Duke President talks with students Vik Devisetty, Carina Barnett-Loro and Darrius Barnes during a Duke Conversation March 6 at the Fuqua School of Business. Photo credit: Les Todd

Durham, NC - Let me begin by saying a word about a subject that has been much with us. It is now almost a year ago. There is a way, a very regrettable way, in which the name Duke and the name Durham have become linked to a story -- to other words, such as lacrosse and scandal. I hope that this is an association that will not last forever. You know that this combination of ingredients: starting with the party; starting with an accusation that followed from the party; starting with many, many statements made by the District Attorney at the time speaking with great certainty about the truth of the accusations and then all the media that fell in. All these things acting in interaction produced one of the just hottest and most obsessionally interesting stories in modern American history. There were periods in the past year where the Iraq War got somewhat more news time than events at Duke, but there were periods when that was not true. And I want to tell you, when people write the history of modern times they will note that North Korea fired a missile one day and that was on the front page, and there was no news until the time when it learned that they had also tested a bomb. But all those periods we enjoyed, if I may say so, the attention that other stories did not.

This has been a long, hard time. It's been hard for many people and hard in lots of different ways. Certainly hard for the students who have been accused or, as it now seems increasingly likely, falsely accused in this episode. It's been hard for a great many people who occupied one or another position in it only to find themselves treated with incredible belligerence and caricature in the world that passes for modern debate. It's been hard for Duke and it's been hard for Durham to become known nationally in the highly caricaturish ways that have been prevalent in recent times. And I also think that there were chapters in this story when it was hard to have faith in the criminal justice system, which is an especially difficult thing since that is the foundation of our civil society together.

I've had my own difficulties in this story, though I know I've shared them with many others. In the role I had, one had to face a circumstance of great complexity where the facts were different almost every time you opened the paper, but where everyone was in a state of total certainty day by day about everything, though sometimes they were in a state of certainty about the opposite thing from what they were certain about so short a while before. You know that this is true. In this circumstance, the main thing that someone in my position needed was to try to stand up for three values. That the crime alleged, rape, is indeed a profoundly serious thing. That for all that, a person is not guilty because they're accused, but rather that in our country there is the presumption of innocence. And then a point it was also important for me to make, that the verdict in this situation is not to be passed by me or you, and it's not to be passed by someone who just saw CNN or someone who just saw Fox News. The verdict can only be established through the deliberate process of weighing the evidence and the action of the criminal justice system. It took a long time for that to begin to work. You know all these chapters. Why am I telling you this story? You could tell it to me. Some of you are editors and have. (laughter) You know that since December the rape charge was dropped. You know that at that time we learned of a Bar Association investigation of the D.A. Shortly thereafter the D.A. stepped aside, and the case was put in other hands by the Attorney General and that brought us to the state we had needed since the first day of this story.

Namely a state where we felt that a difficult case had been put into fair and objective hands that would look at it and tell us, "Is there the evidence for a case? If so, let's bring it. Or is there not the evidence for the case? In which case, let's say so and put this whole thing on the shelf and allow people to go on with their lives."

There are ways in which life has gone on here. Of course it has, and I'm almost reluctant to dwell on this story. But one of the forms that life going on has taken took place a week ago Saturday when the lacrosse season resumed. I met with the captains of the team last spring. They came to me to express their contrition for the party in the early days of this thing. I worked with the team when the team wrote a standard of conduct for itself that they and I agreed to. I worked with them when a new coach was hired, the absolutely splendid John Danowski, one of the finest people in American university life, in my opinion. I was with them when he got them to begin to practice at 7 in the morning. I went to one of their practices, but toward the end because they like to get up early, apparently earlier than I do. (laughter) I know that there are people in this room who are associated with the Ronald McDonald House in this town and, if you are, I know you know that the Duke lacrosse team members are regarded as some of the volunteers they are happiest to see show up there and enjoy that reputation. And a week ago Saturday, the sport resumed. It was a beautiful, sunny day. We had over 6,000 people, and there we were going back to do something again, with some learning in the meantime, which there should have been, and now life was going on. The next day was, in a way, even better. It rained and rained and rained, and there weren't 6,000 people there. There were probably 65 people there for the game. I'd like to see more than that, but we all need around here to have passed through this time. To have learned whatever lessons there are from it and then to have life resume and for us to begin to treat each other as fellow members of this community who have the future to build. That's our task in common.

I dwell on this because it's important. If you want to ask questions about this, you are seeing a person who can answer many of them. (laughter) And if you will ask them, I will answer them as frankly as you wish. But I will say I hope in the question period you will not only ask questions about this episode because I think the greatest damage and the greatest falsity of this episode has been to act as if there's no synonym for the word "Duke" beside the word "scandal." You know that this is a profound untruth. You know that, actually, Duke is the name for a great university where you can get a great education and where a great company of people have been gathered and introduced to one another and become the lifelong friends, such as I see before me now.

If I were to tell my story of this past year, of course, there would be allusions to what I've mentioned. But I'd like to have a lot of other things on that list, and I'd like you to be reminded of these too, though perhaps you know them all. In the year, from the media point of view, was the year of scandal and horror. This is a year in which we brought in a great class of freshmen. One of my most enjoyable events of this year was held in the Doris Duke Pavilion at the Duke Gardens. There were, I think, something like 90 students admitted from the Triangle area to our freshman class. We invited them and their parents, and I believe 81 of them showed up. I don't know where the other nine were. (laughter) You saw this group of people who had chosen this university, and they were so happy to be coming and they were so proud of themselves and so excited about everything that awaited them and why shouldn't they be. And there were their parents, as proud as can be. I met tonight some parents of a student already admitted for next year, and so the fun begins again. So that was a piece of good news.

You know that my first initiative as president was to try to raise a great deal of money to lend permanent or endowment support to the cause of financial aid to make sure that every school at Duke will stay open to students of talent, whether their parents can afford it or not. In the year when the nation thought scandal was the story of Duke, we reached the $216 million mark in raising money for financial aid, and I'm very grateful to everyone who has helped with that extraordinarily worthy cause. (applause) I'm not going to tell you to be quiet. (laughter)

This was a time, too, when we opened building after building. Not because it's nice to have cool buildings, but because of the great things that can be done if you build the facilities that make them possible. I am standing near the site of the von der Heyden Pavilion and the Bostock Library. You probably got a letter from me with the astonishing news in it that library use at Duke increased 40 percent on the main campus when those libraries were opened. We should have built those libraries sooner is what I've got to say to you. (laughter) Go through the arch of that new library, and walk down the hill: There's the almost 400,000-square-foot interdisciplinary engineering building. A building where no department is allowed to have separate real estate because that's not the way the intellectual world works anymore, but where people from the medical school, from engineering, from computational sciences come together and teach each other the things that enable them to make collective discoveries together. Pass through that building and take a left, and you can walk up the stairs in the new Divinity School to the Goodson Chapel, which I believe is just as beautiful a sacred space has been built in this country in the last "X" years where "X" equals some very large number. (laughter) You can go up behind the Chapel and down through the woods that's there. There used to be a blank space between the biology building and the physics building. Now there is a fantastic new science facility that opened this January with a gift from our friend Melinda French of Duke and Fuqua, now known as Melinda Gates. This is a great thing and, again, its function is to bridge the sciences, to bring advanced sciences, to bring advanced researchers and students into contact, to bring physicists and biologists into contact, to create all that stew in which discovery takes place nowadays. I trust you have all been to the Nasher. I see its director sitting over there, Kim Rorschach. The fun thing about the Nasher is just when you come to feel that an exhibit ought to stay there for the rest of your life, it goes away and some fabulous new thing replaces it. The exhibit of Chinese photography and video -- incredible education. We went a lot of times. You are going to co-host with the Museum of Fine Art in Boston an exhibit of Spanish painting in the time of El Greco and Velazquez. This is going to appear two places in America: Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Nasher Museum in Durham. (applause)

And meanwhile new things will be built. There are buildings very strategic at the very center of this campus that aren't what they could and should be. I think of West Union, for instance. I think of the spaces around the Plaza and the Bryan Center. These are the heart of the campus. They could be way better than they are and speaking of that, if you have a sentimental attachment to the current Central Campus, I'm sorry for you. (laughter) This is a wretched place. It may be fun to live there, but it is not fun to look at it. It was built in what we might style the "cheesy" period of American architecture. (laughter) And it will be my pleasure as president to have that replaced by something that will have the dignity of the East and West Campus of this university. A serious university campus that will not only house the many students we can't now house, but it will create new circumstances. Places where advanced undergraduates and graduate and professional students can be neighbors, which is only natural. Places where they'll be lots of new performance spaces to build on the Nasher to make the arts ever more a part of this campus and just to create the integration of all the dimensions of life - an alumni center - all kinds of things to bring people into new connections there.

You know from many sources and having read the Herald-Sun, if from no other, that in the last year we have done a self-study at Duke under the name the Campus Culture Initiative. The point of this exercise was to ask ourselves, "What's excellent here and how can we generate more of what's excellent and how can we build a campus where each student will be free to become his or her personal self in the fullest extent and people get the richest benefit of being part of a community together." This report made many, many suggestions about dining, allocation of housing, faculty/student relations, alcohol, all kind of things, and I want to tell you about this report. It is the mark of a great university and not the opposite to be willing to ask oneself questions of this sort and figure out how to improve things. There will now be a long debate before we figure out what steps to take.

The point I want to make is it would be way harder to think of these new aspirations if we were stuck only with existing facilities. But the fact that we'll be building new communal spaces, new social spaces, new neighborhoods on this campus, gives us a time to facilitate the new aspirations we have for the nature of this community. And if you wonder what I mean by that, I'll tell you, which is great though the new library is as a place to study and happy as I am that people study there, I will probably never enjoy that library as much as I did a week ago Friday. When two clever and, in the good sense of the word, pushy Duke undergraduates had the idea, "What if we had a great big party and what if we used the new library as the setting for that party?" And what if you sent out invitations and what if about 2,500 people came? And what if everyone dressed up a little? And what if the president got to speak to four or five hundred people just the way you would at a party together as I spoke to you earlier tonight? What if there were faculty? What if there were graduate students? What if there were undergraduates? What if it just became, in itself, an example of the kind of richer community we're talking about? And doesn't it just show when you've got new buildings you can have new kinds of events in those buildings. So let's do these things together.

I will say of all the things we have in mind for the future, the heart of the matter is a university is a place where you assemble expert intelligence, and we've certainly done that here. But the main thing we have in mind, now and going into the future, is to try to build those forms of intelligence, to build new communities among our different researchers and, in every way, to try to link the intellectual resources of this university with the great problems and issues of our time. And so you know, for instance, that we live in a time where in the last decade, what a billion or more people have been lifted out of poverty by the unforeseen economic developments that have taken place around the world. You know that it is estimated that between 200 and 500 million people will be able to entertain some form of middle class aspiration in countries like India and China in the next decade. These were not things that anyone even bothered to waste their breath talking about a short while ago. But you also know that the prosperity that made those developments possible has traveled with new uses of energy and therefore new dangers to the environment that are issues that none of us can ignore. I'm proud to be at a university where when the U.N. did the new authoritative study on global climate change, they asked one of our faculty members from the Nicholas School of the Environment, Gabriele Hegerl, to write that chapter. That's a good thing to have people smart in that particular way. You read about the takeover of the Texas utility last week. This was very big news because it was done in a way that was thought to be particularly imaginative on the part of the environmental front. And if you can't get the utilities to be imaginative on the environmental front, hard to see how the problems of the environment will be solved. Not everyone associated with that project was connected with Duke, but many of them were people who had met each other -- actually this is the room in which we had the launch event for the Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions. And at that event were people on the corporate side, people on the policy side, people on the government side who had worked together to craft that solution. That is to mine the work of a great university.

You know that we live at a time where as the possibilities for good health or health care, at least expensive health care, get more and more available in our country; issues of health care become more and more difficult and intertwined throughout the world. There are still parts of the world that have the diseases of poverty: AIDS epidemic, malaria, river blindness and others. And now, I didn't know this until I spent my life hanging out with so many doctors as one does at Duke, now it turns out that as places rise out of the cycle of poverty they do not move into the world of health. They move, in part, into the world of the diseases of prosperity, as one might call them. Obesity did not used to be a word associated with India, but now that begins to be a phenomenon there. Diabetes, cardiovascular diseases: These things are now rampant in China, and when you have populations that size, these are going to be big issues. So it matters whether a university does or doesn't, and in Duke's case does, make it its business to figure out, "How can we pursue the cures and therapies that speak to the great health challenges of our time? Starting in this city and running around the world, how can we make it our business to bring people here and train them so they can go out to be of help in all the places where these things are needed?"

I see Hunt Willard in the audience who directs our Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. It's also part of our work here to figure out how to reason our way through all the new ethical issues that come up as new scientific mysteries are unraveled. This is, to my mind, the work of a great university. But I can tell you, there are a lot of universities where if you spurred your faculty on to work on these problems, the first consequence would be that they exited from the world of actual students. That happens a lot at universities, but that is exactly what we do not have in mind here. When we talk about making this a place where the activity, the daily work of intelligence, is linked to problem-solving of real-world problems, we do not want that to be a faculty specialization. We want that to be a feature of every student's education, running from post-docs through graduate and professional students to upper-class undergraduates to people starting in their freshman year.

And I can give you 1,000 examples -- I know I'm supposed to share the stage with some other people and maybe sometime I will. (laughter) But now we come to the part where there's some danger that I won't. This afternoon I had two young women come to see me. They had taken a course at Duke in documentary studies and as part of that course they had gone out to the elementary school on Club Boulevard and taught students there how to take pictures and develop them. Not the faciled, trivial, easy digital way; but the old-fashioned way, right? So they taught students how to look at things -- how to take pictures, how to develop them and then they got students writing about the pictures they took. There are a lot of students in the world for whom literacy is really not associated with fun. And where the act of writing is not something one voluntarily engages in, but if a cool student will come to your class and teach you to take pictures and then use that as a springboard to get you writing, our students end up being able to contribute to the development of literacy in an extraordinarily compelling way. We have that kind of thing nearby.

I shared the stage at such an event in Boston with our Sherryl Broverman, who may be known to many of you. She teaches AIDS education and she works in the field in AIDS education in South Africa and Kenya. I know quite a number of Duke students who have spent time with her in Kenya in Muhuru Bay, where they went to teach, only to discover when they got there there's no higher education for women in that part of Kenya. So Duke students took a class, went somewhere to help out, saw a problem they didn't know was there, came back. This class wrote a textbook on AIDS for a country that didn't have access to a textbook and now they've designed a women's college that they're going to go back and build. And I can name for you the Duke engineering undergraduates who, this summer, will be devising the water supply system for this new site in Kenya. (applause)

Now when a student engages in such an activity, and you'll notice that for me, it doesn't matter whether it's one block from here or whether it's 12 time zones from here, when a student engages in such an activity, you get a great result. Things people learn in classrooms are suddenly discovered to actually be more important than things they are going to take exams about. They actually turn out to be living knowledge that you can use in the world, and you discover yourself, not just as a clever student or a little successful whiz, as our culture too often encourages young people to think of themselves. You discover yourself as someone who can actually go participate and engage in the difficult issues of the world and bring something to that process. Thanks to sizable gifts we got from The Duke Endowment in Charlotte and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Duke has announced that starting with the incoming class, we will make available to every undergraduate student who comes to Duke a chance for a financially supported service experience, whether here, whether abroad, whether in education, whether in housing, whether in arts education, whether in health care. You find the opportunity, we'll help you find it. And if you go in a meaningful way for a meaningful length of time, we will supply you with a stipend and travel expenses, and if you're on financial aid, we will assume the burden of the earning expectations. I believe that this will be as much a mark of Duke in the future as the things for which Duke has been regrettably known this past year. (applause)

So when I look back at this year, I'd have to say there have been hard things, and we've dealt with them frankly. If you have questions, I will answer them frankly. But there have been a lot of other things besides hard things at this time and, actually, it seems to me that this has been a time when we really have -- and by "we" I mean not we the administration, but the administration working with the faculty and the students and the whole community of this place and its alumni base -- worked together to try to make this not just a great university, but the kind of university that will be most serviceable to the world we will all inhabit together.