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Lange retires
Topic Started: Feb 23 2014, 09:56 PM (504 Views)
Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://today.duke.edu/2014/02/lange15

Peter Lange Looks Forward

Longest-serving provost prepares to step down at the end of semester
February 20, 2014

(snip)

For the past decade, current President Richard H. Brodhead and Lange have met for at least 90 minutes a week to discuss university issues. Those conversations are a highlight of the day for Brodhead.

[At least 90 minutes a week for a year during the lax case...]

"I remember the first time I met him," Brodhead said. "I had been appointed president, and I knew a little about him but we hadn't talked. We just sat and talked about plans, and I immediately thought he was going to be great to work with. Peter doesn't have good and bad days. He gives attention to all the issues in his sphere. He always approaches them with curiosity and resourcefulness and with attention to the well being of Duke University."

Colleagues say Lange has put his stamp on Duke by a combination of approaches. On one hand, he has an open-door policy, as with the Africa Initiative, and is willing to hear new ideas and act quickly on them. Lange has built flexibility into the decision-making process, said Susan Roth, vice provost for interdisciplinary affairs.

(snip)


There have been bumps along the way. Some faculty members have been vocal about feeling sidelined on strategic issues such as online education and Duke's plans for Duke Kunshan University (DKU). Other critics claim Duke's administrative plans for faculty diversity have produced better numbers but not enough change from the bottom up.

[NO MENTION of the biggest bump along the way...]

But even when there have been setbacks on details, the overall strategic vision appears to have wide support. Lange can point to strong faculty and student involvement in different initiatives -- from Coursera online courses to Bass Connections, a new interdisciplinary curriculum based on contemporary problems.

(snip)

After leaving office, Lange will take accumulated leave before rejoining the faculty. He won't return to European politics, saying too much has happened while he was provost for him to catch up on the scholarship. Instead, his future scholarship will build on what he has learned from the Duke experience.

"We've have had a culture that has been built around ambition and innovation for quite some time, at least dating back to Terry Sanford," he said. "We've moved from being a place that looks at others to decide what we should be to one that looks at ourselves when deciding what to be.

"We have an intellectual vision of how a 21th century university should prepare students, conduct research and contribute to the development of knowledge and to society. Now, other schools are looking and copying what we do."
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2006/11/stubbornness-of-facts.html

Nov. 30. 2006

Duke Provost Peter Lange has been the only figure in the administration whose acts suggested a recognition that promoting due process and the presumption of innocence in what amounted to a witch-hunt environment required going beyond for-the-record rhetorical formulations. Lange issued a public statement terming Houston Baker’s diatribe “a form of prejudice,” the “act of prejudgment: to presume that one knows something ‘must’ have been done by or done to someone because of his or her race, religion or other characteristic.”


Quote:
 
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2012/02/two-e-mail-chains-or-r-brodhead-movie.html

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2012
Two E-Mail Chains; Or R. Brodhead, Movie Critic


E-mail 1, from Brodhead to Moneta and Alleva, 9 or 10 April 2006:
"They have human needs."

Perhaps this can be Duke's new marketing slogan: "Send your sons to our school, at $50K/year: Our president understands they 'have human needs.'"

"We can't do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they have behaved with honor."

(snip)


E-mail 4: Lange to senior administrators, later that morning:

Posted Image


This e-mail from Lange, in response to Brodhead's missive, suggested that one "humane" person did exist among Duke's senior administrators. The e-mail suggests that Dean Sue probably fell into this category as well.

Presciently and perceptively, Lange warned that Duke's throw-them-to-the-wolves policy toward the lacrosse players "is probably mistaken."

Somewhat surprisingly, based on his closing paragraph, even Lange doesn't appear to have considered that a rape might not have occurred. It would have been shocking at this stage if any Duke administrator was certain that the accused players were innocent. (I certainly wasn't certain of it at this stage of the case, following things as I was exclusively in the media.) But it's equally shocking that the Duke leadership doesn't appear to have considered absolute innocence even as an option. That oversight helps explain why Brodhead didn't cover himself with a few throw-away presumption-of-innocence lines in his April 5 and April 20 statements.

The final e-mail, with Brodhead responding to Lange.

Posted Image

Even the clueless president appears to have realized that the lacrosse players and their parents wouldn't welcome a sit-down with the hopelessly-biased Moneta (who was firmly on record, by this point, as saying he didn't believe the players were innocent).

Brodhead's obsession with p.r. came in his comment about the "need to be on script"--which strongly implies that his "whatever they did was bad enough" comments were part of the "script" Duke had elected to follow.

(snip)

[/big]
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
[NO MENTION of the biggest bump along the way...]


This isn't ancient Egypt, where you can erase history by chiseling away the stones.

(Or by demolishing the Buchanan Blvd. house.)

The Duke scandal (not a lacrosse scandal) isn't going away just because Duke refuses to speak
about it...

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Mason
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Parts unknown
.
At first, I thought the title was Large Retirees.

Hitting a little too close to home, there Quasi. where are those glasses


.
Edited by Mason, Feb 24 2014, 12:17 AM.
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