Dean Talks About Transformation to Sanford School of Public Polcy
"The four areas that we want to focus on arise from serious problems that we have in our society and around the world that we want to address," says Bruce Kuniholm.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
DURHAM, N.C. -- Today (July 1), the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy officially became the Sanford School of Public Policy, making it Duke’s 10th school. It’s a rare occurrence for a new school to be created -- the last time was in 1991. Inaugural dean Bruce Kuniholm spoke with Duke Magazine’s Aaron Kirschenfeld to explain the transition and to reflect on where public policy finds itself in the dawn of the Obama presidency.
What’s the difference between being an institute and being a school?
The substantive difference is that as a school we are more capable of being entrepreneurial, which means we can raise resources toward our goals. In particular, we’ve been able to raise resources in order to increase the size of our faculty.
So it’s more than a label change. When you get more faculty members in an increased number of areas, the options for students increase, the mentoring and research opportunities increase, and the chance for engagement increases.
You mentioned goals earlier. Could you elaborate?
The four areas that we want to focus on arise from serious problems that we have in our society and around the world that we want to address. The school’s strategic vision calls for building on its strengths in the areas of environment and energy policy, global governance and international development, health policy, and social policy. What we recognize is that, as a relatively small school, we can’t address them by ourselves. However, we can address them in tandem with other schools.
An example would be environment and energy. We’ve been able to raise resources for the hiring of four new half-professors in the area of environment and energy and we intend to partner with other schools -- the Nicholas School, the Pratt School and Fuqua -- in developing our capabilities. Now, if we were alone, we couldn’t do that, but the Nicholas School has a significant number of people -- and they may be the best school in the country -- who are experts on global warming. The question is: What are the policy implications of their scientific work?
Here, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We don’t have to get scientists here -- they already exist at Duke -- but by working with the Nicholas School, for example, we can bring knowledge to bear on some of these critical issues. We intend to do the same with social policy, global governance and international development, and in health policy, where we have a partnership with the Duke Global Health Institute.
Do you think public policy studies will be more popular during the Obama presidency?
I think that the advent of Barack Obama has created an excitement about public service that didn’t exist over the last eight years. At the same time, I think there are going to be more public-sector jobs, and indications from newspaper reports are that there are increased applications to public policy programs. Our master’s degree program had a 33 percent increase in its applications this year.
I think there’s a lot of interest now in doing something. I think that was less true in recent years, but now it is, and it makes it fun.
Where do you find that your graduates are going, post-Duke?
We graduate roughly 180 undergraduates each year, we graduate about 50 MPP students, about 35 international development students, and will be graduating about six Ph.D. students every year.
Now, undergraduates go virtually everywhere. … Roughly, about a third go into the private sector, a third into the public sector and a third into nonprofits, and many of them go on to graduate schools to get law degrees or business degrees. … About a quarter of our MPP students go into the private sector, and another 40 percent into government positions, mostly at the federal level. The rest work in nonprofits, international agencies, the legal profession and other sectors. … The analytical skills that we teach them are actually desirable in all sectors.
During his lifetime, did Terry Sanford ever mention wanting to see the institute become a school?
I think that probably, in his mind, whether we were an institute or a school made little difference. There was a role for us to play, and he expected us to play it. And the fact that we’ve made a transition to a school would probably be less important to him than the fact that we continue to do what we were doing well, but are doing it better and on a greater scale.
