Chapter 4 - Academic Goals and Strategies to Build Distinction
The availability of Ph. D. applicants from under-represented groups in certain fields remains a significant issue. To enhance the pool of potential faculty members, we will create a fund to hire post-doctoral fellows from under-represented groups. We will also make special efforts to recruit graduate students from historically black colleges and universities and like places from which we can increase our pool of diverse candidates.
Hiring by itself, however, will not be sufficient. Retaining these faculty members, assuring their ability fully to pursue their research and teaching programs, and building community will also be critical. Minority, women, and minority women faculty members often face demands on their time exceeding other faculty members because they are asked to serve as representatives on multiple committees and because, in addition to their normal advising activities, they are sought out as informal advisors and mentors by minority students. Better accounting for and rewarding these important activities for all faculty will be an administrative priority as will promoting faculty research programs that bring disciplinary and interdisciplinary tools to bear on issues of race, culture, gender, and ethnicity.
Administrative oversight of these activities will be the responsibility of the newly created Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity and Faculty Development.
Facilitate the integration of teaching and research
Undergraduate education occupies a central place in the vision of Duke University and expectations for our faculty. The Faculty Enhancement Initiative must encourage and support the balance between - or perhaps more aptly put, the integration of - undergraduate education and research. For faculty currently at the university, we must provide opportunities, in addition to the normal sabbatical leave, for deepening research, fostering collaborations, learning new methodologies, and creating new courses within and across schools. Through use of strategic resources, several university-wide institutes, such as the Social Science Research Institute, are developing faculty fellows programs. Such collaborative programs impact research through joint grant proposals and interdisciplinary work, as well as advance curricular offerings through development of new first-year Focus clusters and interdisciplinary courses.
Technology and its effective educational applications can also serve as the means for creatively integrating faculty research and teaching. Expanded use of educational technology allows faculty to bring their own, real-world research projects, data, and experiences into the classroom, thereby strengthening their ownership of the teaching enterprise and making it more personally meaningful. Technology connects students more directly to faculty scholarship, fostering greater engagement with the culture of research. We seek to pursue thoughtful applications of educational technology and to lessen the view - and rewards for the view - that research and teaching are separate and competing endeavors.
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