Considerable progress is being made on the campus of Duke Kunshan University, Provost Peter Lange said at Wednesday evening’s Duke Student Government meeting.
Lange updated the Senate on DKU as that campus comes closer to finishing construction and opening to students. Next week, he will be submitting an establishment proposal to the city of Kunshan that will outline the plans that Duke intends to take after construction is completed. He said there has been some feedback from students concerned that DKU construction is depleting funds that could be allocated to the arts and sciences at Duke.
“Undergraduate financial aid is costing us a lot of money and causing a squeeze in the arts and sciences funding, not DKU,” Lange said. “DKU is just a drop in the bucket.”
He estimated that Duke will be required to pay about $5.5 million each year to keep DKU running. This small fraction of Duke’s total expected expenditures in the next five years, he noted. To date, the University has raised between $6 and 7 million dollars for DKU.
“No top quality university pays for itself with tuition,” Lange said, adding that Duke will pay 50 percent of the operational costs of DKU, and the city of Kunshan will contribute the other 50 percent.
Unlike Duke, DKU will not be need blind to the financial needs of its applicants, but Lange said the tuition rates will be “very sharply discounted” for Chinese students. He added that most of the buildings’ frameworks have been completed, and the campus is beginning to look a lot like the models. Currently, the construction contractors are focusing on completing the interiors of the main buildings.
“We are not there yet, but when you see the campus coming out of the ground and the buildings in place, you can really see how the campus is going to emerge,” Lange said.
Duke is setting the standards for the construction, but the city is paying for all of the costs. There have been some conflicts on the building standards, Lange said, citing a miscommunication between members of the construction team that resulted in the ceilings of a building being finished before the plumbing and electrical wiring had been installed. The Chinese construction workers had planned to compensate for the oversight by installing the ductwork below the ceiling.
“That may have worked if everyone was my height, but there would be no way someone like Mason Plumlee would be able to walk through that room,” Lange said.
Lange noted that despite differences of opinion on some work standards, the city of Kunshan and the Chinese government have been very supportive so far in the process of completing the campus. He added that Duke has been guaranteed full academic freedom on campus, but there are back-up policies that will be put in place if academic freedoms are interrupted.
The campus has space for about 200 residential students, but when DKU first opens, there will not be full-time undergraduate students. There will be programs for undergraduate students to spend a semester at DKU, and there will be full-time graduate students. Four to five years after the campus opens, DKU will begin offering its own undergraduate degrees, Lange said.
There are many aspects of the academic experience at DKU that will differ from a student’s experience in Durham. For instance, students will only take two classes for seven weeks at a time, with the courses covering material twice as fast is typically done at Duke.
“We want to try things out there and bring them back here,” Lange said. “China has a lot of student talent.”
The curriculum at DKU will be taught exclusively in English.
Applications will be accepted through the Duke Office of Admissions.
In other business:
Students studying in Lilly and Perkins Libraries will no longer have to worry about their electronics dying in the middle of a study session.
Sophomore Brandon Sassouni, senator for services, presented legislation to use the DSG surplus fund to purchase a total of 50 computer chargers and 90 phone chargers.
“Everyone has had a time when they wanted to go to the library to study, but they had to go back to their room instead because they needed a charger for their phone or computer or both,” Sassouni said.
The chargers will be given barcodes and checked into the library system. Students can check out the chargers for the duration of their time in the library. If the chargers are stolen or damaged, they will be charged to the student’s bursar account.
He added that the staffs of Lilly and Perkins fully support the legislation, which passed unanimously.
Senator for Services Lavanya Sunder, a freshman, proposed legislation to encourage on-campus dining vendors to donate unsold foods to local charities. She added that there have been many requests for excess on-campus food donation through the Fix My Campus program. Sunder created a petition to gauge the interest in the legislation, and it received over 560 signatures in one day.
There has been “mixed luck” with vendors agreeing to participate in the donations, Sunder said. She added that if administrators supported the donations, it might result in more vendors participating.
Under the Good Samaritan Laws in North Carolina, vendors cannot be held liable for any food that they donate. Sunder said that most of the unsold food on campus is thrown away when it is “perfectly safe to consume.”
The legislation passed by unanimous consent.
Beth Fox, director of the Academic Advising Center, announced that there will be changes in the undergraduate advising beginning with the Class of 2017.
Previously, an undergraduate advisor was assigned an average of between 12 and 18 first year students. Fox said that beginning in the Fall, advisors will receive an average of 6 freshmen.
She added that the Academic Advising Center is expanding the algorithm for how incoming students are matched with undergraduate advisors. Previously, students filled out their three top academic interests to be matched with advisors. Now, there will be seven levels of compatibility to match students with advisors.
Sophomore Joyce Lau was elected the chair of the Student Organization Finance Committee for the 2013-14 academic year by a Senate body vote.
She was chosen over juniors Matthew Schorr and Jerome Utley.
Lau said she was best suited for the role of SOFC chair because she is opinionated and has a breadth of experience in student groups on campus. She served as the treasurer of DSG this year.
Executive Vice President Patrick Oathout, a junior, said he was “really underwhelmed” by all of the candidates.
Oathout read a proposal to amend the process for selecting the Young Trustee Nominating Committee.
“I understand the concern that DSG has too much influence on the process, and I think we should try to mitigate that,” Oathout said.
The proposal will be discussed and debated at next week’s meeting.
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