2 - SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 2017 - THE CAROLINA TIMES
Duke University president: Diversity
forces new view of problems
By Emery P. Dalesio
Associated Press
(AP) - As questions about
the Trump administration’s
direction on race and col
lege admissions swirled this
week, the new president of
Duke University said his
tenure would seek to expand
diversity at the elite private
campus while preserving
fairness.
Diversity of views and.
knowledge is fundamental
to higher education’s task of
pushing the limits of research
and training problem-solvers,
Vince Price said in an inter
view a month after starting
his job July 1.
Price, 60, won awards as
a political science and com
munications professor be
fore becoming the Univer
sity of Pennsylvania’s chief
academic officer. He was se
lected from that Ivy League
post late last year to take over
Duke University, which like
Penn is located in a city that
is
Diversity is “not a one-and-done. You don’t say, we’re
going to be diverse in five years and check it off your list.
It’s an ongoing commitment we make as institutions of
higher learning,” Price said.
Price’s academic specialty includes the effects of po
litical polls and TV news coverage on helping shape pub
lic opinion. He became a university president the same
month a Pew Research Center poll last month found that
nearly six out of 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning
independents believe colleges have a negative effect on
the U.S. Two years ago, a Pew poll found that a major
ity of the same people believed colleges had a positive
impact.
Price believes the poll reflects an abstraction of uni
versities “that bears little resemblance perhaps to what’s
actually going on on college campuses today” similar to
poll findings that Americans hate Congress as a whole but
tend to approve of their specific representatives.
“I think the challenge is to help make people aware of
what goes on, every day, on a great college campus like
Duke. The kinds of discoveries we make. We advance
those discoveries, commercialize those discoveries,” he
said. “We could do a better job of telling those stories.”
more than 40 percent black and has a growing
Demonstrators took the statue of a Confederate solderate in front of the old
Durham County Courthouse. The base of what is left.
teaching presence in China.
One of Price’s first messages upon arriv
ing in Durham was that he would work to
make Duke a model for diversity in higher
education.
“I see no disjunction between our quest for
diversity and our fundamental commitment to
fairness in the way we manage all aspects of
the university,” Price said recently. “I mean
diversity in a deep way. That is to say, we are
about open inquiry. That’s what universities
are about. And the only way to produce high-
quality, open inquiry is to go out and seek out
difference and bring different points of view,
different perspectives together, so they can be
brought to bear on challenging problems.”
Price spoke after The New York Times re
ported the U.S. Justice Department was seek
ing internally for attorneys interested in race-
based discrimination in college and university
admissions. The department later said it had
no broad plans to investigate whether univer
sity admission programs discriminate against
sftidents leased on race, but was focused on an'
administrative complaint by Asian-American
associations against Harvard University.
Recent years have seen America’s elite
private colleges, many of which have drawn
criticism over race-conscious admission poli
cies, become increasingly diverse.
Minority students made up more than 40
percent of the freshman classes at nearly all
Ivy League schools in 2015, according to
the most recent federal data, while only two
topped that mark in 2010.
Duke’s 6,600 undergraduates last fall were
41 percent minorities and 46 percent white,
according to National Center for Education
Statistics data. Racial data on Duke graduate
programs training more than 9,000 physi
cians, lawyers, business executives and oth
ers were not included in the federal data.
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