Newly elected Board of Trustees chair Robert Steel started his life at Duke, or close to it.
Steel, who was elected chair at the Board’s Saturday meeting, was born in Durham and raised just off East Campus. When it came time to choose a college, Steel did not venture far; he picked Duke.
“I started in the Duke orbit at birth,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance.”
A Board member since 1993, Steel will take the helm from current Chair Peter Nicholas July 1. Steel said he plans to help Duke continue on the path of institutional development established in the University’s strategic plan, which expires this year. The new plan, which is being developed by the administration, will tweak and enhance the ambitions of the current plan, Steel said.
“We are at a punctuation mark where we like what we’ve been doing, we’ve been continually reevaluating and now is a time to pause and review and refresh our plans,” he said.
Steel said helping the University plan the project to overhaul Central Campus will also be a priority of the Board in the coming years. The Board received a report on the project and took a tour of the campus at their meeting last weekend.
“The focus to date has been on process: getting the right input, getting the right committees to think about things, engaging the community, hearing what students think,” Steel said. “Now we’re about to move from that stage to starting to design.”
As a Durham native, Steel said he is attuned to the local community and interested in developing stronger ties with the city. He said constant dialogue and service initiatives, among other things, are important methods of connecting the University with the surrounding area.
“Duke won’t be as good as it could be without a very collaborative spirit with Durham and helping Durham be the best it can possibly be—and vice versa,” Steel said.
Steel also served as chair of the Duke Management Company and was a member of the Duke University Health System board of directors. Most recently, he directed the presidential search committee that brought President Richard Brodhead to Duke.
He is the advisory director for Goldman Sachs & Co.; he retired as vice chair of the firm in 2004. Steel also teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and works with several other organizations.
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