New Trustees Named

 

Six new trustees began serving July 1 on Duke’s thirty-seven-member board of trustees. They are: Anne T. Bass of Fort Worth, Texas; Paula Hannaway Crown ’80 of Chicago and Aspen, Colorado; J. Lawrence McCleskey ’62, B.D. ’66 of Columbia, South Carolina; Susan M. Stalnecker ’73 of Wilmington, Delaware; Michele M. Sales ’78, J.D. ’81 of Issaquah, Washington; and Andrew C. Nurkin ’03 of Atlanta.

“ We are particularly pleased by the diversity of experience, geography, and gender that our new trustees bring to the board,” says Peter M. Nicholas ’64, who chairs the board of trustees. “We look forward to having their counsel and insight as we address Duke’s many challenges and opportunities.”

Bass, president of the Anne T. & Robert M. Bass Foundation, has served on Trinity College’s board of visitors and is a member of the Campaign for Duke steering committee. She and her husband, Robert, have been generous supporters of Duke, most notably through the Bass Program for Undergraduate Excellence, aimed at improving undergraduate teaching; the Bass Society of Fellows, which recognizes Duke faculty members who are outstanding in both teaching and research; and Duke’s nationally recognized FOCUS program, which offers integrated courses developed around interdisciplinary themes for entering students. She has been a trustee of her alma mater, Smith College, and currently serves on the boards at Bright School of Divinity at Texas Christian University, Texas Health Resources, and the Lucile Packard Hospital in Stanford, California.

Crown is a principal of Henry Crown and Company, a private investment firm. She was a vice president of Salomon Brothers, Inc. She has served on Trinity College’s board of visitors and is on the Campaign for Duke steering committee. While at Duke, she was a member of the varsity women’s golf team. She and members of her family have established the Lester Crown Endowment for Lectures in Ethics at Duke. She serves on the boards of the Children’s Memorial Hospital, Children’s Memorial Institute for Education and Research, the Aspen Music Festival and School, the Lyric Opera, and the Latin School of Chicago.

McCleskey, the resident bishop of the Columbia area for the South Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, earned his doctor of ministry degree at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1984. He has been a member of the Duke Divinity School’s board of visitors and has served on the university’s Annual Fund executive committee. He is the elected president of the Southeastern Jurisdiction College of Bishops of the United Methodist Church and a member of its executive committee. McCleskey has served more than thirty years in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, including appointments as superintendent of the Winston-Salem district and as senior pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte.

Stalnecker, vice president of E.I. du Pont De Nemours & Company, earned her M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She is a member of Duke’s Annual Fund executive committee. She and her husband, Mark Eric Stalnecker ’73, were co-chairs of the Reunions Gift Committee for their thirtieth reunion in 2003. She is a member of the boards of the Elwyn Institute and Pennsylvania Power and Light Company and is president of the Delaware Art Museum.

Sales, the current president of the Duke Alumni Association, has served on the law school’s Alumni Council and its alumni association board, and was for several years president of the Duke Club of Puget Sound. In 1999, she received the university’s Charles A. Dukes Award for distinguished alumni service. She is an attorney specializing in mediation and arbitration of personal injury, employment, and medical malpractice matters. She has been a trustee for the Legal Foundation of Washington and is the Washington state representative to and chair of the Alternate Dispute Resolution Committee for the Defense Research Institute. She has been active in the Seattle Council of the Navy League of the United States and chaired the commissioning committee for the USS Shoup, a destroyer that was commissioned in Seattle in June 2002.

Nurkin graduated with highest distinction in English and received both the FOCUS academic writing prize and the Terry Welby Tyler Jr. award in poetry. He chaired the Campus Council, the student-led, residential life policy-making body, and participated in Project BUILD, a community-service orientation program for first-year Duke students, and the Duke Model U.N. During his summers, he studied English and religion in London, conducted a service-learning research project with the Atlanta Community Food Bank, and was an intern at Algonquin Books.

As president of the Duke Alumni Association, Sales will serve a two-year term on the board, the first year in a nonvoting capacity and the second year as a voting member. Nurkin will serve a three-year “young trustee” term, serving as a nonvoting member the first year and a voting member the following two years.

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