Chapter 1 - Building Distinction at Duke: Past, Present and Future
Our planning process has focused on continuing to build and shape a distinctive identity for Duke among the top echelon of research universities. We have witnessed a remarkable rise to prominence since the 1838 founding of Union Institute and
James B. Duke's 1924 transformative gift to Trinity College that created Duke University. Over time, we have developed strong graduate programs that complement core original strengths in undergraduate education in the liberal arts and professional programs. Our standing has extended from a predominantly regional one only a few decades ago to a national and international one at the highest rank. Our trajectory had been steep in recent decades, spurred on by former president Terry Sanford's vision of “outrageous ambitions” for our university. To continue and further steepen our trajectory of excellence, we will need not so much to seek to replicate the faculty and programs of the schools with which we compete but to strengthen our own distinctive identity. This means drawing on qualities that have already brought us to preeminence and, even more, developing innovative new areas that will make us particularly well-suited to meet the challenges at the intersection between the frontiers of knowledge and changing social needs. In doing so, we will not only attract to Duke the finest faculty and students but also mark Duke out as a flexible institution that best meets the challenges of education, discovery, and service that we believe must be hallmarks of the 21 st century university.
To make progress in this way, we must define this distinctive identity to which we aspire and candidly assess our current strengths and weaknesses. It is only in this context that our goals and strategies can make sense. Duke's ambition is targeted not towards rankings but rather towards achieving a place of real leadership based on substantive contributions to society through the education we provide, the research that faculty pursue, the lives our graduates lead, and our direct involvement in making our local community a better place to live and work. While these ambitions are not unique to Duke, we pursue them and frame our identity in unique ways:
- Duke was founded on a close collaboration of the liberal arts education for undergraduates and training for careers in the learned professions. This is a vital and distinctive legacy at Duke today, where the major schools and programs of the university all operate in close physical proximity to one another and where joint degree programs and interdisciplinary research flourish.
- Through a distinctive combination of schools and the relationships among them Duke combines strength in core arts and sciences disciplines with outstanding programs in business, earth and environmental sciences and policy, engineering, law, medicine, nursing, public policy, and theology. This combination of resources allows us to both deeply explore basic issues in disciplinary research areas and to address enduring and emerging intellectual and policy problems from multiple perspectives, responding rapidly to the needs of our students and the wider society. Out of this combination comes, for example, the ability to address such issues as the care at the end of life, the ethics of the genomic revolution, and the racial components of disease. Our advantage is not these particular programs, as important as they are, but the institutional resources and culture that allow us to evolve and adapt programs to changing needs.