Duke and the Changing Landscape: A Planning Prologue
Five years ago, in February 2001, Duke University issued a strategic plan entitled Building on Excellence. Five years later, this university can look back with satisfaction - and even inspiration - at what it accomplished with that plan's direction. Candidly assessing Duke's current state in face of the array of challenges all universities would encounter, that document proposed a set of overarching goals to govern this school's institutional choices. At the same time that it set these ambitions, Duke also embraced the discipline of designating significant resource streams that would be available only for strategic projects.
Thanks to this combination of ends and means, Duke University as a whole and each of its component parts have become significantly stronger over the past five years. New buildings have created the spaces for pioneering research activities: having embraced the goal of strengthening science and engineering, for instance, Duke opened the Fitzpatrick Center in 2005, and the French Family Science Center is now nearing completion. The difference these splendid facilities make for recruiting top faculty and students is already apparent. New programmatic strengths have arisen together with new buildings. Guided by the commitment to extend our global reach and influence, Duke has become a leader in internationalization, exceeding all American universities in federal support for international area studies and engaging unusually large numbers of students in study abroad. Under the influence of Building on Excellence, our core infrastructure has been radically strengthened as well. Duke has changed from a follower to a leader in the use of information technology, and the university's central academic resource, its library, is being renovated with dramatic results. Since the Bostock Library opened in October 2005, library use has increased by an astonishing 40%.
One less obvious achievement needs noting as well. Building on Excellence was a university plan in the sense that its goals were not particular to any individual school but relevant to them all. In addition to their own local strategic priorities, Duke's various undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools were asked to embrace these shared values and decide how to pursue them to advantage on their own terms. In consequence of this approach, as each unit has become individually stronger, Duke's component parts have knit themselves together far more closely over the past five years, by working toward common goals. The sense of common purpose and the habits of university-wide collaboration created through Building on Excellence are among the most remarkable of its accomplishments.
In many universities, "strategic planning" is an unromantic prospect, a bureaucratic exercise doomed to produce recommendations that will gather dust while the status quo moves forward more or less unobstructed. At Duke, strategic planning is exciting to undertake because it actually makes a difference: it produces visible transformation in the university's capacities and direction. Having realized many of the ambitions hatched in the last planning period, the time arrives for Duke University to plan the next phase of its evolution. So the question arises, if we really are capable of making a difference, what are the most valuable differences we could seek to make?
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