Duke University Year In Review - $2 Billion and Counting

1993: Duke selects Nannerl O. Keohane as its eighth president. She becomes only the second woman ever to lead a major private research university in the United States.
1995: Historian John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke professor emeritus of history, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for his long and distinguished career as a scholar, intellectual leader and civil rights advocate.
1995: The National Research Council ranks eight Duke graduate programs--literature, Spanish, French, religion, English, biomedical engineering, ecology-evolution-behavior and pharmacology--among the top five in the nation. The ranking, which takes place only once in a decade, placed Duke’s Graduate School as a whole in the country’s top 20 for the first time.
1996: Duke alumnus Robert Richardson PhD ’66 receives a Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in the isotope helium-3.
1996: The Fuqua School of Business launches the successful Duke MBA-Global Executive program, making Duke a world leader in business education. In 2001, Fuqua starts the Cross Continent MBA with a campus in Frankfurt, Germany, extending Duke’s global reach even further.
1999: Duke becomes the first school ever to place both its men and women’s basketball teams in the national championship games. In 2003, the women’s basketball team becomes the first women’s team to win four consecutive ACC tournaments, a record feat the men’s team had accomplished the year before.
2002: A record-breaking four Duke undergraduates and one graduate student land Rhodes scholarships, followed by two more in 2003. Since 1996, Duke has been one of only two American universities (Harvard is the other) to have had as many Rhodes Scholars in a single year.
2002: Senior Melanie Wood becomes the first U.S.-born woman to become a William Lowell Putman Fellow, the most prestigious math honor for undergraduates. She also leads a team of three Duke students to third place in the 63rd annual Putnam mathematical competition--the eighth time since 1990 that a Duke team placed among the top ten schools. Only Harvard University has won the competition more often than Duke.
2003: More students apply for admission to Duke than at any other time in history. This year’s application total of 16,656 surpasses by more than 750 the record set last year (15,894).
2003: During the past decade, Duke University, the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University Medical Center and the School of Medicine consistently ranked among the top ten in the nation in surveys conducted by U.S. News & World Report and Business Week.

Duke is younger than all of America’s other most prestigious universities, but its national reputation has soared in the past decade--bolstered by a string of major achievements in areas academic, athletic, scientific and societal. One of the accomplishments most critical to achieving the university’s long-term ambitions was announced on January 16, 2003.

As of that week, the Campaign for Duke had raised $2,006,684,498—surpassing the $2 billion goal nearly a full year before the campaign’s scheduled completion. Thanks to tremendous support from its friends and alumni, Duke is one of only five American universities ever to have raised $2 billion in a single fundraising campaign. Only Harvard, Columbia, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California had achieved such an ambitious goal, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The stunningly successful campaign is helping to fuel Duke’s continuing pursuit of excellence in scholarship, teaching and service to society. As President Nannerl O. Keohane put it, campaign gifts allow Duke to “reach out for new goals, in order to claim our great future”—and to continue along its ever-inclining trajectory as one of the world’s foremost research universities.