✔✔✔The Fact Checker Manifesto for Kunshan
Effective April 8, 2011
✔1) President Richard Brodhead will immediately inform all stakeholders that Duke is not committed to Kushan, that the city as well as Wuhan University understand he has the "green light," as the Chronicle put it after the last Trustee meeting, only to continue negotiations.
Our partners know any tentative deal reached at the negotiating table must be ratified by the Trustees. And considered by the faculty as well.
Mr Brodhead should put before the Trustees the option of stepping back for a year or two for a collegial, collaborative and strategic process to replace the hubris that has propelled us this far.
✔2) Mr Brodhead and his administrators will join in a statement recognizing the appropriate role of all stakeholders in the future of Duke University. The disrespect, distrust and disdain must end: people who make inquiry shall not be treated as traitors.
✔3) The Board of Trustees special committee on Kunshan, headed by David Rubenstein, will add faculty and student representatives, just like other board committees.
✔4) Mr. Rubenstein, founder and head of the corporate vultures called Carlyle Group, knows all about "due diligence," the proper agree of independent investigation that must precede any acquisition or merger. For due diligence on Kunshan and other international initiatives, the committee will employ a separate consultant or consultants not beholden to the administration to examine all aspects of our global thirst. All consultant reports will be available to all stakeholders as they are received.
✔5) Duke University will post everything -- and we mean everything -- related to any aspect of our global ambitions on a website. Not only for Kunshan, but for the nine other international cities where we are planting our flag.
✔6) With specific reference to the financial aspects of our global ambitions, full details of the current and upcoming budgets for the University in Durham will also be available on the website. We must know how much we are crimping at home to afford this international splash.
The budgets will be clear, devoid of Enron gimmicks. They shall specify clearly capital costs (including furnishings for buildings) and recurring operating expenses.
There shall be specific attention to revealing full details of fund-raising, with appropriate monitoring in place to determine if efforts on the part of Duke Kunshan University are interfering in any way with the mother campus in Durham.
✔7) Stakeholders will have available full specific information to assure that core values of Duke are maintained.
This includes academic freedom.
This includes need blind admissions
This includes affirmative action
This includes non discrimination in all categories specified in our own policy manual.
This includes standards for contractors (such as those building the Kunshan campus and those who will staff such functions as food service). A mechanism shall be established to monitor compliance.
This includes clear guidelines for students and faculty who may wish to involve themselves in individual and organized ways to bring about change in China and other lands. This is a strong Duke tradition -- evidenced by historic involvement in the desegregation of Durham and in helping the city's continuing attempts to uplift itself.
✔8) The University must not only seek to open a foreign university but to arrange its affairs so that students, faculty and others on the mother campus are enriched thereby, and all this shall be apparent.
✔9) FC will add things as they are thought up.
