"What are universities good for?"
Cleveland City Club, 11/6/06
"...Indeed, at my university we're trying to make a lot of efforts now to break down barriers, not just between disciplines but between the formal part of a student's education and everything that they do with the rest of their life... Everyone I ever talked to spoke as if it were an almost equally or possibly more valuable part of their early education that they worked on a student newspaper or that they helped tutor in a local school or that they worked in a local health care clinic or something of that sort not on their official transcript. That's not a bad thing...Duke is working hard to break down the divides between formal academic study and the other things students do with themselves to make these things more connected and to have that connection be a little more intentional....[Experiential] learning of this sort not only makes academic study more real to our students, it gives them a sense of their own power. It gives them a sense of the difference they can make in the world. Now it will not have failed to occur to you that all the examples I just gave also show education in another thing: They all involve taking students across the boundaries of cultures and nations."

"Take advantage of Duke's opportunities"
Convocation address to Class of 2010, 8/23/06
"...It's also part of the distinctive character of Duke that it offers rich access to real-world experience that can help you test and amplify classroom learning and put it to human use. You "have to" take a foreign language at Duke, it's true. But which would have a better payoff: to do just as much as you "have to" and call it a day? Or to take your Spanish to the Durham public schools that are experiencing a massive influx of Latino population, where you could get real-world practice using your language, perform a real-world service to people new to a very foreign land and learn something beyond frozen political slogans about contemporary American immigration? Students in the Pratt School "have to" learn all sorts of things to master the disciplines of engineering. But you'd also learn the power that knowledge gives if, like students I know, you bring classroom-trained design knowledge to bear on the challenge of designing prosthetic devices for disabled children or assisting victims of natural disasters, like the students of Duke's Engineers Without Borders."

"Finding and educating global talent"
6/30/06
"...At Duke, we stress that college is a time for exploration for undergraduates, not a rigid adherence to a pre-professional track. A liberal arts education will not make a student smarter, but it will make a student more versatile and flexible in adapting to changing world circumstances. Just as we need students to emerge with practical skills that will serve them in whatever career field, or fields, they choose, so do they need to graduate with an understanding of themselves and the world in which they live."

"Engage your time in possibilities"
5/13/06
President's Baccalaureate address encourages students to put what Duke taught them to use in the world

"New initiatives will enhance students' education"
3/21/06
In recent years, international exposure has become an increasingly central part of education, supplying first-hand knowledge of the cultural differences that shape our world and also our increasingly inevitable interconnection. Time abroad can also supply a particularly potent way to integrate academic and experiential learning.

"Affording opportunity"
12/7/05
"It's about giving the young the exposures, stimulations, hard trials and challenges and encouragements that allow them to realize their powers and build the most capable version of themselves."

"What makes Duke distinctive?"
9/29/05
One of the things I've found most distinctive about Duke is the real-world orientation Crowell and J. B. Duke long ago prescribed: the way academic inquiry is naturally brought to bear on real-world problems, and intelligence used to create solutions to pressing human needs. In a way I have come to find quite inspiring, Duke has taught me to think of the university as a problem-solving place, a place where intellectual inquiry can be mounted with subtlety and power without shutting itself into an isolated space of abstract expertise; a place where intelligence is energized by the challenges of real-world problems and exercises its powers in devising their solutions. And since students help set the character of a school quite as much as faculty, I'm not surprised to find the same institutional mark on their brows.

Brodhead calls for courage in convocation address
8/25/05
President Brodhead urges students to 'lose themselves' in education
So with you: it's the whole person, not the student alone but all the sides of you, fully engaged and acting in concert, that will get the full education Duke can give. So you'll plan your education best if you remember to allow the whole of you to be acknowledged and engaged...It probably has not occurred to you, but the way you choose to interact with each other will be the main fact establishing the medium you're about to live in. You're the ones who are about to decide, by the way you treat each other, whether this will be a broadly welcoming place (as I trust) or a society of tight exclusionary systems; you're the ones who will decide if this is a place of where people vie to assert their superiority or support and applaud each another's attempts. I know Duke and I'm very hopeful, but it's only you, not the institution, who can make these differences in practice.

A talk to undergraduates
3/22/05
It's my intention to make these chances to connect academic inquiry with real-world practice and service even more numerous at Duke and to put these opportunities in plain sight for every student.

Convocation for new graduate and professional students
8/19/04
Of the major research universities I have been associated with, this is the one where the graduate and professional students are most emphatically welcome to participate in the life of the university outside their local borough...The Duke culture of community service that will put so many of you to work in neighborhood legal clinics, medical clinics, small-business consultancies, and the rest will give you a splendid occasion to practice your new knowledge while still in school, and to think how this knowledge can be translated into a social good.