​Selecting a Young Trustee

While the Editorial Board will not be endorsing a candidate for the Young Trustee election, we thought it necessary and important to take time to discuss the role of the Young Trustee as students make their decisions on who to elect. There are three Young Trustee candidates with three equally forward-looking but nuanced visions for the University. In deciding how to evaluate their candidacies, it is in our estimate vital that students first understand the role itself.

Duke’s Board of Trustees, on which the Young Trustee gains a seat, is tasked with ensuring the fiscal solvency and big picture sustainability of the University and its mission. It is meant to help prioritize the many ambitions of the University given the constraints—financial and other—that are “necessary or appropriate for the good government of the corporation and its various operations.” The Young Trustee, then, must be someone who can scale up a broad knowledge of the University and the breadth of the student experience to begin to think about the University as a trustee. Who can best transfix their one set of experiences onto a totally different scale?

While we do not pretend that any of the Young Trustees will be able intervene with detailed financial or historical analysis in the Board room given their relative youth and experience, we do expect them to provide an important voice when the Trustees are meeting. Undergraduates need a voice that can be innovative, adding ideas to the conversation that help the Trustees prioritize the many proposals that feature in their agendas. Given this role, it is important that the Trustee is well-equipped to represent the voices and communities on campus that are now least effectively translated to the Board. It is this voice—a reflective combination of both innovator and translator—that students must look for as they set out to entrust a peer with being a steward of the entire institution.

When voting, one needs to ask, who is best equipped to do this? Do we need the “typical” Duke student? Is there even such a thing? Should the candidate be mostly judged on their prima facie experiences or the way they are translating these experiences into a platform for the election? Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Each candidate has made unique choices on what their platforms emphasize, but all of them have significant breadth of experience. The role of the Young Trustee is unique, and so too should be its voice–ambitious and bold as it synthesizes the diversity of the undergraduate experience and uses its seat at the table to make sure the stewards of the institution are aware of the most significant aspects of campus life that may not be readily available in financial data or conversations with administrators.

We think that the discourse during the next week leading up to the election can help students evaluate the candidates for these traits. Their effectiveness at driving campus dialogue in the next days will be a good proxy for their ability to be a positive voice in the Board room—one whom will make their familiarity with the undergraduate experience heard, rather than one that will be a token rubber stamp at the table. So, we encourage our peers to search for the most dynamic and authentic voice. At a time when so much on campus seems in flux, find someone who you feel is prepared to think about the most vital issues on campus. More importantly, find the voice that you think will be most engage and contribute to an audience and that has the best vision of the University for a student.