As I look out on this audience, I see several groups of people who are critical to the enterprise of Duke University. I see students, a number of whom were asked to be here to be recognized for their special achievement. I do not see my favorite senior, our daughter; for she has by now surely slipped beneath a pew, hoping to spare herself the association should it prove embarrassingly necessary. I see the University’s officers and fellow trustees, for whom this is a ceremony of state. I see faculty who have kindly shown up to add substance and color to the occasion, and some also to be recognized for their teaching excellence. And the others I see, who predominate – are those of you who are here for one very simple and fundamental reason: you love this University as I do. You are profoundly indebted and invested and linked to this place, as I am. And of no persons is it more true than our honorands, today: Sally Robinson (who is definitely who I want to be when I grow up), her husband Russell Robinson, Ruby Wilson, and Jim Wallace.

Let me begin where I began my lifelong relationship with Duke University, standing on the front porch of 1537 Larchmont Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio, opening a letter postmarked Durham, North Carolina. The letter contained an offer of admission to Duke’s Woman’s College and an offer of financial aid. To show you how different our contemporary era is from that time, I was overwhelmed not only to have been given the option to attend Duke, but some resources to help make that option feasible. It never once occurred to me that I had any entitlement to either advantage. But, it came to mind many times that I had been given a great gift in the invitation to occupy a space that equally or more deserving young people could have had.

But what seared most deeply in my memory was the sight of tears in my father’s eyes, the mixture of pride and sadness, of prospect and loss that they reflected. My mother later told me that, as they drove off from Bassett House dormitory and headed home to Ohio, he observed “She’ll never come home again.”

And, he was, of course, both right and wrong, for I did come home again - - perhaps not as often as they might have liked. But, indeed, the Paula Ruth Phillips who returned to Larchmont Avenue with a surer sense of self was at once the same, and yet, a very different person. And, if a university is doing its job, isn’t that precisely the way it should be?  I tried to remind myself of that four years ago when we brought our daughter here to go to college.

As a student at Duke University, I imagined possibilities for myself that I never could have dreamed of, had I not ventured out of my comfort zone and found an environment where my horizons broadened considerably beyond the limited radius I had known and where I stretched to such extent that I would never fit again into my old skin. This place lifted me up, and over the years since, I have come increasingly to know the real value of this tremendous gift – the opportunity to attend a great university, to study with an outstanding faculty, and to be educated also by classmates whose life experiences and perspectives were different from my own.

I am only one of many who are similarly grateful that, from an early day, Duke afforded opportunity. Today, as an alumna and trustee, I am proud of Duke for making such a bold commitment to sustain access by commissioning, under President Brodhead’s leadership, an ambitious financial aid initiative to raise 300 million dollars. This effort will ensure that our student body is drawn from the widest array of human talent and abilities, qualities that we know are not correlated with income level. Moreover, this commitment stands as a testament to the belief that the resulting diverse student body creates the most interesting and most educationally rich environment for learning, an environment from which every student’s education profits.

The financial aid campaign is significant, not only for what it does for individual students or for the quality of their educational experience; it is important because of what it says about who we are as an institution. It is probably the single most important thing we could do to ensure the character and values of Duke University.

By providing financial aid that allows access without regard to ability to pay and makes enrollment feasible by meeting full financial need, Duke facilitates for future generations of students what it did for me: upward mobility. I do not use this term in its more limited and perhaps crass sense of succeeding generations having higher income levels and being more comfortably situated than their parents. I suggest a deeper meaning – moving upward in the broad sense of being helped to a place where mental capacities could be exercised more fully, where talents could be cultivated and skills mastered so that later life could be richer in all its many dimensions. I mean moving upward in the sense of growth and the fullest realization of promise. This is what a liberal education does. And this is what Duke did for me - and dare I suggest – strives to do for all who pass through this place, “taking the good of it,” to use a favorite Brodhead expression.

As a first generation college student, I understood this. And, perhaps you now know why I can say unequivocally that I considered myself to be very much a child of privilege at Duke University.

It is for this reason that I have been particularly troubled by one aspect of the media commentary on our University during this current time of trial. The press really has it wrong, I think, when they caricature my alma mater as being populated largely by privileged students. Their error is not the failure to acknowledge that over 45 percent of the students at Duke University receive some form of financial aid. Their error is not to recognize that, regardless of financial status, all students at Duke University share equal access to the educational riches of this place, making Duke a university populated entirely by children of privilege. Whether paying 100 % of the tuition and fees, or 50% or 25%, or none, every young woman or young man enrolled at Duke is privileged to be possessed of incredible wealth of opportunity.

There is a second part to my message. It is not the commitment to access and therefore upward mobility that will set Duke University apart and make it the institution our founders intended. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. What will lift this institution to a realization of its potential, just as we hope students are lifted to realize theirs, is a dedication to the promise of upward nobility.

Let me explain the meaning behind this clever little pun. If there is a quality lacking in the world today, I do not think it is so much an absence of civility, (although there is that in ample measure,) but, something even deeper:  a lack of nobility of spirit. The tendency in popular culture, to be entertained by the acts of people debasing one another and making sport of seeing how low the common denominator can be driven is thoroughly depressing. Certainly, President Brodhead had it right to urge entering freshmen to treat others with civility as a reflection of their being truly educated and as a means to harvest the advantage of difference. Many years earlier, I heard President Terry Sanford address a group of students and put forward the profound but simple proposition that getting an education was a process of becoming civilized.  This I took to mean that students were to be introduced to the highest forms humankind can create and to the achievements of thinking at its highest level – across all realms of human endeavor, whether poetry, law, theology, biomedical engineering, genetic research, or political philosophy.

But there are signs that Duke understands it has the capacity to do more than to encourage the deepest appreciation for the best of what fertile minds have created. Duke can embrace a broader agenda without doing violence to the first charge.  And that agenda is to take these products of the intellect and turn them to good for our society. In doing this, we move from practicing civility, to showing that we are truly civilized, to aspiring to high ideals and a nobleness of spirit. We recognize our privilege not solely to reap the advantages of being here for ourselves, but for others.

By giving students a chance to lift themselves up by education, we are expressing faith that youth will lift others up by the fruits of their subsequent labor, especially if they have been encouraged to work for the good. There is no time line by which to judge when this should or will happen. President Emerita Nan Keohane notes the tensions between “love of learning for its own sake and an investment in making the world a better place,” but affirms that the  “basic enterprise of the university as an institution rests also on the faith that there will be time for our efforts to make a difference for good.”[1]

Thus we would seek not to create at Duke a privileged class of noblemen in the sense of social hierarchy, as other countries have done via their educational systems. American higher education has been a great equalizer and liberator, giving every young person the chance to become a nobleman or noble woman in the sense of exhibiting strength of character and embracing lofty ideals and making a personal commitment to rise higher than the mean.  Regardless of blood lines, every woman and man at Duke has the capacity to become a noble person, not by inheritance of rank or position, but a bequest of tradition and values. 

Monarchies and other hereditary social systems are somewhat out of favor today, and I see this as no great loss. But, alas, I am not overwhelmed by the examples of leaders on the world stage who are noblemen in even the broader sense of the word. I do, however, find dozens of local examples that give evidence of upward nobility. These persons are in your classes; they teach your classes. They are individuals who are alert, lively, and engaged. They are doers. And they are doers for good. If each person at this University cultivated this habit, there would be no need for a campus culture initiative; it would take care of itself.

Much of the work I see being done for the good is evident right here in our own backyard. It is a painful irony to me that some of the current, negative, press that emphasizes a divide between Durham and Duke comes at a time when Duke is showing such evidence of a service orientation and meaningful involvement with the community on a host of issues. We can and will do more, but in the last decade, Duke has made significant progress in strengthening its role in Durham and becoming more “of this place.” This is reflected in work in and for the schools, in health care initiatives, in partnerships for economic development.

Some twenty years ago, on the occasion of the announcement of the B.N. Duke Scholars Program, Mary Semans made a statement that I have remembered since and quoted often: “In order for the tree to flourish, its roots must be nourished.” Indeed, this substantial engagement in the community is real nourishment of our roots in a way that our founder, James B. Duke, would have approved.

And Mr. Duke also would have approved of the fact that while we have become more deeply rooted here, we have also become at once more international. In his aspirations for the University, Mr. Duke saw no conflict between a regional commitment and an international reach. And Duke is making strides on both counts.

James B. Duke set out aspirations for the University, but also made some practical decisions with consequences for the character of Duke. One such decision is clearly related to my second theme of upward nobility. Mr. Duke showed special genius, I think, in directing that a chapel should be erected at the head of the quadrangle. He even tinkered with the plan to ensure that the chapel be placed on higher ground. And thus now stands an architectural testament to the inspiration that we want students to find at this University. The fact that we want students to look up to higher aspirations and more lofty goals is well symbolized by this iconic building on our campus. Were I a linguist, I would digress to consider the roots of the words “spire” and “inspiration,” but the superficial connection works well enough for my purposes today. We are summoned to lift our sights, to raise our aspirations, to think beyond ourselves, to move from creating to serving.

As our University community has become more diverse, there are those of various faith traditions who may feel discomfort at the extent to which this grand building houses explicitly Christian symbols. It apparently was not originally intended that the services in the building reflect the trappings of traditional Protestant churches, at least according to Duke University historian, Robert Durden.[2]  And, to be candid, there have been times when I have thought more effort to be inclusive was warranted. But this chapel is emblematic of much more than a single faith tradition. One might ask: “Who does this chapel say we are?”  My answer is not that we all share a religious creed, but rather that we share lofty aspirations for ourselves and our University.

Because of my work with the Board’s Building and Grounds Committee, I have been thinking a great deal about campus architecture and what it can signal. One of my hopes for the development of Central Campus is that we will be able to create a distinctive environment that will mediate between the sense of order and grace characteristic of East and the sense of permanence and enduring truth of West.

If the press or anyone really cared to understand this University, they would look not to Buchanan Boulevard, but to the Chapel, or to the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering Research and Applied Sciences, or the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. They would consider the Global Health Initiative. They would know the profiles of engaged students who daily are promoting education and service. They would lift up the example of the science camp for Durham middle school students created by Duke students, or the admissions program for Duke employee children also created by a Duke student, or Spanish instruction to elementary students at Lakewood School, or to the services provided by volunteers at the Walltown Clinic, or any of hundreds of examples we could name. They would see the accomplishments of faculty and students enlivening the spirit, elevating the mind, and improving the human condition. These are students exhibiting a nobility of spirit and a sense of purpose. This is the Duke that I know.

It is the Duke that our founders envisioned. And it is the Duke that many noble souls have kept on building, continuing the foundational efforts of Benjamin Newton Duke, Washington, Duke, and James B. Duke, and William Preston Few, and John Carlisle Kilgo.  These were good leaders whose only agenda was getting it right for Duke. I can name them, you can name them. The identities of many are engraved on stones above the quadrangles, but many more are etched in our hearts. Among these are noble people like Jane Philpott, Mary Grace Wilson, Hugh Hall, Charles Putman, James Cleland, Elizabeth Persons, Robert Rankin, James Price, Tommy Langford, the list goes on.

I am confident that this relatively young University will continue its rise in international stature, not measured by any external indices developed by magazines, but by our own notions of what we are aiming for. We would thus see our role not just as taking smart people and making them smarter, but taking good people and making them better as a result of the opportunities and inspiration they find here. We would measure the success of our graduates not by rank or position but whether they lead lives of consequence. And their nobility would not be a factor of social rank or income, but of greatness of spirit.

In the early days of James B. Duke’s engagement with Trinity College, President William Few wrote to him expressing the hope that he would get “enduring satisfaction and happiness” out of what he had done for Trinity College, because, he wrote, “You are able to feel that through it, you have done some permanent good on earth.”[3]

More than nine decades later, Duke University has many noble hands, including those gathered here today, who are committed to continuing to build a great institution. We are privileged all; we are founders all. As long as the chapel stands as a tangible symbol, which I fully expect will be a very long time, Duke will be aspiring. It will still be on an upward trajectory, moving toward courage, and honor, and generosity of spirit, and the most noble thoughts and deeds - - toward doing some permanent good on earth.