Sitting in a spacious conference room on the outskirts of campus, the Board of Trustees met this past Founders' Day as they always do to plan, discuss and celebrate the University's latest initiatives. After working much of a Friday in committee sessions, members of the University's most powerful governing body congregated at the Fuqua School of Business to act on resolutions and hear presentations from campus leaders. They met again Saturday, then left campus, with relatively few members of the Duke community even noticing.
Their meetings are short, their work is fundamental to Duke's future, and the atmosphere is a mix of professionalism and jovial backslapping.
But just as Duke has catapulted to national prominence only in the last few decades, the Board of Trustees has not always comprised as diverse and well-known members as it does now.
Pick a category--race, ethnicity, geography, gender, age--and the Board has diversified in recent years. The change has been rather drastic in gender, for example, as the Board is now a quarter female, and relatively modest in other categories. The average Trustee age, excluding the just-graduated Young Trustees, has fallen from 59 in 1992 to 57 today. Whichever measurement one uses, the Board has paralleled Duke's transformation during the last 20 years from a mostly regional institution to a first-tier research university.
"Every board in a way reflects an era and reflects the development of a university, and Duke is a much stronger institution than it was 20 or 30 years ago. The Board is both a reflection of that as well as a contributor," says John Chandler, Divinity '52, chair of the Board from 1991 to 1994.
But although changes to the Board seem to have fit naturally with the University's progression, several factors collided in the past 20 years to force change, welcome or not, among the Trustees. Long-time University president Terry Sanford stepped down in 1985 and returned to politics, to be replaced by an academic, Keith Brodie, who promised to improve Duke's standing as a top-20 university. The Board of Trustees faced growing pressures from the faculty, students and others who openly criticized the structure of University governance and Duke's responsiveness to contemporary issues, like divestment from apartheid-dominated South Africa.
Looking back now, Brodie praises past Boards for their unwavering dedication to Duke, but also says there was a need for change--beginning at the top.
"When I came into the Board, Terry Sanford had been president for 16 years, and he had recruited most of those people," Brodie says. "He recruited many of his friends or other politicians--he ran for [U.S.] president several times, and he served on about 10 corporate boards. And he would meet people there who later became Trustees.... I was faced with replacing them with a younger Board and a Board made up of people closer to the University."
Taking care of business
Perhaps no aspect of the Board's composition was more controversial than the balance between representatives from the academic and business communities. Few Trustees held doctorates, and those who did usually were not the leaders of the Board, says Nathan Garrett, who served as a Trustee from 1976 to 1988. Himself best known as an executive with N.C. Mutual Life, the oldest black-owned insurance company in the United States, Garrett said business executives led the Board and, more than any other group, shaped its priorities.
"There were a few academics at that time, but the bulk of the Board leadership was from industry," he says. "President Brodie was a respected academic when he became president. Terry Sanford, while he was a strong leader, was certainly not an academic.... The two men shaped the Board with the interests that they had."
In 1982, faculty desire to have more say in the University's priorities and in the allocation of resources led Academic Council members to seek structural changes.
Enter the Trustee Nomination Committee.
In just one of several changes in the 1980s to how the Board identified potential Trustees, the committee explicitly sought to increase the number of academics on the Board. Although the committee had no direct authority to appoint Board members, it served as a clearinghouse for potential Trustees whom the faculty considered academically qualified.
"We thought that the Board ought to have the peers of all the people at a University, at a good research university like Duke, and take advantage of their experiences," says Allan Kornberg, a professor of political science who chaired Academic Council in the late 1980s. "You could argue that universities are not just buildings--universities are faculty and students.... As important as the bureaucracy is, it's ancillary to our mission of teaching and research."
The committee had a direct impact on who became a Trustee. Partly because the Board's need for academic expertise was growing along with the Medical Center, Graduate School and other areas of Duke, and partly because of professors' advocacy, more academics joined the Board. Brodie says the 1987 appointment of Herman Postma, former director of the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory, resulted directly from a physics department nomination.
The committee remains just one source of nominations, however, and Trustees from the business world still dominate the Board's leadership, notes Dr. Dale Purves, current chair of the Trustee Nomination Committee and chair of the neurobiology department.
"It sounds like a sort of grandiose committee, but it's not. There are a lot of sources for nominations for the Board of Trustees, the faculty being one of them," Purves says.
Even as the Trustees have welcomed more academics into their ranks, more top-flight business executives have joined as well. President Nan Keohane credits leaders such as current Board Chair Harold "Spike" Yoh, Engineering '58, chair and CEO of Day & Zimmermann, and Trustee Roy Bostock, Trinity '62 former chair of Bcom3 Group, Inc., with bringing stronger financial and business expertise to the Board.
The deep end of the pool
One of the most important sources for nominations is also new: the boards of visitors of various schools. Although the School of Medicine has retained an advisory board for decades, other parts of the University have only recently recruited boards of visitors. Now that they exist, they serve as a sort of farm system for the Board of Trustees, testing out potential applicants for their commitment and ability to serve. Yoh says the Sanford Institute of Public Policy's board, founded in 1980, and Trinity College's board, founded in 1990, have been among the most fertile grounds for new Trustees.
Moreover, as the University's alumni base grows and becomes more diverse, Trustees have a deeper pool from which to draw new Board members. The undergraduate body reached its current size of over 6,000 only in the 1980s. Integration began in 1961, and racial and ethnic diversity on campus have increased ever since.
Due to the length of Trustees' terms on the Board, its composition--regarding race, ethnicity, gender, age, geography or profession--has evolved slowly. Several structural changes have attempted to speed up turnover, however, including the creation of Young Trustee positions in 1972 and a policy soon after limiting Trustees to two consecutive six-year terms.
Together with a policy of involving more Trustees, administrators and faculty members in screening candidates, those changes brought renewed energy to the Board, says John Koskinen, who served as Board chair from 1994 to 1997.
"There's a continual influx of new members to the Board, which brings in new energy and enthusiasm as new members join," he says. "Board members realize there is a beginning, middle and end to their terms, and then you get new people with new ideas."
A new set of priorities
Not surprisingly, who is on the Board has had a significant impact on the projects it takes on and how it acts on those projects, say Trustees and administrators. A combination of necessity and interest has led Trustees to deal with growing pains in the Duke University Health System, to reevaluate the University's financial management under Duke Management Company, and to take more of a role in planning.
"The changing demographics of the Board, reflecting those of the University itself and the alumni body, have also been reflected in agenda priorities," Keohane wrote in an e-mail. "The Board is more interested in issues around diversity and community involvement, in sophisticated budget management, and in intensive strategic planning on key academic priorities, than they used to be."
Brodie says one need look no further for evidence of Trustees' changing priorities than recent changes to residential life. He says that although administrators were the ones who eventually implemented the decade-long residential life review, Trustees offered many of the ideas and much of the momentum for the project. Trustees toured other universities and helped administrators analyze options, and gave final approval to the plans. The review resulted in changes like an all-freshmen East Campus in 1995 and in requiring all sophomores to live on West Campus beginning this year.
Trustees' willingness to become involved in residential life and other student issues originated, Brodie says, from the Board's changing composition.
"There was a trend to get younger people on the Board--people who were close to the University and understood the problems of the day, who had made good in the world and who could relate their experience," Brodie says. "I think that has resulted in the dramatic rise in student services. The new dorms, more computer services, athletic facilities have all arisen in part from a greater sense of student needs."
Except for a one-hour session in the middle of their weekend-long meetings, the Trustees now hold all their sessions in private. Yoh says the presence of administrators, the press and others was too distracting.
"It allows people to speak more openly and to be able to focus," Yoh says. "It wasn't just students in the room, but there would be 20 or so other administrators. It was a whole group of people getting involved, and they all had agendas."
Koskinen points out, however, that the faculty and students still have access to the Board, as they have representatives who serve on the various committees. Those representatives, including student government leaders and average students, allow for a full vetting of issues, he says.
Still, the Board strives to stay out of the public eye, choosing instead to defer to the administration, or at least to air their concerns in private.
"Anything we can do to lower the profile of the Board is wonderful," Yoh says. "The president and her staff are running the University, and they deserve the attention. We try to keep it as low-profile as we can."
A responsibility to the past
Trustees likely succeeded in remaining mostly out of the spotlight this Founders' Day weekend, with their meeting overshadowed by a football team that is winning more and a campus that was preoccupied with Greek Week and other festivities. But even if a low profile characterizes the Board of Trustees, so apparently does a changing sense of its place at the University. As it shifts, Koskinen says, the progress tempts some to pass judgment on a Board that, comparatively, may have been inefficient, less responsive and more homogenous. But Koskinen says the greater task is planning for the future.
"As things evolve, it's not a criticism of the past. It's really a natural growth of an institution," Koskinen says, "and what's made it most productive is that it's an ongoing dialogue: How can we best discharge our fiduciary responsibility to the University?"
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