n the third annual Duke Magazine Campus Forum, retiring Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane had a public conversation with Frank H.T. Rhodes, a geologist who is president emeritus of Cornell University. When he retired in 1995, after eighteen years, Rhodes was recognized as the longest-serving Ivy League president and as an eloquent national advocate for education and research.

Since retiring as Cornell's president, Rhodes has served as a principal of the Washington Advocacy Group, chairman of the board of Atlantic Philanthropies, and a member of the boards of the Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Johnson Foundation, among others. He is currently president of the American Philosophical Society. He is also the grandfather of two Duke undergraduates. The following is an edited version of the conversation.

On liberal-arts college versus research university

Rhodes: President Keohane, how would you articulate the difference between the undergraduate experience at a fine liberal-arts college and the experience at an institution such as Duke, which is also a world leader in research?

Keohane: Well, my answer may surprise you, because it's not the one that you might normally expect. I don't think you can say that the main difference is that students at a research university have more opportunities to do research. Because I know that, at Wellesley, students did research with their faculty members and did independent research, and it was often very rewarding for them. I think the major difference is that you have a far broader set of options among the courses that you take. There are wonderful courses at liberal-arts colleges, and many more than any student could ever take in the course of a four-year period. But the depth and the breadth of a great research university and the things that are available to students are just fantastic.

And that you have the opportunity, also, to have some exposure to the professional-school faculties. And that's something [a liberal-arts college like] Wellesley cannot offer. I know that for many of our students who are pre-med, having had some opportunity to interact with some professors or graduate students from the medical sciences has been a tremendous advantage and the same in business and in law and in divinity and so forth.

I guess, finally, I would say that, at its best, a research university can provide an amazing balance for students between faculty members who care deeply about their work and faculty members who are deeply engaged in research which is truly cutting edge. Even though there are fine researchers at liberal-arts colleges, there are probably more at a research university who are truly on the edges of their fields. And if the system works, they get the benefit from that in the books they're asked to read, the papers they're asked to write, the reactions they get in class. And that symbiosis between a faculty member who cares deeply about teaching, but also is doing truly cutting-edge research, that's a fantastic advantage.

On championing diversity

Rhodes: During your tenure, the university has become more competitive in admissions, and you have championed the increase in diversity. Has that changed the student body? Have you seen in these eleven years significant differences in the incoming students?

Keohane: We have had some very specific goals around diversity, which I think have made a difference, most recently, by raising the percentage of international students. Duke eleven years ago had very few international students in the undergraduate student body, as compared with the graduate and professional schools. And we have changed that. I think it has made a difference to a university that has talked a lot about becoming more global, which we have. But it would be odd to become more global in every other part of our enterprise and not in undergraduate education.

I think we have, also, been more mindful of the importance of diversity in our own domestic recruitment, both in terms of racial diversity, but also geographic diversity and diversity by socio-economic background. We have been fortunate enough to have gender diversity in undergraduate education as almost a kind of a fallout beneficiary of the ways in which we recruit and the kinds of students who want to come to Duke. But, overall, I think we have tried to make this a more multifaceted institution, deliberately. And that we've all benefited from that.

On affirmative action

Rhodes: The University of Michigan found itself before the Supreme Court in recent months over the whole question of affirmative action. Would you say a little about the benefit of that for the whole community?

Keohane: I think that we are very fortunate in the way the Court decided the issue. And that we now feel much more confident about the kinds of admissions procedures which we know to be right, which we know to benefit all students, which allow us to take race into account, just as we take so many other things into account. It always struck me as extremely odd that we might reach a situation when we would be allowed to take everything else in the world into account: your family background or the state you were from; whether you play the flute or pitch a baseball. But we could not take into account your racial background, in a country for which that has always been one of the most important divides and sources of tension and sources of opportunity.

So, I'm really quite relieved that we are now, clearly, able to say--not that we set quotas, not that we give it disproportionate weight, but that we can take that into account as we think about how to build a strong freshman class. People are always pressing back--where is your data that it makes a difference? We are beginning to compile some data. But in the end, it has to be the anecdotal evidence of almost every person who's ever been in a classroom--that you don't make much progress with a homogeneous group of people. It doesn't have to be by race, but there has to be some heterogeneity of views. I think differences of views are particularly important, and people's backgrounds can often give them the ammunition and the perspective from which they offer different views.

I'm teaching this spring a seminar on inequalities. I can't imagine teaching such a class in a course if every student came from precisely the same background and held precisely the same views. It would be very boring and not at all educational.