(Sorry. we are traveling and cannot post headlines at the moment)
Duke women’s soccer player Anastasia Hunt ’14 and her mother survived the Moore, Oklahoma tornado inside this above-ground shelter. Both are fine, but the storm destroyed their house, car and belongings.
“I’m physically okay and I’m alive, most importantly,” she writes.
Another athlete, basketball player Richa Jackson, from Midwest City, Okla. Jackson was visiting a cousin and both had to seek shelter. Both are safe.
So now we know their names, and the Chapel did not topple. The Board itself and the Administration follow a doubly opprobrious policy in “electing” new Trustees in secret, and then absurdly withholding names of the “winners” so that months pass before we find out who the future leaders of the University are.
We rightfully revealed immediately what we were able to find out. And we pledge we will continue to work hard to illuminate all corners of the University.
Taken one at a time, we’re favorably impressed with each of the new Trustees. Particularly with “Pag” as Loyal Readers might conclude from the biography that we assembled.
But taken together, along with the three chairs of Duke Forward, and the new leadership team at the Board, we see a dangerous trend building. Perhaps it is inevitable as the University seeks to raise more than $3 billion, but the people leading the charge have lives that focus on money, not ideas. They have lives that revolve around measuring and extracting profits today, rather than building long term value.
And their work occurs by manipulating the corporate financial structure, not by invigoration and invention.
Hopefully the leaders of Duke will be able to separate the theory and methodology of their private lives, with their responsibility to insure the perpetuity of this unique place.
Who says the political parties in Congress can’t get together? Just watch what happens on Tuesday when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hauls Apple’s chief, Timothy Cook MBA ’88. into a hearing on tax avoidance.
“Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax offshore tax haven,” said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chair of the subcommittee, which is delving into tax havens. “Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.”
And Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is the panel’s senior Republican, said: “Apple claims to be the largest U.S. corporate taxpayer, but by sheer size and scale, it is also among America’s largest tax avoiders.”
For Cook, the stakes are high: this will be a hearing not only about Apple, which shifted $74 billion out of the reach of the Internal Revenue Service, but about the corporate culture that Cook spawned.
“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former staff director at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “Unbelievable chutzpah.”
Just before midnight, barely 30 minutes after we posted two names of new Trustees given to us by the Allen Building Mole and said we needed the third, a very Loyal Reader who has amazing contacts sent us e-mail! That’s the way this blog is supposed to work!!! Send your tips to GoDuke@DukeCheck.com
(If you missed our earlier post about the first two, scroll down. We explain the process and the secrecy there in more detail.)
The new Trustee was selected also in a secret process with his name withheld until this moment. He is Edward A. (Ned) Gilhuly ’82, a West Coast private equity kingpin who also has an MBA from Stanford.
As Loyal Readers know, Duke has an untenable policy of not announcing the “election” of new Trustees until July 1, when the new Trustees take office. We see no reason for either the secrecy nor the delay.
Gilhuly sits on the board of Duke’s investment vehicle, Duke Management Company. But aside from basic biography, little is known about him; in fact he is not even in the on-line directory of Duke alumni. But apparently the fund-raisers have had little difficulty in chasing him down and establishing rapport.
We are having difficulty finding a picture of Gilhuly; while several possibilities pop up in an internet search, we are unable to confirm any of them. Strangely, Gilhuly’s private equity firm does not include a picture on its website.
In September, Gilhuly’s name was listed on the Steering Committee for Duke Forward.
In the last capital campaign, run by President Nan Keohane, Trustee Ann Bass and her husband encouraged the creation of new professorships by pledging matching funds. There is a Gilhuly Family Professorship in Sociology that arose out of this process, but we do not know if this is the same Gilhuly. Yet.
Gilhuly left Duke in 1982 magnum cum laude and went to work for Merrill, Lynch, the stockbrokers, in its mergers and acquisitions department. In other words, doing fancy deals that could be sold to investors.
He stayed there for four years — and during that time also picked up an MBA from Stanford.
He next went to the dog-eat-dog atmosphere in the San Francisco office of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a some-times controversial private equity firm most often referred to as KKR. The firm is also identified by the name of its most prominent and publicity seeking partner, Henry Kravis. It was in on the vortex of the tech and dot.com booms.
By 1994 Gilhuly was a partner, and by 2000 he was on their central investment committee. By 1998 he was dispatched to Europe to build its business there.
There was a second rising star at KKR whose career path eerily followed Gilhuly’s. They became partners at the same time, they sat on the same internal committees. They were involved directly in 28 transactions where $8.9 billion of equity capital was invested and together sat on 34 boards of directors, mostly of small companies you never heard of: Dillingham, Demag Holding, Legrand, LNG Holdings, MedCath, Merit Behavioral Care, MTU Aero Engines, Newsquest, Owens-Illinois, Red Lion/Doubletree, Rockwood, Smiths, Tenovis, The Marley Company, Union Texas Petroleum, Wincor Nixdorf, and Zumtobel.
The second KKR partner was Scott Stuart.
And in 2006 they struck out on their own and formed Sageview Capital. Gilhuly heads the Palo Alto office. Stuart is in Greenwich, Connecticut. And they have a European base in Stockholm.
Private equity was much in the news during the Presidential campaign, as criticism of George Romney focused on his role in founding Bain. These firms are vultures, looking for companies that are down at the moment and lunging in and getting control. They most often pay for their acquisition by borrowing against the assets of the corporation — and milking it.
There is little concern for the future, and in fact Sageview says it takes the “long term” approach in its investing — as long as three years! Private equity has a reputation of savaging anything it can, closing stores for example of it is more profitable to sub-lease the space, and laying off people.
Few jobs are ever created in the brutal process.
Particularly since it is so highly leveraged by borrowing against assets, the result can be huge profits for the financial manipulators. Gilhuly’s personal wealth is not known. Yet.
Our research did turn up the name of his wife, Karen, and their joint ownership of a $6 million home at 376 Mountain Home Road, Woodside, California, just west of Palo Alto.
Switch on your TV at dawn. There’s Charlie Rose anchoring the “This Morning” program on CBS.
Switch it on late at night, and he’s anchoring a public television interview program.
Hit the radio midday on weekends, and he’s talking for Bloomberg News. And then there are other tidbits, including appearances on 60 Minutes and the CBS revival of Ed Murrow’s Person to Person interviews in celebrity homes.
And soon Charlie Rose — Duke ’64 and Duke Law ’68 — an accidental journalist who, at age 71, is regarded as the “hardest working men in television” — will have a Friday night prime time PBS program too. The announcement will be made Monday.
The new show, to be called “Charlie Rose Weekend,” is in part designed to get the jump on the Saturday and Sunday public affairs interview programs like Face the Nation and Meet the Press on the commercial networks. It will also incorporate footage from Rose interviews over the years.
At Duke, Rose initially was interested in medicine, but switched to being a campus politician active in student government as well as his fraternity. His entry in the often-inaccurate alumni directory omits that and says he worked on the Chronicle, but that’s a stretch as he was never a core member of the staff.
After Duke, he married classmate Mary King ’68, a woman who happened to become an assistant to Bill Moyers, one-time White House press secretary and long-time PBS mainstay. And Rose got his entry: while working for a New York bank, he was a weekend reporter on Channel 11 (Daily News) in New York and then a producer for Moyers.
The marriage ended after 12 years and Rose became a fixture on the New York dinner and benefit circuit, sometimes escorting the grand dame Brooke Astor, two generations his senior. His frequent companion over the years has also been Amanda Burden, step-daughter of the late CBS founder William Paley and a leading New York socialite. It’s been a long road from growing up in Henderson, North Carolina, the only child of tobacco farmers. Among his homes today is a 575 acre farm in Oxford, NC.
Rose: “I get up every morning with a new adventure. The adventure is fueled by interesting people. I get a chance to control my own destiny. I do something that is immediately either appreciated or not. I get feedback.”
Stay tuned.
We are still waiting several of the most important Form 990′s for various divisions of the University, including the investment arm (Duke Management). Some of our analysis is delayed until the receipt of these items, which were filed on paper forms. We have the 990′s that were filed electronically. This is for the 2011-12 year.
When we reported the elevation of David Rubenstein ’70 to be chair of the Trustees, we noted that three new members of the board had also been elected, but that Duke PR was withholding their names.
That’s one of the most absurd policies around here: it’s bad enough that our leaders are selected in secret, but then their names are kept in pectore. The official announcement will come just after July 1, which is the date the three newbies take office.
Loyal Readers, we see no reason for you to have to wait. So…… the Allen Building Mole comes through again!
First, who is retiring:
– Rick Wagoner ’75, who has been chair for the past two years, because of term limits. Bye bye. We believe he will remain on the board of the most important subsidiary, Duke Health, which is, as we have commented before, an unfortunate weaving around a policy designed to bring in new blood.
– Paula Burger, an education consultant and erstwhile Dean of Duke’s Women’s College (boy, that dates her!!), one of the few faculty members who has ever sat on our Board. Because of term limits.
– Kenneth Hubbard ’65 who apparently was barred from a second term by a little known provision in the by-laws that says no one can be elected a Trustee (or re-elected) after reaching age 70.
He’s been a mystery man on the board, totally silent so far as we know, after an initial $500,000 contribution as an alumni leader. The only picture we can find of him, on the official Trustee website, is blurred.
Hubbard’s name surfaced last week in the conflict of interest section of the newly released Form 990′s (part of the federal tax return that Duke is obliged to make public): he is executive vice president of a huge national real estate firm which paid a record price per square foot to purchase an office building complex in downtown Durham. Hmmm… The firm has a multi-year, $10 million dollar a year lease with Duke to rent the entire building, thus insuring its profits. A Deputy DukeChecker has this under active investigation and we anticipate a report in a week or so.
And now the envelopes. Well, we’re not perfect, so we only have two of the three new Trustees, and the Deputy who failed to get the third name has been sent to the Great Hall for dinner.
– Steve Pagliuca ’77, managing partner of Bain Capital, and personal protege of Mitt Romney, the founder whose vast wealth from the firm became an issue during the last Presidential election. Pagliuca did not do so bad either, with estimates of his hoard at approximately $400 million.
Pagliuca joined Bain and began working his way up in 1982 after several years as an accountant and international tax specialist in the Netherlands. Bain is one of the nation’s biggest managers of university endowments and pension plans, and no, we don’t know, yet, if Bain has any Duke money under its wing.
Most notably, Pagliuca is co-owner of the Boston Celtics; he says he fell in love with the Celtics when he first moved to Boston, and had nose-bleed seats partially blocked by a pole.
In fact, he was in love with basketball much earlier, in Brooklyn where his penniless grandfather settled and became a shoe-maker, and New Jersey, where he grew up, and then at Duke, where he rode the bench on the freshman squad. (There used to be freshmen and varsity BB teams). (Picture: Pagliuca, second from left in moment of victory for the Celtics)
Pagliuca is chair of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has taken no prisoners in the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandals, taking the lead in successfully calling for the resignation of the Cardinal in Boston, Bernard Francis Law.
While Pagliuca contributed to Romney campaigns starting in 1994, he is quick to explain it was out of friendship, and certainly not political belief. Pagliuca is an active Democrat, declaring he is “pro-business, pro-healthcare, pro-freedom and (a believer in) a ‘big tent’ philosophy that works to find common ground among people of differing political opinions.” His website includes a pic of him with Bill and Hillary, as well as dozens of shots, everything from his childhood home to visiting with President George W. Bush when the Celtics finally won a championship. More on that website in a moment.
In 2009, Pagliuca ran for Democratic nomination for the US Senate to succeed Ted Kennedy, and came in last. His slogan included his nickname: Pags = Jobs. (The recent speaker at Duke, Mo Cowan ’91, was not in the election; he was appointed to fill out the remainder of Kennedy’s term, having announced in advance he would not run for the full term.) During the campaign, Pags became known for his rumpled, sweaty appearance. More positively, he has a reputation in the financial world as a deep thinker and prudent risk taker.
Pagliuca is a former director of the Hospital Corporation of America, where the vice chair of Duke’s Trustees, Jack Bovender ’67, G’69, presided for years. And no, we don’t know if Bovender played a role in engineering Pagliuca’s rise at Duke.
Pagliuca has also been on other boards, notably Burger King and, the discount stock broker TDWaterhouse Ameritrade.
Pagliuca is a close friend of a former Trustee, John Mack, who was head of Morgan Stanley.
On some days, Pagliuca seems like his is everywhere. On the gossip pages huddled in a tony restaurant with his friend, Goldman Sachs chair Lloyd Blankfein; on the business pages attending the clubby Davos, Switzerland international economic conference; and on the local news pages trying to put together a deal to buy the Boston Globe newspaper. Whoops, that last venture did not pan out.
He seems to relish publicity, loves to be interviewed on TV, and even preserves the best interviews on his unusual, and unusually revealing, website that’s worth looking at if you are just surfing: http://www.stevepagliuca.com/ He’s also on Facebook with 10,818 likes.
There is one curiosity about Pags’s postings: only one brief mention of his wife Judy and four children in an otherwise extensive exposition of his life. We believe two of his children came to Duke: Joseph ’07 and Stephanie ’12.
Pagliuca was a member of the Board of Visitors of Trinity College from 2001 to 2008, and its chair from 2005 to 2007. This board, with no authority under the by-laws, is advisory in nature, and also serves to keep people involved in affairs of the University and interested in its initiatives, which happen to be the first steps in fund-raising. He served on the Arts and Sciences Campaign Committee from 1997 to 2004.
We can find no announcement of any significant gift to Duke. So far.
Oh yes, after Duke he got an MBA at Harvard, and he’s active as an alum there too.
Another new Trustee is Carmichael Roberts Jr. ’90 Ph.D. ’95 Roberts is also in high finance, having switched from an industrial career. Like Pags, he is based in Boston.
Roberts is a general partner with the venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners, focusing on emerging businesses using chemistry (his Ph.D. is in organic chemistry), materials science and materials engineering. He has been on the board of directors of the Duke Alumni Association since 2007.
With Harvard professor George Whitesides, Carmichael founded Diagnostics for All, which is developing paper-based medical diagnostics to provide inexpensive options to marginalized patients around the world.
Carmichael: “I sometimes feel cheated that I wasn’t around at the time of Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, when there was so much ‘white space’ for innovation. I enjoy finding the diamond in the rough in the US but where it’s wide open is in the developing world, where some of the best inventions have yet to be made and current inventiveness can be creatively applied and have tremendous impact.”
Previously, Carmichael co-founded and served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Arsenal Medical, a company that develops foam and fiber materials that heal localized trauma to tissues and organs.
In 1999 he was named one of the world’s top 100 young entrepreneurs by MIT’s Technology Review.
Carmichael received his BS and PhD in organic chemistry from Duke University and completed his postdoctoral National Science Foundation fellowship at Harvard University. Carmichael also has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He serves as an advisor for MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Harvard’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, and schools of Science and Engineering at Duke University.
From the MIT alumni magazine: “Carmichael Roberts greatest invention is himself. A scientist with entrepreneurial dreams, colleagues say Roberts has poured unmatched energy into his transition from lab bench to boardroom.
“After carrying out world-class glycobiology research for his PhD at Duke, Roberts co-founded NPG Research, a nonprofit institute that’s landed funds from biotechnology companies and the National Institutes of Health to turn his science into lifesaving drugs. Soon, it was on to an apprenticeship in the for-profit realm when he joined Union Carbide, a chemical firm trying to break into new life-science businesses. After breezing through an eighteen-month training program in four months, Roberts started sizzling up the ranks. But entrepreneurship beckoned, and he headed to Boston where he’s getting an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Business.
“Roberts didn’t wait long before launching his first venture. His startup company, Surface Logix, which he co-founded with Harvard nanotechnology guru George Whitesides is looking to commercialize a chemical approach to microfabrication. Handing over the promising technology to Roberts doesn’t worry Whitesides, who says, ‘Every one of Carmichael’s instincts is what I expect from an entrepreneur with 15 years more experience.’ Beyond his scientific and business skills, Whitesides says it is Roberts’ outstanding human qualities–enthusiasm, humor, courage and caring–that guarantee his success organizing and motivating others to move innovations into the marketplace.”
From Roberts, also in the MIT magazine: “Picture a computer you can put on your body like a sticker or a removable tattoo – or a stamp, a biostamp. Athletes can use biostamps directly on muscles to measure the effectiveness of their workouts. Moms and Dads can use biostamps to monitor the health of their children. The opportunities are only limited by imagination and innovation.”
Two new Trustees. Sounds very promising for a change!!!!
To our surprise, there has been little coverage and even less reaction to the revelation of Coach K’s salary in 2011: $9,682,032.
A check of the Lexis-Nexis index service, as well as Google News and Yahoo News, finds the story in low key headlines around North Carolina, but not nationally. Here at DukeCheck, where we often get many e-mails in response to posts, the only comment came from a faculty member who we solicited.
On the other hand, on Saturday Sports Illustrated posted a story indicating Krzyzewski was reconsidering the decision he made after winning gold at the London Olympics to forego leading Team USA for the third time. That story promptly appeared around the nation courtesy of the Associated Press. It even merited a headline in the Sunday New York Times. And the Durham Herald-Sun, which had stumbled badly by missing the Coach K salary story when it broke.
“There is a chance” was the quote in Sports Illustrated, hinting at a flip-flop. Coach K addressed this issue last in February, when he turned 66, and at that time he remained firm.
The man who must appoint the coach, USA Basketball Chairman Jerry Colangelo, it was noted, has yet to name a replacement. But he revealed that since the Blue Devils bowed out of the NCAA tournament on March 31, he and Coach K have spoken twice about the matter.
Colangelo: “Give it another week and it should be resolved.”
We will close by noting that here at DukeCheck, we were astonished to learn Coach K’s salary. Come on… it’s the game of men’s basketball where he coaches, along with an army of assistants, a team that totals 13 players. Almost ten million: that’s nine times what the President of Duke earned, and about 15 times the earnings of the Chief Academic Officer.
And to boot, Arts and Sciences is being starved, but it would flourish with the same increase of $2.4 million that Coach K got in one year. Not to mention that the entire University budget is being kept afloat only with a $65 million infusion from reserves (that might otherwise be devoted to endowment.)
Loyal Readers, thank you for reading DukeCheck, on days when you react and on days when you do not.
On the same weekend that Peter the Provost told the Trustees that the Administration was still interested in membership in the 2U Corporation’s scheme to offer classes on line, the important journal Inside Higher Education reported that two more universities bowed out.
As Loyal Readers know, the faculty’s Arts and Sciences Council rejected Duke’s participation, nullifying a contract that PTP had signed. Peter blamed politics and timing, not substance, for the faculty’s vote. Poor Peter, as in Kunshan, he doesn’t know when he’s got a loser on his hands.
Thus, seven schools remain attached to 2U, which called its offerings Semester on Line. And at least three of the seven are expressing serious misgivings.
Loyal Readers will recall: we are not talking about an MOOC — a mass on-line open course that is free with no credit. 2U wanted schools to charge their regular tuition — enrolling their own students, students from other universities, and most notably, students “admitted” by 2U which was vague on what credentials they would have.
The scheme would have Duke giving college credits to someone who was not admitted here, or at a comparable university. Similarly, a Dukie could accumulate significant credits toward a Dukie degree taking courses at one of the other schools, perhaps Wake Forest University.
Duke’s faculty — for these reasons and more — voted against the proposal in the Arts and Sciences Council.
Another school that has now stepped away from a contract that its administration signed is Vanderbilt. And there were cogent arguments there against 2U.
First, since 2U would charge regular tuition for an on-line experience, others would undercut its efforts with lower prices and the scheme would soon fizzle.
Second, 2U wasn’t doing as originally stated, and that is, offering students, for example at Duke, an enriching experience with subjects not available on our campus. Rather, it was lining up courses that would attract as many students as possible to enhance 2U profits.
The University of R0chester has also backed out, saying it was going to focus on MOOCs through Coursera. Interestingly, two is aligned with that on-line experiment too.
Brandeis has delayed offering any classes, but its students can enroll in 2U offerings. There is what is described as a “robust” debate among faculty.
At Northwestern, the university has stalled on a campus-wide policy, and is letting individual departments decide whether credits will be accumulated.
The man of the hour: Daniel Werfel
AGE — 42.
EDUCATION — Bachelor’s degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University; J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; master’s degree in public policy from the Sanford School at Duke in 1997.
EXPERIENCE — Controller of the Office of Management and Budget, 2009-present. Prior positions with the Office of Management and Budget: deputy controller, chief of the Financial Integrity and Analysis Branch, budget examiner in the Education Branch, and policy analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Former trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
FAMILY — Wife, Beth; two children.
Barely two weeks after Duke ran into right-wing headwinds for adding trans-gender surgery as a benefit in the student health plan, there’s another decision that has the potential to raise some hackles: we’ve learned that Duke University Press is going to start publishing a scholarly journal entitled Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Duke will be the publisher. Its co-editors will be Dr. Susan Stryker of the University of Arizona and Dr. Paisley Currah of the City College of New York. First issue: early 2014.
Stryker: ”There’s this really vital and vibrant conversation happening within the academy about transgender issues and its all been happening slightly under the radar. It’s time for it all to come above ground and have a really high profile physical place where this kind of scholarship can be seen. It takes the conversation to the next level.”
The editors have been looking for a publisher for several years, after first collaborating in 2008 on a trial run of the Quarterly. They promptly got more than 200 submissions, even though they only had room to publish 12.
“I think that working from inside the academy becomes a really powerful way of changing the conversation about something,” Stryker said. “It really changes not only what people know, but how people know about something. I see what we’re doing here as really trying to change the conversation about trans issues.”
We have no information on the cost to Duke, if any. The editors are currently engaged in fund-raising.
The first five issues will cover topics such as “Trans-Cultural Production,” “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary” and “Postposttransexual: Terms for a 21st Century Transgender Studies.”
During this past academic year — as the University commemorated the 50th anniversary of the arrival of its first black undergraduates — we’ve presented several behind-the-scene essays on how Duke overcame segregation in admissions. First, in the graduate and professional schools in 1961, and then, unexpectedly, in the undergraduate colleges at Commencement 1962.
Those Trustee decisions did nothing to begin to desegregate the faculty nor the staff. And they presaged great moments which we will describe when their anniversaries come. Most notably, the Silent Vigil for economic justice that gripped the University after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and, a year later, the take-over of Allen Building and the dismissal of President Douglas Knight.
We have only alluded to the Medical Center — as it was then called — in part because this blog does not cover Duke Medicine with the same depth that we accord to the educational and research missions of the University. Please allow us to add this observation:
There was never a vote of the Trustees, that we are aware of, to institute nor to terminate segregation: the white waiting rooms, the colored waiting rooms; the white treatment rooms, the colored treatment rooms; and the split hospital wards.
Those barriers, and others, fell one at a time because of the work and determination of individuals acting on their own. We’ve mentioned some: the Medical School Dean (today he’d be called Chancellor) Dr. Barnes Woodhall and Dr. William S. Lynn Jr., known now to Loyal Readers as the professor with the can of solvent who by night would eradicate signs on rest room doors designating white or black. What a story!
We cannot understate the role of federal money, either.
In 1946, Congress took the first big step in aiding medicine, providing for the construction of modern hospitals throughout the nation. One specific provision of the law — an obvious concession to the southern yahoos in order to get the measure passed — allowed racial discrimination so long as separate but equal facilities were provided. The Supreme Court struck that down in 1963, part of the swirl of changes occurring throughout society. And Duke quickly realized that its separate waiting rooms in the diagnostic clinics and separate floors in the hospital had to change.
To conclude this series, we turn attention to the staff at Duke, and discuss two people: a maid in the freshmen dorms, and a janitor working overnight in an administrator’s office.
I cannot recall ever writing for this blog in the first person singular, but today I will as I stretch back 50 years. Yes, that’s when the guy who is behind DukeCheck graduated, ’63, Law ’66. (Luckily there are some Deputy DukeCheckers who are far more current).
Yes, a long time ago, when tuition and fees totaled $800 in my freshman year and $1300 in my last year.
On the day I arrived for my freshman year, at the top of the steps in a Kilgo Quad dorm, a lady who was probably 40 years ago and dressed in a black and white uniform called out a cheerful welcome. She said “Hi, my name is Mary,” and I said I was Ed. She looked sheepishly, explaining I could be Mr. Ed, but never just Ed.
We had maids six days a week in the dorm rooms — the rooms — not the halls or bathrooms. They made our beds, they changed our linens if you left out clean sheets. They hung up all our clothes. They emptied the waste paper basket and dusted and waxed and polished the floor. The windows, which swung open like barn doors, were cleaned inside and out. My father called Duke a country club. (On Sundays, only the bathrooms were cleaned by male janitors).
The maids, all black female, wore uniforms and reported at 8 AM and worked until 1 PM.
I arrived on a hot day and among many observations, I noticed that the water cooler in the anteroom of the bathroom — were there were tables for your books and hooks for your clothes — was broken.
That night, three workmen, all white, hovered over it and got it going again.
The second day was beastly, and returning from orientation in Page Auditorium around noon, I encountered Mary. She was half-in, half-out of a small, smelly closet where she kept her cleaning supplies, holding a clear glass gallon jug.
The jug reminded me of home, because we had precisely the same glass jug containing bleach next to our washing machine.
As Mary poured herself a glass of water from the jug, she said innocently that it would sure be nice to have a cool drink. And I replied, happy to convey the news, that the water cooler had been fixed.
Mary seemed to look past me. Over my shoulder, staring into the stone hall, saying nothing.
I figured she perhaps did not know the fountain had been broken and repaired. So I repeated the fountain was working quite well now and pointed toward it. And that’s when she said quietly, matter of factly, “We cannot use that fountain.”
If it is possible to shiver when the temperature is hovering near 100 and it is humid, I did.
The only place I had encountered segregation was on a family trip to the eastern shore of Maryland when I was a kid, probably around 10 years old. While my father gassed the car, I remember looking for the men’s room and finding two. White. Colored. Next to each other.
I went back and asked my father about this, and he explained. I listened, and turned to go to the bathroom, and in my first act of defiance, used the one reserved for blacks. I can still remember the look on the face of a white man I passed as I exited.
And in my first act of defiance at Duke, I took Mary’s hand, walked her toward the men’s room, checked to insure it was empty, nudged her into the anteroom and stood guard while she filled her glass.
It was our secret; we repeated this all during my freshman year. And not one of the white boys on the third floor of my dorm became ill.
As Christmas approached, my best friend Fred, who had more focus than anyone I have ever met and more determination to become a doctor than I could ever imagine, was planning to fly to Florida to join his family. (Fred was valedictorian of his medical school class)
We had learned that Mary’s husband was a cab driver, and Fred, who saw less of Mary because of his class and lab schedule, asked me to inquire whether her husband could take Fred to the airport.
Mary looked astonished, pleased but astonished, and said she would ask her husband.
The next day, she said that it “looked OK,” because her husband normally drove by campus to pick her up as she left work and that’s the precise time Fred wanted to escape. And then she said, quietly, with no emphasis, that her husband had said it was OK because they’d be leaving town immediately and be out on the highway, and drivers in Chapel Hill and Raleigh were beginning to carry whites.
I could not believe this: Mary’s husband had never driven a white person.
The next day, Mary asked if I thought “Mr. Fred,” as she called him, would mind if she rode along to the airport. When I said of course not, she was overjoyed. Allowing that she had not been outside the city of Durham for 21 years.
Mary wanted to work five days a week, not six. She wanted more than 30 hours of pay, and did not like the layoffs when the student body was not on campus, so she left Duke after 18 years at the end of my freshman year to work in a home in Durham.
Our maid was named Mary, and I shamefully must admit I never knew her last name.
And now Oliver Harvey.
One day in the law school, a janitor named Larry — I am sorry to admit once again, that like with Mary, I never knew his last name — was acting almost as if he were doing something he shouldn’t. Gingerly, he approached two students hanging out near a Coke machine.
The two had spoken loudly with a letter to the Chronicle challenging President Knight for continuing to sell building lots in Duke Forest to faculty members, lots that contained covenants against ever reselling or renting to a black. Or even letting a black stay on the property overnight unless he or she was household help.
“We notice,” Larry said, “that you are not afraid of them.” And so he asked if we could help draft a petition to the Administration for a pay hike.
Eight years earlier, Larry explained, such a petition had worked, resulting in a nickle, and Larry said another raise like that would please him so.
At the time, Larry was making 85 cents an hour, Mary was making 65 cents an hour.The federal minimum wage was $1.25, but the legislation had many loopholes. Among those not covered: workers at private universities.
And so a self-appointed committee of four law students — all of them night owls — was formed. In short order, Larry said the expected, that some maids and janitors might fear signing a petition, unless they were at a meeting where they could all sign together.
Asked if he thought such a meeting was feasible, Larry said without hesitation that Oliver Harvey could assemble “everybody.”
Few students encountered Oliver. He worked overnight in an elegant house on Myrtle Drive (now called Campus Drive) originally built for Vice President Robert Flowers but later converted into offices. And ironically, it had become the offices of institutional advancement. Namely, the fund-raisers concerned about making the place better.
Oliver was a slight man, a bit stooped, one hand painful with arthritis which in part explained his assignment. He could spend more time dusting and cleaning in the offices — and less time gripping a mop. It was hard to guess his age, perhaps 45 with some premature greying and thick glasses.
And so the law students would meet Oliver Harvey in the office of the vice president for institutional advancement at 1 AM most Tuesdays to talk strategy, to line up support, to write appropriate letters, and eventually to draft a petition on the vice president’s secretary’s typewriter. I loved it.
Oliver looked amazed at the speed with which the words flowed together. I wish, he would say repeatedly, that I could “phrase-er-ize” the way you guys do. Phraserize. Phraserize. Oliver used the word all the time.
A union was out; there was too much resistance to the very word among white people, too much fear among blacks. Moreover, the only union we could find headquartered in Durham that might help was the hod carriers union, devoted to construction workers carrying the bricks for masons. And the hod carriers had problems of their own.
In due course, Oliver scheduled a meeting, first in a small church, and then two days later he moved it to the basement of the largest black church in town.
A petition was drafted. The Duke Employees Benevolent Society was formed. It did not seek a contract, it sought a nickle.
The petition got no further than one story in the Durham Sun, the evening paper in those days. Allen Building had no response for more than two and a half years. During that time, a small knot of students kept the idea alive, and one day Oliver Harvey (center) mustered enough determination to stand with them at a table on the main quad distributing literature. No black employee had ever stood up like that before at Duke.
Finally, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and hundreds of people standing silent day after day on the main quad in a vigil for economic justice, the chair of the Trustees flew in from Detroit (where he was a leading executive of a car company) and relented. A nickle.
The chair’s name was Wright Tisdale (center in the picture) The look on his face as he joined students and muddled through “We Shall Overcome” was priceless.
We are reviewing 15 separate tax returns for the University, the Health System and other independently run segments of Duke. These were filed electronically.
There are approximately 10 more returns that were filed on paper, and we expect PDF files soon. Some of these are quite important: for example, Duke Corporation Education (DCE), the division of the Fuqua Business School whose profits were supposed to be directed to pay for a large share of the subsidy of Duke Kunshan University. DCE is known to have deep trouble, and the Brodhead Administration has not revealed alternate sources for the subsidy.
We anticipate our review will take several days; there will be posts as appropriate.
The tax forms that we are reviewing are not organized by function. Thus, there is no line for athletics, or Kunshan, or the history department, so they tell only a limited story about Duke. The University is of no help, releasing what it did only because required to do so by federal law.
Forced to release data by federal law, on Wednesday afternoon the University provided DukeCheck with copies of federal tax returns for the 2011-12 academic year that show Coach K’s earnings soaring to a startling $9,682,032. Coach K had some important benefits in his contract that are revealed in the tax forms. He flies on a private jet, and can have company (meaning his wife). In some cases, Duke “grosses up” his earnings, meaning that the University gives him additional pay to compensate for his federal income taxes.
In addition, the University made a grant of $215,033 to the Emily Kryzewski Center in Durham, a neighborhood help center that is named for the Coach’s mother. That by far was the highest contribution that Duke made, although Duke Health, which has a separate budget, contributed more than $1 million to Ronald McDonald House, which allows parents of very ill children to stay nearby.
Faculty reaction has been swift. One senior professor, astounded, sent us the e-mail at the end of this post.
Our initial review of the tax documents — subject to more detailed analysis — indicates only one other salary surprise. And that is for the Athletic Director and Vice President Kevin White, $936,457.
That is almost double what the Chief Academic Officer, Peter the Provost, received.
In the three years of reports since White was hired, his salary line has always been high — but we were led to believe that it included a payment he had to make to the University of Notre Dame because of his resignation while under contract there. However, last year, with White’s salary also very high, we were told that the payment had been made.
The salary for head football coach David Cutcliffe remained fairly steady, at $1,792,285.
The data available does not give information about the women’s basketball coach, Joanne McCallie, because only the top salaries must be reported.
Kryzewski’s earnings far eclipsed those of the leaders of the University. The following figures are for earnings during the year, including deferred income:Thus, our new numbers are for the academic year that ended 11 months ago.
Please check back in the hours ahead for additional stories and details.
We agreed to post this without identifying the faculty member who responded to our request for reaction.
“According to Federal tax returns for Duke University, during the 2011-12 academic year the men’s basketball coach earned a salary of $9,682,032. For the 2012-13 academic year, tuition and fees amount to $43,623. By that count (and assuming Coach K. hasn’t seen a massive pay-cut), it took the parents of 221 undergraduates (out of a class of approx. 1,700 students in any given class) just to pay the salary of one individual.
“Considering that the role of basketball and, hence, that of the coach is entirely peripheral to the educational- and research mission of the university, it is difficult to imagine another single fact that would illustrate more forcefully how profoundly our institutional priorities have been distorted over the past decade or two.
“To be sure, except for a privileged few, nobody knows how far the revenue generated by the athletics program goes toward covering the lavish salaries (of coaches, asst. coaches, trainers, etc.), operating expenses (hotel, transportation, catering, etc.), and countless perks associated with Duke’s various programs in divisional athletics.
“What is abundantly clear, however, is that the money spent on a single individual is sorely missing in (or, rather, withheld from) other, truly central parts of the university. Coach K’s salary alone far exceeds the (artificially created) budget “shortfall” in Arts & Sciences and the growing hole in funding Duke’s (entirely meritorious) commitment to need-blind admission. When, one must ask, will Duke’s trustees step in to fill the vacuum of responsible leadership that has allowed our institutional objectives to become so massively distorted?”
Loyal Readers will undoubtedly remember our coverage: in the summer of 2011, just weeks before he was to join the Class of 2015 as an Angier Buchanan Duke Scholar, Jay Ruckelshaus had a terrible accident.
He dove from a dock into a lake that proved to be shallow. He hit his head but did no brain damage. But the impact reverberated through his body and severed his spin cord, making him paraplegic.
There was a long road of rehabilitation: unable to move any of his limbs at first, he gradually has gotten some limited use from his arms.
There was always fire — never diminished — to come to Duke. And that’s what Jay did, precisely a year late.
With a buddy from Indianapolis as his assistant, with outstanding cooperation from the Brodhead Administration, which held open his full-freight scholarship, Ruckelshaus thrived at Duke.
His grades last semester: three A-pluses and an A.
On Saturday night in his hometown, nearly 700 people will attend a gala fund-raiser where Jay will announce his new foundation, the Ramp Less Traveled.
He says that too often, people with life-altering injury think that education is out of their reach. That, Jay says, has to change.
There’s more. The next chapter. We have Jay going to Oxford for the summer, part of the enrichment experience for every AB Duke Scholar.
Just moments after he was elected chair, David Rubenstein ’70 gave us a peek at what goes on behind the closed doors of Trustee meetings.
Rubenstein, who joined the board in 2005, said that while he’s been a member, there’s never been a vote on any issue — because everyone reaches a consensus. “The Board is not divided as some university boards that have big splits,” he said. “This Board works very collegially. It’s a pleasure to sit through the board meetings.”
Rubenstein spoke to a Chronicle reporter, who did not press him. But think how incredible this is, for example, in considering the proposed Duke Kunshan University.
There are deep splits among stakeholders on campus about the bricks and mortar approach to our international ambitions. The faculty, in particular, has raised question after question, and the faculty in the Fuqua Business School has shot down a proposal for an executive MBA degree specifically, and many of the terms and conditions surrounding a Masters in Management Studies.
But on the Trustee level, it’s unanimous!
The Chronicle also captured parting words from Rick Wagoner ’75, forced to retire by term limits. Speaking of his successor, Wagoner said enthusiastically, “He’s a very open guy.”
Which would be a big switch from Wagoner, one of the most secretive leaders in Duke history, who dismissed the Chronicle’s attempts soon after he became chair two years ago to regain the right for stakeholders to attend Trustee meetings. The meetings were open for about four decades, starting with President Terry Sanford and ending when President Brodhead started to run into strong headwinds.
Just a couple weeks ago, Team Brodhead was turning a cold shoulder to students who were demanding an “open endowment.” In other words periodic reports to stakeholders on how their money was invested.
Vice President Richard Riddell, who as Secretary of the University controls much of the board’s agenda and who doubles as President Brodhead’s executive assistant, denied the students’ request to raise the issue at the Commencement meeting of the Trustees, and instead consigned a well-executed report from the students, who use the name “Duke Open,” to be considered, in turn, by committees stacked on top of each other. In other words, not to be heard from anytime soon.
Read the report: www.DukeOpen.com
Ah.. that was a long two weeks ago. Sensing a sustained effort, last weekend Brodhead prepped the Trustees, unexpectedly, to deal with the issue at their September meeting.
The twin ideas of transparency and accountability are not new, of course, but it seems that seems that Uncle Dick may have taken time from his reading and re-reading of English literature to learn something from a German philosopher who spoke about an idea whose time has come.
Right now, stakeholders get little information about Duke’s investments. At the close of business on June 30th, the end of the University’s fiscal year, the current value of holdings is announced, along with investment results for the past year. Duke Open wants periodic reports on where the moolah is invested; the idea arose a generation ago with divestment from South Africa and has kicked around since.
Duke has about $6 billion in endowment plus money in its pension plans and significant hospital reserves. Duke also serves as investment agent for the hoard of The Duke Endowment and for campus groups (like the Chronicle).
In its last report, Duke Management Company, the arm of the University handling these things, said it had $12.6 billion under its aegis.
The exiting chair of the Trustees, Rick Wagoner ’75, has expressed confidence that the 5th timetable for opening Duke Kunshan University will hold. Wagoner spoke after the Trustees watched a report from Mary Bullock Brown, the #1 Duke honcho assigned to China, via satellite.
Michael Schoenfeld, vp for pr and obfuscation, characterized the report as “wide-ranging.”
So it must have gotten into construction issues — and like how much we must spend for the third patch-up for shoddy work, a total that the Brodhead Administration has never revealed.
And it must have gotten into the status of construction, which as Loyal Readers know, was stopped during virtually all of 2012.
Speaking of that construction, we have asked Schoenfeld for pictures of what is happening now — as we have had three reports that indicate not much is happening.
Duke PR routinely distributes pictures of buildings under construction — and on Tuesday furnished this picture and others of the renovations inside Baldwin Auditorium on East Campus. We hardly recognized the place, which had been allowed to deteriorate to the point of being seedy.
So, Mr. Mike, now you know the type of picture we are interested in out of Kunshan.
Blair Holliday, the promising football player who suffered substantial brain injury in a water ski accident last July 4th, who came close to death from pneumonia and then made a miraculous recovery, will return to classes on Wednesday when Summer Session begins.
You may recall our report last January that raised quite a howl: despite Blair’s wishes, his family’s support, his medical team’s endorsements and his football team’s celebration, Duke refused to readmit him for the semester just ended. Moreover, the University would give no reason.
University policies require readmission after medical leave.
Head coach David Cutcliffe then stepped forward, adding Holliday to the program’s staff in a move widely seen as stuffing it to Allen Building. Holliday worked with the video crew and wide receivers.
Last week, Holliday attended the graduation ceremony for the Pitt Community College nursing student who gave him emergency breaths and CPR at the time of the accident. She is Chelsea Gibbons.
The University announced the winners of the Reginaldo Howard Scholarships this morning, listing four incoming freshmen who will have all their expenses paid at Duke. The school made no mention of the startling truth: four others who were offered the $250,000 awards said no thanks.That disclosure about “the Reggies,” as they are known, was made by an impeccable faculty source, who, like DukeCheck, is increasingly concerned about the inability to land more of the people that the University has identified as having the greatest potential. This is important not only for classroom work; each of the scholarship programs, includes, as the Reggies, “an ongoing agenda of events and activities that keep alive the legacy of Reginaldo Howard keeps the group an active and visible one on campus and in the Durham community.” With fewer students, there is obviously less impact.
Last week we reported that there would be only eight Angier Buchanan Duke Scholars, even though Duke offered 21 initially — and probably more after rejections started to come in. The AB Dukes are considered Duke’s top national merit awards, worth even more than the Howard Scholarships because they provide for international travel and summer enrichment.
On Monday, we reported that seven students will receive full freight University Scholarships endowed by Bill and Melinda ’86 MBA ’87 Gates. While we could not find out the number offered, the seven are the smallest number since the awards were created in 1998; in some years there have been 13. These are merit awards, with consideration of family economics factored in.
The Howard Scholarships are for “students of African heritage who have a demonstrated a serious commitment to academic achievement, leadership, community involvement and social justice.”
They honor the memory of Reginaldo Howard ’77, the first black student body president at Duke, who was killed in an auto accident after his election but before he could take office. (Picture at left)
The Brodhead Administration has refused to discuss the awarding of any of our most valuable merit scholarships with DukeCheck. It has taken a very defensive position, as if it were one of its failures.
But a highly knowledgeable source, who has discussed this with a Deputy DukeChecker on a confidential basis, said that the yield rate — the number of scholarships offered versus the number accepted — for past years is not known, and while there may be flutter this year, the rate is still impressive. That’s because the candidates we are offering scholarships to are among the very top — who also get full freight offers to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford. That’s pretty tough competition.
In the source’s analysis, need-blind admissions has also influenced the yield rate on scholarships — because other schools, even if they do not offer a merit scholarship, meet the full demonstrated need of the student. The yield might improve dramatically if scholarships were directed at students from larger families who have incomes above the need-blind level, but who face strain to pay for college educations.
The Admissions Office so far has not made any announcement about the Class of 2017 in general. Some — but not all — of competing schools have made announcements, led by Harvard, which had 82 percent, the highest in 44 years. But a caveat: comparisons between schools are difficult, because some of these schools do not have early admissions policies and others have changed their policies in recent years. With early admissions, there is almost 100 percent yield on a portion of the freshman class, since often the student must pledge to say yes to an offer of admission. That distorts the entire picture.
We are closely watching the yield rate here, if for no other reason than it is a crucial statistic in the U S News and World Report ratings.
The list of the Reginaldo Howard Award winners follows:
– Matthew Carter Alston of Clarkston, Ga., a graduate of Academe of the Oaks in Decatur, Ga., and son of Stacey and Ronald Alston.
– Justin Olivier Bryant of Johns Creek, Ga., a graduate of Northview High School in Duluth, Ga., and son of Jacqueline Royal-Bryant and Colin Bryant.
– Chidinma Hannah Nnoromele of Richmond, Ky., a graduate of Model Laboratory School in Richmond Ky., and daughter of Salome and Patrick Nnoromele.
– Azeb Yirga of Glen Allen, Va., a graduate of Henrico High School in Henrico, Va., and daughter of Mariam Alemayehu and Solomon Yirga.
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