From the category archives:
If the recession has you hunting for work, Duke is probably not the place to send your resume.
The University is on track to receive 125,000 applications for non-faculty jobs this year, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said.
“And of course, we have no jobs,” he added.
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Several people in the Sanford School of Public Policy want to help prevent people from making poor decisions when they drink.
Although they may not care whether people who imbibe keep their clothes on, Philip J. Cook, professor of public policy, and Maeve E. Gearing, a doctoral candidate in public policy, want to keep them off the roads.
Cook and Gearing co-authored an op-ed article that ran in the New York Times Monday about ignition-interlock devices. These devices are breathalyzers that attach to the ignition of a car and will prevent the vehicle from starting if the driver is intoxicated, which if widely used could save as many as 750 lives a year, according to a National Highway Transportation Safety Administration report estimate.
Currently, eight states require drunk-driving offenders to have ignition-interlock devices installed in their cars and 25 states require repeat offenders to install them, according to the article.
But in 2007, only 146,000 ignition interlocks were in use, they wrote, adding that the reasons were clear: the devices are expensive to install and there is little enforcement or oversight of their installation.
The authors suggest courts connect installing ignition-interlock devices with substance-abuse treatment requirements and only allow offenders to remove the devices when they do not try to start their cars while drunk over an extended time period.
“The ignition interlock could be an extraordinarily effective way to prevent drunk-driving recidivism,” Cook and Gearing wrote. “But it can save lives only if we make sure people use it.”
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When I sat down with Fuqua’s Kathie Amato, assistant dean for executive MBA programs and associate dean for the Master of Management Studies program, and Deputy Dean Bill Boulding, or spoke via telephone with Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard about the new Master of Management Studies, the question of why Duke does not have an undergraduate business program often arose.
The University once had an undergraduate business program—it ended in 1979, the year Sheppard came to Duke.
“The reason we got out of it is a belief that business is inherently narrowing as a subject matter, and if it is the first thing you learn, you are really ill-prepared for the world you are about to enter,” Sheppard said. “We believe that, we inherently believe that.”
He said the creation of the Master of Management Studies program does not indicate that Duke should have an undergraduate business program.
“Is the existence of a law school evidence that we should be teaching law in undergrad—silly question,” he said. “I’d say the same thing about what we’re doing.”
Amato drew from personal experience to help explain the lack of an undergraduate business program.
“We really like the marriage of either the strong base in the liberal arts or the strong base in the sciences… with [the Master of Management Studies program] because we really believe that when you combine those two, it is a far more powerful combination and really gives someone the benefit of what we believe is a true Duke sort of education, quite frankly,” she said. “I was a religion undergraduate who immediately went to school and got an MBA. The fact that I have that very strong liberal arts, religion, philosophy background was very huge to me throughout my career.”
Duke does have a broader option for students interested in business, the Markets and Management Studies Certificate program.
“If you want to go into business, business school, start a business, or work for a business, this is the way to do it,” said sociology professor Lisa Keister, director of Markets and Management Studies. “The whole idea, especially at Duke, is that you have very broad liberal arts training…. That is still true in the certificate program.”
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The controversy surrounding the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a black Harvard professor, has brought issues of race and prejudice back into the media spotlight.
Most of the attention has been focused on how black men and the police view each other. But some light has also spilled onto the year Gates spent in Duke’s English department, a period Gates described as, “The most racist experience I ever had in my professional life,” according to a 1993 New York Times article.
In the 1993 article, which focuses on Duke’s struggle to attract black professors, Gates’ contributions paint an unfavorable picture of the University.
“No matter what kind of car I drove or house I had, it was assumed it was a gift from the university,” Gates told the New York Times. “It was all a ‘Where did that nigger get that Cadillac?’ kind of thing.”
This characterization of Duke (though not Gates’ 1993 comments) was raised again Friday on the front page of the New York Times Web site by Stanley Fish, a regular blogger for the paper.
In a blog post titled, “Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again,” Fish, who was chair of Duke’s English Department when Gates was hired, describes how Duke professors questioned Gates’ academic credentials, speculated on his salary, and spread rumors about him when he left the university. He also says workers and delivery people at Gates’ house routinely mistook the professor for a servant, a mistake whose message was, Fish writes, “What was a black man doing living in a place like this?”
By the time Gates left Duke, he had taken to calling the University “the plantation,” Fish says.
But according to an ABC-11 story, also published Friday (which brought up Gates’ 1993 description of his time at Duke) both students and administrators say the situation for blacks at Duke has improved since the early 1990’s.
And a 2002 report from The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education ranked Duke first on a list of prominent universities, based on its success at hiring black professors and attracting black students. Still, the journal’s description of Duke notes racial segregation among students and high turnover among black faculty as continuing problems at the University.
Nevertheless, it concludes, “A decade ago, Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. called his one year experience at Duke the most racist experience of his academic life. But clearly the climate at Duke for both black students and black faculty has improved immeasurably since that time.”
Duke saw the fruits of this improved climate last year, when it hired J. Lorand Matory who had been co-chair of Harvard’s Association of Black Faculty, Administrators and Fellows and a professor of anthropology and African and African American Studies, to chair the University’s African and African American Studies Department beginning this month.
The hiring represented a reversal, of sorts, of Gates’ decision to leave Duke for Harvard, The Chronicle noted at the time.
As he discussed leaving Harvard with the Boston Globe, Matory said Harvard’s professors were not diverse enough. “Harvard clearly has an insufficient number of African-American professors, and it’s being abandoned by one more,” he told the Boston Globe last September.
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