Robert Shepard, Duke's Alumni and Development VP since 2004, to Retire

Robert Shepard, who oversaw Duke fundraising efforts that improved campus infrastructure, enhanced the undergraduate experience and increased financial aid resources, will retire June 30.

“Bob Shepard’s contributions to Duke could be measured in billions of dollars raised, but his impact has been broader and deeper,” said Duke President Vincent E. Price.  “He’s built and sustained relationships on campus, and with donors and friends, that transformed every part of Duke, from financial aid and faculty support, to the building boom of the past decade, to the engagement of our alumni around the world.  One of the great pleasures of my time at Duke has been the opportunity to work with Bob. His legacy of leadership will last for years to come.”

Duke’s vice president for development and alumni affairs since 2004, Shepard led the Duke Forward fundraising campaign, which concluded last year having raised $3.85 billion for the university. He says now is a good time to step aside so Price can bring in a new development chief to plan a future campaign.

Shepard arrived at Duke in 1995 as executive director of development and played a key role in the Campaign for Duke, a capital campaign that concluded in 2004 and raised $2.36 billion. As vice president for development and alumni affairs, he oversaw both Duke Forward and the Financial Aid Initiative, the latter an effort that yielded $308 million in new endowment for financial aid.

“At its best, university fundraising is the art of building relationships in support of inspiring aspirations,” said President Emeritus Richard Brodhead. “Bob Shepard has done this work as well as anyone in his generation. Over the 13 years we worked side by side, his professionalism, his human decency and respect for others, and his devotion to Duke never wavered. Duke’s continuing advance owes a huge debt to Bob and the team he put together.”

And under Shepard’s leadership, the Duke Alumni Association expanded in scope, mission and impact, the culmination of which is the current construction of the university’s first Alumni Center on Chapel Drive.

To explain much of the university’s fundraising success, Shepard points to Duke’s vast network of alumni.

“They feel such strong bonds to the place,” he said. “We have alumni who are just dying to participate in some way in the life of the university. We struggle with having enough volunteer opportunities for them. I do meet a number of alumni who get involved in various advisory boards, and inevitably when their time was finished, they ask what they can do next.”

Shepard says he’s particularly proud of the impact private fundraising has had on access and affordability. An early priority of Brodhead when he took office in 2004, the Financial Aid Initiative included more than $220 million for need-based scholarships for undergraduate students.

The tangible proof of that initiative’s success is displayed each year at a dinner Duke hosts for donors and scholarship recipients.

“The students talk about Duke being a pipe dream for them – not even thinking they could attend if they got in because their parents couldn’t afford it,” Shepard recalled. “It’s the financial aid that makes it possible. That’s really what it’s all about.”

Under Shepard’s leadership, private fundraising has also underwritten programs like DukeEngage, which has become a core feature of the Duke experience. Funded initially through gifts from the Duke Endowment and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DukeEngage is a civic engagement program that sends students all around the world each summer to immerse themselves in other cultures.

“It has become one of the defining programs of the undergraduate experience,” Shepard said.

Private fundraising has also provided a significant boost to campus infrastructure, funding construction projects for academics, athletics, the arts and more. One particularly notable new facility is the Rubenstein Arts Center, which opened this month along Campus Drive thanks in part to a $25 million gift from David M. Rubenstein, a Duke graduate and former chair of the university’s board of trustees.

The search for Shepard’s successor will begin immediately under the leadership of Senior Vice President and University Secretary Richard Riddell, who will chair an advisory committee that will make recommendations to Price.  The executive search firm of Isaacson/Miller will manage the search process.