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Hello, and thanks for all you do to support the Duke University community.

While our campus is much quieter now as we swing into the summer, the world of higher education continues to be noisy, and complicated.  

We’re working every day to sort out many significant federal policy changes—and proposals for additional changes—that have quite dire implications for the University.

Federal funding threats affect all areas of our work, and include:

• severe cuts to research funding; 
• dramatic increases to university tax payments, and threats to our non-profit status; 
• restrictions on international education;
• losses of federal financial aid and loan programs;
• and changes to government-funded healthcare programs. 

I expect you share my grave concern about what these dramatic policy changes mean for our work at Duke. And I want you to know that we are advocating, in every way possible, at both the state and federal levels, to:

• maintain funding for our mission; 
• to protect jobs and economic vitality here in Durham and across North Carolina; 
• to support international students and scholars; 
• and to keep education and healthcare accessible to all. 

I am personally engaged in this work on a daily basis, along with many other Duke leaders. 

I also serve on the board of the Association of American Universities, or AAU, through which we are working collectively with America’s leading research universities to demonstrate powerfully, and advocate strenuously, for the transformative power of education, research, and innovation.

Though we still don’t know the full degree to which Duke’s financial resources will ultimately be affected, the considerable reductions we’ve already experienced—along with the scale of the additional losses we could face—mean that there is, sadly, no scenario in which Duke can or will avoid incurring substantial losses of funding due to these policy changes. 

As I announced in March, this spring we began planning a university-wide strategic realignment and cost-reduction process to prepare us for the road ahead. 

And now, like many other organizations around the country, we are being forced to reduce  the scope of our activities and spending in order to sustain excellence in our core missions.  

The leadership of every school and unit at Duke has had to think carefully about how to do critical work with fewer resources, while developing strategic plans for moving forward. 

This involves making incredibly difficult decisions and painful choices about reducing the scope of our work. I know our leadership teams have felt the weight of those decisions, and their implications, throughout this process.

As you are likely aware, we’ve taken several steps: 

• we’ve frozen most staff and faculty hiring; 
• we’ve suspended capital spending on new projects; 
• we’ve limited non-essential spending; 
• and we’re making some tough decisions about our work and how to do it most efficiently.

We will, for the foreseeable future, have to be smaller—and do our work with fewer people. 

I sincerely wish that were not the case, but the harsh reality is that reducing our spending by the scale required means that Duke will have to employ fewer people. 

It is likely we’ll come to a point where we’ll need to engage in involuntary reductions in staff; but first we are trying to do as much as possible through a voluntary process, one that provides generous separation benefits to eligible staff at all levels of the university.  

Within this landscape of significantly reduced funding, academic leaders will also need to give thought to the future shape of our faculty. 

In the coming weeks, eligible faculty members will receive information from their schools about new, again voluntary, retirement incentives that are being offered across the university.

Each of you has made a major contribution to our mission over the years, and this process highlights the value of those contributions.

As with all personnel matters, voluntary separation and retirement offers extended to colleagues are confidential, and I trust that our community will be thoughtful and respectful regarding decisions others may be weighing about their futures. 

I’m confident that the steps we are taking now will position the university for continued success in the years ahead. But none of this will be easy, and I’m especially aware of the impact these changes will have on valued colleagues and their families. 

I hope that if you have questions or concerns, you will discuss those with your supervisors, reach out to your unit HR professionals and other Duke resources for support, and consult the updates.duke.edu website for more information. 

Yes, these are challenging times. Yet our recent Centennial celebration reminds us that the Duke community has faced and overcome many challenges over the past one hundred years. 

I’m incredibly proud to be part of this community as we enter Duke’s second century, and I thank you for your ongoing commitment and support for each other, and for our mission. 

This morning’s Commencement ceremony is both a celebration of the Class of 2025, and the continuation of a cherished academic tradition that connects Duke students and alumni across class years and generations.

And today’s ceremony is special in this regard, as we honor the 100th anniversary of the first Duke University Commencement, held just months after James B. Duke’s indenture of trust sparked the transformation of Trinity College into Duke University.

As we conclude our formal celebration of this centennial year, we are also looking ahead to the pivotal roles Duke students, faculty, staff and alumni will play in addressing the tremendous opportunities and challenges of the next 100 years. 

In doing so, we may find helpful perspective in the life experiences of the class of 1925.

In June of 1925, the first students to graduate from the newly named Duke University gathered in Craven Memorial Hall on East Campus, where they were addressed by Curtis D. Wilbur, the Secretary of the Navy. 

Among the 187 members of the Class of 1925 were several individuals of note, including:

• Yasuko Ueno, the first Asian woman to graduate from our university;
• Graduate student Mike Bradshaw Jr., who was one of the Chronicle writers credited with first referring to our athletics teams as the Blue Devils;
• And Charles E. Jordan, who received his Law degree that day, and whose lifetime of service to Duke and Durham would later be recognized in the naming of Durham’s Jordan High School, located just a few miles from here.

They and their classmates would go on to pursue lives of purpose and principle in a variety of settings that would have made our benefactor James B. Duke proud. 

Indeed, at the time of their graduation, the majority of the class reported an intention to pursue teaching, business, medicine or religious work, paths that aligned very well with the fields Mr. Duke considered best positioned, in his words, to “uplift mankind.” 

The class of 1925 emerged from Duke during the Jazz Age, a dynamic period in American history. Optimism was high thanks to strong prosperity and seemingly lasting peace following World War I.

But the graduates would soon be forced to wrestle with rising social, economic and political tensions, and a general tenor of uncertainty that may seem familiar today.

• Just a month after that graduation, the Scopes Monkey Trial, held 400 miles west of here in Dayton, Tennessee, would draw the world’s attention to questions of evolution and religion, and their place in public schools.
• Some four years later, the Great Depression would result in heartbreaking family hardships and widespread economic devastation with generational consequences.
• And of course, a decade after the Great Depression, the outbreak of World War II would signal the beginning of some of humanity’s darkest days. 

However, in their lifetimes, the class of 1925 also enjoyed an era of enormous innovation and nearly unimaginable progress. 

Consider—if you will—some of the wonders they would experience: 

• The life-saving discovery of penicillin, in 1928, which would revolutionize treatment of bacterial infections. 
• The unprecedented economic growth and prosperity that followed the end of World War II.
• The advent of home televisions, of commercial aviation, and other technologies that facilitated the flow of information, ideas, and people. 
• And the significant movement—albeit sometimes slow, and sometimes uneven—toward equal rights and broader distribution of opportunity in society.

The class of 1925 was part of what came to be known as “The Greatest Generation.” Shaped by hardships—and fueled by resilience, honor, and an industrious spirit—their generation went on to make possible the many remarkable achievements of the 20th century.  

Class of 2025, in your relatively short lifetimes the world has already seen transformative developments, including:

• breakthroughs in artificial intelligence;
• a revolution in media and information sharing; 
• and the introduction of life-changing technologies, including the iPhone and electric vehicles

… to say nothing of the air fryer—not exactly revolutionary, but a big step forward for making homemade chips.

Just as Duke’s very first Blue Devils, those members of the greatest generation who commenced into their unpredictable, changing world 100 years ago, today you commence into yours.  

This changing world will bring challenges, I assure you, including many we cannot foresee today. These will test your resilience, your honor, and your industrious spirit. 

But it will also bring opportunities for innovation and human progress, perhaps as never before. 

And your generation of Blue Devils will discover and develop the breakthroughs that will define the 21st century. In that transformative, life-improving and life-saving work, as alumni of this university you will carry on Mr. Duke’s bold vision for uplifting mankind.  

In this century to come, may you come to be known as the even greater generation.

Congratulations, Class of 2025.

Good afternoon, Class of 2027! On behalf of the administration, faculty, and staff, I’m delighted to welcome you formally to Duke University.

Today is the beginning of a new journey, and you’re joining us at an exciting time.  Yes, this is the start of a new era for each of you; but it’s also the start of a new era for Duke. 

We’re proud to welcome our new Provost and chief academic officer, Alec Gallimore, along with several other new members of our leadership team. And beginning in January, we will celebrate Duke University’s centennial, reflecting on what we’ve accomplished in the past 100 years and setting our sights on what’s ahead.

You see, 100 years ago, a new class of students was entering the last full academic year of Trinity College, housed on East Campus. And the magnificent and stately Chapel where we are now gathered was still farmland.

The Class of 1927 was, like you, facing a rapidly changing world. Although they had nothing like ChatGPT in their midst, they were poised to enter the Roaring ‘20s, after their years in high school had been scarred, stolen in a way, by the recent world war and the terrible Spanish flu pandemic. 

The first issue of The Chronicle that year noted the ways Trinity College was transforming, even with no hint then that, by the time the class of 1927 would graduate, they would do so as alumni of Duke University. 

Contributors to The Chronicle, noting with pride the expansive growth of the College, observed that so many women were on campus that the capacity of Southgate was strained, with 3 coeds in each of the smaller rooms and 4 in larger rooms. 

Ten new faculty were joining the College.  As today, key leadership transitions were celebrated. That year Alice Baldwin would be named Dean of Women, and become the first female granted full faculty status at Trinity. 

And let me tell you, the Class of 1927 was ready for a full schedule of lively welcoming events.  They thrilled to the annual opening of the academic year with the raising of the flag by the senior class.  And there was excitement building for a reception featuring music and ice cream—and appearances by a campus celebrity named Scab, the dog adopted by the sophomore class, who would soon be joined by a first-year Poodle named Cicero.

Those new students had little sense of what their century, the 20^th, would bring, including the Atomic Age.  But Chronicle editors tried to be helpful: warning first-year students against slick sales pitches from boarding house operators and laundry services.

So here we sit, similarly with no clear sense of what our century, the 21^st will bring.  And I’m mindful that any advice I lend you today might seem, by future lights, to be about as helpful as a warning against unscrupulous boarding house recruiters or collectors for laundry services.

But advice is a part of the convocation tradition, so with your indulgence, I’ll briefly give you mine. 

It’s my answer to the question many are asking these days: What can a university offer you in 2023? With more ways than ever before to learn and to disseminate knowledge, what is a university even for?

We are a learning community, dedicated to the pursuit of greater human understanding.

You’re here to learn, you know that. But we are all here to learn. 

Duke is a research university, which means your faculty are asking their own questions too. They design experiments, conduct interviews, run simulations, dig through archives, dig through the mud. Whatever form their work takes, they contribute new insights to their fields.

As you work alongside the faculty, not only will you grow in your own studies, but you’ll also help us grow in our understanding of the world.

We get to follow the evidence wherever it leads — and we are at our best when we do that together, as a diverse community with very different perspectives, disciplines, backgrounds, experiences, ideological orientations, identities, and religions.

That’s the exciting work of a university—but that’s also the hard part.

You’ve just been through orientation, which is wonderful; I’m here to say that the work ahead, if you do it right, will be disorienting as well.

Like physical training—which entails pushing us to the often-painful limits of our endurance in service of gaining strength—intellectual and moral training similarly come, inevitably, with discomfort. 

And more noxious even than physical discomfort is confusion.  It can be quite destabilizing, and exhausting. 

Take care to remember that nobody ever walked the path from not knowing to knowing without wandering over that difficult territory called confusion.

But my advice to you today is that you embrace disorientation and confusion, because on the other side comes greater moral strength and mental agility. 

OK, this is a celebratory gathering, and I don’t want to bring you down.  I also have some good news. 

You are not traveling this path alone, but as part of a larger, and  beautifully supportive, community.  A community you will live with, eat with, think with, argue with, learn with, win with—graduate with and grow with for the rest of your lives.   

This is the defining character of a university, and why it’s more relevant in 2023 than perhaps ever before in history.  In an era of machine learning and social media, the unrivaled power of a living, breathing, human learning community is real.

It is true blue.  It is Duke.

It’s an idea we would do well to remember: the sharpest thinking, the fullest understanding, emerges from communities — not individuals in isolation. 

We can and we must have faith in our ability to learn together, from each other. I know that’s hard to do sometimes, especially on topics where we might worry that we will say the wrong thing, or where we know others disagree with us.

But even in that discomfort, we need you to engage. We need you to speak up because you might see something that the rest of us have missed.

And equally important, we need—every one of us—to listen, without judgment, because your classmates may very well see something that you, and we, have missed. As I’ve said elsewhere, while we hold some truths to be self-evident, most are not.  And an excess of moral judgment may be one of the greatest threats to our still-new century.

Yes, this can be clumsy, and not without some pain as we grow more agile and stronger—particularly living in a world more likely to respond to challenge with indignance, where contradictions are met with quick and unreflective condemnation rather than conversation. 

Our Duke community can respond differently, though: listening to each other, assuming always the best in each other, and being open to changing our minds when the evidence leads us to do so.  The wise community, as suggested by experience across millennia, is humble in admitting what it does not know.

It’s daunting. But you are more than capable of having these tough conversations. With the support of good teachers and the accountability of a diverse community, you can do this.

Before I conclude my remarks, I will also offer you the same practical advice I share with every incoming class: please, make sure you get enough sleep. Life is too short and too beautiful to waste on doom-scrolling. Caffeine can only get you so far, and we all need adequate sleep to do our best work and treat each other with bright eyes rather than weary eyes.  In this aspect at least, I think our Trinity colleagues of a hundred years ago were perhaps our betters.

Class of 2027, I thank you for choosing Duke. Your presence makes our community stronger, and in your hands our future will be as well.