A matter of trust

The Board of Trustees is the University’s most important decision-making body—and its most private one. The issues that the Board discusses may not always be appropriate for outside observers, but the Board does not have to give up closed meetings to justify its decisions to the University community.

The Board’s current media policy—which closes its meetings but allows reporters to meet with the president and the Board chair afterward—does half the job of a good media policy. The Board is right to close its meetings—some agenda items, like real estate acquisitions or high profile hires, simply cannot be disclosed until after they have happened. Opening meetings will only waste time and drive important discussions into the back room. We all win when the Board of Trustees can do its job.

We do not need to know every dirty detail of every Board of Trustees meeting—we just need to know what policies the Board has endorsed and, crucially, why it endorses those policies. The Board’s current media policy rightfully keeps the minutiae secret, but does a woeful job of providing public justification for the Board’s decisions.

All members of the University community—from students to Board members—would benefit from stronger justifications for major decisions. The University community has a right to know in what direction Duke is moving and why. But the Board also has self-interested reasons to justify its decisions: It can win buy-in by providing strong arguments for its positions. At the very least, strong justifications would prompt students to reckon with arguments from Trustees rather than to dismiss their deliberations as top-down and out of touch.

The Board currently publishes an anemic “Summary of Actions Taken” report after each of its meetings. Right now, the report curtly gestures toward major decisions—the Dec. 3 report notes that the Board has developed a “New Campus master plan” but says nothing of the matter—and does not elaborate or justify those decisions.

But this report could be the seed of an essential document: the Board’s public arguments for its decisions. Just like the United States Supreme Courts justifies its judicial actions, the Board should justify its policy actions. We are not asking for names or dissenting opinions; we just want to know why, in the end, the Board approved the Masters in Management Studies Degree at Duke Kunshan University or the renovations to the Gross Chemistry Building.

We do not need to look farther than DKU for a cautionary tale. The Board approved the initial $5.5 million of DKU funding in December 2010. But the justification was sketchy, heavy on catch phrases and light on key details, like what the curriculum would look like. Confusion and angst ensued. As late as April of the following year, one professor could still point out the lack of a publicly available, “coherent and responsibly detailed vision for Kunshan.” Indeed, we only found in December 2011, a full year later, that a degree program—the MMS degree—had been approved for use at DKU.

All of this disarray could have been avoided with a strong initial justification for DKU—one that addressed the details of execution and ruled out competing alternatives. We do not want the Board to air its dirty laundry. But we want to know why the University is dressed the way it is.