Over the course of his thirteen years as president of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead spoke at numerous university ceremonies, community forums, and faculty meetings, and even appeared on The Colbert Report. Speaking of Duke collects dozens of these speeches, in which Brodhead speaks both to the special character and history of Duke University and to the general state of higher education.
In these essays, Brodhead shows a university thinking its way forward through challenges all institutes of higher education have faced in the twenty-first century, including an expanding global horizon, an economic downturn that has left a diminished sense of opportunity and a shaken faith in the value of liberal arts education, and pressure to think more deeply about issues of equity and inclusion. His audiences range from newly arrived freshmen and new graduates—both facing uncertainty about how to build their future lives—to seasoned faculty members. On other occasions, he makes the case to the general public for the enduring importance of the humanities.
What results is a portrait of Duke University in its modern chapter and the social and political climate that it shapes and is shaped by. While these speeches were given on official occasions, they are not impersonal official pronouncements; they are often quite personal and written with grace, humor, and an unwavering belief in the power of education to shape a changing world for the better.
Brodhead notes that it is an underappreciated fact that a great deal of the exercise of power by a university leader is done through speaking: by articulating the aspirations of the school and the reasons for its choices, and by voicing the shared sense of mission that gives a learning community its reality. Speaking of Duke accomplishes each of those and demonstrates Brodhead's conviction that higher education is more valuable now than ever.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface
- 2003
- Remarks on Being Named President of Duke University
- 2004
- Freshman Convocation: Authoring a Community
- Graduate and Professional Convocation: The Virtues and Limits of Specialization
- Inaugural Address: More Day to Dawn
- Remarks at the Induction Ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Literature as Life
- 2005
- Baccalaureate: On Education and Empowerment
- Founders’ Day Address: On Founding as a Continuous Labor
- Faculty Address: Financial Aid, the Problem-centric University
- 2006
- Preface to the University Strategic Plan, Making a Difference: Duke and the Changing Landscape: A Planning Prologue
- 2007
- Commencement Address at Fisk University
- Freshman Convocation: The Ethic of Engagement
- Lessons of Lacrosse
- 2008
- Baccalaureate: Frolics and Detours
- 2009
- Baccalaureate: Advancing in a Recession
- In Memoriam: John Hope Franklin
- 2010
- Faculty Address: The University and the Financial Downturn
- Baccalaureate: Walk Ten Thousand Miles, Read Ten Thousand Books
- 2011
- Faculty Address: Budgets, International Opportunities, the Humanities
- In Memoriam: Reynolds Price
- Freshman Convocation: On the Use of New Freedoms
- John Tyler Caldwell Lecture on the Humanities: The Fire That Never Goes Out
- 2012
- In Memoriam: Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans
- Faculty Address: Duke and Race
- Baccalaureate: Repairing the Broken World
- 2013
- Baccalaureate: Connecting and Disconnecting
- Interview with Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report
- Freshman Convocation: Receive, Connect, Engage
- Remarks at the Opening of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity
- Presidential Address, The College Board Forum: The Value Debate in Higher Education
- 2014
- Lecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing: Interconnected Knowledge and the Twenty-First-Century University
- Faculty Address: Leadership Transitions, Rebuilding the Campus, the Role of Philanthropy
- Commencement Address at Miami Dade College: Opportunity Changes Everything
- Freshman Convocation: On Comfort True and False
- 2015
- Faculty Address: Choices That Made Duke—Medicine, Athletics, Durham
- Remarks at a Community Forum on a Racial Incident
- Freshman Convocation: Constructing Duke
- Keynote Address, Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities: On the Fate and Fortunes of Public Goods
- 2016
- Baccalaureate: I Learn by Going Where I Have to Go
- Freshman Convocation: Citizens of Duke
- Index
- A
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- U
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