Alvin Crumbliss was going to take some time off.
After 40 years as a professor of chemistry, and the last three as dean of natural sciences, Crumbliss had earned a sabbatical. He planned to spend it in Genoa, a seaside city in northern Italy known for its history and cuisine.
But instead of stepping back, Crumbliss is stepping up. He agreed to serve for a year as dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and dean of Trinity College after the previous dean, George McLendon (incidentally, also a chemist), left Duke to become the provost at Rice University.
“I viewed it as an honor to have been asked to take this position,” Crumbliss said. “In the end, I didn’t want to pass it up.”
The dean’s job—simply put, running Trinity College—has never been easy. You’ve got to keep the ship on a forward course, and it’s a complicated ship.
“The deans are absolutely critical to mapping and developing the future for the school, and for the interaction between the schools and for making sure we advance on our academic priorities,” Duke Provost Peter Lange explained.
That means regular meetings with deans, department chairs and other representatives of Trinity’s 635 professors. It means working with students who want to do research and with student leaders who want to change policies.
And, as Lange noted, the dean is also responsible for managing Trinity’s roughly $300 million budget, a task complicated by the University’s continuing need to cut spending.
But fortunately for Crumbliss, he’s following in the footsteps of McLendon, who hired many distinguished professors to Trinity’s faculty and fostered interdisciplinary research and teaching as dean of Trinity College and dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences.
“I don’t see any drastic direction changes,” Crumbliss said.
That doesn’t mean Crumbliss will be sitting around in McLendon’s oversized shoes, minding the helm for a year until someone else takes over.
Crumbliss will continue hiring professors and work to figure out how undergraduates fit in on Duke’s new overseas professional school campuses in China and Singapore.
“He’s got considerable vision,” Lange said. “He really understands the underlying culture of us wanting to press forward with innovation.”
That culture extends to students, too.
Crumbliss wants to push more undergrads to do research with professors during their time at Duke.
He has seen the value of this research himself as director of the Crumbliss Lab, where he works with a handful of students each year, studying the role of iron in biological systems. But Crumbliss didn’t just take the top job in Trinity because he’s looking forward to more responsibilities.
Midway through our interview, Crumbliss stopped me in the middle of another question about the challenges of the position.
“You didn’t ask me about the fun part of the job,” he said. “What I enjoy is… talking about the intellectual interests of my faculty colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the natural sciences.”
The fun, as much as the honor, is why Crumbliss opted to postpone his Genoan sabbatical, he said. After all, he’ll still get his chance to go to Italy next year. But the opportunity to lead at Duke, that comes just once.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.