Interview: Vincent Price, President Duke University

The right strategy

Pre-pandemic framework proves to be the right one for a postpandemic world

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. 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 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.

Vincent Price

President – Duke University

Christine Johnson McPhail

President – Saint Augustine’s University

I think that we’re in a very robust community here in Raleigh. When I think about St. Augustine’s as an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities), we need to look at that in a number of ways: we have to be mindful of the economic impact; we have to be mindful that as an HBCU in America, we have a political face as well; we also have to pay attention to the fact that we play a cultural role as well.

The graduate programs that we are developing are very intentional in the extent to which they look at those three aspects.

( ) Unique opportunities In terms of educational attainment, 55.4% of RaleighDurham’s college-educated population have a bachelors, followed by 22.4% with a masters, 12.9% with an associate degree and the remaining 9.3% was shared between doctorates and professional schools. True to its high-tech and science reputation, the concentration of bachelors degrees in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area are dominated by Science and Engineering and related disciplines, representing 51.5% of the total in 2020. Arts and Humanities followed at 22.7%, Business at 17% while Education attracted the remaining 8.7%.

Creative problem solving in the higher ed sphere was evident in the Triangle as well. Case in point: Duke University is laying out its plans to increase enrollment of community-college transfer students from its typical 5% in any given year. The Durham-based institution is joining a trend observable across the country as community colleges can potentially provide a student pipeline for private colleges still reeling from enrollment issues and committed to diversifying their student populations.

Looking at the future of education, Duke University received its single-largest donation since its inception: $100 million from The Duke Endowment of Charlotte. It will serve as the foundation for the university’s Duke Science and Technology Initiative, primarily focused on recruitment in the realms of material science, computing and artificial intelligence, and biological resilience.

In parallel, Duke University is accelerating the commercialization of its research via its Research Translation and Commercialization Initiative, launched in July 2021. The aim is to restructure the university’s Office of Research into the Office of Research and Innovation to produce startups and licencing agreements from its research at a faster pace. In 2020 alone, Duke University reported 405 invention disclosures and $65 million in revenue, while also receiving 98 patents and launching 17 startups.

UNC-Chapel Hill followed suit by partnering with BASF Corporation on a deal for bolstered research and funding for the university.

Amid a bevy of corporate announcements relating to the Triangle, Apple’s $1 billion expansion into Research Triangle Park is poised to act as a boon by improving rural connectivity and keeping the skilled talent produced in the region.

Trade schools The region’s strong focus on tech and sciences does not mean that the Triangle overlooks its skilled trade needs, although here too there are challenges, mainly to do with an aging labor force. In 2019, 70% of the ( )