Centennial Oral Histories:
Richard Brodhead

Ann Pelham  0:17

Hi, I’m Ann Pelham, and I’m pleased to be here today with Duke’s ninth president [Richard] Dick Brodhead to have a conversation about Duke University and his experiences here.

Richard Brodhead  0:27  

Well, aren’t I lucky to be interviewed by such a dear friend?

AP  0:30  

[Laughs] Thank you. I know that you have multiple degrees from Yale University, and that you got your Ph.D. in American Literature. And then you began to teach there. I think in today’s world that would be quite an accomplishment. Often they make you go off into some other place before they give you a job. But you were at Yale when Duke came knocking, Jack Bovender’s search committee came up. 

RB  1:05

[Robert] Bob Steel.

AP  1:06

Bob Steel’s search committee came up in 2003, sorry, and convinced you to leave that home and come to Duke. And I’m interested in — we’re all interested in — what your thought process was when you considered that offer and chose to leave the North and come to the South, and had such a great 14-, 13-year term at Duke as our president? 

RB  1:31  

Well, you can put in one sentence the story of my life. But the story, you know, had to be lived through. Indeed, I was at a university. English departments used to be a very important thing in universities. I wish they all still were. I was at a place that was regarded to have the number one one. I loved teaching there. I had wonderful students. I had the perfect career. And then I got a job, [the] so-called dean of Yale College, where I was in effect oversight of faculty hiring in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and every aspect of undergraduate education. So I just loved that. What an education. I was supremely happy. I was dean for 11 years. It had never occurred to me that I would leave. I’d been approached by universities about presidencies, quite seriously. But they were more serious than I was, because why would I do that [laughs]? But the funny thing is, when Duke came, there were two things. One, I’d been dean for 11 years already. So, I’d already learned what there was to learn from that job. And in some sense, I’d probably already done what there was to do in that job. And then, Duke wasn’t like Yale, but less. Duke superficially had things in common with Yale, but the more you learned about it, the more you realized — this is just a different kind of beast entirely. So this would really be a whole new chapter of my life. And so it proved.

AP  2:50  

Different kinds of blue, but also different kinds of cultures?

RB  2:55  

It wasn’t the easiest thing to decide to leave. All our friends were there. We’d lived — Cindy [Brodhead’s wife] I had met in graduate school there. But when we decided to do it you just thought, “Maybe a whole new life would be interesting.” And so it proved. And the funny thing about it is, having thought it would break our hearts, actually neither of us ever had the slightest regret about leaving. And nothing but great happiness when we got here.

AP  3:22  

You had a whole new adventure. And she was a great partner for you.

RB  3:37

She certainly was, and still is. 

AP  3:29

She took on a role in Durham, and elsewhere.

RB  3:34  

In many places. She is the biggest Duke athletic fan, as you know. Once I said something critical during the game, and oh, I was very seriously scolded by her.

AP  3:43  

Well, it was wonderful to watch the way you both embraced the opportunity and stayed as partners in learning about Duke, and figuring out what roles you would each play, and how you would become part of the community. Not just the university community, but the Durham community.

RB  4:06  

But part of the Duke difference is that Duke was a very welcoming university. Yale had never had a leader who didn’t have a Yale connection. They had a president once whose graduate degree, only, was from Yale. That was strange. But Duke hasn’t had a president who went to Duke. Who, if any, ever did? So that wasn’t expected, and I think people were happy to meet us, happy to give us a chance. And off we went.

AP  4:33  

I know to believe you when you say Duke never had a president who went here, because you’re such an excellent historian. 

RB  4:41  

And you were the head of the alumni.

AP  4:44  

You had some letters, or maybe facsimiles of letters in your office. Could you talk about those?

RB  4:52  

I sure did. History fascinates me. That things aren’t what they are, they are the product of an ongoing history. And when you’re the president of a university or a trustee or anything, you’re making history. You shouldn’t be pretentious about it, but those are the truths. It’s the choices made day-by-day. So once I took the job, I was very interested to learn the history of Duke. Which was like, if you had made it up, it couldn’t have been more wild, okay? Elementary school, founded by two religious sects. A teacher, an illegitimate child who had no formal education who used to teach himself things at night. And then the next year, he could teach that subject. And finally, he got to the point where you had elementary school, and high school, and then you could teach college courses, and you could call it Trinity College. And then this Civil War and you can’t make the payroll for your faculty for two years, but nobody leaves because where are they going to go? And then a graduate student from Yale is hired to come and be the president, who figured out how do you separate it from the high school? How do you find a new home in Durham? How do you find some donors? And then he went on and became a labor economist for the US government. His field was child labor. So, it’s just — I mean, let alone becoming a university. Let alone becoming one of the best-known universities in the world. It’s this astonishing history. And just to underline the fact, it’s true that I was at Yale. Yale was 75 years old when the Declaration of Independence was written. So they have a different relation to history. 

AP  6:28

We’re having a centennial.

RB  6:30

I understand. I spoke at the Yale Tercentennial. [Crosstalk] But the funny thing is, Yale’s long age is an extraordinary asset for it. But it also has inhibiting features. It’s hard not to do the things you’re famous for already doing. And Duke’s short age is, in some sense, a downside. But it turns out to be an incredible asset, because people aren’t addicted to doing things the way they always have.

AP  6:52  

Do you think that’s the biggest cultural difference?

RB  6:56  

I think that the biggest one is that Yale is a place that has been so good in so many things for so long, that no one can understand why you would want to change them very much. And at Duke — when Nancy Andrews came [and] became the first woman to head a major medical school. She came from Harvard, and she said of Duke that Duke is inspired by its traditions, but not determined by them. And I always thought that’s just the perfect way to put it. People don’t despise the past of Duke, but I never met anybody who wished this place were the way it was 20 or 40 years ago. It’s just not nostalgia. The self-esteem is based on confidence for the future. Confidence you’re going to be something even better. Rather than longing for what you used to be.

AP  7:45  

When you arrived, of course, you had no idea you would be here for 13 years. 

RB  7:50  

It’s funny. I once said to Cindy early during our time here, “You know, I would think seven or eight years would be about the amount it would take to get anything done.” Because the whole point is [that] we never talked about it. I mean, it seems stupid, but we actually never talked about it when we came, how long it might last.

AP  8:04  

Well you just rolled up your sleeves and got to work. Both of you.

RB  8:08  

I don’t think either of us has ever planned for the long future. We just did what made sense chapter by chapter.

AP  8:16  

Well, you had a nice house that you got to live in. I think you were the first, were you not?

RB  8:21  

I certainly was. Because I had only been to Duke once before I became president. And at that point, I was the head of a committee to review the English department that had been created by Stanley Fish. So this was a very complicated task. And the review committee was housed in what was the president’s house, but the president elected not to live in it. The Knight House. So like, I’ve come to Duke, okay, Gothic University. Strangely modern house, in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t even find the university from that house. It was a very strange visit. And then I took the presidency. I knew there’d be a president’s house. Guess what? It was the Knight House. The very house where I’d been a guest at that point became our house. But then the Hart House, the house that had been built to lure [J.] Deryl Hart when the medical school was founded, just came back into the university’s possession. And that was perfect. You know, the house — nothing had been done to it. It was not air conditioned, in 2004.

AP  9:27  

I once toured that house with a medical student who was living there in the garage. It was quite something. I mean, they had five children and you got to see the bassinet and the bathroom.

RB  9:40  

Because none of it ever went away. We used to have medical students come, years after we lived there, knock on the door and ask, “Could I go see my old room?” 

AP  9:50  

And you turned it into a real asset for the university. I think it’s a comfortable home, and also an appropriate venue for events that feel more personal than an institutional building right on campus.

RB  10:09  

Well, we were incredibly lucky. Because it is a home. It’s a family home, in which nevertheless, you can have 30 people for dinner or 150 people for a reception. And the thing is, both Cindy and I, we like to entertain. We like to meet people. And so having the whole of the university, and the whole of the alumni body, and have the interesting people in the world come to our house, that was really part of the fundamental pleasure — continual, fundamental pleasure. Students as well, of course, because we had tons of students in our house.

AP  10:37  

You had them all the time, and you could just skip out the door to the football game.

RB  10:41  

You could skip out the door to the football game. 

AP  10:45

Or walk a little further to the basketball game. 

RB  10:47

I could see from my study when the goalpost was torn down in the old Wallace Wade [Stadium]. After the away game, so there wasn’t any football team there. But it was the year we only won one game against Northwestern, and students stormed the empty stadium and tore down the field. I saw it. You are there.

AP  11:07  

Well, the house has turned into a wonderful asset for the university. One of the things that happened when you were president, the ninth president, was the global financial crisis. Could you talk a bit about that?

RB  11:27  

I remember it well. Sure, of course. Universities live in the real world. And you can enjoy the positive features of the real world, but there’s no escaping them all. The financial crisis was interesting. Bob Steel, who was the head of the board, was at that point the undersecretary of the Treasury, right before that happened. And then he left that job to become the president of Wachovia, one of the biggest banks in the country. In any normal circumstance, he would have been splendid at the job. But other of our trustees included John Mack who was the head of Morgan Stanley, Alan Schwartz who was the head of Bear Stearns, and Xiqing Gao who ran the sovereign wealth fund of China. So really, when you had Trustees meetings in the middle of the downturn, we had a trustees meeting in late September, and it was when whether Wachovia would survive the night — these questions were in the air. It’s hard for people to remember. This wasn’t just an economic downturn, people wondered whether the entire functioning economy might come to a halt. I mean, I can remember the day that Congress didn’t pass the so-called TARP troubled assets bill, and the market fell 1500 points while I was on a flight from Washington to Durham. 

So these were crazy times of deep uncertainty. But the thing is, I felt a wonderful thing about Duke showed in that, which is [that] Duke doesn’t feel entitled to be greatly rich. If we have assets, we feel an obligation to do something good with them. But we don’t live as if our standard of living has to be guaranteed. And so as soon as that happened, okay, here’s a new circumstance to deal with. And people just got right down to work. What can we cut back without harm? What do we need to figure out how to have a glide path, so you won’t harm things by acting too abruptly? [Fiscal officer] Tallman Trask managed the finances very brilliantly. Peter Lange and he had such a good relation between the academic and the financial part. Very rare in universities. And the deans of all the schools. You didn’t have sore heads saying, “This should never be happening to me.” It’s just — it was very appealing. Just the functional, positive attitude of realism in the face of that, and it had effects for the university. It took a while for this to become clear. But it had effects that were good. 

One thing is we were very lucky that we still had positive things happening even in the midst of the downturn. My first goal was to raise $300 million for financial aid. Duke had a very generous financial aid policy, very little of it based by endowment. They just had a campaign where very little money was raised for financial aid. And we got the gift from David Rubenstein that brought us to the goal. Happened on, I think, September 28, or something. Right in the middle there. And then also, we got the funds for the Sanford Institute to be elevated to a school. And so you could say we [were] still making forward progress, even in a tornado. 

But the second thing is, we were thinking about a campaign — what became the Duke Forward Campaign in the fullness of time — and we’d asked the schools to each think of their highest priorities. But after the financial downturn you’d have to say, “Now you have to really think.” Now that it’s clear that you can’t just expect endless resources to be coming your way. If there were limited resources, what are the choices, what are the investments that would make absolutely the most difference for the thing you do. And then we were able to harmonize those across all the schools. And those became the goals of the campaign. A lot of fundraising campaigns don’t do universities nearly as much good as they appear, because it’s just lots of random things that are rolled up [crosstalk], right, or things that people wanted that really aren’t very high priority to anybody. And our campaign ended up being very disciplined, to support the highest priorities of the university. So, you know, every cloud has a silver lining.

AP  15:30  

You also were attentive to the employees, while at the same time came up with some opportunities for buyouts and things like that…

RB  15:44

Sure.

AP  15:46

That were appropriate, and controlled for the situation. I think that your goal was to do as little harm as possible to your staff.

RB  15:58  

Well, sure. I mean, and don’t forget, I discovered when I became the president of Duke that I was now head of one of the top four private employers in the state of North Carolina. One of them went out of business — Wachovia Bank — and soon I had been raised up on that list. But what this meant is in the downturn, you had to think not only about the students and the faculty and the research operations of the university, you really had to think about the well-being of the multiple 10s of 1000s of people who are dependent here. So it was very, very important at the beginning. Some of the things that we I think we can all — these decisions were not mine, they were made by teams of people — but I think we could all look back with pride at the fact that the faculty had no raise, while we gave raises to people with incomes under $50,000. That’s less today than it would have been then. And the next year, I think we gave raises to people with incomes under $75,000. And to me, it’s just — do you begin to get the idea that I actually love this place? Because I’ll tell you one thing. I’ve lived my life with faculty members. Faculty members are not always attuned to the general good of the university. If you raise their parking fee, you’re going to have complaints. We never had a single complaint from a faculty member about the two years with no raises. Think how much money was saved, and therefore that you didn’t have to cut out things that were really priorities.

AP  17:26  

So Duke did emerge. And there were other — I suppose it’s hard to say benefits — but there was a tightening of, not the finances, but the spending. There was an effort to be a little bit more…

RB  17:45  

Oh boy, now you’re bringing it all back. There was something called DART (Duke Administrative Reform Team). [Duke Vice President for Finance] Tim Walsh was the genius who led this program. And so what you had to look at is, if every separate unit of the university has its own communications team, and every separate unit has its own finance team, and every separate unit has its IT team, and all that, might there be some economies to be made in this? And it’s actually very hard, because you would think that reasonable people can agree to that so easily. But actually, if you have the deans of two adjacent schools, and you say, “Couldn’t you share a communications person?” The people who will follow the discourse of the law aren’t going to respond to something that’s been designed for, you know. And I get it. But the task was not to have thoughtless pseudo-economies that actually do harm. But also not to have lots of thoughtless redundancies. And some money was saved that way. I haven’t thought about DART in a long time.

AP  18:44  

I bet you haven’t [laughs]. You once said [that] education is the great empowerer. And what you’re talking about, really, are changes that are introduced in a collaborative way, most of the time. Not always imposed. So how has Duke cultivated that sort of healthy, collaborative, in this case, academic environment where scholarship thrives?

RB  19:17  

I see that as actually two separate questions. And so if you’ll allow me. When I say education is the greatest power, I’m thinking of what education does for individuals. We’re born, there’s things we get, there’s things we can figure out, but there’s so many things you can’t figure out unless somebody helps you. And if you have the chance to get a great education, look, it’s one of the great paradoxes of our society. Our society is so wealthy. The wealthiest in the history of the world. But it tolerates very unequal degrees of education, going back to pre-K. And we live with all the consequences. So the thought that that’s a good saving is just not true. But a person who’s had the kind of education — starts with your family, and then with elementary school, high school, and by the time you get to university, you’re the age where a new kind of education is needed. That kind that’s really either going to open up your powers as a mature person, or not. Open up your mind to the world, or not. And so it seems to me that — I would never have ever wanted to be anything but an educator. I never spent one second wishing I’d had a different career. But I used to think teaching was about teaching English. Later you learned that teaching is about waking people up. And that’s what it did for me. Every subject contributes to the — and that’s what I mean, by empowering. The power to understand. The power to know what you can do. The power to know what you need a team for, what role you can play in the team, what role you need someone else to play on the team. Why do we have [inaudible] in universities? It’s partly because that’s a place where you learn some of those gifts that you really don’t learn in more academic classes.

AP  21:07  

Right, the teamwork part. So how does this healthy, collaborative academic environment…

RB  21:17  

Oh, I didn’t get back to that. 

AP  21:18  

Now, that’s alright.

RB  21:20  

I mean, for me, it’s interesting. Because when I came to Duke, the striking things were how future-oriented it [was], how willing to experiment with things, to try new things. Even if you had to move resources to do it. And how people were willing to play well with others. Universities are not based on the principle of collaboration. They’re not. Because guess what? They’re made of separate departments in separate schools. And then you ask these people who’ve been chosen on the basis of separateness to all of a sudden do something together? But Duke — see, it’s another advantage that Duke doesn’t have departments that were already great in 1870. It doesn’t. So in a way, it has the freedom of that. People at Duke always understood, you have to make things happen beyond your own resources to do them. And the only way you can do that is by doing things together. You know, the biomedical engineering, I think the second department, ever was at Duke. Because people in medicine and people in engineering saw [that] we could be more together. I learned a phrase from Coach K. Two are better than one, if two can play as one. You know what? It’s a great saying. And it’s actually totally true.

AP  22:35  

I thought that was [about] marriage [laughs].

RB  22:39  

Well but I mean, when I think of how many examples — look at Duke’s relation to public policy. It’s because you could have economic, statistics, the business school, the law school, form part of something that each contributes to. You can’t see it through one lens. But with all those lenses feeding into a picture, you can see it better.

AP  22:59  

And in the real world, there are no departments. 

RB  23:03  

It’s an astonishing fact.

AP  23:08  

The collaboration and the interdisciplinarity became really a touchdown for Duke, I think, during your time.

RB  23:19  

I would take it further back. For one thing, biomedical engineering goes back way before my time. The Sanford School was in Terry Sanford’s time. I would give [Nannerl] Nan Keohane and Peter Lange a huge amount of credit for understanding that this was the differential advantage of this university. And so already there were things. And of course they devised a financial system to put funding into new interdisciplinary institutes. [Crosstalk] And that was, to me, a big attractor when I came. Because everybody knew you should be doing that in universities. But typically, the resources were all tied up in the existing separate entities. And Duke figured out how to facilitate real interdisciplinary work on complicated problems. So when I came, that was always a big thing for me. In my inaugural address, I talked about how Duke would be a natural place to have a global health institute. Because health is a financial problem, a business problem, a legal problem, an intellectual property problem, a nursing problem. It’s an everything problem. So instead of teaching it separately in 10 schools, what if we pull it together? But I can remember this as if it were yesterday, a few weeks later, somebody saying, “Well, did you start that global institute yet?” What?

AP  24:41  

You mean your idea…

RB  24:45  

What I mean is, people acted as if well, it would be the most natural thing in the world to proceed from saying something to actually doing it. And that was amazing. But I’ll tell you, by the end of that summer we had a commitment of major money from the Chancellor of the Health System, Victor Dzau, who came in with me. From Peter Lange, from the interdisciplinary funds. In the next year we hired [Michael] Mike Merson. And a short while later, we had undergraduates coming to Duke to study global health. In every school and undergraduate major. And then I remember going to the Gates Foundation, you know, they know a thing or two about global health. And when we had an outside review, it was said that ours is the fourth best department of global health. But the thing is, that you couldn’t start and have the fourth best department, all of a sudden, of some traditional discipline. But you could, because the space for exploration, entrepreneurship, and the future is this interstitial space. And that’s, I think, what works so well at Duke. How does it happen in the world? You’ve got these problems. Health, as the pandemic reminded us, this is not a national issue. The environment, not owned by any one country. And so for Duke to be so strong in the fields that are the biggest problems of the world, and training people in an interdisciplinary way. This is how you empower people so they can go do the things with their gifts and their knowledge they can do.

AP  26:19  

Your example is not the only one for global reach for Duke. You’ve also got the medical school in Singapore — the Duke-NUS Medical School — and then Duke Kunshan [University].

RB  26:33  

DukeEngage is a global program.

AP  26:36  

That’s right. So all these things started on your watch, as they say.

RB  26:42  

And the funny thing is, they didn’t all start during periods when we were enormously rich. Because it wasn’t about the money. It was more important, and harder, for other places to get people to collaborate, and then find ways to support them. Rather than to start with a support, and then find that actually all the money in the world won’t make people collaborate who don’t want to.

AP  27:06  

So you’re endorsing the creative synergy that Duke is willing to endorse and accept, rather than being hide-bound and stuck in I know, you won’t say these words [laughs].

RB  27:23  

You can say them, that’s okay. I mean, isn’t there something that they say — Like, the house of cards? I couldn’t say it, but you could. You might say so, but I couldn’t possibly say it. I would say, it’s funny as I think biographically — I became a different person when I became the president of Duke. I never did stuff like that, [that] wasn’t part of what you did when you were dean at Yale. Mike Merson was the dean of the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale. He came and begged us to have more undergraduate classes that his faculty could teach in. The students were dying to take courses in such a thing. The departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale did not want those people teaching their courses. I was the dean and I couldn’t. But when I came here, I mean, I felt that my life at Yale gave me a fantastic preparation for a somewhat traditional university. Which Duke is in part. But I also thought it gave me a fantastic appreciation for a more experimental, a more open-ended university. And so in my first year, we did Global Health, and plus the Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions was a new feature at that time. And then before you knew it you had all these things. DukeEngage was created only in 2007, if I remember correctly.

AP  28:47  

How did [DukeEngage] come about? 

RB  28:51  

Well, it’s a long story, but to me, an endlessly interesting one. Duke had just done a strategic plan. And the strategic plan was based on the idea that for the future universities have to think about education in a different way. In the 19th and 20th century, the idea of specialization — of I know everything, I’m not going to unfocus myself, I’m going to study economics, or I’m going to study biochemistry — that gave us a very powerful education system that lasted for a long time. But I think many of us have had the intuition that for the future, you no one’s going to know enough when they finish one specialization. You’re going to need to know a little bit about lots of different things. And you’re going to need to be very good at putting things together in new ways. Because the nature of the problems change so fast these days. So there’s a splendid strategic plan that outlines all this. I’m proud to say I wrote the introduction to it, in which you can read this all in a very abstract form. But then the question came — how can we make it clear to our students that Duke is the home of a new model of education? We’re not saying we’re number seven instead of number nine. That wasn’t the boast. The boast was, we’re a place that has really shaped itself to try to answer the question [of] what kind of education do you need for the future, do you need for your long life, rather than for today? 

And so DukeEngage gave a kind of answer to that. Because you see that DukeEngage — there’s two things about it. One, it’s about getting students out of the university, out into the world, out into the places where real men and women live with limited resources. You know, the smarter you are in this country, the more likely you are after a while to live in the little closed world of super smart people. Colleges, jobs. It’s a strange feature of modern times. So part of the idea of DukeEngage was [to] help students who have been in the university get out of the university. And go find out what problems really look like. Then second, understand that problems aren’t problem sets. The problems you’re going to need your intelligence to help solve in the world aren’t homework problems. You did the homework to learn how to solve problems that aren’t homework problems. And so it was how do you get out of the bubble, and how do you give students the challenge to use something you do actually know because you studied it to solve a problem that would never have been offered to you in a class. 

So I remember that first summer. I mean, it was amazing. So we came up with this idea, and we patched it together. Many of us contributed. And I pitched it to Melinda Gates. She had recently been a trustee. She was, as you know, a splendid person. I can remember this so vividly. I think this would have been in the very late part of the year 2006. Does that sound right? I think it was. So she used to meet me in Seattle. She never brought anyone. And I started explaining this. And it was as if she had said, “I get it.” As if she could help you complete the thinking of it. Because it was so much what their Foundation’s thinking was. And so she gave us a $15 million endowment for a program that had not yet been announced. And then the most amazing thing happened after I got home. You know that Mr. Duke created a university, but also a foundation. Confusingly called The Duke Endowment. Not to be confused with the Duke Endowment. But anyway, the Duke Endowment was, at that point, headed by Russell Robinson. And the vice chair was Neil Williams. And I got a call from them at the very beginning of January. I had just come back from Christmas break. And they said, “We’ve heard about this program.” And it was obvious that there was something unpleasant — unhappy — about their tone. And they said, “And we just wonder, why didn’t you give us a chance to participate in this?” So I said, “Well, why don’t you come for lunch next Tuesday.” The students hadn’t even come back in. They came. We were all very, you know, Sally Robinson had been on my search committee. I had taught Neil William’s daughter when she was an undergraduate. She’s an English professor now. In my very field. So we were very close. But when they came, they weren’t mad. But they wanted to help with this. And so they [asked] how would it work if they were to match Melinda Gates’ $15 million, with $15 million of brand new money from The Duke Endowment. I would not have a problem with that. 

And so it was, that when we announced DukeEngage — and the whole point is, it would be open to every student. And we made a decision that first was a bit of a head-scratcher, which is [that] we will fund this project in the summer. And we’ll fund it whether you have financial need or not. Because otherwise you would have a skewing of who would do it. And you know, there are students who don’t quite meet a scholarship. That doesn’t mean they’re free to go to Honduras for the summer. And so that first summer we had 90 students. It’s incredible. It’s like the stories out of World War II. How did this thing get put together so fast? We had 90 students in the field that summer. And if anybody wondered about it, it was — one group went to New Orleans. It was after Katrina. There was all this emergency money, but the timing of the emergency money was running out, because you had to submit your grant proposals by a certain point. And all of a sudden 10 students, I think, from Duke arrive in New Orleans. And here’s the city that has to generate all these grant proposals, because no one really knows how to do it. No one knows how to do the statistical tables that you need to support the work. But of course, the Duke students arrive. “Oh, I know how to do that. I’ve done that a million times.” And so the students got to participate in something in the world where they could see their knowledge make a difference. And the city got the benefit of getting the emergency funding as a result of it. So, I mean, that was the perfect prototype. Because education can be very abstract and academic. But what if you take it and turn it into something? It’s not about the dichotomy of the academic in the real world, it’s about the two of them actually functioning and supporting each other. And that was the aspiration. And so, gee, soon we had 200, then we had an average year 350, or 400. 400 students a year, at a university that only brought in 1600 a year, at the university’s expense going to Marion, South Carolina. Going to Tanzania. Going to Dublin. When I think back, if you ask me something that really makes me look back with extraordinary contentment about the years I was president, that program would certainly be high on the list. 

AP  36:00  

It was quite remarkable to see. 

RB  36:03  

Cindy, and I used to go — because you can launch a cool program, but you actually have to go see is this really working and is it working the way you want it? We used to go in the summers. I can remember we went to Tanzania. Duke had long medical ties with Tanzania. Tanzania was one of the worst countries hit in the world by the AIDS epidemic. And doctors from Duke — John Bartlett was the first — had started working in Tanzania in 1987, if you can believe it. So there was this long relation with a medical center in the northern part of Tanzania. And so we went one year to see this in operation. And not too far away was a group of students living in a house with a family with no running water. In a place that had a medical clinic filled with expensive equipment that hadn’t worked for years. Because when Western donors would dump this equipment on them, no one trained them in it. So the job of the students — one group’s [job] was to figure out, how could you write a manual so that people can fix things when they break? And another one, I remember this so vividly, going to a dental clinic where you couldn’t actually do anything. Because you couldn’t get any light into the patient’s mouth, because the electricity was only on [about] four hours a day. So they devised — these kids, they were Duke engineers. I could tell you their names if you want to know it. I mean, I’ll never forget them. Duke engineering undergraduates from the Pratt School who were living in the middle of Tanzania in a non-urban setting. They probably have never been to a farm in their life. And it didn’t bother them. And their job was to figure out, how can you make there be a continuous light source in a place where the electricity fails? 

So they went into — I don’t remember where it was, Dar es Salaam or somewhere — and bought all kinds of LED strips and figured out this way. And I said to these kids, “The day you get that light to come on in this clinic, I want you to send me a picture.” And then I went home, and I went on vacation. And it wasn’t that long later, bingo. My phone lights up with a picture. The students — their first names were Andrew and Harsh. [They showed] the doctor, and here’s the light. But the whole point is, when they’re gone no one will know how this happened. But now they’ll be able to do the dental work they were equipped to do that couldn’t happen otherwise. I learned a phrase at this time. Kristina Johnson, the dean of Engineering, taught it to me. Some people thought it was too cute, but I think it’s good. D — discovering the use of knowledge is education. D-U-K-E. Discovering the use of knowledge is education. That doesn’t mean all knowledge is useful. That’s not what it means. What it means, though, is learning something for the pleasure of learning, but then discovering that it actually can be put to a use that no one told you about when you learned it. That your education becomes education the day you can use it. 

AP  39:07  

Very powerful. I wanted to ask you about Duke Kunshan [University] as well. It’s thriving at the moment. It had some challenges in COVID. But the dream of that relationship and that opportunity, that was under your watch.

RB  39:27  

It certainly was. Why did we do so many international things? As you say, why did we partner with a medical school in Singapore? Creating one of the principal most highly-reputed medical schools in South Asia as a result. Why did we create DukeEngage? Why did we do [the] Global Health [Institute]? Well, it was a time when it was just so obvious that every problem of the world is an international problem. And so if you don’t have partnerships elsewhere, if you don’t see how issues look from other angles than your own, you really aren’t going to be able to solve them. Whatever good intentions you might have. So that’s what really laid — it was really a kind of analysis of the world, and an analysis of the value of trained knowledge for the world, that led to all those things. And then there was this thing, which is that China’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger. More and more consequential in the world in all its problems and in all its prospects. And Duke was very little known in China. And China is full of very smart people. It’s full of people who want an education. There’s no doubt that China will be a force in the future. 

When I had been at Yale, it was funny. People at Yale were very miffed, because everyone in China knew the name of Harvard. Now don’t forget [that] during the Cultural Revolution, and before 1979, there was no opening to Western education at all. So people at Yale had the idea, “We just need to go make ourselves more visible there.” And actually, [Richard Charles] Rick Levin went every summer to China. And after about five years, Yale was as well-known in China as Harvard was. And when I first went — I got an honorary degree in China at Tsinghua University in 2006. Duke was not very well-known in China at that point. So the thing [was], [Duke] needed to become better known. You needed to become better connected, you need to define the global health partners for your faculty in China. The person who became the Minister of the Environment was the head of a university Duke collaborated with. So there were all these reasons for the link. 

And then at the very, very bottom, there’s another one. Which is, you know, I lived through a period when there was no cultural exchange between China and the United States. For a period of 30 years. And I lived through another protracted period of hostility between the United States and the world under Russian domination. And my thought was, whatever the world is going to bring, you need more people in China who can see things from an American point of view. And you need more people from America who can see things from a Chinese point of view. If you don’t have that, you’re just going to have blind people who are the victims of treating their ignorance as wisdom. And so that was a reason to go there. 

But nevertheless the Chinese, as a matter of policy in the year 2010, adopted the idea of joint venture universities. They wanted seven universities that would be partners between Chinese and Western universities. The Chinese have the wisdom to be very self-critical in areas where they want to get better. You don’t get better by not being self-critical. And they knew that, although they had greatly expanded their university systems, there was something about the quality of education that was still greatly deficient in China, compared to the best Western universities. So their idea was — let’s have some great Western universities come and make partner places in China, so that China can learn about better models of pedagogy. So that’s a pretty tempting thing. Especially to a school that’s willing to run some risks and do some experiments. To go make yourself more visible as the place that is bringing this new model of pedagogy — liberal arts for the 21st century. And that also could give you a base where your global health people could work with Chinese partners in your environment studies. 

But they wanted us to open a four-year undergraduate school. They would have been happy if we had done that. It’s the first thing we did. You could never do that. We didn’t know if this was going to work. So we did baby steps. In China, they always use this phrase. Crossing the river by feeling the stones. You reach down, you put a little foothold. Oh, you didn’t fall that time. Then you reach another foothold. That’s soft of what Duke did. We spent many, many years of making little incremental steps — starting with graduate programs — to see, would this work? Because we know that China is not a country that is interested in free inquiry. But that is the hallmark of Western education. So if we could not conduct this teaching in an atmosphere of free inquiry, we weren’t going to do it. And I think it was important that we had year after year after year after year of experiment before we asked the faculty to vote on the undergraduate degree, or the trustees to. To tell you the truth, I sat at these negotiating sessions with Kunshan. You had to tell them — Whatever you may want, you don’t understand. I can’t command it. That’s not the way things work. The faculty of the university has to approve this. The trustees have to approve it. So I’ve got to be able to give them the evidence that this is a plausible experiment. Now, my God, the campus is huge. Students apply there in extraordinary numbers, a student from Duke Kunshan won a Rhodes Scholarship.

AP  45:15  

Not too shabby.

RB  45:16  

Duke sometimes reminds me of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk. You know, there’s just these things. It’s an idea, but you stick it in the ground, and then you come back. Whoa.

AP  45:27  

It is a remarkable accomplishment. And, you know, the future is not entirely clear.

RB  45:36  

Oh, it absolutely is not. So of course between then and now — first of all, how horrible for an infant school with students from all over the world to have COVID come so people there can’t leave. People who have come here for spring break, can’t go back there. What a horrible test for a school to have been put to. And then there’s, you know, China is not famous for becoming more liberal in its approach to free inquiry and free discussion. But knock on wood. We’ve been crystal clear about what our conditions are for staying in operation there. And so far, there has been no interference.

AP  46:14  

It is remarkable. So, congratulations. 

RB  46:17  

It is remarkable. But don’t forget the Chinese have an interest in the success of this, too.

AP  46:22  

And certainly Kunshan is…

RB  46:26  

Well, Kunshan is the Duke of cities. I mean, it used to be rice paddies and impoverished fishermen. And now it’s one of the entrepreneurial centers of China, and it has a great university there.

AP  46:38  

And it’s beautiful. It’s sort of remarkable.

RB  46:41  

It’s beautiful. I went through Kunshan the first time I went to China. So we’re talking 2001. I was going to the famously beautiful city of Suzhou from Shanghai. And so we drove along, and it’s very flat, very undistinguished, you know, nothing much going on here. That was Kunshan. So I had been to Kunshan before I became — do you understand that I am still the honorary chancellor of Duke Kunshan University? I don’t get to tell people about it very much. But thank you for asking.

AP  47:17  

There are so many positives in your 12 years, 13 years. There was a painful time [while] you were in charge, and that was [the Duke] Lacrosse [case] in 2006. Three Duke lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape by a Durham woman. And the accusation came against the backdrop of race, sex, [and] privilege. And it drew extensive national media attention for several months. My daughter happened to be a senior that spring and she was mad at everybody. The media people were all over the quad. 

RB  48:03  

It drew horrible attention for a period, and then it drew a period of bad feeling that lasted much longer. I’ll speak of this very honestly.

AP  48:13  

I appreciate that. I just want to say that the charges against the players were dropped. 

RB  48:20

Yes. After a very long time.

AP  48:24

The players were exonerated. And the prosecuting attorney was charged with withholding exculpatory information.

RB  48:30

And was disbarred and forbidden [crosstalk]

AP  48:31

I’m sure that it’s, even today, not something you enjoy talking about. But let’s go ahead.

RB  48:40  

But come on, I’m here to talk about my experience at Duke. My experience at Duke does not only include the fun parts of it. And you want to know something? I think the world pretty well knows nowadays, if you’re going to be a university president for some length of time, something is going to happen that you never foresaw. That you’re going to be responsible for. Okay. So here’s how it unfolded. Word came to me. At first — I learned pretty early about this thing. But the people who looked into it didn’t think there was much of an issue there. The lacrosse team had had a party over spring break in an off-campus house, and they had hired a stripper. They had, in fact, hired two strippers. The stripper was Black. They apparently did not seek to hire a Black stripper. But the stripper was, in fact, Black. And the evening went south in some way. And the person left, and there was some uproar. And there was a yelling of a racial slur. This was reported. A neighbor heard it, it was actually never denied. And then the stripper charged the team with rape. Okay. And from then on — so you had, you know, I’m gonna say I regret that I was ever on bad terms with any member of the lacrosse team or their families. They were the victims of a horrible injustice. Nevertheless, the behavior that touched this whole thing off was very inappropriate and very ill-advised. Okay? 

But once the rape charge was made, and once the race of the person making the accusation was known, all of a sudden you had more World War III. Because the trouble — you know how scandal works. Stories that are just things that happen all of a sudden they fit into plotlines that people have. Just like their mind is just full of energy, and all of a sudden the energy can just be directed at this. And so you have the idea [of] rich white — privileged rich white athletes. Some of the people, actually two of the people, had a fireman for a father. But that didn’t matter. They were still rich white athletes sexually victimizing Black women. And so all of a sudden, you had national outrage. I had people who I’ve known for my whole life call me and say, “I can’t believe that your students are rapists.” And you remember what it was like. It was crazy times. And then further things happened that added to the fire. It just kept going off and going off. 

The trouble with it is, you know, you learn something. Our world is addicted to scandal. It is. It’s addicted to the scandal and controversy. And when scandal strikes, it works by activating these preset ideas of feelings of loyalty and hatred. And after that, no one’s very interested in the truth. How do you know — in the middle of a scandal, people don’t say to themselves, “How do I even know that any of this is true?” That’s the last question people want to know. “You know what, it’s so outrageous. I know it’s true.” I used a quote from Othello — I’m an English professor, I was interviewed in the New Yorker. This was not my happiest day of my life. You know, Othello is a Black man who marries the daughter of a white city councilor. And it takes a long time to get the father outraged about this. But finally, the person just keeps yelling, basically, racial epithets, until the person all of a sudden not only believes that the man is a Black rapist, he believes that he’s always believed this. “Belief of it oppresses me already.” And this is what the lacrosse story was about. The world, all of a sudden, everyone knew what they thought about everything. And that it was outrageous. And that went on for a very long time. 

And then, of course, we still didn’t even get to the worst of it. Which is then the district attorney, who was running for reelection, made a series of claims that implied that if you knew all the evidence as he knew the evidence, you would know how guilty these students were. And once you have that, then you were really in the soup. Even the guys who — there’s a guy who wrote a bestseller about the lacrosse story. Even he said in late May of that year that he was now 90% sure the players were innocent. But that’s how uncertain things were at that time. And especially with the district attorney playing that role. The university — I mean, I know this stuff by heart — the university said three things. One, the alleged conduct is of the deepest concern to us. Second, nevertheless, the players must be considered innocent until proven otherwise. And third, that the ability to decide the truth of these charges has to be entrusted to the criminal justice system. What else could you say? But this was, of course, regarded, by the world that knew that the guy should be hanged or who knew that she was a lying whatever, everyone knew one or the other, no one was interested in things like that. 

So it was a very hard time. And of course, it took a very long time. The party was in March, the thing was in full firestorm by the end of March. It was the end of December before [Durham County DA Mike] Nifong revealed that the evidence for one of his charges was not true. And then his case fell apart very quickly. And it wasn’t until the next spring that there was an investigation by the bar of the state which disbarred him. But you know, that’s a long time to live in a scandal. And don’t forget then, as soon as it was known that it wasn’t true, then all of a sudden the faculty who’d supported a victim of rape, all of a sudden they became the subject of intense and organized hatred throughout the country. I mean, do you remember this? [Crosstalk] It was a very hard time. And all I can tell you is, if you’re going to be the president of a university, you can’t pick and choose which things you’re going to deal with. I was, I felt — I regret the episode. I’m not going to tell you the silver lining of the lacrosse episode. But the trustees of this university were phenomenal through the middle of all this. And eventually, at the end of it, we actually ended up with a new athletic director. We ended up with a new coach. The team won the national championship about two years later. And actually, I do think that athletics is on a significantly stronger footing at this university than it was when I first became president. I’m sorry, I gave…

AP  54:57  

No, I think that’s right. And I remember hearing Kevin White, then the athletic director, describe his practice of speaking with every captain of every team, to let them know that if there’s something like that that happens, or that they have a concern, that his door is open. And that was an effort to create a culture of openness and responsibility.

RB  55:25  

And responsibility, because of course this whole thing is, if athletics is educating — and it is, it’s educating in aspiration and discipline and teamwork — it’s also education in responsibility. In responsibility for your own conduct, and that of your team. And so, as I say, this is an episode I regret. But I certainly can’t deny that I know about it or lived through it. 

AP  55:49  

Thank you for talking about it. And I think athletics is going through an entirely different kind of upheaval at this point with, well, it’s not just name image and likeness. It’s a tremendous disarray in what was a fairly orderly system, despite its various scandals.

RB  56:10  

It was an orderly system based on the idea that students are students enrolled at the university, and also athletes. Now, the idea that they are actually employees and that they should be compensated by outside donors. This used to be — the NCAA existed to keep the interference of outside money with players. That was the worst no-no. Now, of course, we have a system where that’s legally mandated. Since the time when I agreed to visit everyone today, the Dartmouth basketball team has voted to unionize. And the NCAA has seemed to think that — you know, they don’t even have athletic scholarships there. I don’t think they’re one of the top four teams in the Ivy League. Do you suppose there’s a lot of NIL [Name, Image, and Likeness] money for these people? I mean, no disrespect to the Dartmouth basketball team. But we live in a truly crazy time. And I got to see my own craziness. But there’s new craziness now. 

AP  57:10  

That’s right. And it’s hard to know where it will end up.

RB  57:14  

I’d have to say, I always thought that if you’re the president of the university, you have to first begin by asking, what is a university for? And then why do we have this in relation to that mission? Why do we have that in relation to the mission? And actually, you know, I love athletics, but we don’t have athletics to have entertainment. We have it because it’s connected to education. And when all of a sudden you can’t run athletics that way, then then it’s a problem that I don’t — I’m not the right person to solve.

AP  57:47  

We’re in a challenging time for sure. I don’t want to leave us on that note. Maybe it’s about what you think makes Duke uniquely resilient, given that we’ve just talked about a challenging time, as well as many other challenges that universities have.

RB  58:11  

The funny thing about Duke is, it’s full of smart people. But it’s actually also a very communal school, a very good-natured school. At Duke, because it was built out of whole cloth — the medical school is right next to the library is right next to where students live is right next to the athletic field — when I walk across the campus today, I can see absolutely everything as part of a continuum. And it’s a very special feature of this university, how much people take that for granted. And how much they enjoy all the other parts besides their own. And how much they feel they add up to a whole. I mean, it’s quite remarkable. One thing we didn’t talk about, if I could toot one horn. When I came to Duke one of the things that did surprise me was for such a congenial place how little space it had for community activities. We had stadiums, but where were you going to eat? And so the fact that the Duke Endowment gave us the funds to rebuild the key original Duke buildings — Baldwin, Paige Auditorium — but then also what was the West Union. The West Union was a dismal place in which you could not even find your way around, with vending machines here and there. And now it’s not just a beautiful place, and it’s not just [that it] has very good food. It’s a magnet. And so I ate lunch there today. Who did I see? A professor of economics who I used to know. [William] Bill Turner who runs the Divinity School staff, a powerful preacher. Two students came up to talk to me. Somebody introduced a student from Eastern Kentucky to me. And I just thought, okay, I didn’t name it the Brodhead Center. I’m a little bit embarrassed about that. But I’ll tell you, this place is doing the very thing I hoped, which is it’s just a place where everybody gets the continuing education of being part of a community together.

AP  1:00:09  

It is a crossroads. People who might not know each other connect. So there are tremendous opportunities there. 

RB  1:00:17  

I’ve never been in there when I didn’t see somebody I knew, who introduced me to somebody I didn’t know. That’s great. 

AP  1:00:22  

And the Penn Pavilion, which was…

RB  1:00:26  

That’s absolutely right. We never could have done the West Union if we didn’t have a place to feed people in that year. And Bob and Katherine Penn gave us the means to build another space that’s now used all the time. 

AP  1:00:36  

It’s a glass box that can turn into whatever you want it to. 

RB  1:00:41  

Absolutely. I guess, if there’s one thing we haven’t talked about, that I would maybe sign a little note of — which is the people who live in this place, and enjoy it, and give back to it, have no idea how much they owe to the trustees and the alumni who have continued to give the means to make the university able to live up to its promise. When I was president, I had a lot of friends who were university presidents. Generally their trustees were not regarded as one of the things they boasted of. But I’d have to tell you, we never had a single problem where I didn’t feel the goodwill of the trustees, the range of their intellect, their integrity, and their absolute devotion to the health of this place.

AP  1:01:27  

One last question. It’s a small one. So, what are your hopes for Duke?

RB  1:01:32  

David Rubenstein once said, “One last question. Why did you shave off your mustache?”

AP  1:01:39  

Oh, that’s a good question.

RB  1:01:40  

You don’t even remember,

AP  1:01:42  

What are your hopes for Duke in its second century?

RB  1:01:49  

My hope is that Duke, and I even have confidence in this. My hope is that Duke is never content to just be a very good, very highly-reputed school. My hope is that it actually asks itself, what are we here to do? And good though the current answer is, what could we do to make it even better? What can we do to live up to the promise of education for individuals and for the world in an ever fuller way. And have the confidence to try new things? If I were to come back in 50 years, and actually Duke was so pleased with itself that it had now become frozen in place. I would think that this would be the tragedy of Duke. but I’m sure it won’t be true.

AP  1:02:29  

Stay on the balls of our feet ready to move to the next thing. Thank you so much, and thank you for all that you’ve done for Duke.

RB  1:02:37  

Thank you for your friendship and your support in hundreds of roles through the years.

AP  1:02:43  

It’s great to have you back on campus. Thank you.