President-Elect Vincent Price: "Duke Is A Place Dedicated to Improving Our World."
I am both honored and humbled to have been selected to serve as President of this great institution.
I’d like to express my deepest appreciation to you, David, Ellen and others for your diligent work in the search. It has been, from my perspective, a wonderful, ongoing conversation over these past many weeks about this extraordinary university, its many accomplishments, and its highest aspirations.
I’ve learned much about this amazing community of scholars, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, scientists – dreamers and doers – who have charted perhaps the most impressive ascent in higher education today.
I’ve also learned, importantly, to distinguish shades of blue. Blue has for centuries been associated with loyalty, faith and truth. Have faith. I am true to only one shade now: Not too light, not too dark. Just perfect. Duke Blue.
In all seriousness, what I look forward to most in my work as President will be the absolute pleasure of interacting with a world-class community of scholars, students, administrators and staff, as we work together to face the challenges and realize the opportunities of the 21st century.
As you know, Duke is a very special place—something that’s as evident to an incoming freshman as it is to the longest-serving staff member or the most senior member of the faculty. It is a place where innovation is fueled by creativity, and where creativity is continually informed by rigorous and pathbreaking scholarship.
Most important, it’s a place dedicated to improving our world – intellectually, socially, and physically – through both research and education.
Under President Brodhead’s extraordinary leadership, we have maintained these core values while also enhancing them through broader engagement with Durham and the world, by advancing knowledge across disciplines, and by increasing access to this wonderful, increasingly diverse institution.
The results speak for themselves. Duke has arrived at the very pinnacle of education and research.
Duke has accomplished this as a community, led by truly fabulous deans, by dedicated chairs and other faculty leaders, and by what may be the best collection of administrators and staff in higher education. And also by student leaders, both graduate and undergraduate, who not only wrap themselves in Blue, but who quickly weave themselves into the very fabric of this University. And of course, Duke alumni – 160,000 proud and passionate graduates around the world.
You, in this room and those watching beyond it, make Duke what it is.
As President, I will work with you to make it even more: A uniquely powerful voice for education and innovation that is more than equal to the challenges and opportunities now before us.
And now is the time: the research university today faces an array of forces that may prove as historically profound and transformative as any recorded to date.
The digital revolution has thoroughly reshaped contemporary life, spawning entirely new social practices, consumer markets and companies. The deep and broad implications for our teaching and research are just now being fully appreciated.
Duke is perfectly poised to seize unparalleled new possibilities; to thoughtfully deploy technology to redefine our work.
Globalization has similarly broad ramifications. Markets for labor, consumption, and capital are now thoroughly global in character, and even the most local of enterprises are affected by global trends and events.
Duke is again perfectly poised to ensure our curricula and research programs convincingly address the needs of a globalized society, realizing the full potential of Duke Kunshan University and Duke NUS.
As the world shrinks and societies evolve, Duke can serve as a model for promoting openness, diversity and inclusion. We will continue to diversify, and we can do more to realize the full intellectual and social benefit of that diversity.
Every member of our community is here to inform and to critique, to offer support and criticism, shaped by unique experiences and circumstances. Every member of our community belongs. If we share our differences, respectfully and with vigor, we are all the stronger, intellectually and socially.
Even as higher education grapples with escalating costs, public support of higher education, of the arts and basic research, is fragile. Sadly, this comes at the very moment when long-coming breakthroughs in so many fields stand to improve our lives in dramatic ways.
Duke is poised to be a leader in showing, in the most compelling ways, the continuing value of investing in higher education. We can together identify and realize operational efficiencies and creatively devise new resources.
We are poised as well to advance translational research, and Duke Health positions us extraordinarily well, not only to innovate in healthcare delivery and set the standard in clinical practice, but also to propel biomedical discoveries. We have enormous upside potential in physical science and engineering, provided that we are able to enhance our technological and scientific capacities, and sustain and develop Duke Health. I am confident that, together, we can do just that.
We can continue Durham’s recent ascendance as an innovative community for start-ups, working closely with our neighbors to advance the quality of life for our wider community, and to catalyze new scientific, medical, cultural, and artistic ventures.
I am, finally, confident that the Blue Devils can sustain and expand their excellence on the field, on the court and in the classroom … and I look forward to becoming a Cameron Crazy tomorrow night.
In a recent convocation address to first-year students, I spoke about what it’s like to be new. To face challenges, and opportunities. I talked with them, more specifically, about being new to places – places like Duke and Durham, that are steeped in glorious history and tradition but which are, nevertheless, places of new beginnings, places continually renovated by the people who live and work here.
I thank you for inviting me and Annette be new members of your community, and I look forward to deepening our relationship as we engage in our important work as stewards of this great institution.
As spinners of the threads that will tie its distinguished past to its even greater future.
Thank you, all of you, for making me a partner in this work. I can’t imagine another place where I’d rather live and work, a community I’d rather share … or a color I’d rather wear.
Go Blue Devils!