EDUCATION INTERVIEW
The right strategy Pre-pandemic framework proves to be the right one for a postpandemic world
Vincent Price President – Duke University Our commitment to life-long education is also a critical part of our framework. How has Duke invested in science and technology? Our strategic framework emphasizes an investment in people. This means investing in our faculty and students when it comes to financial aid and in our staff in a wide array of ways. We are emphasizing strategic areas where Duke can excel and these are strengths not just at Duke but in the region more generally. These are areas connected to computing, especially the intersection between machine learning and health applications, but also quantum computing. We’ve identified strengths in material science, particularly as they relate to the creation of novel materials, soft materials and materials that can assist in health and therapeutics. We are working on how the brain and body can be made more resilient and repaired by engineering the immune system. We’re catalyzing highly specific areas and bringing in new researchers across the schools to strengthen and vitalize Duke. What changes in strategic planning do you foresee given the new landscape? Our strategic framework was developed in my first year as president through consultations with faculty, staff, trustees and students. The first thing we did early in the pandemic was to revisit that framework and ask ourselves whether it needed alteration in light of what we were facing. The answer was that it was right and most of what we have done has been accelerated by the pandemic. Our commitment to racial equity and social justice, which has been pronounced for years, has become much more focused and stronger in dealing with the second pandemic that has affected our country: not the virus but the social and systemic fissures that the virus has exposed and widened. The people-first orientation of our strategic framework has become more important. 146
| Invest: Raleigh-Durham 2021 | EDUCATION
What are your near-term priorities? In 2024, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the creation of Duke University. I remind people that Duke was created out of Trinity College in Durham in 1924 and that was five years after Durham and Trinity college had navigated through the Spanish flu pandemic. We find ourselves 100 years later under similar circumstances. We look forward to our anniversary as an opportunity to do as much great work over the next 100 years as our counterparts did in the previous 100 years. What we are thinking about is leveraging all the assets we have, principally our human infrastructure, and mobilizing all our energies around those elements of our strategic framework. When we celebrate our centennial, we will be looking forward to a second hundred years to take us even further than the first.
