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Fact Checker Manifesto on Kunshan
Topic Started: Apr 8 2011, 07:47 AM (316 Views)
Quasimodo

(a manifesto which could easily be applied with only slight changes in wording to
both the lax and the Potti scandals, as well) :

Quote:
 
http://dukefactchecker.blogspot.com/

Fact Checker issues Manifesto on Kunshan


Effective April 8, 2011

(snip)

✔2) Mr Brodhead and his administrators will join in a statement recognizing the appropriate role of all stakeholders in the future of Duke University. The disrespect, distrust and disdain must end: people who make inquiry shall not be treated as traitors.

✔3) The Board of Trustees special committee on Kunshan, headed by David Rubenstein, will add faculty and student representatives, just like other board committees.

(snip)


✔5) Duke University will post everything -- and we mean everything -- related to any aspect of our global ambitions on a website
. Not only for Kunshan, but for the nine other international cities where we are planting our flag.

✔6) With specific reference to the financial aspects of our global ambitions, full details of the current and upcoming budgets for the University in Durham will also be available on the website. We must know how much we are crimping at home to afford this international splash.

The budgets will be clear, devoid of Enron gimmicks. They shall specify clearly capital costs (including furnishings for buildings) and recurring operating expenses.

There shall be specific attention to revealing full details of fund-raising, with appropriate monitoring in place to determine if efforts on the part of Duke Kunshan University are interfering in any way with the mother campus in Durham.

✔7) Stakeholders will have available full specific information to assure that core values of Duke are maintained.

This includes academic freedom.

This includes need blind admissions

This includes affirmative action

This includes non discrimination in all categories specified in our own policy manual.

This includes standards for contractors (such as those building the Kunshan campus and those who will staff such functions as food service). A mechanism shall be established to monitor compliance.

This includes clear guidelines for students and faculty who may wish to involve themselves in individual and organized ways to bring about change in China and other lands. This is a strong Duke tradition -- evidenced by historic involvement in the desegregation of Durham and in helping the city's continuing attempts to uplift itself.

✔8) The University must not only seek to open a foreign university but to arrange its affairs so that students, faculty and others on the mother campus are enriched thereby, and all this shall be apparent.

✔9) FC will add things as they are thought up.
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
Friday, April 8, 2011
Professor Pfau writes amazing Letter to the Editor of the Chronicle

Following is the text as published Friday.

(snip)

Once again, however, the Duke administration has chosen to bypass faculty counsel on another major issue of strategic planning, preferring instead to present the Kunshan adventure as a “fait (presque) accomplit.”

Even more disturbing is that this particular initiative highlights the administration’s growing confusion as to Duke University’s identity. We are (and hopefully will remain) a dynamic and complex research institution in Durham. What we are not (and should not pretend to be) is some multinational corporation peddling an increasingly amorphous and empty commodity marketed as the “Duke Experience.

Had The Chronicle’s independent Editorial Board done due diligence, they would have inquired about the collateral effects of the Kunshan adventure on our finances here at Duke, which, contrary to the starry-eyed projections of our administration, remain a zero-sum game.

For some time now, the administration has been financially squeezing and intellectually starving its academic core units (aka departments), and it continues to do so even now, ostensibly because of a sizeable budget deficit in Arts and Sciences.

This worrisome development has manifestly reinforced the University leadership’s strategy (well known to observant faculty) to shift attention and support to new centers, programs and a flurry of often uncoordinated and ephemeral initiatives—of which Kunshan is only a recent and conspicuous instance. Much of the growing resistance to the Kunshan adventure (correctly noted in the editorial) stems from the faculty’s pervasive alienation from, and distrust of, a University administration that consistently fails to consult its faculty’s collective expertise and wisdom before the fact.

(snip)

A less high-handed and more timely, consultative approach would have allowed everyone to consider and evaluate the Kunshan adventure’s comparative merits vis-a-vis various other, far less cost-intensive (albeit less headline-grabbing) proposals, such as a formal and focused comprehensive faculty exchange initiative.

Thomas Pfau

Professor of German and Eads Family Professor of English
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