It took only a few hours for the Board of Trustees to unanimously approve "Making a Difference," Duke's most recent strategic plan, at its Sept. 29 meeting.
But the Board's approval was long in the making. After more than two years of interviews, discussions and committee meetings, administrators drafted and resubmitted a proposal of goals that promise to become the University's most powerful themes in the coming years.
In light of the Board's recent approval, The Chronicle examined the significance of the $1.3-billion Making a Difference, analyzing how the document stacks up against past plans and those at other universities.
Planning the plan
In 2004, with Duke's last strategic plan, "Building on Excellence," in full stride, administrators had already begun the process of culling through the myriad opinions and ideas of the University's various schools, said John Simon, vice provost for academic affairs and the coordinator of Making a Difference.
First, administrators drafted a tentative list of long-term priorities. Keeping these themes in mind, the administration charged each school to chart how they planned to move forward in the coming years.
Simon said the schools' roles as both independent entities and members of the larger University community created a sometimes-disorderly convergence of ideas.
"In many ways, you could call it controlled chaos," he said.
Soon, dozens of committees on varying scales discussed the long-term goals of the University and the needs of the schools, and the result of those conversations was Making a Difference, Simon said.
In the plan, officials chose six central themes: interdisciplinarity, knowledge in the service of society, affordability and access, the importance of the humanities, internationalization and diversity.
Simon noted that many of Duke's themes are popular among peer institutions.
"No one university does something unique for very long," he said. "Once there is an idea, everyone does it."
A year after the start date of Building on Excellence, for example, the University of Pennsylvania implemented a strategic plan by the exact same title.
In the plan, Penn highlighted several themes that were also targeted in Duke's recent plans, including internationalization and the arts.
The evolution of the strategic plan at Duke
In 2001, Duke launched the current plan's predecessor, Building on Excellence. The document included strong provisions, like budget and resource allocations, for achieving its goals, said Provost Peter Lange, who heads the development of each strategic plan.
"Building on Excellence was a significant departure from our past, our earlier planning undertakings," he said.
Lange said it was the "tight language" of Building on Excellence that contributed to its success, and administrators replicated that model in Making a Difference.
"The difference at Duke isn't that we have a strategic plan, the difference at Duke is that Duke tends to do what's in that strategic plan," President Richard Brodhead said after the Board's September meeting.
Although many factors sparked the switch to more ambitious planning, Simon said it was the exponential rise in Duke's endowment that made it financially possible.
Currently, Making a Difference is slated to use $1.3 billion in strategic funds to achieve its goals. Unlike the last plan, which largely coincided with the Campaign for Duke-a major capital campaign that raised $2.3 billion over seven years-the next plan intends to draw from existing University funds, Simon said.
Unity of strategic ideas
With three professional schools, more than a dozen graduate programs and two undergraduate schools, Duke's university system is more complex than that of many of its peers.
Through its strategic plan, however, Duke attempts to foster excellence through unity among its schools and this centralized approach is unique, Lange said. "Very few universities do central strategic plans," Simon said.
At many other schools, long-range plans are fractured, separating academic, administrative and financial goals.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, long-range plans are divided along these lines, said Mike McFarland, UNC director of university communications.
"There are no dollar figures," he said, referring to the school's long-range academic plan. Duke's way of doing things, however, is not unheard of among elite institutions.
Brown University recently implemented the most consolidated long-range plan in the school's history, said Dick Spies, executive vice president for planning at Brown.
Like Duke, Brown aimed to create a single plan that would guide a set of goals outlined by its administration.
Spies noted, however, that Duke's centralized goal-setting involves more effort than a school like Brown, because of its many professional and graduate schools.
Duke's complexity makes the unifying role of the strategic plan all the more important, Simon said.
"I just think there's a culture that's been created here whereby the University community does come together and think about developing the path of enhancing itself," he said.
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