James S. Roberts
james.roberts@duke.edu(919) 684-3501
Executive Vice Provost for Finance and Administration
As Executive Vice Provost for Finance and Administration, James S. (Jim) Roberts has three principal areas of responsibility. First, he leads the budgets, planning and institutional research group within the Provost's Office, supporting the Provost and other senior officers in resource allocation planning and a variety of institutional reporting and analysis tasks. Second, he has broad responsibilities for coordinating student administrative services at Duke, including deployment of the PeopleSoft student administration system, which supports each school of the university as well as a variety of central offices. Finally, Roberts is involved with academic space planning, with a particular emphasis on developing information resources and analytical tools to support the effective utilization of campus space. A veteran of almost 20 years in the Provost's Office, Roberts has helped lead several institutional planning processes, the most recent of which culminated in February 2001 with the approval by the Duke Board of Trustees of Building on Excellence, the University's long-range plan.
Outside Duke, Roberts has represented the university as assembly representative in the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), a group of 31 distinguished private colleges and universities and as chair of COFHE's Research Advisory Committee. He was a member the Ad Hoc Committee on College Costs of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), which developed a framework for discussing college costs in response to the 1998 report of the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education. Roberts has also served on the faculty of NACUBO's professional development program "Financial Planning in an Institutional Setting."
Roberts earned his B.A. from Northwestern University in 1972. He completed a Ph.D. in modern European social history at the University of Iowa in 1979. After teaching in Stanford University's Western Culture program and completing a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Alcohol Research Group of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, Roberts completed an M.B.A. degree at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1985.
In addition to his administrative appointment, Roberts is an Adjunct Professor of History. He is the author of Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth Century Germany (1984) and numerous articles on the social history of alcohol. He teaches regularly as part of the team taught course (Psychology 102) "Alcohol: Brain, Individual and Society."