Dukes Position on Fund Raising and Admissions

A front-page article in the Feb. 20 Wall Street Journal examines how fund-raising concerns affect the admissions process at universities. Duke is the focus of the article, which argues that consideration of development issues constitutes a form of affirmative action for rich, primarily white, students.

Duke recognized the importance of a public discussion of this question and cooperated with reporter Daniel Golden in his preparation of the article, which unfortunately highlighted specific students and made assumptions about why they were admitted to the university.

Nonetheless, Golden's article raised important questions about how Duke and other universities handle race, ethnicity, geography, athletic or other special talents, family background and many other factors in filling a limited number of places from a large pool of outstanding applicants.

Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane was among those who interacted with Golden on the story. On Feb. 13, she sent him a message responding to his two questions, about why Duke considers "development issues" in its admissions process, and whether this bears on the debate over affirmative action for minority students. Her response, which Golden's article cited only briefly, is reprinted here:

E-mail message from Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane To Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden February 13, 2003

Dear Mr. Golden:

I think your two questions are closely connected. Every year, highly selective institutions like Duke admit many students who are less "academically qualified" than some of those we do not admit. Hundreds of high school valedictorians and students with perfect SAT scores have to be disappointed, in order for us to take other factors besides academic talent in the narrow sense into account.

This may seem unfair to those who are turned down, but unfortunately, a place like Duke has room only to accept a small fraction of the wonderfully talented students who would like to be here. We review every application carefully and consider many factors in molding a class, and we cannot admit everyone whom we would like to have at Duke. This is the way I respond to talented students who are turned down every year.

Every student must be able to succeed at Duke, in the best judgment of the Admissions Office; but above that threshold -- a demanding threshold, to be sure -- many different factors come into play. We are committed to ethnic, racial, cultural, socio-economic and geographic diversity, to becoming more international, giving particular support to students from North and South Carolina (by reason of our founding indenture and our commitment to our region), admitting students with a range of probable academic commitments (engineers, pre-meds, classicists, historians, etc), succeeding in athletics, making sure that our drama and music and arts programs have students who will continue and enjoy their traditions, and more. Alumni and development concerns are just one part of this mix, and numerically, a rather small part.

These goals and these processes have served Duke and many other colleges and universities well over the years. And we believe that it would be very counterproductive to allow us to take all these varied factors into account with one exception: race. It would seem especially strange in this country where race has for so long been a vexed issue, and where we are still coming to terms with the consequences of that and attempting to build leadership for the future, for us to be able to look at everything else but be "race blind."

Thus I do feel that the use of preferences for children of alumni, development prospects and other factors that are likely for reasons of history to be disproportionately favorable to white students should be considered within the larger context that affirmative action is designed to address. The two are definitely related, and it seems odd to me to allow one sort of preference, but not the other.

Again, I hope this is helpful.

Letter to the editor sent to the Wall Street Journal by Christoph Guttentag, Duke's director of undergraduate admissions, on Feb. 25:

To The Editor,

Your article discussing Duke University's admissions process (Feb. 20) stated incorrectly that a decade ago "about 20" students were admitted because of the advocacy of the university's development office. While a direct comparison is difficult because of changes in the way decisions have been recorded, our records indicate that a more accurate number for the early 1990s would be approximately 90 a year. Ten years later that number has decreased. Then, as now, a variety of factors were considered in the individual evaluation of each applicant; our practice has always been to admit only those students we believe can fully succeed at Duke.

Christoph Guttentag