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Leon Dunkley, director of the Mary Lou Williams
Center, talks with students. Graduates of the Class of 2001
donated the first installment of multimedia materials for
the center's new library, created to energize and support
critical inquiry of issues of race and social difference.
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A welcoming community built around diversity in all its dimensions
– ethnic, international, and cultural – is critical to
securing the greatest intellectual talent and hence to ensuring
the quality and success of the contemporary university. The best
living, learning, and working environment is one in which its members
are heterogeneous, offering different perspectives from which all
can gain knowledge and skills. Diversity in educational experience
prepares students to live among, work with, and lead diverse groups
of people.
To achieve this goal, Duke continues to focus on increasing its
racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity among faculty, students,
and staff. We are also working to recruit greater numbers of women
in areas such as social science, natural science, engineering, and
business, where, in the past, women have been underrepresented.
Though we are not satisfied with the pace, our efforts are producing
results. The most recent comparative data, published in Black Issues
in Higher Education, show Duke ranked fifteenth in the nation for
total minority doctorates conferred in 1999-2000, 63, or 27 percent,
a higher percentage than Stanford or Harvard. The same issue showed
Duke ranked sixth in the number of Asian-American doctorates conferred
(50), trailing only schools on the west coast such as Stanford and
the University of California at Berkeley.
An article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education published
in the summer of 2001 entitled “Duke’s Ongoing Effort
to Racially Diversify Its Campus,” stated that “(Duke)
has taken more concrete steps to diversify its campus than almost
any of the nation’s highest-ranked universities.” The
article noted that while other universities leveled off their number
of new black hires, Duke has continued to aggressively recruit black
faculty, such as Houston Baker Jr., one of the nation’s most
visible and preeminent scholars of African-American literature and
culture. Since 1988, the number of blacks teaching at Duke more
than doubled. It is now at 75. In addition, Duke almost tripled
its number of African-American students from 56 in the freshman
class in 1984 to 165 in the first-year class in 2000-2001. Duke
also has one of the nation’s best black student graduation
rates. Duke’s professional schools, including medicine, nursing,
and law, are also achieving significantly more diverse student bodies.
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Students receiving master of public policy
degrees prepare to receive their diplomas during Commencement
2001.
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Duke saw a record number of applications from minorities in 2001,
with significant increases in the number of Asian, Latino and African-American
student applicants. “We have been fortunate to see a steady
rise in the number of students of color,” says Christoph Guttentag,
director of undergraduate admissions. “I think a part of that
is that we continually try to refine our recruitment efforts. Another
important part is we’re matriculating a really significant
number of these applicants. When potential students visit Duke and
see the diversity of our campus, that builds upon itself.”
Thirty-four percent of the students in the Class of 2005 are ethnic
or racial minorities: 15 percent are Asian/ Asian-American, 11 percent
are African-American, and 8 percent are Latino/Hispanic.
The rich diversity of more than 100 student organizations –
including Campus Crusade for Christ and Hillel, the Asian Students
Association and La Asociación de Estudiantes Latinos, and
Gothic Queers and the Duke Conservative Union – enrich the
extracurricular experience for everyone, through social gatherings,
film festivals, political rallies, holiday celebrations, and religious
observances.
Information technology is an indispensable component of education
and research in the 21st century. This principle can only be fully
supported by the thorough integration of information technology
into all appropriate aspects of university life. Assessing what
contributes to learning and what doesn’t will be an important
component of our efforts. Students still express their desire for
face-to-face contact with the faculty and we will preserve this
important aspect of the Duke education. Information technology will
be used to create a rich environment that facilitates communication,
learning, collaboration, research, and innovation.
We will increase our use of technology as it relates to enhancing
research and teaching. We set as a strategic objective the incorporation
of some level of online learning into every appropriate class at
Duke. More than 270 courses in arts and sciences use software to
create course web pages and to incorporate learning materials from
audio and video files.
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