Good evening! As President of Duke University, I am delighted to welcome you to the United States Capitol for the annual Sanford on the Hill celebration. I understand from Congressman Price that this event long predates my time at Duke – and perhaps even his time in Congress. I am honored to help carry on the tradition.
It is wonderful to see so many Dukies of all ages with us this evening. Not two weeks ago, I completed my first year as Duke President, so all of you – even the current students – have been a part of this community longer than I have.
The benefit of being a relative newbie is that it provides some opportunities for comparison. Durham, for instance, has much better winters than my previous institutions. Our dogs seem particularly to appreciate that.
Duke’s alums are more actively and passionately engaged than at our peer institutions. I think it’s either the lemurs or the basketball.
And one of the things I’ve found most striking: at Duke, we’ve forged a much stronger bond between our campus community and the policy world in DC. That relationship is a direct result of the active engagement of the Sanford School of Public Policy – which is one of our greatest assets as a university.
Between Duke in DC programming, the political and policy expertise of Sanford faculty, immersive learning opportunities, and our commitment to rigorous research methods, I strongly believe that Sanford provides the best policy education in the United States.
Now I have to admit that I am a little bit biased, as I am a member of the Sanford faculty … and President of the University.
At the same time, Sanford is helping Duke project its scholarship into the public policy conversation in Washington. We are working to build a first-in-class policy bridge between our academic work in Durham and policymakers and elected officials here in DC – the goal is to turn our innovative and rigorous research into solutions that can, in the words of James B. Duke, uplift our region and the world.
We have a wonderful program this evening, which we will be getting to very shortly. I know that we’re all excited to hear from our distinguished fellow Dukie, Judy Woodruff, about the latest goings on in the building where we’re sitting and the one a little ways down Pennsylvania Avenue.
But first, a special guest.
My first year was a period of transition for Duke, with three of our Deans either returning to the classroom or moving on to new roles. I am pleased to report that after nationwide searches, eight of our ten Deans are now women, including Kerry Abrams of Duke Law School, Toddi Steelman of the Nicholas School for the Environment, and tonight’s special guest, Judith Kelley of Sanford.
Many of you in this room know Judith Kelley from her 15 years as a Sanford professor, a role in which she mentored scores of Duke students and was awarded the Susan E. Tifft Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award and the Brownell-Whetten Award for Diversity and Inclusion.
Dean Kelley earned her undergraduate degree at Stanford and her M.P.P. and PhD from Harvard. She is a distinguished scholar of international efforts to promote democracy and prevent human trafficking, and she’s the author of three books and numerous articles. Since 2014, she has served as the Senior Associate Dean at the Sanford School, responsible for faculty and for research.
I have the utmost confidence that Dean Kelley will build on the progress made by Dean Brownell and lead the Sanford School to an even brighter future. Please join me in welcoming her.
Good morning/afternoon! Welcome back to this beautiful chapel, where you officially began your career as Dukies at Convocation just a few short years ago.
It’s fitting, then, that you should return for the beginning of Commencement weekend, which is the formal celebration of your academic careers at Duke. This is the moment you’ve been preparing for, practicing and planning for, both actively and unknowingly, throughout your lives on campus.
This weekend’s events are the result of a tremendous amount of active planning by many people. I know, I’ve been in the meetings. Let me just say that if you’re still trying to decide where to go to dinner tonight, it’s probably too late.
The next few hours are going to fly by – at least as soon as this speech is over. So, I encourage you to make time for saying thank you to all the people in this crowd who have supported you over the years. First, your family. Let’s all give those family members joining us here today a thunderous round of applause for all that they have done to make this day possible!
And let’s thank the community of staff and faculty here on campus – the teachers and mentors, the cooks and groundskeepers, the advisors, counselors and coaches, for the roles they have played in your success.
By the way, for those of you with last names ending in [A through Q | I through Z | R through Z] – if you’re here, you’ve successfully hacked the baccalaureate system.And of course you share this moment with your friends – at least those in your third of the alphabet.
Like most of you, I’m enjoying my first Commencement weekend at Duke. But as a veteran of many graduations, I can tell you that one of the highlights is the Baccalaureate service, with two organs and a full choir that lend this occasion a fitting degree of inspiration, pomp and circumstance.
You just processed in to a triumphant march composed by Herbert Brewer, who wrote the piece for Gloucester Cathedral in England, a medieval sanctuary that looks a lot like this one. Each booming chord was meant to reverberate through the nave and off of the vaulted ceilings, so that you can still hear the music echoing for a few moments after the piece has ended, like the afterglow of a sunset over the horizon.
The beauty of Brewer’s march is not so much in the melody itself as in that echo: the rising and falling in the spaces between the notes, and the anticipation of each towering chord to come. On the sheet music, this is often denoted by a squiggly line – a simple mark for such a powerful effect, the passage from the lowest depths to the highest highs.
Today, I’d like us to think about those spaces, the spaces between the notes.
Of course, today will feel like a high note. As it should. And indeed, we tend to think of life as a series of high or low notes. The thesis completed, the relationship that ended badly, the bowl game or championship won, the job offer accepted. I know that as soon-to-be minted Duke graduates you are all ready to make good on those plans you’ve been making, to continue to excel, to hit the high notes to come.
But the richness of life really is the space in between: the minute steps that we take every day toward a future that is never entirely clear to us, the decisions that we make almost without realizing it that come to define who we are, and who we want to be. In the scores of our lives, it’s those squiggly lines indicating a glissando, or the bars or dots marking rests between the musical notes.
I’m the first to admit that it is often very difficult to focus on those spaces in between. We all feel a natural urge to strive for our next impressive achievement; and I know that our parents – I’m one of them – relish in bragging about them.
At Duke, you’ve worked hard to play all the right notes while keeping one eye on the future. And amidst your great successes, you’ve probably found that this can feel stressful, overwhelming, even chaotic. We can get so lost in the playing that we forget to pause and listen to the beauty of the music, listen carefully enough to hear those echoes, and those silences.
Chances are, when you look back on your time here, you won’t think of the time you spent studying orgo or your brilliant analysis of Shakespeare, or of graduation weekend – or this speech.
You’ll remember instead the nights you stayed up late laughing with your roommates. You’ll remember the spontaneous road trip to Asheville to see the leaves changing in fall; the guest speaker who inspired you to work part time on a political campaign; painting your face for your first home game in the student section – or celebrating that national championship three years ago.
And I’ll bet that some of the classes you remember most fondly over the years may not be the required stepping stones toward a future job or profession. They will be those classes you fell into when you stepped off the pathway. Those moments when you surprised yourself, or got stopped in your tracks by something or someone who made you pause, and think, and look around and see things in a completely new way.
Those times you allowed yourself space between the high and low notes, space to relish in the everyday moments of reflection and gratitude when friendships are forged, creativity is fostered, curiosity sparked, and convictions strengthened.
These moments are frequent but fleeting. They may come when you’re on a morning run or winding down for the evening, when you’re commuting to work or waiting in line at the grocery store.
…Or they may come as your President drones on at Baccalaureate and you are waiting to process out of this Chapel for the second and final time as Duke students.
Soon enough!
In just a few minutes, the organ will begin booming again for the recessional, courtesy of Robert Parkins and Kit Jacobsen, the University and Duke Chapel Organists. Kit is up here at the Aeolian organ, and Bob is sitting way up in the Flentrop crow’s nest behind you.
Playing the organ is a feat of mental and physical coordination. It’s no coincidence that organists gave us the expression “pulling out all the stops.” If Bob and Kit only play the keyboard, no sound will come out. They also have to pull on a series of levers, or stops, that allow air to flow into and out of the pipes, which in turn produce the high and low notes and leave behind the beautiful echoes. So, as they carry the melody, they constantly have to see two, three steps ahead and prepare the mechanisms for the notes down the line.
We may all feel that way sometimes.
As you depart from Duke, I know that you are well prepared to plan for the brief lows and soaring highs to come. You have accomplished so much here, and your work will long echo on our campus.
But I encourage you to take time for the squiggly lines and to remember that there is so much to celebrate in the quiet pauses of a life well lived.
Thank you, and congratulations to the great class of 2018.
Good morning! I want to begin by saying thank you to all of the reunion volunteers who are with us for your leadership over the past year. This morning’s class gifts and this weekend’s celebrations are a testament to your tireless efforts on behalf of our university. We are so very grateful for your commitment to Duke.
Would the reunions class volunteers please stand to be recognized.
I also want to recognize those of you who supported your reunion class gifts, which will make a significant difference in the lives of our students.
Duke is a university committed to teaching and learning from the world around us, and with your support, we are developing new and innovative programs to better educate the leaders of tomorrow. We are deeply invested in the health of our neighbors, and with your support, the health professionals we train will be able to continue healing the sick and serving the most vulnerable among us. We believe in rigorous research for the betterment of society, and with your support, our faculty will be able to make new discoveries and drive the creation of new technologies that will improve lives.
With your support, we are building a future that lives up to Duke’s values and promise, and I’m very excited about what we can accomplish together. Thank you for supporting the Duke we have always been and the Duke we are destined to become.
This morning, I am delighted to officially welcome you back to campus. Having visited some of the class parties late last night, I am also pleasantly surprised to see you brave, over-caffeinated souls here for my first reunions address.
This has been a year of firsts for me. It is, of course, my first academic year at Duke. In August, I welcomed my first class of first-years to campus, and my wife Annette and I have since ticked off our first football bowl game victory, our first Duke solar eclipse, and our first trip to the beach.
On the academic front, we’ve continued our proud tradition of Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, and Schwarzman scholars, sending our brightest Dukies on to graduate study that will prepare them for lifelong leadership. Our incoming class was the most competitive ever – almost 38,000 students applied to join the Class of 2022.
We’re also making new investments in our campus. This weekend, you’ll have a chance to visit beautiful new buildings, like the Brodhead Center, the comprehensive Student Wellness building, and the stunning Rubenstein Arts Center. These investments are helping to revolutionize campus life and give our students new collaborative, innovative learning opportunities.
In my first few months at Duke, I’ve also enjoyed getting to know the students, faculty, and especially alumni – I met many of you already at homecoming and our events in DC, New York, and California. To a person, every member of the Duke community has been incredibly welcoming to me and Annette, making us feel right at home in the Duke family.
But despite my best efforts to make a good first impression, far and away the most popular members of the family are our two dogs, Scout and Cricket. Everywhere they go on campus, they are surrounded by a crowd of fawning students and staff.
It’s like Beatlemania, only it’s Doodlemania.
I was walking them through Duke Gardens one recent Saturday. It was beautiful early-spring weather, and the dogwoods and azaleas were in full bloom – the sort of day that Annette and I had been looking forward to since we moved to North Carolina. The main lawn of the Gardens was packed with students and neighbors throwing the Frisbee and sprawled out on beach towels reading and listening to music.
Annette and I wandered over to the ponds, because Cricket and Scout are obsessed with the ducks. They don’t chase them – they just watch intently – very intently – from the edge of the water with a look that is somehow equal parts arrogance and terror.
We were sitting by the ponds when a girl walked by with a camera around her neck – she was with her family on a college visit, taking pictures of Duke. She complimented us on the dogs and snapped their picture before walking off with her parents and her younger brother. After a few seconds, she came running back up to me and said, “excuse me, but my brother recognized you.”
I smiled, preparing to introduce myself.
“Are you the head of Duke Basketball?”
I wonder how Coach K would feel about that.
This episode got me thinking about cases of mistaken identity, which seem to abound these days in higher education. There’s an arms race among elite colleges and universities – each time one of us builds something or invests in a new program, the others follow suit. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: it means that we’re investing alongside our peers in redefining higher education for the 21st century.
But it does present a risk: we have to be sure not to lose our sense of who we are as an institution. For the roots of our future – of the Duke University of tomorrow – lie not only in the decisions we make today, but in the history and values that make Duke Duke.
As a newcomer, I still have the benefit of an outsider’s perspective, having spent the bulk of my career on the campuses of our peers. I came to Duke from the University of Pennsylvania, where I served as Provost, and I also taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford. So naturally, I’ve spent a great deal of time this year thinking about what sets Duke apart.
Duke, first and foremost, excels at institutional balance. We do a better job than our peers of striking the balance between teaching and research, between rigorous academics and top-tier intercollegiate athletics, between a commitment to improving the region and a desire to bring about positive change globally.
Duke is also right-sized for our mission of discovery and service: we are large enough to have the resources to tackle the world’s greatest challenges, but we’re small enough to still have a human impact in our immediate neighborhood. Through innovative partnerships in Durham and throughout the Triangle, we are building an even stronger future for the region.
But what really sets Duke apart is our people. As President, I have learned very quickly that physical infrastructure gets the headlines, but it’s the human infrastructure that is our true value proposition.
This is even reflected in our architecture – the gothic spires on Abele Quad were intended to mimic the medieval universities of Europe, guilds of learning built around libraries, communities of people rather than the physical campuses we think of today. Degrees were created as formal documents of admittance into these communities; that’s of course why diplomas include that bit about the rights and privileges of a graduate.
At Commencement, you are not so much graduating from Duke University as graduating into the school of Duke alumni.
Going forward, Duke has an incredible opportunity to cultivate and engage with that community, a family of extraordinary people of accomplishment and purpose. That means offering our alumni new opportunities for continuing education; it also means continuing to encourage you to engage with our students to share your talent, drive and experience to advance our educational, research, and service missions.
We recognize just how valuable you are as members of the Duke community, and we want to provide you the support and encouragement to lead even more fulfilling lives.
This being my year of firsts, I’ve had to rely on support and encouragement myself from time to time. I’m sure many of you remember, for instance, that the President – meaning me – formally begins the academic year by leading nervous new students in the alma mater at Convocation. And as new President, I joined my fellow First-Years in another longstanding tradition: frantically learning the words to Dear Old Duke in the waning hours of orientation. Not only did this make me an honorary member of the class of 2021, it also ensured that the eight short lines are forever seared into my memory.
When I think about this community, I am reminded of one passage in the alma mater: though on life’s broad sea our fates may far us bear, we’ll ever turn to thee. It speaks to the fact that wherever life has taken you, whether near to campus or a world away, Duke will forever be your home. Each of you has made a difference in the history of this university and its intellectual life, a contribution for which we are so very thankful. I am delighted to welcome you back here to engage once again in this truly exceptional community. Together, we are Forever Duke.
President’s Ballroom, Washington Duke Inn, Durham, NC
Thank you for the kind introduction. I am honored to be here to celebrate Dr. Cook’s life and career. I want to begin by recognizing his family members who are with us tonight, including his wife Sylvia. We are delighted to welcome you back to Duke University.
And as this is the first dinner since Dr. Cook passed away, we are also paying tribute to his advocacy for social justice and his enduring contributions to the Duke community. In that spirit, I also want to recognize tonight’s award winners who are carrying on his legacy here on campus: Andrea Lynette Harris, Debra Brandon, Felicia Tittle, Danielle Purifoy, and Michael Ivory. Congratulations.
This is the second event in as many months where the Duke community has had the opportunity to reflect on that important legacy. A few weeks ago, I had the honor of welcoming students, faculty, staff, and neighbors to Duke Chapel for a commemoration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And while I spent some time discussing Dr. King’s visit to Page Auditorium in 1964, I left half of the story of his connection to Duke untold.
You are likely already familiar with the coda to which I’m referring – a peaceful protest broke out at Duke immediately following Dr. King’s assassination in April 1968, a vigil that drew students, employees, and faculty of all races and creeds to the steps of the Chapel, to what we now know as Abele Quad. For eight days and nights, the crowd camped out under the stars and gothic spires. They sang protest songs and picked on acoustic guitars. They listened to impassioned speeches through crackling megaphones. And they called for justice at Duke, in our state, and for our nation.
I bring this up now for two reasons. The first is that we will celebrate this spring the 50th anniversary of the vigil. We are planning to host exhibitions, panel discussions, and community events continuing the campus conversation that began on those eight days in April half a century ago.
The second reason I bring this up tonight is that Samuel DuBois Cook played a pivotal role in this vitally important moment in our university history. Dr. Cook was our official representative to Dr. King’s funeral at Morehouse College, and he traveled to Atlanta just as the first stirrings of protest were beginning here at Duke.
He returned two days later to a campus in open ferment. National news trucks circled the quad, and the crowds of students, faculty, and neighbors had swelled to the hundreds at the foot of the Chapel. And remarkably, at this moment of tremendous sorrow and tension, Dr. Cook addressed the vigil with a message of hope.
He began his remarks by recounting a conversation with a white colleague, who had asked him how he could cope with this great tragedy. At first, Dr. Cook didn’t have an answer. He shared the frustration and bewilderment that so many were feeling in the days after King’s assassination, the sense of having lost so great a champion of justice and equality.
But after much reflection, after returning from Dr. King’s funeral to see the crowds so peacefully calling for change, he told the students holding the vigil that we can only cope with hatred by continuing to affirm life. He told them that we can only find peace with a divisive past by hoping for a better future. He told them that we can only heal our national divisions by believing in the promise of America.
Tonight, that message still resonates. In the face of the resurgence of hatred and division, it would be easy for us to retreat to frustration and bewilderment. But Dr. Cook’s vision of hope, of a better future, instead compels us to action, to listen to our neighbors’ voices and to stand for what we know is right.
Tonight, a half century after the silent vigil, we are still inspired by Dr. Cook’s enduring voice, calling on us through the years to build a stronger, more inclusive community, one that finally fulfills the great promise that he glimpsed on the Chapel quad in those difficult days in April.
Thank you and again, congratulations to tonight’s winners.
As President of Duke University, it is my honor to welcome you to this historic chapel for a celebration of the life of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We gather today as well to celebrate of the trailblazing legacy of Dr. Samuel Dubois Cook, Duke’s first African American professor, who passed away this May.
I am also honored to welcome our distinguished guests, our colleague and Mayor Steve Schewel, our other elected officials, Dean Powery, and today’s speaker, Sherrilyn Ifill, the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
We are of course not alone in this important commemoration. Every January, we join a great fellowship of towns and cities, schools and universities, congregations and communities of faith, and families and individuals around the world in remembering Dr. King’s abiding contributions to justice and equality.
Indeed, this celebration marks the passage of time in the Duke community, coming as it does after many commemorations over the years. Here in the chapel, we have hosted such luminaries of the civil rights movement as Ambassador Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Marian Wright Edelman, Maya Angelou, and the Reverend Joseph Lowery. And outside of these stone walls, beyond the stained glass, generations of Duke students, faculty, and staff have joined together each year in service to Durham and the surrounding region.
But these events don’t simply mark the passage of time. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made toward Dr. King’s vision of equality. They serve as a reminder of our responsibility to resist the forces of hatred and division that are not yet fully vanquished, a reminder that only through empathy, righteous witness, and a conviction to learn from the past can we ensure that the arc of the moral universe bends ever closer to justice.
This year, that reminder holds particular resonance at Duke. As many of you know, we have been engaged over these past few months in a difficult but productive conversation about our university history, a conversation informed by Dr. King’s example and the struggle for civil rights.
Led by a Commission on Memory and History, we have come together as a community to reflect on our past and take formal steps to build a more inclusive future. We have adopted new principles for engaging with controversy and injustice in Duke’s history. That conversation will continue this spring and beyond with exhibitions, panel discussions, and community events. And we will proudly open a new Research Center to address disparities in clinical care.
We have also renewed our community commitment to defending the right of all of our fellow students, faculty, staff, and neighbors to participate fully in university life, in accordance and alignment with our abiding values of service, learning, and faith.
These conversations have never been more important, as we have witnessed the tragic violence in Charlottesville, the shocking revival of white supremacy, the demonstrations in downtown Durham, and the events at this very Chapel.
Many of you already know that Dr. King visited our campus in 1964 and gave a speech in Page Auditorium, right next door. The Duke of Dr. King’s visit was still in the vice grip of a segregationist South – I have even been told that he spoke at Page only after he was denied the opportunity to preach from this pulpit.
But because of his vision and his labor, and with the support and struggle of many like him, progress was already underway. Just a year before his visit, the university had admitted its first African American undergraduates, breaking the policy of discrimination that had governed our admissions since the institution’s founding. Over the intervening decades, through years of tension and protest, we would begin to build a university that lives up to our values. We would endeavor to learn from our past and to begin to mark the passage of time with confident steps toward justice.
At Duke, Dr. King repeated a refrain from his speeches throughout the South, from Birmingham to Richmond: “the time is always right to do what is right.”
Today’s celebration comes as we at Duke are taking action to continue our progress toward the future Dr. King wanted. That progress isn’t easy, and we may lose our footing from time to time, or lose ground along the way. But we must continue to step forward for what’s right, moving toward a community that can be an example to our neighbors and the world.
Thank you, Jack, for the kind introduction, and to you, Ellen, for that heartfelt blessing. I also want to echo Jack’s appreciation of Nan and Dick, who provided visionary leadership to this university, and offer a special thanks to you, Amy, for sharing your friendship, wisdom and experience.
We commonly think of an inauguration as a beginning, and for me and Annette this does mark the beginning of a new life here as North Carolinians, as part of this vibrant university and wonderful city of Durham … and the conversion of our wardrobes to that luminous shade of blue that marks us forever as Dukies.
But what does this day mean for us together, as we gather today on Abele Quad, in front of this magnificent chapel, at the foot of these majestic trees? A beginning, yes, of sorts; but in an important sense no beginning at all. Rather another step, another iteration, in a long succession of events – and Presidents – that have come before.
Duke has been called “the university in the forest,” and those of you visiting for the first time can clearly see why — even on beautiful Abele Quad, the center of Duke’s academic and community life, we are surrounded by towering trees, indeed many of them older than this campus.
In fact, this forest of trees was once largely abandoned farmland. Young loblolly pines were the first to seed the barren fields, still rutted with the scars of agriculture. They grew quickly into lonely stands, dropping needles to renew the soil and providing shade for hardwood species, which in turn matured into the thriving, diverse forest we see today.
Environmental scientists call this process succession, a natural regeneration whereby each stage of renewal prepares the land for the stage to come.
At Duke, we are the beneficiaries of a similar process of institutional succession, of continuity and renewal. Like the towering trees in Duke Forest, these magnificent buildings surrounding us today rose into the sky a little over 80 years ago, born on this land from the extraordinary vision of James B. Duke and President William Preston Few, who dared to see a university in a near-wilderness of pine and pasture.
The Gothic campus they brought to life was itself a rebirth and a renewal of Trinity College, which had taken the great risk of moving to Durham a generation before. This process of succession, of powerful and periodic renewal, can be traced directly all the way back to John Brown’s one-room schoolhouse in Randolph County, and as our architecture so clearly signals, indirectly to great traditions of learning stretching across continents and millennia.
Throughout our history, each iteration of this institution has risen with purpose to meet the great challenges of its day and has shaded and seeded the ground for the grander things to come. Each generation of Duke leaders has acted decisively in the face of ferment and turmoil to resist — as President Few put it — the mighty influences that would sway the university from its true course and to boldly accept the consequences of their choice.
Today, this university is again facing a world in ferment. We are again besieged by influences that would divert or distract us from our missions of teaching and learning, discovering knowledge, and of healing and serving society.
We face difficult questions about what role higher education should play in an increasingly globalized, interconnected world. We live amid concerns about the sustainability of our trajectory, in light of pressures placed upon students and their families. We hear criticisms from those who believe that elite universities are a barrier to — rather than an instrument of — the democratization of knowledge.
Again we are called upon to answer the challenges of the day.
So let us think of today not so much as a beginning, but as another renewal: both a renewed commitment to the values that guided the choices of our predecessors at Duke, and a renewed charge to make bold choices of our own, choices that will permit this noble university in the forest to thrive and to shape the course of a still-new century.
This renewal must begin where Duke began – in the classroom. Inspired by the great American philosophy of pragmatism, our forebears developed a thoughtful, far-sighted teaching model that blended the best of their past with what their present permitted, and what their future demanded. Their brilliant and broadly applicable system of departments, credits, and professionally accredited degrees is familiar to us because it became the paradigm of the modern research university.
And yet even as this model was perfected, the society that called it forth continued to evolve. Indeed, the research university system itself unleashed many of the most profound technological, economic, and cultural forces that have so undeniably altered our society: a society that, reflexively, now demands that we change, that we adapt. Today’s workforce, today’s human needs, today’s students – all have been transformed by the digital age. So too must our ability to elevate them and shape them for the better.
So, let us renew our commitment to lead in teaching and learning. Let us boldly set about the work of again blending the very best of our past with the full technological capabilities our present now allows, and with an eye toward the scalability and adaptability that our future will demand.
Duke has shown its boldness before. Are we bold enough now to invent new and creative ways to better adapt to and personalize every Duke student’s educational needs and interests? To offer them more efficient just-in-time and on-demand learning opportunities? Are we flexible enough to offer not only the finest residential education anywhere but also continuing access to learning, discovery and re-training throughout their entire lives as Blue Devils?
Our new century calls for a university audacious and visionary enough to fundamentally redefine learning and teaching in higher education.
I believe Duke can and will be that university.
We are similarly called upon today to renew our commitment to discovery. By transforming Trinity College into Duke University nearly a century ago, by reshaping and enlarging the departments of the college and founding new schools of graduate and professional study, our founders committed to fusing the finest in teaching with the most advanced research and scholarship.
This division of the research enterprise into disciplines has led – at Duke as it has elsewhere – to a wide array of transformative discoveries. Never has humankind understood more than we do today about our natural and physical worlds, our minds and behavior, our societies and cultures, our history.
But as our collective knowledge has grown, so too has the realization that the most pressing problems and far-reaching opportunities of our world tend not to fit into one discipline or profession. We must prevent our research from ossifying around practices that were designed to confront another century’s challenges, and that limit our ability to confront the emerging problems of today. The landscape of human knowledge and human challenge has changed; so too must our maps and tools for navigating them.
So, let us renew our commitment to opening our intellect, and the full generative power of our faculties, to the true shape of the world’s needs and opportunities rather than our established research conventions.
Duke has shown its boldness before in launching innovative interdisciplinary initiatives around – among others – the environment, the brain, and entrepreneurship. Few if any of our peers do it better. But I believe we must do more, and better yet.
Are we bold enough now to invent more productive and sustainable ways to organize and catalyze scholarship around pressing problems? Are we broad-minded enough to collaborate across the full range of scholarly perspectives, disciplined enough to drive resources to support this work, and flexible enough to alter our expectations of what “counts” as valuable research?
Our new century cries out for a university where the drive to discover is not hemmed by disciplinary logics; where philosophers work side-by-side with physicians and physicists; where nurses find inspiration in narrative theory; where mechanical engineers team up with marine biologists or musicians.
I believe Duke can and will be that university.
We are, finally, called upon today to renew our commitment to healing and to serving our surrounding communities. At each key moment of institutional regeneration, our predecessors understood and reconfirmed their obligation to marshal Duke’s teaching, learning, and discovery to positive social ends, and so we do today. We heal human injuries and illnesses; we work to heal division within our own community; and we use our skills and knowledge to aid healing and reconciliation elsewhere. We serve our fellow students and colleagues, our local community, and the world beyond to improve life and well-being for others.
This work begins here on campus. Our new century demands that we prepare ourselves for a diverse and often chaotic world, whose challenges, controversies, and crises do not stop at Duke’s gates. We need to work together to defend — even seek out – voices that are different from our own. This is hard work, but if we are to heal the divisions in the world we have to open ourselves, honestly and deeply, to a diversity of perspectives.
One great advantage Duke has in this work is that we are part of a vibrantly globalcommunity. But we must be careful not to overlook the challenges and opportunities in our own backyard. James B. Duke called on us, in his words, to “develop our resources, increase our wisdom, and promote human happiness.” The truest tests of our commitment to healing and serving, the most accurate gauges of our resolve, are right here in North Carolina.
We have done much over the past decade to strengthen our service to this city and region. And yet, much good work remains.
Are we bold enough to consciously work to break down the division between what we do regionally and what we do globally? Are we humble enough to understand that we need not travel to the other side of the world to find communities in need, both rural and urban, or willing partners with whom we can work to propel human welfare, creativity, and fulfillment?
Our new century calls for a university that grounds its ambition to heal and serve the world in humility; that confronts its own problems as readily as it does others’, and that shows its most generous and supportive self to its own neighborhood.
I believe Duke can and will be that university.
Today, then, we are called upon to renew one of the last century’s great ambitions – this Duke University – for the new and very different century that lies before us. Ultimately, this renewal will require the active participation of every member of the Duke community: faculty, students, staff, alumni, and neighbors.
Together, we endow the university with our talents, our labor, our differences, our passion, and our knowledge; and in so doing, we join a long succession of men and women who have renewed the Duke University of their day.
We know it can be done. Consider the boldness of John Franklin Crowell’s moving Trinity College to Durham 125 years ago, when the institution was in dire financial straits, packing the 10,000 volumes of the library onto mule carts and sending them off on the trail to what is now East Campus. Or imagine James B. Duke and William Preston Few in the 1920s, picking their way on a cow path through fallow fields and having the audacity and the vision to dream of a Gothic campus rising on this hill.
We sit here for a moment’s rest at a point on the same trail, shaded by the very same hardwoods and pines, a trail that was at best obscure to the founders of this university. But they set our coordinates; they each cut their own section of this trail; they marched hard and gained so much ground for us.
And now it is for us to push further along, and to blaze a new path toward the brighter days ahead.
