Thank you, Mark. Let me begin by thanking you for your leadership. And I’m grateful to all of the members of this Council for your service. Your ongoing work sustains the strong traditions of shared governance at Duke, built over generations by many, including George Christie, whose passing we’ve mourned this year.
At this time last year, I spoke with you about the many challenges we face: dwindling public support of higher education and academic research; a precipitous decline in our primary sources of external funding; rapid introduction of new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, that disrupt established practice; and a social, political, and cultural milieu characterized by instability and heightened conflict.
I talked then of our need to be prepared, not only to seek cost-reductions across the university, but also to re-imagine our work and consider how we might strategically realign around our highest priorities.
In the time since, we have continued to face challenges, and we’ll discuss some of those in our upcoming executive session. But even as colleagues across the university continue adjusting to new ways of operating, I believe we have made important strides.
Indeed, as the name of our current fundraising and alumni engagement campaign signals, Duke is Made for This. Made for this moment of change and uncertainty. Made for a world that will need, now more than ever, a liberal arts institution with our particular culture, sensibilities and expertise.
My confidence is reinforced by the many different people I encounter every week, both here on campus and in my travels.
I consistently hear from them that Duke is recognized for our remarkable forward momentum, and for making value-driven decisions that are positioning us for a brighter future.
My confidence is also grounded in the tangible progress we continue to make toward the five overarching priorities I articulated to this Council in my first annual address in 2018: Empowering our people; transforming teaching and learning; strengthening community; partnering with purpose in Durham and the region; and engaging our global network of alumni and friends.
Let me take each area in turn.
First, we are empowering our people. Times like these remind us that Duke is an extraordinary university because of the students, faculty and staff who bring our missions to life. And even though circumstances have forced us to become smaller, we undertook our strategic realignment precisely to ensure we could continue to invest in our people.
Our students are the embodiment of our future. Notwithstanding constrained financial resources, we’re expanding our commitment to making a Duke education accessible and affordable. Our annual expenditures on undergraduate student financial aid exceeded a record $200 million this year. I’m especially proud that our initiative for students from the Carolinas and additional strategic measures have resulted in quite substantial increases in socio-economic diversity among our student body. And beyond financial aid, we’re prioritizing support for first-generation students and those from lower-income backgrounds, to ensure that they can take full advantage of all Duke offers.
We’re also investing in you, the faculty who propel our teaching and research missions and inspire us with pathbreaking scholarship—impactful work like that I witnessed recently in the lab of Professor Nanthia Suthana. There I met a military veteran who suffers from severe and formerly untreatable PTSD. Now he’s finding life-changing relief from a novel, tiny implant capable of monitoring his brain activity, predicting when PTSD symptoms will occur, and proactively delivering interventions to short-circuit those debilitating symptoms.
Empowering this type of work requires continuous investment in faculty excellence, and our ongoing campaign has already raised over $300 million for endowed chairs, with a goal of raising $2.5 billion for faculty support, including chairs, discretionary funds, and research support.
Another way we’re investing in faculty is by supporting research translation and commercialization, moving discoveries from the lab into the market. Since 2020, this work has led to more than 1,600 invention disclosures and generated nearly $500 million in licensing revenue—revenue distributed back to you, and your labs, departments, and schools to support further research and innovation.
And the world is taking note of your extraordinary achievements. Duke has been recognized among the top six institutions in the world in each of the first two years that the Times Higher Ed has published its Interdisciplinary Science Rankings. Over the past five years, 32 Duke faculty members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. These new members represent fully 21 percent of Duke’s living members of those distinguished honorary societies.
Our clinical faculty, too, are a critical part of Duke’s mission. Duke University Health System is returning to a position of financial strength, thanks to our integrated physician practice, which has unlocked capacity for growth and expansion of our world-renowned academic medical center. Forward-looking projects—like a proton therapy center for advanced cancer care and our partnership with UNC to build the state’s first stand-alone children’s hospital—will ensure that patients here in Durham and throughout North Carolina will have even greater access to world-class care.
We’re also making tangible progress on the second part of our strategic vision, transforming teaching and learning.
Our progress includes several recent, faculty-driven curriculum enhancements: the new Trinity College curriculum; the Pratt School’s first-year design curriculum and Character-Forward initiative; the School of Medicine’s new Patient-FIRST curriculum; and our new Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship. All of these ground our teaching in experiential learning opportunities and in professional decision-making contexts.
Duke continues to be distinguished by our interdisciplinary and experiential education programs such as Bass Connections and DukeEngage. The Data+ program has supported 140 projects over the past five years, ranging from advanced mathematical sciences to art restoration, with nearly a third of its projects in the computational humanities. And we’re poised to implement recommendations of the 2030 Teaching Excellence & Innovation Committee, which will improve the ways we define, evaluate and support effective teaching and mentoring practices.
And as we confront both the opportunities and potential downsides of artificial intelligence, we’re building on more than a century of excellence in liberal arts education, committed to asking the most fundamental questions, such as:
- How can we ensure that a generation of students who have always had instant access to information will also experience the power of deep scholarly immersion and reflection?
- How can we responsibly deploy AI and other tools to augment and deepen, not erode, our human capacities for rigorous inquiry and creative exploration?
- How can we preserve the thrill of intellectual discovery in a digital age?
As I recently shared with colleagues at the Franklin Humanities Institute, these are some of the questions we, as faculty colleagues, need to wrestle with as we look to the future of teaching and learning.
I’m also heartened by the progress we’ve made toward the third element of our strategic vision, which is nurturing a campus community where everyone feels supported in reaching their fullest potential.
We have now fully implemented the QuadEx undergraduate living and learning model, and it is succeeding in enhancing faculty engagement with undergraduates and fostering belonging and well-being from our students’ earliest days on campus.
As we strive to be a community of people who embrace our differences and learn from our disagreements, we’re providing structured opportunities for developing and practicing habits of constructive engagement. We’re investing in new programs to help faculty advance constructive dialogue and integrate core values of pluralism, free inquiry, and belonging in the classroom.
Five years ago, we introduced a campus-wide culture survey that marked the first time all internal constituents—faculty, students and staff—were asked to share their experiences and perspectives on life at Duke, and it has motivated us to seek new pathways for staff career advancement. Data from our second campus culture survey, administered in 2024, indicate we’re making positive progress in the lived experience at Duke. But there is more to be done. This January marked the fourth year that began with more than 300 university leaders coming together for a day-long meeting focused on achieving inclusive excellence as a university, and at the department and unit levels.
The arts are also a vital aspect of building community, and with the leadership of Vice Provost Deborah Rutter, former Director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, we’re extremely well positioned to expand the role of the arts on campus, in the Durham community and beyond. We’ve implemented recommendations of the 2019 Arts Planning Group and invested in key campus assets such as the Nasher Museum; the Sarah P. Duke Gardens; and our newly restructured Center for Documentary Studies.
Duke Athletics is another fundamental contributor to community. As the landscape of intercollegiate athletics continues to change at a bewildering pace, we are committed to ensuring that Duke provides a world-class student-athlete experience and that athletics continues to serve as a positive influence on the university’s national and global reputation.
Our investments in excellence are yielding clear results in this domain as well. We are now the first school in ACC history to win conference championships in football, and men’s and women’s basketball, all in the same year. And we should all be proud that Duke holds one of the nation’s leading Graduation Success Rates, and that our student-athletes have led the Atlantic Coast Conference in ACC Honor Roll selections for 36 of the past 37 years.
The fourth element of our strategic vision is partnering with purpose to advance health and well-being in Durham and the region.
As our hometown and region experience tremendous growth, we’re taking new steps that are in direct alignment with our core missions and that seek to ensure that all residents benefit from regional advancement.
One is the Durham Early College of Health Sciences, which welcomed its first class of ninth graders last August. This pioneering high school is a collaboration among Duke, Durham Technical Community College, and Durham Public Schools, with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The school provides pathways directly to healthcare careers at Duke while also building our region’s healthcare workforce.
We are living up to our Climate Commitment. We’ve now expanded our goals for reducing our operational impact to include not only carbon, but also waste, water, transportation, and food, and our Health System is being incorporated in climate and sustainability goal planning for the first time.
And this week, we’ve formally launched HomeGrown, a transformative initiative that represents a $200 million commitment to our community over the next three years.
Through HomeGrown, we’re aligning Duke’s core business operations with the economic health of our region, with measurable goals across several priority impact areas:
- Through employment at Duke;
- Through purchasing from local businesses;
- Through our construction projects;
- And through investment, by partnering to increase housing supply and by expanding homeownership pathways.
We are making specific commitments in each of these areas, with public reporting and with measurable goals.
The fifth element of our vision for the future is activating our global network of alumni and friends, through programs to support their lifelong growth and by engaging them as partners in advancing our educational, research, and service missions.
Our campaign, Made for This, is the first in Duke’s history to have explicit objectives for both fundraising and alumni engagement.
Last month, I spent time with some of the 500 alumni and friends who visited campus as part of Women’s Weekend. This summer dozens of alumni will return to Duke for the third installment of the Forever Learning Summer Academy. There, they will indulge their love of learning in week-long courses on topics including Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” and Lincoln and the Civil War.
Last year alone, over 25,000 Duke alumni attended events and programs like these around the world, and more than 14,000 volunteered their time to support our students or their local communities. Over 33,000 alumni made a gift or pledge last year to support our work as a university. This is why our campaign has been so incredibly successful from a philanthropic perspective. Just one year into its public phase, it has already become, by a wide margin, the most successful fundraising effort in Duke’s history.
Empowering people; transforming teaching and learning; strengthening community; partnering with purpose; and engaging our global network. Owing to extraordinary efforts across all five of these priorities, we are today well positioned to lead even—perhaps especially—in tumultuous times.
Indeed, this moment of profound ferment offers, at least to an enterprising and ambitious institution like Duke, an opportunity to ascend in the next century even more so than in our remarkable first 100 years.
I’m grateful to have had this opportunity to serve as president as we crossed our centennial threshold; and guided by our strategic vision, I look forward to working with you to secure our trajectory for an even brighter future.
Thank you.