valuable heuristic tool that it has always been.

 

We may also learn from the experience of others. This year we are in the midst of a "Year of Bloomsbury" which offers a whole range of departments, centers and institutes an opportunity to come together around an exhibition at the Nasher Museum, of the art of the Bloomsbury Group. In these events we can see and be inspired by the many ways in which those scholars and public intellectuals benefited from and contributed to the artists, writers, and humanists in their midst. Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of his generation, saw his ideas examined and discussed in the novels of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. The painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell reflected in their art the deep concern with the social power of myth that fascinated the historians and psychologists. I hope that you will all take part in as many of these Bloomsbury events as you can.

With an imaginative and well-funded program to experiment with the integration of the fine arts and humanities across the university I believe that Duke could be a model for the nation and the world. Such a program would invigorate the teaching and research of this institution and it would help to restore liberal education to its rightful place in the curriculum. Wouldn't it be wonderful if some far-sighted and generous new founding alumni were to join with us in responding to this urgent challenge in the tradition of our original founder?

 

Thank you very much.