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DURHAM -- In nearly 40 years at Duke University, Joel Fleishman has performed myriad tasks.
He's been a law professor and a fundraiser, the head of a center on ethics and an administrator.
He has accomplished much and has been Duke's "go-to guy," university President Richard Brodhead said. But Thursday, as he gave the official address at Duke's Founders' Day Convocation, Fleishman recalled the errors he had made.
After he was introduced by Brodhead during a ceremony full of pomp at Duke Chapel, Fleishman noted that "whenever I hear ... the kind of praise that I just heard, I always remember the mistakes I have made."
Among those mistakes, he said, was his initial decision to call what is now the university's Sanford School of Public Policy the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs.
Even today, Fleishman said, "no one understands what that means."
The school's founding director, who had nurtured what Brodhead said had been just a "gleam in Terry Sanford's eye" used his speech to extol what the institute -- which officially became Duke's 10th school earlier this summer -- had become.
Public policy analysis, he said, "is absolutely essential to the effective functioning of a democracy. It tries to widen the common ground between opposing points of view," and let's us "reason together with civility" and frame policy choices in an objective analytic framework.
The Sanford School, he noted, is one of the best of its kind in the nation, and that's because "our faculty has always believed that good intentions are not enough." They have equipped students with a "tool kit" that has enabled them to succeed.
Fleishman's speech was the centerpiece of a ceremony during which Duke honored outstanding faculty, employees, alumni, students and trustees. Along with Ernest Mario, a pharmaceutical industry executive who is the second-longest serving Duke trustee, Fleishman received the University Medal for Distinguished Service, one of Duke's highest awards.
Judy Woodruff, the television journalist and an alumna, received the Distinguished Alumni Award at the ceremony.
