Graduate and Professional Student Council
General Assembly Meeting
1-29-2008 7:00 - 8:00 pm
Convene: 7:01 pm
I. Approval of the Minutes from 1/29/08
Move to approve the Minutes from the 1/29/08 meeting
Motion Passes Unanimously
II. Announcements
Steve Misuraca – Our next meeting on the 26th we will be holding our Young Trustee elections, probably one of our most important meetings of the year. Tell all who are interested to come. You’ll be getting a blurb with all of the candidate statements of those selected to be the three finalists and they will be coming to address you before you vote on who should be the next Young Trustee.
Eric Vance – Are the elections to be held in this room?
Elizabeth Rach – Yes.
(Secretary’s note – since this meeting, the location has been changed to the Love Auditorium in the Levine Science Research Center)
Christie Eyler – The next GA meeting is February 26th and it will be dedicated to electing our Young Trustee nominee. She just wants to remind all Reps that according to the bylaws, only official Representatives (and not Proxies) can vote in elections for Young Trustee, so please make every effort to attend.
Julie Roy – You have all been getting emails about Duke Impact Night, February 12 6:30-9 pm. This is a cosponsored event between GPSC Community Service and Fuqua Social Interest Club. It is to bring all of the Duke leaders that are involved in active programming. You should come even if you are interested in becoming involved, but are not yet.
Yvonne Ford – There is a Hoops Watch party in Cameron. The doors will open at 8 and there will be several types of games to participate in. If you are an Inferno member, you can swipe in for a point getting into the game.
Elizabeth Rach – Happy Birthday to Crystal Brown and David Kahler.
Jessi – Friday is the Shooters party with a Date Auction to auction off dates with many people at the school. There will be a Trischool mixer, a Financial Service seminar, and Thirsty Thursday at Tylers with Davison Council.
III. President Brodhead’s Address
Crystal Brown – This is President Brodhead’s fourth year as President here and prior to his Presidency he was a Dean at Yale for 8 years. At Yale he was an undergraduate, then got his Master’s and PhD in English there. While at Duke, President Brodhead has focused his efforts on financial aid and international/domestic images of Duke, among other things. He is not just a President, he is a husband to his wife Cynthia and a father to his son Daniel. He also enjoys traveling and the outdoors, and is an avid college sports fan.
President Brodhead – He is happy to be here to address GPSC. He wanted to get a chance to meet us for some time and so will address the body and then afterward there will be a reception to give people the opportunity to interact with him in that setting.
As part of being President, he reflects on the fact that Universities are really there for two things. The first is the extension of knowledge relating to all important intellectual subjects. The second thing is for training human capital, taking people of promise and giving them that kind of challenge and support so that they can go on after the University to perform important work in the world. So the question might arise, what do GnP students have to do with these objectives, to which he would say they have everything to do with them. All of the core functions of the University are ones that GnP students are not only connected with, but ones in which GnP student play pivotal roles. He first thinks of the work of training – for example, in the Nursing School there is an area where you can tend to a “patient” where there are people who can adjust this person’s vital signs. He then met someone in a hospital in the area and met a Nursing School graduate, demonstrating the continuity of this training.
In terms of expansion of knowledge, it’s really not separate from the work of the University. He went into CIEMAS recently and there’s this room called a Clean Room and he didn’t know what this was. He was amazed to find out that it was a room where people were able to work on the level of molecules because the room is so clean. If you go there, you will see that people are trying to figure out how to integrate the math, engineering, and other areas so that you can take a drop of blood and determine whether someone is infected with malaria so that it might be useful as a diagnostic test in countries with high levels of this disease. These sorts of technologically advanced things begin in Universities, and then go elsewhere. You always find GnP students involved in partnerships leading to these advances.
As for GPSC, he has to say that he was a senator from the English department when he was a graduate student. He does want to offer his sincere gratitude to us for the work that we do. GnP studies are different from undergraduate study. People become specialized and knowledgeable in their subjects, but by virtue of this, GnP studies can be very isolating. It’s part of the structure of advanced study. It’s not that you don’t want to specialize, but you don’t want to be trapped, so it is good to break out of it as much as possible. You can choose to do this by making human relationships with others.
When people ask me some of the things that are unique about Duke, he does think that there is more of a sense of community here amongst GnP students here than there is at many Universities. For example, he lives next to the location for the GnP basketball campout every year and knows that it has all kinds of students there together bridging the various programs. He is grateful to Duke that they take the input of GnP students very seriously. Next month you are having a meeting to decide upon a Young Trustee. That is not the case at many Universities, where the only Trustees are old ones. Furthermore, it’s not that you have the Trustees and then a “Mini-me” as the Young Trustee – in fact, the Young Trustees serve as true Trustees. It’s part of the respect that GnP students are accorded here. Another aspect of GnP student involvement he found amazing at Duke is that GnP students here participated in the decision to adjust the health insurance burden so that families were not overburdened by overwhelming premiums for health insurance by partially distributing a fraction of costs amongst all GnP student health insurance users. For him, the fact that GnP students were so participatory in this discussion was amazing.
People often ask him what he sees in this place. He and many of the people in this room have something in common in the fact that all of us have come here within a very recent period. He would only spend his life at a University that took its students seriously. Furthermore, he loves the scale of the school – he loves the fact that it’s not so small that you realize you know everybody within a short time span but it’s not so large that you know that no one would notice if you vanished. Duke has the relevant schools – some problems of the world are problems of business, some are problems of engineering, some are problems of medicine. We have the schools that can train people to solve many of these problems. He does believe that this is uniquely the great American University where the different schools take an interest in each other and have a sense of collaboration and partnership amongst the different schools. He used to think the reason for that is that Duke is a very friendly school. He has found it to be so, but that is not the reason for the cooperation amongst the various disciplines here. This is a school where very smart people want to reach out and use that intelligence to make some difference in the world. There’s not a single interesting problem that any one discipline is able to solve on its own. He loves coming to a University that has a great Genomics Center – well, lots of Universities have great Genomics Centers. But what he finds so interesting is that at Duke, once it was found that you can unravel things in a genetic way, it was understood that this was an ethical issue, but also that it brings in policy issues as well. There are even English professors in the Genomics center. There are so many people from so many disciplines involved. When Duke set up a program to deal with energy issues, who was going to be involved in that? Of course you have to have engineers involved, but at the same time you know you have to have environmental people in there. You are also going to have to have public policy people in there. One of the things that he helped get going here at Duke is the Global Health Initiative – there’s not a single school that is not involved in this. For example, Duke hosted an International Conference on African Health Workers this fall. Africa is thought to have 25% of the health burden of the world and only 3% of health workers. That Symposium was hosted by Medicine, Nursing, and Divinity (which is relevant due to the large component of health work that is provided by missionary workers). The way that you are going to be able to deliver your value to the world is if, in addition to learning about your own specialized area, you also learn something about what the person next to you is learning. Take every opportunity you can to learn about whatever you can.
Yvonne Ford – Her question is that there has been a lot of interest with GnP students in moving outside of their silos, say she as a Nursing student might to get certificate or another degree in another program. What do you see your role as being in facilitating this sort of opportunity for GnP students?
President Brodhead – In a way this picks up on what he was saying a bit ago. He likes the idea that a person studying one thing might realize that it would benefit them to learn something about another discipline. The thing is, degrees mean something – your nursing degree will mean something because you have to go through a disciplined process to get it. No school will make it easy for you to “rack up degrees.” At the same time, what he finds interesting here is that there are certificate programs that involve GnP students that allow people to do crosstraining along the way. Right now they’re in the process of developing a Masters of Science in Global health and they’re assuming that people in nursing, public policy, engineering, and business might take it, and so on. That is the work of the Deans working together with the Provost as Chief Academic Advisor.
Question – How will GnP students be affected by the creation of Central Campus.
President Brodhead – You know that Duke has a Central Campus. When he first came to Duke he had meetings on East and West but it took awhile to realize the inclusion of Central Campus in the overall Duke community. We will be building a very significant expansion for the campus that will include departmental locations as well as student housing, art facilities, international departments and others. He’s been of the view that we ought to have a small segment of all populations living there including people from GnP schools. They also think that it’s important to not just assume that if it were built, GnP students would automatically want to live there. They are in the process of trying to figure out what the optimal arrangement would be for GnP student facilities. There will certainly be facilities to cater to GnP students, but they are still in the process of assessing how this will best be done.
Question – How is Duke handling the recent Graduate student security attacks?
President Brodhead – In his many years of responsibility at Universities, the worst thing that that can happen on this campus is what has happened recently. We’re talking about a crime wave of considerable seriousness in the city of Durham as well as what has occurred on campus. You need the police to deal with that because there are restrictions on what the University directly could have done to deal with that. There is a new police chief in this town and they have been in close touch. It was police work that led to the advances in that case. Duke hosted a meeting of landlords of apartments housing lots of GnP students to investigate security concerns. In the span of your life you’re going to have to live someplace that have security issues. Everyone in the world has to learn to pay attention to these issues. But it is also certainly the great and grave responsibility of Universities to do everything they can and to work with the city to create the environment that is safe.
Question – Duke Conversations, Duke Engage and Distinguished Leaders are all valuable programs offered to undergraduates. Could these programs be extended to GnP students in the future?
President Brodhead – The answer with regards to some of those is sure we could, while the answer to others is that we do offer them to GnP students already. Duke Distinguished Leaders is a program that gives students a chance to sit down to dinner with people who are leaders in the world and is something that GnP students already have more access to just by the nature of their programs. Last year he met Dr. Dell when he was coming to speak to Fuqua students. Duke Engage is the program where Duke has told every undergraduate that if they can take the things that they learn in class to go on site to try to solve problems that may exist, the school will give financial support. That is something they will be looking to extend to GnP students, though to some extent it already does. For example, he knows of Divinity students who, on Duke’s dime, have worked in South Africa on AIDS programs. In Latin America, he knows of Medical students who have done similar things. One of the things that makes him very happy about this school is that there are students here who participate, as some Fuqua students he recently met do, in non-profits in the Durham area.
With regards to Duke Conversations it is where students can invite some interesting person in the world to come and is similar to the Distinguished Leaders program. He’d have to say that in our own schools we have an interesting flow of people coming already, in addition to those that come through these University-wide programs.
Question – The Career Center can be a resource to GnP students transitioning into the workspace. Would Duke consider expanding the Career Service Center to meet the needs of a growing GnP student population?
President Brodhead – The short answer is yes, and the longer answer is that each of your schools has the means to provide career services to help you find careers specifically in your field of study. Career Services is more helpful for people looking outside or across discipline boundaries and has had an excellent head of this office, who is unfortunately leaving but a search is underway for her replacement. In conjunction with that, he knows that Larry Moneta and Jo Rae Wright have been talking about this as well and have commissioned a report, which is now in and that he is very interested to see when it is available to him..
Question – In what ways are GnP students included in efforts to expand the arts?
President Brodhead – Since we largely do not offer GnP academic programs in the arts, other than the Art History and Visual Studies and the Composition component of the Music department, this will mostly be a question about the enrichment of life versus formal coursework. Did you know that Toni Morrison came and spoke in the chapel recently? Did you know that the Solomon Burke and the Dixie Hummingbirds came to campus? There have been a series of great performances here. He encourages us to go to the Nasher because it has a lot of great works. If you are interested in this, you have to show up for these things that are offered because life is so much more interesting if you fill it with these sorts of things.
Heather Mallory – You’re talking about Central Campus and the architects and plans. You would not separate a scientist from his lab, but by moving many of the humanities departments you will be separating all of the readers from the library. And their only lab is the library. Was there any consideration for that?
President Brodhead – Like any analogy, he sees how it applies to a situation, but also sees how it doesn’t. A scientist has to be in the lab with the technology that is needed to do the experiments. That typically is not how it works with the humanities. What you need is proximity to the books. There will be a library associated with Central Campus associated with visual studies and there will be adequate transportation to provide proximity to the libraries and books.
Eric Vance – Currently there are plans for a Graduate student center in the Bryan center. He is worried that a lot of money will be spent there and GnP students will say that is nice but it’s not what I wanted. Is there any plans to hire a consultant to ask the GnP students what they want out of a Graduate Student Center?
President Brodhead - Nothing he knows about Duke suggests that the administration would sit down and draw an idea up and build it and just assume that’s what is wanted. In terms of this issue, he is not the one working most closely with these considerations and you would want to spend your time talking to Larry Moneta and Jo Rae Wright, since they are the ones most invested in these plans. When we create such a place, we need to bring it to a place where people will use it and make it a thing that people will want to use. When we were thinking about locating this center on Central Campus, we certainly heard from GnP students that this would not be as accessible or used in such a location due to its location far from most GnP programs and schools.
Crystal Brown – Elizabeth has put all of the Rep names in a database and will randomly be selecting 10 people to attend a lunch with President Brodhead. They will receive an email notification as well.
People selected:
- Xing Zong
- Liza McClellan
- Liz Faria
- Richard Bouchard
- JD Lubenetski
- Laura Barnard
- Nathan Morton
- Elizabeth Frazier
- Ashley St. John
- Sean McClure
Crystal Brown – We would just like to thank President Brodhead for his time this evening and would like to present him with a GPSC plaque of appreciation. She would love to see this as an annual event. We will be having a reception at the close of the meeting, provided generously by President Brodhead’s office, for people to interact one-on-one with the President, as he very much wanted to happen.
Jessi Bardill – We heard you would like to be involved in some of our student life events so we brought you some shirts for your wife and yourself from our Student Life committee.
Adjourn – 7:55 pm