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Paula Gilbert D’77 G’84
The Bishop’s House is a good fit for Paula Gilbert, director of Duke’s Office of Continuing Studies.
The East Campus building was erected in 1910 as a home for John C. Kilgo, who had just resigned after 16 years as president of Trinity College to become a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Kilgo lived in what became known as The Bishop’s House until 1915. Since then, it has done service as a dormitory, a faculty residence, a faculty club house, an infirmary, the home of Duke University Press, and, since 1983, as the home of the Office of Continuing Studies.
Gilbert also comes to The Bishop's House by way of the Methodist Church. She has a master’s from Duke Divinity School and a doctorate from the Duke Graduate School, and worked for a decade at the Divinity School — first as director, then assistant dean of admissions and student life, then as assistant dean. She also taught American church history, was minister to York Chapel, the center of “corporate worship” at the school, and administered a summer program providing theological training to United Methodist ministers who did not intend to go to seminary.
In 1990, Gilbert went to work at what was then known as the Office of Continuing Education (later the Office of Continuing Education and Summer Session). She has directed the office since 1995. Explaining the latest name change, which took effect in fall 2003, Gilbert said it reflected a shift in the office’s mission. “For the entirety of its history,” Gilbert said in an interview, “this office provided some help for adults who had not finished a degree to return to school, to see if Duke was the place for them. The rest of our operation, for the most part, focused around personal enrichment opportunities. Our Institute for Learning in Retirement, our Short Courses, even our summer Youth Programs — all fit into that category. The current administration has given us permission to move more and more into professional development and into certificate programs that help people advance in a career or make a career change.
“With certificates available in human resource management, financial planning, paralegal studies, communications, leadership, and nonprofit management, we became aware that Continuing Education was in some ways a dated label, that it led people to think only of our Short Courses. With the office rapidly growing in the professional development area, we were looking for a name with the energy and dynamism and freshness that would describe all our programs.”
"Significantly Influential" mentors
Continuing Studies has also seen an extraordinary leap in Summer School enrollments — by 21 percent since 2002 and 89 percent since 2000, when the new curriculum was launched. “Students are thinking more strategically about their academic careers,” Gilbert said. “Duke students like to have two majors, or two majors and a certificate program. To do that, and to have a Study Abroad experience, which is also part of the ethos of Duke, more and more students are finding that going to school in the summer eases some of the pressure. They can get some courses toward one of their majors or a certificate program and have a little bit more freedom in the fall or spring semesters. Pre-health-profession students, most of them thinking of heading toward medical school, are a significant part of our summer enrollment. They’ll come to take first-year chemistry or organic chemistry or physics and can get a whole year of their sciences finished during the summer.” Other factors, Gilbert said, are that “we now offer financial aid in the summer that we didn’t use to, and we’ve just finished the third summer where the national economy wasn’t good, which typically helps people find their way to summer school.”
Gilbert has a BA from Huntington College in Montgomery, AL, where she was “incredibly fortunate” to double major in English and religion and philosophy. “The chairs of both departments were Duke Ph.D.’s,” Gilbert said, “and were significantly influential in getting me to think about Duke. I came to the Divinity School, got my master’s, started my Ph.D., did all my course work, passed my exams, and ran out of money. That’s when I started working.” She finished her doctorate in 1984.
Gilbert taught undergraduates for six years, giving a first-year seminar in “Religious Best-Sellers and the Shaping of the American Identity.” Gilbert recalled: “We read autobiographies of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait, Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and books by C.S. Lewis, Harvey Cox, and Harold Kushner. The reading reflected not just religious ideas, but cultural developments in this country.”
Gilbert still works as a premajor adviser and volunteers with the Duke Wesley Fellowship. But she’s especially attuned to the special needs of Continuing Studies students: “Degree-seeking Continuing Studies students could be as young as 24, 25, 26. They have a sense of how college works. But we have had students in their late 40s and early 50s. They need a lot of encouragement; they know they look different; some of the students will mistake them for the instructor. Frequently, they’re Duke employees and have to figure out how to flex their schedule to take a course that may meet four or five times a week.”
Born and raised: Mobile, AL.
Education:
Huntington College, BA, 1974
Duke Divinity School, MDiv 1977
Duke Graduate School, Ph.D. 1984
Last vacation: England and Ireland, April 2003.
Last books read for pleasure: Office of Innocence, by Thomas Keneally; A Fearsome Doubt, by Charles Todd.
Last movie/play/performance seen: Cloud Nine, by Caryl Churchill, presented by the Duke Department of Theater Studies, 2002.
Listening lately to: Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet, by Yo-Yo Ma; Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors, by George Winston; “jazz of all kinds and descriptions.”