He does that because he respects the scientific enterprise, but also because, in his line of work, people’s lives depend on getting the science right.” Early Career Questions

At a festschrift in his honor, colleagues reflected on Cook’s “life of scholarship on bad behavior.” Bruce Kuniholm, Sanford’s first dean, called Cook the “intellectual godfather of the Sanford School.” This spring, Cook completed his final year of teaching, committee service, and administrative leadership and became one of the first emeritus professors of the school he helped create. Cook arrived at Duke in 1973 just as the university launched its program in the nascent field of public policy studies. The topics he studied drew him into politically charged debates, and at times, his email inbox was peppered with hate mail.ĭuring those four decades, Cook held several key leadership roles at Sanford, helping build the program from a small interdisciplinary unit to a school enrolling more than 700 students each year. His work produced entirely new ways to think about, and measure, society’s efforts to temper human excesses. Economic inequality and “winner-take-all” markets. During Philip Cook’s 44-year career at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, he has studied some of our nation’s most intractable problems.

Imbd phil cook