As the Board of Trustees has grown in national scope and diversity of professional background over the years, creating another kind of diversity--equitable representation of minorities on the Board--has also become a goal, although a more elusive one.
Currently, of the Board's 37 voting members, 10 are women, four are black and none are Latino or Asian-American. That means the Trustees are significantly less diverse, at least in terms of race and gender, than the student body. Still, given the challenges that exist and the changes that have already taken place, Trustees and administrators remain optimistic about the Board's makeup.
"It is by any measure a very diverse board that gets more and more diverse... each year, certainly, that I've been on the Board," says Young Trustee Justin Fairfax, Trinity '00, adding that the Board is not trying to fill any kind of racial quota.
As evidence of diversity, Fairfax points to the fact that the newest member elected to the Board--C.G. Newsome, Trinity '72, dean of Howard University Divinity School--is black. So is Wilton Alston, Engineering '81, the new president of the Duke Alumni Association, a nonvoting Trustee.
"It's a difficult question. You'd really like them to get as many [minority members] as possible, but I really think they are making a great effort to get members on the Board," says civil rights attorney and former North Carolina Central University chancellor Julius Chambers, who accepted a spot on the Board last year, but resigned due to a potential conflict of interest with his law firm. "I thought they were doing pretty well."
Most Trustees agree that the Board needs to work constantly at increasing its diversity, even though they say the current number of minority members is reasonable. "Some of us on the Board are committed to making sure that the Board keeps moving in the direction of a Board that is representative of a broad variety of viewpoints," says state legislator and Trustee Dan Blue, Law '73.
Diversity--of race, gender and other characteristics--is important, Trustees say, because it represents a corresponding diversity of ideas that allows for a deeper consideration of all the possibilities that the University is facing.
If the Board is so committed to diversity, why are its members still predominantly white and, to a lesser extent, male? In part, the answer rests on the fact that most of the University's alumni from 30 years ago or more, tend to be white men; since Trustees tend to be older alumni, the pool of potential minority Trustees is limited.
"The Trustee Screening Committee has been quite actively engaged in bringing more diverse Trustees on board, and the only thing that hampers us is that when we send out requests for nominations, most of the names we get are white males--good names, to be sure, but without the kinds of balance we are seeking," President Nan Keohane wrote in an e-mail.
That fact presented even greater difficulties in the past. Duke did not have any black alumni on the Board until 1990; Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, Woman's College '67, who left the Board this year after serving for 12 years, was the first.
"Each year we worked at it, and it seemed to get easier to find some graduates who were African-American," explains Keith Brodie, University president from 1985 to 1993. "Obviously, at a school that just began graduating African Americans in the '60s, you're not going to have a large number to tap."
Of course, not every Trustee need be an alumnus, a fact that can allow for greater flexibility in building diversity on the Board. Chambers is not; neither is Nathan Garrett, a black insurance executive who served from 1976 to 1988.
Ultimately, will the Board become more diverse? It's hard to say, but Fairfax and Blue predict that if Trustees continue to look in the right places, it will. And it's clear that the Board is much more diverse than it was 20 years ago.
In the end, Chambers says, the University is probably on the right track, since the deciding factor for minorities--as it was for him--in agreeing to join the Board will be a perception that Duke is committed to improving diversity at all levels of the University.
"We'll just have to wait and see," he says. "Whether or not people will come on the Board is going to depend, I guess, on whether minorities are convinced that [University leaders] have a real commitment to working hard and being fair with their treatment of minorities--and as I said, I've been impressed, particularly with Dr. Keohane."
--By Matt Atwood
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