Indian dancers present Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and change at the Fuqua announcement. Photo credit: Les Todd

Durham, NC - With the assistance of Cossack dancers, Chinese acrobats and a Beatles tribute band, the Fuqua School of Business announced Monday a network of five new partner campuses to better bring business education to students and scholars worldwide.

While the school has spent two decades increasing the global reach of its education programs, Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard said the announcement represents a major step forward not only for the school but for the entire university.

"Our hope is that Duke University as a consequence of this network will be profoundly changed," said Sheppard. "We jointly will build the world's first legitimately global business school."

"We always said we would build leaders for a global economy," he told hundreds of students, faculty members, dignitaries and others who gathered in Fuqua's Fox Student Center amid flashing lights, video screens and performances that also included three Indian dancers and a belly dancer representing Dubai. Each performance featured a location highlighted in the announcement.

"The challenge is we can't do with a standard model for a school of business," Sheppard said after the Beatles band finished a medley. "It's essential for business education, for business research that we plant ourselves in the markets that will shape the economy in the 21^st century."

The new $500 million program represents "boundaries dissolved and boundaries redrawn," Duke President Richard H. Brodhead told the audience. "This is the natural evolution of Duke's engagement in the world. It means the boundaries we study are not marked by any fixed geography but rather by the challenges that the world faces. -- What we need is a business school for a flat world, where what happens in Shanghai, New Delhi or Dubai matters as much as what happens on Wall Street."

Events beyond the campus provided an exclamation point for Brodhead's remarks, as Wall Street grappled with a historic financial crisis that extended across the globe.

At the ceremony, Sheppard announced the first partnership in the new network, with the Graduate School of Management at St. Petersburg University. He introduced four members of that school's faculty and administration, who traveled to Durham for the ceremony, and said the upcoming weeks would provide announcements about Fuqua's partners in London, Shanghai, Dubai and New Delhi.

Fuqua's plans received immediate attention from the international business press, with a Business Week headline proclaiming "Duke Rethinks Idea of a Global Campus" and The Financial Times calling Sheppard "one of the most innovative architects of business programmes."

The new plan call for Fuqua to establish a significant presence in each location rather than the more casual affiliations found in some other international business programs, Sheppard said. Each of Fuqua's regional campuses will support all Duke MBA programs, including the Executive MBA programs. Each also will include a Duke Corporate Education site or partnership, open enrollment executive education, at least two research centers and Fuqua faculty, as well as service learning activities tied to local needs. Duke's commitment to civic engagement will extend to these new initiatives.

The leading activity in Fuqua's global expansion will be The Duke MBA -- Cross Continent program, which begins in August 2009. This program will be held in each of the five regions before wrapping up with elective courses at the Duke campus. More details can be found here.

In addition to the performances and speeches, the ceremony also included video announcements from business leaders such as Morgan Stanley's John Mack and General Motors' Rick Wagoner, who described the importance of business leaders learning to manage effectively in an increasingly global marketplace.