Neo Nan: pre-inaugural photo session, 1993 Photo: Jim Wallace

hen Duke's eighth president, Nannerl O. Keohane, delivered her Founders' Day address last October, something annoying happened. The Duke Chapel carried not just Keohane's voice but also the persistent beeping of a construction vehicle as it shifted into reverse gear. Annoying, yet appropriate.

In her eleven-year presidency, Keohane conspicuously has been a builder. The Founders' Day audience was reminded of one building in progress--a Divinity School wing, just next to the Chapel. But building activity is affecting everything from art (a new museum) to zoology (a planned science center). The physical transformation of Duke under her presidency is comparable to the building of the university's two campuses between 1925 and 1932.

Keohane has also been a builder in a metaphorical sense. Under her guidance, Duke has elevated its ambitions and developed the resources to realize those ambitions. "Duke and Nan have grown together in stature and respect," says John Chandler '52, who led the search committee that identified Keohane and who later led the board of trustees.

Duke now has more global ties than ever, with more international students at every level--a trend helped along by the awarding of aid to international students--and more international collaborations, notably among the professional schools. Since 1998, Keohane has traveled more than 60,000 miles on Duke-related trips to China, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Canada, England, and France, among other places. While those visits have focused on building alumni networks abroad, she has also made high-profile speeches in venues ranging from the Foreign Correspondents Club in Japan to the American Chamber of Commerce in Brazil.

At the same time, Duke is more closely tied with its region. One exemplary educational partnership is the Robertson Scholars program, through which scholarship students study at both Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This spring, UNC named a new visiting professorship in Keohane's honor--a striking gesture from the traditional rival down the road.

For a decade before coming to Duke, Keohane was president of Wellesley College, known for undergraduate excellence. With the goal of building a stronger student community, she focused early on undergraduate life at Duke--particularly on East Campus, which was in search of a sharper identity. In 1994, Keohane renewed and reinvented it as an all-freshman campus. She weathered a lot of student criticism at the time; students, after all, are a change-resistant constituency. That comes with the territory, she says. "I was used to it. I had been targeted before for decisions that people didn't like. It's not as though it's pleasant when you wake up in the morning thinking, Gee, I wonder who's going to have signs today telling me to get lost. You just take it in stride and move on."

She moved on, and the freshmen moved in. After a year, she was able to report with satisfaction, "East Campus today is vibrant, colorful, and energetic. It works very well in providing new students with an opportunity to learn about Duke, develop a sense of class cohesiveness, and experience the full range of possibilities that a great university offers undergraduates." Those were all features, she noted, that students in the Woman's College enjoyed when it was on East. Today it's hard to imagine, or rationalize, the early vehemence of the reactions; the all-freshman East Campus is basic to the fabric of Duke.

"You could look at the issue of East Campus from an administrative and budgeting point of view," says Richard Burton, a Fuqua professor who, as chair of the Academic Council, served on the presidential-search committee. "And Nan did that. But what really drove her was the idea that we could have a better educational experience for students." More than a builder, then, Keohane is a builder of communities--even classroom communities. A just-graduated Duke senior, Tyler Rosen, who was in a seminar she co-taught this past semester, says he's never seen a professor who is more respectful of the opinions of students and more interested in seeing the whole class wrestle with those opinions.

Over the years, students have wrestled, not always enthusiastically, with changes in the broader campus community. Richard Rubin '00, a former Chronicle staff member who now covers city government for the Charlotte Observer, says that students have been quick to credit--or blame--Keohane for Duke's shifting social dynamics. Students, says Rubin, have seen Keohane as responsible for a perceived diminishing of a kind of campus exuberance, as the force behind an "intellectualization" of the campus that translates into "lack of fun." Of course, Rubin adds, "You would have read in the 1990s, the 1980s, even thirty years ago, in the 1970s, that Duke is not as fun as it used to be."

Jessica Moulton '99, a Chronicle editor who went on to earn an M.B.A. at Harvard and to work for McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, is one recent graduate who admires the trend of transformation: "Students increasingly tend to value intellectual growth and learning over partying and socializing. That's not to say that Duke isn't a very social place, which it is. But to the extent that the Old Duke meant kegs on the quad from Wednesday night onward, it is only an improvement."

"It is certainly true," says Keohane, "that ten or fifteen years ago, people thought that Duke was a place where there would be a wonderful lubrication of a lot of events with alcohol and a lot of parties beginning on Wednesday night, and somehow they would also be able to get a great education and a wonderful Duke credential and cheer for the sports teams and sit out in the sun." That might be an appealing scenario for some undergraduate students, she says, but it's not a good model for taking education seriously.

As Keohane sees it, Duke is now endeavoring "to walk a very fine line, between saying, All right, we are going to focus on intellectual life at the expense of everything else, and saying, It's okay if people pay more attention to parties or sports or drinking and intellectual life takes a back seat." Adhering to either extreme would be a mistake, she says. "What we've been trying to say instead is, This is an institution which is distinctively for people who both care deeply about the life of the mind and also care deeply about other things. They have passions for community service or social life or Greek life or sports. The two can fit together in ways that are not the old, tired canard of 'work hard, play hard,' but rather reflect a rich and full undergraduate experience which pays deliberate attention to what happens outside the classroom, as well as what happens within it."

"When Nan came on board, there was a lot of talk about Old Duke and New Duke," recalls Harold "Spike" Yoh B.S.M.E. '58, a former trustee chair. "Nan was the best spokesperson for the idea of one Duke. That meant building on tradition, building on the past, and using that as a foundation to enhance the university in every way. The all-freshman East Campus is an example of that. She stuck her neck out on that decision. But she analyzed it very, very completely, and she listened and made corrections as she absorbed new information."

Student leaders were among those who pushed to rename the area forming Duke's newest residence, known as the West-Edens Link, Keohane Quad. In remarks at the April ceremony, senior Katie Mitchell observed that future generations of Duke students who reside in Keohane Quad probably won't have personal acquaintance with its namesake. "But my hope is that through this dedication and this naming, they will know that there was once a president at Duke who passionately and humbly believed in the academy in its most holistic form--believed in a place where learning was not about the something you did. It was about the somebody you became."

Something Duke became during the Keohane era was more complicated organizationally. That was a consequence of a reinvented medical center. Duke Medical Center a decade ago meant Duke Hospital and the schools of medicine and nursing. But growth was seen as key to financial survival, and the medical center developed its own health-care system, including oversight of other hospitals. Keohane recalls, "When I came, I was told that I would have plenty of time to learn about the medical center. And then [Chancellor] Ralph Snyderman came into my office six months later and said, 'The lines are crossing in the wrong direction, and unless we do something, we're going to face some serious red ink before too long.' And so I had to come up to speed much more quickly than expected, and to work with Ralph to help face that."

Chandler, the chair of the presidential-search committee, calls it "a very brilliant stroke by Nan" that, soon after she was appointed president, she expressed an interest in visiting the medical center to see open-heart surgery. "So they outfitted her with the requisite gown and mask and all that, and she witnessed the surgery. Well, it took a matter of seconds for the word to spread throughout the medical center. I thought that symbolism got her off to a very fine start and helped give her credibility as a leader who knew the priority that needed to be assigned to the medical center."

"Over time, I think we clarified its relationship to the rest of the university, which was a little bit inchoate at the outset," says Keohane, who, along with trustee leaders, sees work to be done in that regard. "There was a sense that the medical center was over there, and although it was very much a part of Duke University, and something that was a jewel in the crown for Duke University, it was pretty separate in many ways." Today, she says, "in some ways, it's more separate, because it's become a quasi-corporate identity for the health system, but less separate in terms of the academic side, where it is now more fully integrated with the other schools."

If Duke is more unified than it once was, that's, in part, because of Keohane's skills as a communicator. "She is one of the world's great public speakers," says John Koskinen '61, a past president of the Duke Alumni Association and a former chair of the board of trustees. Keohane speaks not just as a lively presenter but also as a deep thinker, he says. "She always represents the university as an intellectual enterprise at its heart."

This spring, the Academic Council decided to honor her with an academic symposium rather than an elaborate reception or string of collegial tributes. The symposium looked at the intellectual legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century French political philosopher in whom she has had an enduring scholarly interest. It brought together Duke faculty members in Romance studies, classical studies, art history, political science, public policy, history, engineering, and divinity to consider the question (taken from Rousseau's First Discourse), "Does Progress in the Arts and Sciences Serve to Improve or Corrupt Morals?" It was an intellectual sendoff for an intellectual leader.

"I've marveled at her ability to speak to audiences, to move them beyond a focus on the immediate and into a longer perspective," says Koskinen. "Whether she speaks for three minutes or thirty minutes, I have never heard her give remarks that were not only appropriate, but that left her audience with ideas worth thinking about and talking about."