Survey of Engagement Efforts at Duke University
Civic Engagement and Research Universities
Betsy Alden and Cheri Ross
January 24, 2007
Duke University has always been committed to harnessing the power of higher education for larger societal goods. The school was founded in 1924, in the words of James B. Duke, to serve The s se”the needs of mankind along physical, mental and spiritual lines.” Over the past two decades, linking academic interest with public service has been a growing priority. The past three University strategic plans have increasingly called for greater emphasis on education that combines research, service and learning. The new strategic plan, Making a Difference, puts still greater emphasis on “the learning that arises when theoretical intelligence is tested in the arena of real human needs.” It also calls for nurturing in students a life-long passion for making a difference in the world, by deepening the undergraduate experience to increase opportunities for experiential learning of this kind.
Existing engagement efforts at Duke are varied, multiple, and spread across a great number of units and programs. Among the most prominent are the following:
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The Community Service Center serves as a gateway office offering assistance, advice and placement for individuals and groups interested in volunteer, community-based work-study, and other community service activities in Durham and the surrounding area.
The Community Service Center aims to involve students early on in their undergraduate careers. First-year students encounter an extensive array of opportunities upon arriving on campus. During orientation week, many participate in “Into the City,” a program in which students are brought into Durham to see what the major problems are and places where they can help. Additionally, freshman-year dorms usually have a year-long community-service project, such as volunteering at a local grade school.
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The Neighborhood Partnership, a unique program shared between Duke and Durham, organized through Duke’s Office of Community Affairs, helps to marshal university resources to address needs identified by residents as major concerns in neighborhoods and schools near campus.
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The Office of Community Affairs partners with Duke’s Program in Education and Division of Student Affairs to sponsor Project Child, which provides first-year students with an extended orientation to Duke University and the greater Durham Community. Through weekly tutoring, participants expand their perspective of educational issues and civic engagement.
Community Affairs also collaborates with a vast array of University offices and programs to offer Project HOPE, in which first-year students devote themselves to an after-school program for at-risk students who live in Duke’s partner neighborhoods. The program recently received a $2.25 million grant from the Kellogg Foundation.
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Service-learning and research-service-learning courses connect academic experience with community focus and cut across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Duke has multiple service-learning initiatives offered through units such as the Hart Leadership Program, the Kenan Institute of Ethics, the Center for Documentary Studies, the Nicholas School of the Environment, and the Program in Education. Service-learning courses require 20 service hours each semester with a community partner in addition to ethical inquiry reflection sessions. These serve as gateways to research-service-learning courses, which instruct students in conducting community-based research for the benefit of both the community partner and the student investigator.
This model of a tiered and phased approach to service-learning and research-service-learning was pioneered at Duke by a FIPSE-funded program, “Scholarship with a Civic Mission,” a joint project of the Hart Leadership Program and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.
When the FIPSE grant concluded in 2006, Duke moved to ensure that such courses would continue to be fostered by creating the Office of Service-Learning,which provides instructional support (training, mentoring, and consultation); standards of best practices; and logistical assistance to departments, programs, and individual faculty members seeking to integrate service-learning into their academic objectives.
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Several University programs help support immersion experiences focused on service in a local, regional, or national community, or abroad. Among these are merit scholarship programs such as B.N. Duke, Robertson, and University Scholars, which provide students with innovative summer immersion experiences. Robertson Scholars, for instance, spend five weeks in Ho Chi Minh City, living with Vietnamese roommates, teaching English and learning Vietnamese, taking a course on contemporary Vietnamese society, participating in cultural exchange and home construction projects.
Hart Leadership’s programs provide a variety of kinds of support for service. Service Opportunities in Leadership (SOL) offers a powerful integrated educational experience for students interested in service, research, and immersive learning. SOL is an intensive twelve-month leadership program that combines academic study, research-service-learning, mentoring, and leadership training. The Hart Fellows Program offers recent Duke graduates ten-month fellowships with innovative organizations in developing countries that are facing complex social, political and humanitarian problems. The Enterprising Leadership Initiative introduces students to the study of leaders and organizations dedicated to market-based solutions to social problems.
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Duke websites and print publications such as Learning to Make a Difference; Hart Leadership; Senior Stories), Student Stories, and Build Your Own Duke offer highlights of individual students’ experiences in public service. Through these virtual lenses onto students’ engaged lives, we learn about Duke students who are deeply engaged in their communities, such as one who started a summer camp for siblings of children with cancer and raised money and established ongoing student leadership needed to sustain the project. They document the story of the Spanish/psychology major who took service-learning education classes at Duke, went on to spend 10 weeks in the summer working for a NGO in Honduras on teenage sexual health issues and became so committed to service that she is going to teach inner city children upon graduation. Such stories as these on service-oriented websites help to inspire and guide students to find their own paths to civic engagement.
In addition, Learning to Make a Difference locates centrally, in a searchable format, information about service-based courses, research projects, local volunteer opportunities, semester or summer programs, study abroad, and other activities. The website allows students to find appropriate opportunities by searching in ways that match their interests and studies.
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Most of the efforts mentioned so far have been aimed at undergraduates at Duke. Directing study and action toward solving societal problems has extended to post-graduate programs and professional schools as well. The Duke Law School Community Enterprise Clinic trains law students to serve as resources for non-profit organizations and low-wealth entrepreneurs while offering the students a chance to practice law rather than merely read it. The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurshipin the Fuqua School of Business strengthens community institutions by training students and leaders to apply business acumen to social ventures.
These efforts, among others, led to Duke’s designation by Campus Compact and the Princeton Review as one of 81 institutions in the nation with outstanding community service programs.
The University is fortunate to have President Richard Brodhead as a strong, articulate champion of Duke’s emphasis on putting knowledge to the service of society: “One of the things I’ve found most distinctive about Duke is its real world orientation — the yoking of knowledge, application, and service,” he said when he arrived in 2004. He has consistently exhorted students to link their intellectual interests with service and pledged to make it easier for them to do so. We look forward to further efforts emerging as the latest strategic plan’s emphasis on linking learning to public service is translated into action.
