Chapter 2 - Challenges and Opportunities of the Current Planning Environment
Duke must operate within a set of challenges common to all universities and must forge its own unique path through them, taking advantage of our own particular ambitions and institutional strengths. These common environmental challenges and opportunities include: increased demand for public trust and accountability; increased globalization of research and education; rising costs of education and financial aid; changing patterns in federal research funding; keener competition for faculty, students, and financial resources; changing definitions and methods of teaching and learning; rapidly changing means of information access and learning spaces; renewed call for ethical reflection and commitment; and heightened expectations by undergraduates and their families for personal services and co-curricular programs. Following each challenge and opportunity described below are principles that help guide our planning and inform the specific strategic initiatives that follow.
Increased demand for public trust and accountability
The United States' leading research universities have set the standard of quality for world-wide higher education. They are distinctive in their scope, scale, governance, and financial resources and in their intertwined, reinforcing missions of education for undergraduates, advanced training for graduate and professional students, discovery and dissemination of new knowledge, and active service to society. In virtually all public opinion polls today, universities are consistently ranked among the most respected institutions. Elements within our society, however, also question whether we are doing our jobs well enough. Indeed, the public sector is demanding more from our graduates to address the problems facing the world and is pressing government to demand increased accountability. And the public - including those who will possibly send their children to our institutions - want assurances that the quality we provide in terms of research and education is worthy of the esteem we are accorded, the costs that we carry, and the prices that we charge. As a result, institutions of higher education must take increasingly proactive steps to strengthen public confidence in our value, purpose, and societal benefit. Indeed, in the current political climate of growing restrictions on all forms of discretionary funding, research universities cannot continue to succeed in either defending the autonomy of our enterprise or maintaining the funding of research projects, unless we articulate more clearly our real value and the return on society's investment.
- We reaffirm our commitment to the high standards and integrity that underscore basic research activities leading to new knowledge.
- We acknowledge our obligation to apply the knowledge we produce to help address societal problems.
- We recognize that a critical task for universities is to foster understanding in the wider public of what universities do and the role they play in society.
- We recognize the responsibility for universities to foster constructive dialogue, thereby providing a model to the broader society of a place that affirms the rights of, and is welcoming to, all and all opinions.