Guest Fact Checker: In response to our post "Bloodbath in Fuqua"

FC is expanding. By the start of the fall semester, we hope to have in place a format that will allow readers to comment -- with their comments profiled and headlined along with our own. We are posting this as a good example of what we think FC will be like soon.

From a member of the faculty:

Thanks for posting this startling and disconcerting news (about the shrinkage of the division of Fuqua called Duke Corporate Education and its $7 million dollar loss in the latest year with numbers).

Not that there was need for further evidence about the hubris and irrational exuberance of our administrators. Still, this troubling financial picture once again illustrates our so called leaders' brazen denial of basic reality and common sense.

At the same time, the conversation about Duke's inflated aspirations to becoming a "globally networked university" (to invoke the official hollow slogan) ought not to be about means alone but, first and foremost, about ends. What needs to retrieved as a focal point of a campus-wide conversation is this university's core mission: is it corporate? Is it about selling a "brand" to gullible buyers or totalitarian regimes without any regard whatsoever for the integrity of the product or the buyer?

Or is it about making a long-term contribution to the intellectual and scientific culture of our society, educating young people in specific fields of advanced
inquiry and impressing on them the habits, forms, and values of a life of
learning?

Clearly, our benighted and arrogant leadership has made its choice. Will the rest of the Duke community -- alumni, trustees, faculty, students -- allow a small clique of deluded and grandiose individuals to ruin this institution?