Duke announced its “Made for This” comprehensive campaign Friday, kickstarting a major push to engage community members in fundraising efforts as the University enters its next 100 years.
The campaign is reportedly the first in Duke’s history to consist of both financial and action-based engagement goals, but it builds upon a history of University-wide fundraising efforts tracing back nearly a century.
As Duke prepares to finance a new generation of scholarly inquiry and health care innovation, The Chronicle looks back on prior institutional fundraising efforts — when they were launched, how much they raised and where the money was spent.
The first drives
The tradition of targeted institutional fundraising has its roots in the Few administration but fully began to take shape under President A. Hollis Edens.
In 1938, Duke celebrated its first centennial: the 100-year anniversary of the founding of Brown’s Schoolhouse, the University’s original predecessor institution. At the time, President William Few “pushed a lowkey, one-time fundraising effort” in honor of the milestone.
But according to former Duke history professor Robert Durden in a 1994 journal article, the University had “never staged an organized, well-publicized development campaign, nor had it ever employed the services of professional fundraising consultants.” Roughly a decade later, Duke decided to “take the plunge.”
In 1947, a group of University trustees, administrators and faculty members launched the Loyalty Fund, an annual fund drive that asked Duke alumni to give back to their alma mater for the first time. But soon, those same institutional leaders began to think bigger. In 1948, they began a campaign to raise $12 million.
The initiative sought to bolster the endowment, the original source of funds tied to the Indenture of Trust that established the University and was responsible for the construction of West Campus. The campaign was also meant to provide for “one or two much-needed [new] buildings.”
Edens became a driving force behind the campaign after he assumed the presidency in 1949, as his administration was primarily tasked with pursuing “systematic, well-publicized fundraising” after the Great Depression and World War II had largely drained the University’s coffers.
The “special campaign” ultimately fell short of its goal, but Duke was still left with $8.6 million — over $100 million in today’s dollars — to support expansions by 1952. In the ensuing years, the University established the James B. Duke endowed professorships and finished work on the Allen Building.
Building up and out
Future administrations followed in Edens’ footsteps, overseeing ambitious fundraising campaigns of their own to support the growth of a university that was originally established to become “an institution of learning that in time w[ould] rival Yale or Harvard in prestige and universal educational facilities.”
The next major push came in 1965 with the “Fifth Decade Campaign,” undertaken during President Douglas Knight’s tenure and overseen by George Allen, a longtime trustee of both the University and the Duke Endowment. The campaign aimed to raise $102.8 million for Knight’s “Master Campus Plan” to make Duke “a force” in not only the South, but the nation as a whole.
By September 1970, Duke had raised $89 million of its goal. The campaign’s first phase, which ended in 1969, bankrolled new building construction, including Perkins Library, several new research labs and the Nasher Museum of Art, as well as several new endowed professorships and student scholarships.
The campaign had a final goal of $187 million, but Knight’s resignation in the wake of campus unrest following the 1969 Allen Building Takeover put a kink in the plan.
His successor, former N.C. Gov. Terry Sanford, rose to the challenge.
Sanford had experience spearheading large fundraising efforts, having established the North Carolina Fund while he ran the Tar Heel state’s executive. He brought this expertise to bear when he assumed the Duke presidency in 1970, leading the University through two major fundraising efforts over his 15 years in office.
Sanford’s administration launched the Epoch Campaign in 1972, which effectively became phase two of the original Fifth Decade Campaign. By October 1975, the drive had successfully gathered $76 million, nearly all of which went to creating new programs and meeting standard operating expenses. But Sanford envisioned more, saying in 1975 that the campaign would not be complete until it secured $162 million.
The campaign ultimately concluded in June 1977 having raised $135.5 million, $26.5 million short of its goal. The feat was nevertheless viewed as a “success,” and the substantial funds collected went toward a number of endowments, including professorships, scholarships and library aid; construction of Duke’s first hospital and the medical center; support for operating expenses; and some gifts-in-kind, such as museum donations.
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Still, Sanford’s administration felt there was more work to be done. In 1984, Duke launched the Capital Campaign for the Arts & Sciences with an ambitious goal of $200 million.
Joel Fleishman stepped down from his role as founding director of the Institute for Policy Sciences and Public Affairs, now the Sanford School of Public Policy, to chair the campaign, which is largely recognized as the University’s first official “capital campaign.”
During Duke’s previous fundraising efforts, the University would assemble a temporary staff to lead the outreach that would be dissolved once the campaign ended. But Fleishman suggested that Duke hire a permanent team to oversee alumni donation requests, streamlining the process.
“Without that, I don’t think Duke would have been as successful as it was subsequently in the ‘90s, and then more recently in major capital fundraising activities,” said John Koskinen, Trinity ‘61 and alumni chairman of the campaign. “It all goes back to that first campaign.”
Fleishman’s vastly more efficient system persisted long after the campaign ended in 1991. Over its six years, the capital campaign raised $500 million, far outpacing its initial goal.
New century, new heights
Duke didn’t wait long to embark on its next major fundraising enterprise.
In January 1996, President Nannerl Keohane’s administration launched the “Campaign for Duke” with a lofty $1.5 billion goal. The campaign was not publicly announced until 1998, at which point $684 million had already been raised during the campaign’s “silent phase.”
Keohane came to Duke with extensive fundraising experience under her belt, having served as president of Wellesley College for 12 years, where she led “the largest fundraising drive in the history of American private colleges.”
Two years into the Campaign for Duke, the University moved the goalpost to $2 billion alongside the launch of its new “Building on Excellence” strategic plan, becoming one of only four universities to seek a sum that high. But the Blue Devil community delivered, and in 2003, the campaign ended with $2.36 billion raised, then the fifth-largest fundraiser in the history of higher education and the largest ever for a university in the South.
The campaign allocated $750 million to the University’s endowment, supporting new professorships and student aid. Duke established the University Scholars and Robertson Scholars programs with funds from the campaign, as well as several new academic initiatives. Perkins Library and the Nicholas School of the Environment saw significant investment thanks to a $72 million donation from Pete and Ginny Nicholas — the largest individual gift in Duke’s history at the time.
The Campaign for Duke’s groundbreaking status didn’t stand on its own for long, though. Keohane’s successor, President Richard Brodhead, arrived on the scene in 2004 and would soon announce his own fundraising initiative that reached even higher.
Soon after taking office, Brodhead began by launching the Financial Aid Initiative in 2005, which aimed to bolster support for student aid in the form of undergraduate, athletic, and graduate and professional scholarships. It concluded in 2009, having raised over $308 million and surpassing the initial goal.
The following year, Brodhead’s administration set its eyes on a much larger target with its first University-wide campaign. The Duke Forward campaign launched in 2010, becoming the “largest comprehensive funding campaign in Duke’s history.” Announced with a goal of $3.25 billion, the campaign concluded in 2017 having amassed a remarkable $3.85 billion.
Alumni donors accounted for over $1 billion of the donations, with more than 315,000 overall contributors. Funds were disbursed in support of all 10 graduate and undergraduate schools, as well as the health system, athletics program and libraries.
Similar to previous campaigns, Duke Forward funded several new endowed professorships, scholarships and fellowships. It also provided for 1 million square feet of new medical facilities and a variety of campus upgrades.
President Vincent Price, who took office a month before the campaign ended, said at the time that the initiative would “empower the next generation of students and faculty to advance ideas and solve complex global challenges.”
Now, his administration’s “Made for This” campaign hopes to build on the University’s long history of leveraging its connections in support of common goals, equipping a new generation of Blue Devils with the funding and opportunities they need to “propel a bold new century of impact.”
Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.