The University has reached its $2 billion Campaign for Duke goal almost a full year before its December 31, 2003 target, President Nan Keohane and campaign co-chairs Ginny and Peter Nicholas announced Thursday.
With $2,006,684,498 pledged since fundraising began seven years ago, the breaking of the goal is a milestone for the most substantial capital campaign in the University's history, and one of the largest in the history of American higher education.
"All of us who have been involved in the campaign are excited to have reached this historic milestone," Keohane wrote in an e-mail. "When we first thought about this endeavor back in 1993, $750 million seemed a stretch; now, over time, we have reached successive new highs, and met our formal goal almost 12 months early."
The campaign will not officially end until New Year's Eve, and four of the 10 divisions-Arts and Sciences, Athletics, the Divinity School and the University Libraries-have not yet reached their goals. The Pratt School of Engineering and School of Law surpassed their targets in July, and the Fuqua School of Business, Medical Center, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and University-wide initiatives all reached their goals in the past month.
The University passed the $2 billion mark sometime last week to the surprise of the Office of University Development, which had predicted a February breaking, said Peter Vaughn, director of communications and donor relations.
"We knew we were getting close so we stopped and made sure we counted and allocated everything correctly," he said. "By [Jan. 11], we knew we hit it."
Vaughn said December was a tremendous month for The Campaign for Duke, including several $2 million to $4 million gifts, and a gift of over $10 million to be divided among four of the divisions. Vaughn would not provide details of the major gift, noting that an official announcement will be made early next week and that the name of the donor "will not be a surprise."
The $2 billion is courtesy of more than 225,000 donors, development officials said. It adds about $661 million to the University's $2.37 billion endowment. About 84.4 percent of all pledges have been paid, with $312 million committed by donors to be paid in the future, probably within the next five years.
The campaign was publicly announced in October 1998 as a $1.5 billion endeavor. Over $684 million had already been raised during a two-year "quiet phase," mostly through contributions from Trustees. Amidst a strong economy and with a new Strategic Plan to support, the goal was increased in December 2000 to its current level (see related story, page one). The campaign suffered through the nation's recent recession and the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but has rebounded strongly in the past year.
It has also overcome the inherent fundraising problems of being a young school in the South.
"It's a big achievement for this comparatively young university, one of the handful ever to break the $2 billion barrier," Keohane wrote. "Given the youth and relatively small size of our alumni body, this is a particularly impressive accomplishment; the strong support of parents, loyal spouses, and friends of Duke helped a great deal, as well."
Duke now joins the ranks of Columbia and Harvard universities, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California as schools that sought and reached a goal of $2 billion or more, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago are still in the early stages of their $2 billion campaigns. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is about a billion dollars short of its $1.8 billion by 2007 target.
Campaign officials stressed Thursday that there was still a ways to go.
"While we have raised more than we thought we would, we haven't yet accomplished what we have called 'filling all the buckets,' which means funding every priority we identified at the start of the campaign," Peter Nicholas said in a statement.
Some of the buckets still unfilled include:
* Financial aid, including for graduate fellowships, and merit-based and athletic scholarships.
* Faculty support, including endowed professorships and other faculty funds that need to be endowed.
* Facility support, including the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences, the French Science Center, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Albert Eye Research Institute, a second public policy building, an addition to the Divinity School and the renovation of Perkins Library.
* Community initiatives, particularly through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Initiative.
Keohane said that with such buckets to fill, the fundraising will continue with the same vigor.
"Nobody is resting on our laurels," Keohane wrote. "We'll celebrate briefly and then press on, because there is so much left to do before we can declare victory-and we don't want to lose the momentum or the sense of comradeship around Duke's key goals that the campaign has engendered."
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