What does a good Young Trustee (YT) application look like? The fewer cliches, the merrier—that old rule of writing has special significance in the YT race.
There are two categories of cliche that have infected almost all YT apps, in one way or another, during the last few years.
First, there are the old Duke commonplaces. Terms like “campus culture” and “global [anything]” are vague and only hint at a specific meaning. As has been thoroughly hashed out in these pages, though often indirectly, “campus culture” is usually a generic placeholder for “things people do here that I don’t like.” “Expanding Duke’s global reach” might mean anything from “doing more recruiting in Kenya” to “praying that Duke Kunshan University (DKU) turns a profit someday.” Like most other euphemisms, these terms aren’t malicious in themselves—they’re just convenient for the speaker and unhelpful to the listener. They need to be clarified as soon as they’re used, or else they’ve been used to distort rather than to illuminate.
Second, consider the buzz-terms we’re deluged with both on and off campus. Jargoning by corporations and educators has anesthetized us to terms like “critical thinking” and “strategic vision.” Terms like these always beg the question, “Is there a more precise and specific way to put that?” If a more precise translation isn’t offered, you know the words were used as a ruse to begin with. And if there is indeed a better way to say it, why use the jargon in the first place?
Fun with numbers! Play along at home—you can find each candidate’s application on his website. This year’s three finalist apps use the term “strategic” six times in total—four for Mandl, two for Danesh and none for Wilson. In fairness to Danesh, he was referring to proper nouns both times (e.g., “Undergraduate Experience Strategic Planning Committee”). And as always, we have a mad horde of “globals.” Some form of “global” was used 23 times—nine for Danesh, eight for Wilson and six for Mandl.
Using some of these phrases is unavoidable—we all have to say “campus culture,” even if only to give a sarcastic nod to that term’s cult following. But remember that the YT essay applications give the most thorough account of how each YT finalist thinks of the job and, more importantly, how he thinks about Duke. Cliche-riddled essays are of course ugly, but there’s more at stake than aesthetics where YT apps are concerned.
We want a YT who sees Duke differently than older trustees do. As all of this year’s YT finalist applications point out, the YT is the trustee with the most immediate knowledge of the actual Duke undergraduate experience. The YT is not officially a student representative. But the undergrads who elect the YT owe it to ourselves—and to Duke—to give the Board of Trustees a new member who understands us and will advocate on our behalf. Older trustees know Duke as a sprawling, expensive institution and as a brand. The YT knows Duke as a place where he (and we) recently studied. If you want proof that these sets of priorities are not necessarily aligned, look no further than the consistent and ongoing student skepticism about the trustee-backed Kunshan adventure.
A good YT has to do two things if he wants to do right by Duke undergrads: 1) earn the respect of older, richer, more powerful peers and 2) make it clear to other trustees when their goals and methods fail to serve Duke undergraduates. These aims are of course two sides of the same coin. The idea is to be neither a pushover nor a rube and always to keep undergraduate interests in mind.
Where do the essays, warts and all, figure into the YT’s appropriate role? The essays give us an opportunity to see how Kaveh Danesh, Michael Mandl and Oliver Wilson respond to broad, yet crucial questions like: “What is your perception of the role of Young Trustee?” Questions like these are always partly tricks—it’s tempting to answer them banally to answer generality with generality.
Any candidate who takes the easy way out and leans on vagaries and cliches is signaling that he’s in danger of drinking the Board of Trustees’ Kool-Aid without asking what flavor it is. That is, if you can’t avoid sounding like a marketing brochure or a muddled column in The Chronicle, why should we believe that you’ll be incisive and self-aware enough to hold your own on a board full of experienced bigshots?
A YT whose application reads like an audition for Mike Schoenfeld’s job probably won’t be good at anything other than sticking to the party line. We want a YT who can be a dissenter when he needs to be, so we want a YT who talks about Duke in language that is neither generic nor derivative of what everyone else is saying. Now is a good time to remember that “leadership” isn’t just one of the headings on your resume.
Connor Southard is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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