A Message From Larry Moneta, Vice President for Student Affairs:
The landscape for Student Affairs at Duke is bright, daunting and varied. Our efforts over the past few years have positioned us to be critically engaged in all aspects of students’ lives and to collaborate with students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and many others in the delivery of key services and support to students and all whom we serve. We are organizationally and fiscally sound, comprised of intelligent and caring leaders and practitioners and well regarded among colleagues and constituents.
Simply stated, our mission remains to support the optimal growth and development of our students and to provide services and support that will enhance their intellectual, social, cultural and physical development. In reality, however, our mission is much more complex than that. An oft-used phrase to depict work such as ours is that we ‘comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’. We do the former by caring for the ill, demanding accountability for behaviors and offering advising and mentorship. The latter half of this statement—to disturb the comfortable—represents the more subtle and, perhaps, challenging part of our work and requires that we, in partnership with faculty and others, encourage students to reflect on and establish passions, ambitions and goals.
The primary guiding instrument for our work is Making a Difference, Duke’s new strategic plan. As President Brodhead notes in his introduction to the plan:
“While Duke will continue to embrace the essential aspects of specialized research, teaching and learning, the university will build on its special strengths in collaboration and connection of knowledge to real-world problems. More than ever, we will prepare students to approach issues with creativity, flexibility and a curious mind. Engagement across lines of race, ethnicity, religion and national culture will become more important as training for an increasingly interconnected world.”
This plan expresses Duke’s commitment to a form of education that emphasizes real world application of knowledge, promotion of confidence and inquisitiveness and a global perspective among our students. These values should guide our work for the future and will be the basis for the development of measure of success of our departmental and divisional efforts. In particular, “Chapter 4 - Academic Goals and Strategies to Build Distinction”, will guide much of our work with particular focus on Goal 2: Strengthen the Engagement of the University in Real World Issues, Goal 4: Foster in Undergraduate Students a Passion for Learning and a Commitment to Making a Difference in the World, and Goal 5: Transform the Arts at Duke. Improvements to our facilities will be substantially influenced by “Chapter 5 - Transforming the Campus: Central, West, and East.”
The Strategic Plan notes in particular four broad goals for undergraduate education that will frame our particular contribution to student life. They are to:
• Establish inquiry-based and interdisciplinary learning as the distinctive signature of undergraduate education at Duke University
• Use our developmental model as a method for integrating and evaluating curricular and co-curricular initiatives
• Create increased opportunities for experiential learning and civic engagement
• Develop programs to improve campus culture
It is expected that each member of the Student Affairs staff will be familiar with these goals and the educational objectives they represent, and will be mindful of the principles in executing our work,
We are indebted to our Strategic Plan Thematic Analysis (SPTA) team for conveying the following principles in their recent work and for identifying themes relevant to our work for the coming year. Last summer, the Senior Leadership group of Student Affairs met at retreat to review the SPTA report and we agreed that the report captured well the strengths of our Division as well as the challenges before us. In the ensuing months, we will learn the results of the work of the Campus Culture Initiative and the ongoing discussions to further guide and refine our planning process. This report, then, is the sense of the work ahead for Student Affairs at Duke University.
I look forward to the next phase of our journey. Let’s proceed into the foreseeable future with conviction, humor, optimism and courage. We’ll need all these traits and more to meet and exceed our objectives, but I can’t imagine doing so with a better group of colleagues.
Larry Moneta, January 3, 2008