Academic Council Roundup: Nicholas School Asks to Shorten Its Name
Council also supports DGHI appointments
Friday, May 9, 2008
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Durham, NC -- The Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences is losing the earth sciences from its name but not from its teaching and research mission.
The Academic Council Thursday approved the name change. The motion will now go to the Board of Trustees.
“Earth sciences” was added to the school’s name when the geology department joined it in 2000. Nicholas Dean Bill Chameides said after eight years there was no longer a need to mark the former division.
“I thought it was time to change the name back,” Chameides told the Academic Council. “I don’t want it to seem like we have two different faculties. It’s important that we recognize that our vision of understanding the environment is different from others. We are multidisciplinary, we are inclusive and the name should reflect that. It will send a message as to what we are about.”
The Nicholas faculty had previously approved the name change with one dissenting vote.
In other items before the Academic Council:
The council voted to give the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) authority to appoint regular rank non-tenure track faculty members.
Institute Director Michael Merson said the new positions would mostly be in the research or practice tracks. As an interdisciplinary institute, DGHI has a number of tenure-track faculty members whose primary appointments are in regular university departments.
Merson said the need for these additional positions was necessary to support the institute’s research, education, policy and service missions.
These positions are needed when a researcher’s scholarship “is far more relevant to DGHI’s interdisciplinary mission than to the disciplinary focus of any department,” Merson wrote in support of the proposal. “In such cases, it would be advantageous to DGHI and to Duke to be able to appoint regular rank, non-tenure track faculty directly into DGHI.”
Merson told the council that his goal would be that for each of these appointments, the scholar would have a secondary appointment in a regular department.
There is a recent precedent for this move: Earlier this year the council approved giving the Social Science Research Institute the same authority.
University ombudman
Jeffrey Dawson, professor emeritus of immunology and associate dean for basic medical science curriculum in the School of Medicine, was elected to a two-year term as faculty ombudsman. The ombudsman, who is appointed by the Academic Council and reports directly to the president, serves as an impartial party in complaints involving faculty members.
Dawson has served seven terms on Academic Council and one on its Executive Committee and has participated in several university and medical faculty committees.
