Durham, NC - We're gathered to advance the cause of active citizen service. This nation's challenges won't be helped by complaining of others' failures to address them. We need to regard our shared problems as our common projects, to which we can each contribute our engagement, creativity, and concern.

Service isn't a monopoly of the well-educated, but service has a special place in higher education, and I see that role growing. We all know people whose lives were transformed by experiences in their youth that introduced them to humanity outside their known world andtaught them their power to help. For over a century, service organizations have had a large role on American college campuses. But service has typically been seenas an extra-curricular activity, something apart from education proper.

Duke is working to promote real-world problem solving as an integral part of education, not a good work off to the side. Last year we launched a program called DukeEngage that told our undergraduates, if you will find a intensive civic engagement that takesyou out of the bubble of the university and puts your classroom learning to real-world use, Duke will fund you anywhere in the world, and support you with mentoring before, during, and after you return. This summer we had over 360 Duke students at over 100 service sites: working with at-risk middle schoolers in Durham; staffing rebuilding projects in New Orleans; working on clean water projects in sub-Saharan Africa and health and literacy projects in India and; sharing oral history skills learned during our own Civil Rights movement sothat South African communities can preserve the memory of the struggle to end Apartheid.

But as rapidly as DukeEngage went from conception to reality and it took less than a year Duke'scommitment to forging alliances for peace and prosperity through global service will continue to grow. Over the next six months, our university will announce partnerships for global educationin business, public policy, the environment and other fields that will share theethos and exuberance of DukeEngage. For service is not the exclusive province of those fortunate enough tobe undergraduates on our campus. It must be a vital part of education for allthose we touch, at home and around the world.  

I learned a quote from Bernard Amadei, the founder of Engineers Without Borders, that is attributed to Einstein: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." If that is so, then universities have a greater role than ever at this time. Universities are places for innovating understanding and training young minds to make a difference in the world. Through DukeEngage and other ventures, Duke is committed to applying the intellectual resources of a great university to creative problem-solving in education, economics, health care, the environment, and other great needs of our time.