Nannerl O. Keohane, president of Duke University, jots down a few notes as she listens, with a forthright and assessing gaze, to a group of students who are talking over lunch about the institution’s honor code. She laughs and talks easily as the group downs chicken sandwiches and iced tea.
She has come to seek their advice on how Duke should enforce the code. When one young woman talks about the dangers of forcing students to report on one another, Ms. Keohane breaks the tension with a joke about not wanting witch-hunts at Duke, and then acknowledges the student’s point about the need for trust.
That careful attention to what people have to say has helped Ms. Keohane, a tall and rangy woman with a hint of an Arkansas drawl, to build consensus as she has made changes and defined Duke’s agenda for the past seven years.
Her overall goal, and that of Duke’s Board of Trustees, is to substantiate the reputation Duke gained in the early 1980’s as a “hot school,” so that it truly has the financial and academic resources -- as well as the campus culture -- to be considered among the top universities in the world.
She has walked a fine line in trying to meld the Southern traditions at Duke -- which until the 1960’s was mainly a prominent regional university -- with efforts to improve diversity. Her aim has been to transform the campus culture here from one dominated by alcohol and white fraternities to one that fosters an acceptance of different ethnic and sexual groups. Most on campus consider that a work in progress.
In 1995, she made Duke the first Southern college to offer benefits to same-sex partners of employees. She’s had mixed success in her efforts to increase the numbers of Duke’s minority professors -- a long-time struggle at Duke.
At the same time, she has tried to respect the institution’s history and traditions enough to satisfy trustees and alumni donors.
Her efforts to change the campus culture have drawn fire from many quarters. But Ms. Keohane, a charismatic speaker and a smart political thinker, has won over most critics and helped them understand the reasons for change. Those talents also have helped her deal with crises such as the federal suspension last year of Duke’s research involving human subjects and the upheaval in the English department during the late 1990’s as one star professor after another, including Stanley Fish, left.
Today, she seems to have no real enemies, or even strong critics on campus. She also has raised record amounts of money for Duke from alumni as she has led a $1.5-billion campaign.
“I’m a traditionalist as well as a revolutionary,” she says.
Ms. Keohane is sitting in her office, a room filled with dark wood and shades of blue, dominated by a wall lined floor to ceiling with books. Many are by political philosophers, from Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir.
The president says her work as a professor of political theory at Swarthmore College and then as a feminist scholar at Stanford University, before she became president of Wellesley College in 1981, has helped her in thinking about how to bring people with various, sometimes competing, interests into consensus. Her scholarship focused on “how power is used, how interests are combined, and how people come together to get things done,” she says. “At one level, that’s what I’m now doing with my life, and I find it really fascinating.”
Ms. Keohane also has not hesitated to take a stand with other university presidents on political issues she finds important to higher education. She has written and spoken nationally about the need for diversity on campuses and for affirmative action in admissions and hiring. She is an advocate of merit-based admissions, regardless of students’ need for financial aid.
“She’s clearly one of the leaders among higher-education presidents,” says Neil L. Rudenstine, president of Harvard University. “She’s always on the mark with respect to an issue, and what she says is not just simply sensible, but incisive and worth taking into account.”
He considers Ms. Keohane to be an academic president, a scholar who understands the “core values” of higher education. Her knowledge of political strategy has helped her gain the respect and attention of other college presidents, he adds. “She tends to know when it is likely to be effective to speak out and when it’s likely not to be. She chooses her moments and issues well.”
Spike Yoh, the chairman of Duke’s board, says Ms. Keohane’s political expertise has helped her work with both the trustees and people on campus. “She builds consensus like nobody I’ve ever seen,” says Mr. Yoh. “She listens and considers all the alternatives.”
Some deans say that she doesn’t allow enough time for them to collaboratively reach a decision. But she has written that she thinks a president’s job is to listen and then make decisions -- to lead.
She considers the writings of four political theorists most useful to her as a college president: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Max Weber. “Aristotle talks about us as a species of ‘political animals’ and speaks to the value of shared deliberations,” she explains in an e-mail message. “Machiavelli is trenchant on some of the less appealing emotions that move people in politics; Rousseau is eloquent on how one might bring many selfish perspectives together into the common good; and Max Weber describes politics as ‘the slow boring of hard boards,’ which is exactly what it feels like sometimes.”
Ms. Keohane says she never intended to be a college president. She was chairwoman of the Faculty Senate at Stanford when she was recruited by Wellesley, her alma mater, for its presidency.
“I had no idea what a college president does,” she says. “But it was the lure of my alma mater, and the sense that this was something very important for me to do as a feminist at a time when women’s education, I thought, needed to be brought into clearer focus.”
When she became Duke’s president in 1993, after a dozen years at Wellesley, she was one of the first women to lead a top research university. She had raised $168-million in a campaign at Wellesley, a record for a liberal-arts college then, and Duke trustees say that was one of their reasons for hiring her. But Susan Bennett King, a long-time trustee, says the board was sold on Ms. Keohane when she first spoke before them during the search. “All the old-guard Southern trustees were thoroughly charmed,” Ms. King recalls.
Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of men’s basketball at Duke, says he and other coaches were worried when Ms. Keohane was hired because of her lack of experience handling Division I sports. But she proved a quick study, he says, and forged strong relationships with the athletics director and coaches.
Ms. Keohane saw Duke as an intriguing challenge. Early in her presidency, she was criticized by some trustees as being too distant from professors and students, says Ms. King. But Ms. Keohane made efforts to remedy that.
Now, she is a visible figure on campus, greeting people as she walks across the quadrangle or attends basketball or soccer games on weekends. Students, professors, and others on campus note that she answers all of her e-mail, and gives thoughtful responses, often sending them before 6 a.m.
To sustain her energy, Ms. Keohane runs or swims at the end of an afternoon. She and her husband, Robert O. Keohane, an eminent political-science professor at Duke, have also raised their four children. “It’s very important that my husband is a true egalitarian, and we shared everything at every stage, in terms of child care and housework,” she says. “I’ve been very lucky.”
William H. Willimon, a Methodist minister and dean of the Duke chapel, says Ms. Keohane also is a “relentless” worker. “She grew up as a Presbyterian, and that somehow leads to that. Calvinists are just relentless. They think God works hard,” he jokes.
Ms. Keohane, now an Episcopalian, is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She was born in Arkansas and grew up there, as well as in South Carolina and Texas, as her father, James Overholser, liked to move to new churches every few years. Ms. Keohane says her mother, Grace Overholser, gave up a career as a journalist in order to be a minister’s wife, and found the role frustrating. Many years later, she relaunched her career, as a teacher and writer, and then divorced her husband. She died soon after of cancer, at 58.
Ms. Keohane dedicated her first book to her mother, who “exchanged her press card for an apron when she married.” The president now says she and her younger sister, Geneva Overholser, a Washington Post columnist and a former editor of The Des Moines Register, credit much of their drive to their parents. “We think it’s a combination of our mother’s ambitions for us, in a positive way, not nagging us to do the things she couldn’t do, but just wanting us to fulfill our dreams, plus our father’s belief in our intellectual possibilities, but also his old-fashioned, conventional notions of what women could do, that were not very generous,” Ms. Keohane says. “And so we were sort of trying to live out our mother’s ambitions and show our father,” she adds with a laugh. She also has a brother, Arthur Overholser, an engineering professor at Vanderbilt University.
The months preceding Ms. Keohane’s arrival at Duke had been filled with public questioning of its intellectual environment and campus culture, where the unofficial motto among students was “work hard, play hard.” The novelist Reynolds Price, a long-time professor at Duke, and Mr. Willimon, the dean of the chapel, recently had criticized the dominance of alcohol and fraternities in campus life.
The fraternities, with their predominantly white memberships, occupy university housing in the Gothic stone buildings of Duke’s main West Campus. Female students often felt uncomfortable among the fraternities, as did minority students, Mr. Willimon wrote in a 1993 report. Most black students chose to live on Central Campus, which is separated from the West Campus by 55 acres of gardens. Farther away still lies the East Campus, with Georgian-style buildings that housed the women’s college at Duke until the institution became coeducational in 1972.
Mr. Willimon and Mr. Price say much about campus life has improved through Ms. Keohane’s efforts, including changes in campus housing and a ban beginning in 1995 on campus keg parties, although alcohol remains a problem.
Current and former administrators, professors, students, and trustees say that one of Ms. Keohane’s most important -- and controversial -- decisions so far was in 1994, when she made Duke’s East Campus a residential area for freshmen only. The idea had been floating around the campus before her arrival, but she chose to move it into action, to begin a larger plan for changing Duke’s culture.
“This was a topic that was on the table. It was quite divisive,” Ms. Keohane recollects now. “I think it was waiting for someone to come in and say, ‘All right, this is one we’re going to resolve, and I would like to hear people’s thoughts. I need to know the pros and cons, I need to know more about the history of the place.’”
Janet Smith Dickerson, who was Duke’s vice president for student affairs from 1991 until this past spring, says the unusual system of granting campus housing to selective groups such as fraternities often makes students feel a strong push to join those groups, both for social reasons and to get what they consider the best space. Ms. Keohane’s aim with the new plan was to delay that for a year and try to foster friendships outside of those groups. A few professors would live with the students, to improve the academic environment.
Gary J. Schwarzmueller, executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, says that Duke’s current system of assigning housing through selective student groups is highly unusual. But he says it is equally unusual for a president to try to change campus culture by altering living space.
Since many alumni fondly remembered Duke’s tradition of selective housing, Ms. Keohane formed campus committees and helped them make contacts with alumni and board members, Ms. Dickerson says. The president also worked to win over faculty and staff members who were skeptical.
The critics included Mr. Krzyzewski, the basketball coach, who worried the move would hurt recruitment and force athletes to live too far away from athletics facilities. Ms. Keohane improved the buildings on the freshman campus and met with him there to explain the reasons for the change, he says. He agreed to support it. The tradeoff, over the years, has been that Ms. Keohane has worked to help Duke’s athletics department raise money for several new buildings and improvements to Cameron Indoor Stadium, where its star basketball team trains and plays.
Some alumni and many students still protested. The worst of it, Ms. Keohane says now, was when students, fearing the demise of social life at Duke, picketed on the quad, telling prospective students, “Don’t come to Duke. Duke is going to be ruined.”
Freshmen now may not join selective groups until the end of their first year and are randomly assigned their housing on the East Campus. The result is a more diverse living situation, students say, and despite the early protests, nearly all of them praise it.
But some students feel that environment begins to deteriorate in the second semester of their freshman year, when they feel pressure to join selective groups for their sophomore year’s housing. “On East Campus, you have friends in every dorm, and then housing picks come up for sophomore year, and all the white students go to West Campus, and all the stuff you worked so hard for in freshman year just dissolves,” says Carliss N. Chatman, a black senior, who lives on Central Campus.
Ms. Keohane has resisted calls from some students and faculty members to push the fraternities off campus, in part because she sees the political necessity of keeping them. Some alumni members of Duke’s Board of Trustees also want the university to keep selective housing on the West Campus.
Ms. Keohane says she sees the tradeoff value of keeping the fraternities on the campus while making other changes. “I think they’ve been important enough to Duke’s history and to a lot of people who care about this place that I’d rather work out a way to make them appropriately contributing, reasonably scaled members of the community, rather than,” she snaps her fingers, “kicking them off.”
However, some professors, staff members, and students say the presence of white fraternities on the West Campus results in segregation of minority students largely on Central Campus. “West Campus is where the white parties take place and where the white students live,” says Bunia Parker, an African-American junior. “It’s not very welcoming for many African-Americans and other groups.”
In annual surveys of college students by the Princeton Review, Duke in recent years has continued to rank among the dozen worst colleges in the nation for how often and easily students from different races and backgrounds interact.
Ms. Keohane acknowledges the problems, but says minority students “are not isolated or uninvolved” at Duke. “We are ardently attempting to make Duke feel more inclusive for everyone, and despite some continuing problems (not unique to Duke), I do think we are making progress,” she explains in an e-mail message.
Current and former Duke administrators, professors, and students say the climate has improved during the past decade, and they note that Duke, historically part of the segregated South, only began admitting black students in 1963.
The percentage of minority students enrolling at Duke has increased slightly since Ms. Keohane became president. The proportion of black freshmen increased from 8 percent in 1993 to 10 percent in 1999, while the share of Hispanic students increased from 3 percent to 5 percent. Nearly all of Duke’s minority students graduate.
Duke’s attempt to double the number of black professors has proved difficult. While hiring has increased, retention remains a problem, Ms. Keohane acknowledges. Duke has hired 22 African-American tenured or tenure-track professors since 1993, but the university now has only 29, nine more than in 1993. They make up only 4 percent of Duke’s 693 tenure-track faculty members in departments other than the medical school. Still, that is about double the proportion of black faculty members at other top private universities.
The current hiring plan has no direct requirements for departments, she says, in part because of resentments that arose under a previous plan that professors were being hired to meet quotas. Now, she says, “we’re making sure that people know that they’re not here as some kind of special billet, but they’re here in each case because they’re really wanted and as very contributing and equal members of the faculty.”
Retention rates have improved in recent years, but remain a struggle, she adds. “We try to be attentive in each case, ideally before they even get an offer.”
Houston A. Baker Jr., an African-American professor of English who came to Duke in 1999, says the the number of black faculty members is “pathetic,” and may be due to departmental “insouciance.” But he says he has found the university to be a supportive environment, and believes it is committed to hiring and keeping more minority professors.
Ms. Keohane’s strategy for improving student life after the freshman year includes building two new dormitories near the Central Campus, scheduled for completion in 2002. The dorms, for sophomores, will be joined by an area where all students can mingle. The new housing also will link the freshman campus with the main West Campus and the Central Campus apartments, in response to a complaint by some students that the freshman area is isolated.
Her hope, she says, is that the new dorms will remove the incentive for pledging fraternities in order to get the coveted housing and provide many ways of living together, “so that the whole fraternity phenomenon will be put more in perspective.” She also supports a push this fall by some students to create a social center for various cultures on the West Campus.
Amid all the changes on campus, Ms. Keohane has raised record amounts of money, much of it from Duke alumni, for the $1.5-billion campaign, scheduled to end in 2003. So far, Duke has gathered about $1.3-billion.
Ms. Keohane says she spends about a third of her time traveling for the campaign. She keeps in touch with her senior administrators by e-mail and phone.
She plans to stay at Duke through the end of the campaign, and hasn’t decided what she will do then. She may write down some of her theories about politics and the college presidency. Revealing a note of weariness, she also says she would like a sabbatical, although one wonders if she would rest much. “I would love it. I would really love to. Maybe it’ll even be possible,” she says with a sigh.
Nannerl O. Keohane
Born: September 18, 1940, in Blytheville, Ark.
Education: B.A. in political science, Wellesley College, 1961; B.A./M.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics, University of Oxford, 1963; Ph.D. in political science, Yale University, 1967.
Academic career: Lecturer and professor of political science, Swarthmore College, 1967-73; political-science professor, Stanford University, 1973-81; chairwoman of the Faculty Senate, Stanford University, 1980-81; president and political-science professor, Wellesley College, 1981-1993; president and political-science professor, Duke University, 1993-present.
Books: Author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1980); coeditor of Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology (University of Chicago Press and Harvester Press, 1982).
Board memberships: International Business Machines Corporation, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, National Humanities Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Personal: Married to Robert O. Keohane, professor of political science at Duke -- a second marriage for both. They have four children and five grandchildren.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A35