Editor’s Note: Diverse: Issues In Higher Education has announced the three distinguished 2018 recipients of the Dr. John Hope Franklin Award. Dr. James J. Duderstadt is the second to be profiled in a series that runs through Friday.
In 1968, as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. James J. Duderstadt was asked to give a seminar at the University of Michigan.
While he was flying back home to Los Angeles, his wife, Anne, received a phone call from an executive administrator at the University of Michigan with an offer for a faculty position for him. She immediately and enthusiastically accepted the offer on Duderstadt’s behalf.
“I walked in the door and she said we’re moving to Michigan,” recalls Duderstadt. “And we’ve been here for 50 years.”
While he is known today as a pioneer of diversity and inclusion in higher education, Duderstadt started as an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and was promoted to full professor by 1976. Nuclear engineering at Michigan was then primarily a graduate program. However, the students were not much younger than Duderstadt himself, and as a young faculty member, he became receptive and attuned to their concerns.
“I regarded most of the students I was teaching as friends and colleagues, and we kind of learned together,” he says. “At the same time, I got interested in broader issues involving the university.”
The students at the University of Michigan had been involved in activism throughout the 20th century, engaging with issues such as the Vietnam War, the Black Power Movement and school desegregation. As Duderstadt transitioned from faculty to administration, he leveraged his camaraderie with students to support rather than fight this culture of activism on campus.
