Summer Bounty

It may be quiet on campus, but the $3.25 billion Duke Forward campaign has kept activity humming during the summer.

First, trustee emeritus Morris Williams ’62, M.A.T. ’63 and his wife, Ruth, pledged $5 million to Duke athletics. It’s the fourth commitment of $5 million or more to athletics since last October.

Next up was a $5.74 million gift to the divinity school from The Duke Endowment. The gift will extend the work of the Clergy Health Initiative, an effort to study and improve the health and wellbeing of United Methodist clergy in North Carolina. Those clergy tend to have high rates of obesity, diabetes, asthma, and arthritis; about 10.5 percent also exhibit symptoms of depression—nearly double the national average.

The Duke Endowment also committed $5 million to the law school to support its Center for Judicial Studies. Established in 2011, the center aims to enhance judicial education and the quality of the judiciary, and to improve the legal system and understanding of judicial institutions. The center has begun a master’s degree program in judicial studies; seventeen judges from federal, state, and foreign courts who enrolled in the program’s inaugural class currently are engaged in their second summer of study at Duke Law.

Finally, trustee Ralph Eads ’81 and his wife, Lisa, committed $5.5 million, $4.25 million of which will support Duke’s Energy Initiative—including an energy-finance professorship of the practice, fellowships, conferences and other events, and an energy information and analysis research program.