Developing Leaders for Service

Being a great liberal arts college means preparing students for the current moment and for the future. It also means asking perennial questions. We are asking the same questions about the human condition, about what it means to live together, that our forebears asked in 1924 when the Endowment was founded and the partnership began.

To have that healthy tension between tradition and change is to both be grounded in a sense of place and a sense of history, while being forward looking, which is exactly what we do as an educational institution.

The Duke Endowment has been a partner with us for 100 years in thinking about tradition and change, and how we stay focused on our key values. We share the key institutional needs of Davidson College with the Board and staff members of the Endowment, and they help us think about where we have been, where we are and where we want to go. In three key areas — providing supportive student financial aid, hiring incredible faculty and building world-class buildings — the Endowment has been our partner, our supporter and our friend. We would not be the same college without The Duke Endowment’s extraordinary support.

In our founding Statement of Purpose at Davidson, we commit to helping students develop humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service. Founded in 1837, Davidson College has a strong sense of place. We bear the same name as the town of Davidson, and we’ve been a part of Charlotte for that time as well. We can be a convening place and partner in social issues in the city. We can be a place where people learn from each other and a place where people come to solve those key problems, whether they are local or regional, national or beyond.

Thanks to the Endowment, 17 years ago we were able to become the first liberal arts college in the country to offer need-blind admission, to meet 100 percent of financial need and to do so without loans in the packages that our students receive. Affordability and accessibility are fundamental parts of our commitment to build public good and to educate students for lives of leadership and service.

There’s nothing easy about the work of educating people for civic life and for making a difference in the world. We live in a polarized society. There are serious challenges in our public life. For us to think that preparing students in such a context is easy would be to miss the reality of suffering and the reality of the serious social and technological challenges that we are going to have to solve together. I have every faith, every belief, that Davidson students will be part of the solution to the very hardest, most intractable problems that face us.

As one of my forebears, President Samuel R. Spencer, once said, “The Duke Endowment has taken Davidson from being an average college to being one of the great colleges in the country. We have every expectation to continue being good partners with the Endowment, and we are grateful for everything it does for us as we move into the future.”