Centennial Oral Histories:
President Vincent Price

08:54:52:22 – 08:55:23:17

Ann Pelham

My name is Ann Pelham. I’m here today with [Vincent] Vince Price, the 10th president of Duke University. Our conversation is one among many marking Duke’s centennial celebration. Thank you for being here. It was 2017 when you came to campus as the 10th president of Duke University. That’s a little symmetrical, there. Ten presidents in 100 years. Why did you accept the offer to come and be the president of Duke?

08:55:23:18 – 08:55:50:01

Vincent Price

Well, it’s an honor to be selected to lead any institution of higher learning. But, when you’re invited to serve as Duke’s president, I can’t imagine anybody not being thrilled about it. Three reasons, basically. The eminence of the institution, its reputation for excellence. I was able to see this first-hand because of my encounter with various folks from Duke over the years in educational circles.

08:55:50:03 – 08:56:10:01

Vincent Price

The second thing is the well-earned sense of the place. Its ambitions, its practicality, its ability to get things done. For years, I was part of an Ivy-plus provost group. And we would have these meetings, and I would go back and tell my team, you know, “I think I’m giving away a lot more than I get at these meetings.

08:56:10:03 – 08:56:45:01

Vincent Price

But everything I get, I get from Duke.” It was just a place that was thoughtful, on the move, not hidebound. And then the third thing was a real, I would say curiosity, because I didn’t really know this region of the country then all that well. But [it was] a sense that this was the right time for the South in general, but this part of the South, to deal with some of the issues that have certainly been on our plates here at Duke. But just the growth of the [Research] Triangle.

08:56:45:03 – 08:57:07:10

Vincent Price

I was given a fantastic tour of Durham as part of the recruitment process, I guess you would say. And [Associate Vice President for Capital Assets] Scott Selig, who helps with real estate here in town, his charge was to give me and [my wife] Annette a tour of Durham and then a tour of campus. Our tour of campus was non-existent because he spent all of his time in Durham [laughs].

08:57:07:12 – 08:57:33:17

Vincent Price

And we walked through the then under construction Chesterfield building, and it was just amazing to see what Durham represented, the partnership there. It was part of a campus that had built an innovation district, kind of a place for spinoffs, on the campus. Kind of a Centennial campus move, as was done at NC State [University].

08:57:33:19 – 08:57:54:21

Vincent Price

This is amazing. There’s no need for this at Duke, because Durham is on fire. So all of those things just made me so excited about it. Notwithstanding the blunder that I committed, in my very first interview with the search committee. I knew that Duke — I knew about the Blue Devils. I knew the ool colors were blue.

08:57:54:23 – 08:58:07:12

Vincent Price

I was not educated on the necessity of respecting shades of blue. I wore a tie that was sadly — It was not Penn blue. It was even worse. It was Tar Heel blue.

08:58:07:14 – 08:58:08:09

Ann Pelham

Oh, no.

08:58:08:09 – 08:58:23:11

Vincent Price

Yes. We had a lovely conversation. And toward the end of the interview, Valerie Ashby spoke up, I’m sure on behalf of the whole committee and said, “This has been a great meeting, but I just — Your tie is driving me crazy.”

08:58:23:13 – 08:58:24:22

Ann Pelham

[Laughs] That’s a great story.

08:58:24:23 – 08:58:29:17

Vincent Price

It was drawn to my attention. I have not committed that mistake since.

08:58:29:18 – 08:58:33:14

Ann Pelham

I think there’s probably not a stitch of baby blue in your entire wardrobe.

08:58:33:14 – 08:58:37:20

Vincent Price

I studiously avoid it. We get a pass on shirts.

08:58:37:22 – 08:58:38:12

Ann Pelham

Yes.

08:58:38:14 – 08:58:50:13

Vincent Price

A pass on shirts. But that is it. And respecting the wardrobe rules – absolutely essential. I have a few articles of clothing that get close to that line. You just keep them in the closet.

08:58:50:19 – 08:58:53:18

Ann Pelham

I do the same thing when I’m shopping. Can’t look at that.

08:58:53:20 – 08:58:54:18

Vincent Price

Exactly.

08:58:54:20 – 08:58:55:16

Ann Pelham

Um . . .

08:58:55:18 – 08:59:09:03

Vincent Price

By the way, [it’s] difficult for me because I grew up a UCLA fan. So I had to be sort of trained out of the slightest interested in that shade of blue.

08:59:09:05 – 08:59:34:16

Ann Pelham

Just a quick follow up on your comments about Durham, and Duke’s presence in the city. I think I remember Scott Selig or Tallman Trask [describing it was how] Duke wanted to be a tenant of record as well as buying some buildings, of course. And that allowed a partnership with the city and other developers, in a sense, other businesspeople.

08:59:34:18 – 08:59:38:06

Ann Pelham

Is that something that is continuing to this day?

08:59:38:08 – 08:59:41:04

Vincent Price

Less so, partly because it’s no longer needed.

08:59:41:06 – 08:59:41:14

Ann Pelham

Right.

08:59:41:18 – 09:00:05:03

Vincent Price

So when Nan Keohane was president, she was approached by developers, and perhaps partners in the city, with the prospect of developing Brightleaf Square. And the request of Duke was to master lease a sizable amount of square footage. And the story is that on the spot Nan said, “Yes.” You know, go for it.

09:00:05:03 – 09:00:28:17

Vincent Price

I don’t know if that’s quite true, but she certainly agreed to it. And that really started decades of investment in Durham that required Duke’s participation to make those maneuvers, those investments, sensible from a developer’s perspective. They needed to have a master lease tenant.

09:00:28:22 – 09:00:29:17

Ann Pelham

Right.

09:00:29:18 – 09:00:59:14

Vincent Price

And so that model did a number of things. It revitalized the physically the downtown. Secondly, it brought a lot of Duke employees downtown. And by the time I arrived, 4,500 Duke employees [were] working downtown. And then that becomes a vehicle for supporting restaurants and other kinds of services downtown. And the third thing was that none of this involved purchases of property by Duke.

09:00:59:15 – 09:01:28:21

Vincent Price

These were leases. The challenge there, by the way, is that with all these Duke signs downtown people falsely assume that Duke owns property downtown. But that was never the objective. It was the lease. It kept those properties on the books. On the books, you know, on the tax rolls. It was a fantastic maneuver. One of the most thoughtful partnerships, frankly, between a university and a city I’ve ever seen.

09:01:28:23 – 09:02:01:06

Vincent Price

It is interesting now because, actually Tallman and I were driving back from a meeting at the Research Triangle Park, down [Highway] 147, and he pointed to a building just adjacent to the Durham Bulls ballpark and said, “That’s the first building that didn’t need us.” So the true testament to the power of that maneuver is that that economic engine, once it caught fire, doesn’t depend upon Duke.

09:02:01:08 – 09:02:27:11

Vincent Price

And so now those leases are coming due for renewal. And we’re able to pull employees out of leased properties back on the campus, actually save money for Duke. But it allows the owners of those properties to increase some of those leases, and third parties are there to step in. So it’s just an arc.

09:02:27:12 – 09:02:52:02

Vincent Price

A great strategy, right-timed for the moment. We’re in a different moment. So the nature of our partnerships has changed, but what hasn’t changed is a very thoughtful, very long-term strategic interest in making sure that Durham thrives. Because without a thriving Durham, Duke will be not even half of what it can be.

09:02:52:04 – 09:03:05:14

Ann Pelham

You know, you’re talking about this as if you were an expert on real estate. And actually you are. And a university president has to be an expert on — I can’t even imagine the number of things. It’s one of the hardest jobs around.

09:03:05:15 – 09:03:09:21

Vincent Price

Well, the only thing I have to be expert on is surrounding myself with the right experts.

09:03:09:23 – 09:03:10:11

Ann Pelham

Okay.

09:03:10:17 – 09:03:39:02

Vincent Price

Quite literally, you learn a lot. I love that. That’s what drew me to a university in the first place. But the opportunity to surround yourself with people who just know a lot more than you do about these topics. What they may not understand, as well, is the overall guiding strategy or what the university as an academic institution is trying to accomplish.

09:03:39:04 – 09:04:08:13

Vincent Price

But that’s the joy of being in this job. And the variety is astounding. From dealing with athletics, which is a major commercial concern, as well as a vital part of that educational project to real estate, as you say. And then you have a health system which as a business proposition is quite a bit larger than the university itself.

09:04:08:13 – 09:04:11:02

Vincent Price

And the University includes medicine and nursing.

09:04:11:07 – 09:04:11:19

Ann Pelham

Right.

09:04:11:21 – 09:04:41:11

Vincent Price

So all of that, I just find fantastic about the job. And, yes, the opportunity to learn about all of these different topics is a real benefit to me personally. But the real benefit is knowing enough to know what you don’t know. And then finding – attracting the right talent, and then pushing them to think about new ways to do that work.

09:04:41:12 – 09:05:00:13

Vincent Price

So quietly, we have changed a lot of structures at Duke. And with the arrival of Kim Taylor — our new general counsel, who’s coming to us from the University of Chicago. She will start next week — the entirety of my cabinet has now turned over.

09:05:00:19 – 09:05:01:13

Ann Pelham

It’s amazing.

09:05:01:13 – 09:05:31:10

Vincent Price

And, the deans. Mary Klotman is our longest-serving dean. She started the day I started as president. So that investment in leadership is probably the most significant thing a president can do for an institution. And what excites me is the ability we’ve had collectively to attract that talent. And then within each of their portfolios, to rethink, in pretty dramatic ways actually, how we do things.

09:05:31:12 – 09:05:55:15

Ann Pelham

Well, you mentioned Kim Taylor. She brings a lot of experience at Chicago that Duke will benefit from. But one could say, and I’ll say it, you were probably the best-prepared president Duke has ever had, because of your portfolio as provost at the University of Pennsylvania. The health system wasn’t a surprise. Athletics wasn’t a surprise.

09:05:55:17 – 09:06:25:20

Ann Pelham

You had even managed to do some global education work in China. So a little serendipity there. Was there anything that surprised you when you came to Duke? Let’s just say here’s, here’s being a university president [gestures], and then here’s being a president at Duke [gestures]. Were your expectations different from the reality that you found in any particular couple of ways?

09:06:25:22 – 09:06:48:02

Vincent Price

Generally, I think I was, as you say, I felt well-prepared. And the nature of the interviewing process, and then the onboarding, was outstanding. I mean, absolutely outstanding. Which is one of the reasons why the person who was staffing that committee, [Margaret] Maggie Epps, is now my chief of staff and secretary to the Board of Trustees.

09:06:48:04 – 09:06:49:09

Ann Pelham

She tried out for the job.

09:06:49:09 – 09:07:17:01

Vincent Price

Oh my gosh. She was just doing a job. Not the job she does now, but doing it magnificently. As did everybody. So I felt well-prepared. That being said, there were some things that surprised me. So, one thing that didn’t. I just didn’t know how the development part of this job would play out, because while I did development as a provost, it’s nowhere near the investment a president makes.

09:07:17:03 – 09:07:39:05

Vincent Price

And although it did not occur to me, I knew in my mind the history of the institution. That 1924 was the date when Trinity College became Duke University. But it never actually occurred to me that I would be president during a centennial and have an opportunity to have a centennial-based campaign. But I knew there would be a campaign of some kind.

09:07:39:07 – 09:08:05:05

Vincent Price

That was just a question mark. Would I be good at this? Could I serve Duke in that role? Would I enjoy it? And, I think all of those answers, thankfully, have been answered affirmatively. I love it. We’ve been doing well. One thing, [well] maybe two things that surprised me. I came to the region because of its vitality, the opportunity, all of its work.

09:08:05:07 – 09:08:43:00

Vincent Price

The complications of the Durham and Duke relationship are interesting, perplexing at times. I had a sense of it, but not a deep grounding in it. And when we ran into this whole fiasco over light rail, it just all came together. And that was a surprise to me. It was a surprise to me that the willingness of city leadership and even regional leadership to just turn on a dime and just attack Duke.

09:08:43:00 – 09:09:16:15

Vincent Price

Knowing, actually, that it’s just an attack strategy. I mean, I had people quietly thanking me for staking out Duke’s position. But they weren’t out there defending Duke, right? So your allies can’t always be thought of as allies, in this context. And we’re working very hard at changing that stuff. Stelfanie Williams, vice president for community affairs, has been fantastic.

09:09:16:17 – 09:09:38:15

Vincent Price

That takes a long time. You know, if it takes years to build distrust, it takes double that amount of time to build trust. And it’s just a complicated relationship. So that was new to me. Maybe I had indications of that. I had no real sense of it, deep sense of it.

09:09:38:17 – 09:10:04:18

Vincent Price

Also when I was arriving, the leadership of the city was transitioning. And the new political climate was very different from what my predecessors had faced. So all those things kind of hit at once.

09:10:04:19 – 09:10:36:08

Vincent Price

And the second thing — I thought in my mind I knew about the Duke lacrosse difficulties here. From a distance, I followed it at the time. And I thought to myself a couple of things. One, I admired the way the University stuck with the president, got through it. It was not easy. And against tremendously challenging contextual pressures and forces.

09:10:36:10 – 09:10:55:17

Vincent Price

And that gave me real confidence in the governance, the core governance, of the institution. And as we’ve seen recently, if that isn’t in place, everything becomes fragile. That’s kind of a pressure test of an institution, and Duke succeeded. Where I got it wrong was I thought, “Well, this is a community that’s been through this.

09:10:55:17 – 09:11:19:00

Vincent Price

It’s been chastened. People will think twice before they jump to conclusions.” And, boy, that’s not been the case. I am in receipt of ultimatums that are generated, very, very quickly. They come from the faculty. They come from students. So I think we’re like many campuses in that respect.

09:11:19:00 – 09:11:42:06

Vincent Price

And I sort of thought I would get — not a pass, but a little bit of a break. Now, maybe I am getting a break because this campus has a sensibility to it. We’ve seen this last year as every one of our peers really struggled in ways that fortunately we were able to avoid. But I just maybe miscalculated on what those challenges would look like.

09:11:42:08 – 09:12:00:13

Vincent Price

So those are a couple of areas where I think I was surprised. But in the details about the only thing I hadn’t seen before was a divinity school. Because I had never been at a university with a divinity school. I felt, on the fundamentals as you say, very well-prepared. I hadn’t seen the Duke version of it.

09:12:00:15 – 09:12:30:21

Vincent Price

But I had broad familiarity with it. And my approach to that remains, we should be most concerned that we might get it wrong about the things we have seen before. Because, you know, having seen it somewhere else — in Philadelphia, or Ann Arbor, or California, doesn’t mean you understand it in the Duke context. And so you can’t over rely on your knowledge or expertise.

09:12:30:21 – 09:12:43:15

Vincent Price

If you do, you will make mistakes. And so people have to feel comfortable raising their hand and saying, you know, “Vince, do not do this.” Or, “You’ve got that wrong.”

09:12:43:17 – 09:12:46:16

Ann Pelham

And it’s obvious — the world keeps changing.

09:12:46:18 – 09:12:47:08

Vincent Price

Absolutely.

09:12:47:08 – 09:12:53:19

Ann Pelham

Just because it worked well in the first pandemic doesn’t mean it’ll work in the next one. 

09:12:53:21 – 09:12:56:02

Vincent Price

The next pandemic, happening after my time.

09:12:56:02 – 09:13:04:08

Ann Pelham

Yes, let’s just hope that is the case. Just for the record, could you just say what happened with light rail?

09:13:04:10 – 09:13:38:10

Vincent Price

Yeah, so there’s a 20-year history that precedes my time at Duke with light rail. I should have mentioned, one thing that I did not understand and have come to appreciate, is the lack of a capacity for regional planning in this part of North Carolina. It’s profound, and it’s serious. We have tremendous opportunity, but because there is no region called the Triangle geopolitically — it’s Durham County, it’s Wake County,

09:13:38:16 – 09:13:43:19

Vincent Price

Orange County is not as critical. But these two counties just can’t get on the same page.

09:13:43:19 – 09:13:47:00

Ann Pelham

Wake had picked the buses. Durham was picking light rail.

09:14:00:04 – 09:14:24:17

Vincent Price

And it’s frustrating because if you think about transportation, housing, I mean, any of the things that challenge this region of North Carolina, they require regional solutions. The county isn’t big enough to deal with it. And I just didn’t understand that. Looking back at it, I see that’s what put the whole light rail thing on a crazy trajectory.

09:14:24:19 – 09:14:54:19

Vincent Price

You know, tax proposals were floated and passed, a funding plan was developed to support regional transportation, and the major transportation challenge in this region remains that I-40 corridor connecting Durham and Raleigh. But when Wake County went with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit], Durham decided, no. We were going to go with light rail.

09:14:54:19 – 09:15:13:15

Vincent Price

They teamed up with Orange County to make it a multi-county proposition. It’s kind of a chase of federal funds. By the time it comes to me, it’s a series of presentations from the Triangle board. And I’m looking at these presentations and thinking this doesn’t make sense, right? Just as a plan, it doesn’t make sense.

09:15:13:17 – 09:15:36:03

Vincent Price

But the cost of it kept just spiraling out of control. And the history at Duke was registering — going back to Nan Keohane — concerns about it, saying, “Yes we will partner, we will work with you. But we have these concerns.” And I raised those same concerns. So it was difficult to see a couple things.

09:15:36:03 – 09:16:12:06

Vincent Price

One, that after 20 years, now 27 years, we still don’t have a regional transportation solution. And you look at Mecklenburg County, it’s a totally different composition. More of a traditional, dense urban hub and a spoke. [A] single county that can make its own decisions. They have moved forward, in their case, with light rail. I am totally agnostic about what transportation system solution we come up with, but it’s got to be a regional solution. And that is frustrating.

09:16:12:08 – 09:16:49:22

Vincent Price

The other thing I didn’t fully appreciate, again, was that willingness to sort of throw Duke under a bus. It’s interesting because that proposal never — the participation of the railroad was never secured. It was just not feasible without that behind it. The business community in downtown Durham, very late in the process, was stunned by the plan. Because it would block access to the downtown from areas below the rail line.

09:16:49:23 – 09:17:19:21

Vincent Price

It was just — as a planning process, it was just adrift. So in a way by speaking honestly about it, I put myself and Duke in a bad position of being blamed for the collapse of the whole thing. So what goes down in history is [that] Duke destroyed light rail and that is not the story, number one, but number two,

09:17:19:23 – 09:17:45:05

Vincent Price

I don’t regret it because it was the right decision. But it’s so frustrating that after nearly 30 years, we just haven’t made forward progress. So what we’re trying to do, what I’m personally trying to do, and what Stelfanie and everyone with my office is trying to do, is [to say] “Let’s get together. Let’s be a part of promoting regionality in our thinking.”

09:17:45:07 – 09:18:05:13

Vincent Price

And I hope we can make progress. I’m feeling a little bit more optimistic now, but that was a difficult time for me personally. If you Google “Vince Price”, you get all this light rail stuff. And I still have students, you know — the lore and the history are two different things.

09:18:05:13 – 09:18:28:19

Vincent Price

And there are students who, I don’t know, they take a class on urban planning or something. And the faculty member starts talking about light rail. And it’s just [stated that] Duke killed light rail. It’s frustrating to see that. But that’s true in any circumstance. You just pick up, you move on. But the opportunity in front of us is huge.

09:18:28:19 – 09:18:35:23

Vincent Price

The good news is the growth in our region is considerable. One of the fastest growing parts of the country.

09:18:36:02 – 09:18:38:22

Ann Pelham

Isn’t in Wake County, one of the fastest growing counties in..

09:18:38:22 – 09:18:40:04

Vincent Price

It is.

09:18:40:06 – 09:18:41:09

Ann Pelham

Not to not mention Durham.

09:18:41:09 – 09:18:49:12

Vincent Price

Wake is, I think, the second fastest growing county at the moment. And one of the zip codes around Cary is the fastest growing zip code in the country.

09:18:49:12 – 09:18:51:02

Ann Pelham

Where the Duke Hospital is.

09:18:51:02 – 09:19:23:09

Vincent Price

Yes, indeed. The growth is still — so the influx of population and so on – is still manageable. But if we don’t take care of the infrastructure —  the educational infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure, deal with housing, again, these are all regional if not statewide challenges — then that growth at a certain point becomes your enemy. It starts to undercut the quality of life rather than improve it.

09:19:23:11 – 09:19:49:12

Vincent Price

And we have a huge upside opportunity also to rethink how you manage economic boom times, because they’ve been so poorly managed everywhere else in the country. You look at the Bay Area, it is a shell of its former self. It burns white hot, and then burns out. And you see this in Austin, you see this in the Boston Quarter, wherever you have these innovation booms.

09:19:49:14 – 09:20:20:13

Vincent Price

So there’s an opportunity here to do it differently, help the residential populations already here participate in the economic boom, reskill and upskill workers so they can step into these jobs. North Carolina’s doing a fair amount of that. We could do better on that front. So I’m very bullish on the region. But I think the next five years for the region, five to ten, will be absolutely critical.

09:20:20:15 – 09:20:33:16

Vincent Price

A door opens, and you can walk through it. but you have to be ready. And we’re not entirely ready. The door is definitely open, but there’s still work to be done.

09:20:33:18 – 09:21:01:04

Ann Pelham

You mentioned Stelfanie Williams and the work she’s done, and it brings me to the strategic plan that you have developed, with the five core principles: empowering people, transforming education, building community, forging partnerships. That’s the Durham piece. And engaging a global network. That’s the alumni piece, dear to my heart.

09:21:01:06 – 09:21:20:18

Ann Pelham

I think the example with what we’re doing with Durham and the region is you have to have some patience when you tackle these really big issues. Could you talk about each one of those and why you made those priorities?

09:21:20:20 – 09:21:47:18

Vincent Price

So, a couple of things. When I arrived, it’s pretty common for a new president to be asked about your strategic plan. And I arrived and I realized that a year before my arrival, Duke Health had tied the bow on their strategic plan. And the Provost’s Office was wrapping up their academic strategic plan.

09:21:47:18 – 09:22:10:22

Vincent Price

So, it just didn’t make any sense to develop a new strategic plan. So, this we originally called a framework, now a vision. It’s broader. It’s not a specific plan, but it’s been a very constructive orientation device to keep us focused on the things that really matter long-term. So the five principles, I like to tell people [that] it begins and ends with people.

09:22:10:22 – 09:22:34:20

Vincent Price

It’s centered around community. The fundamental realization that I think all of us made when we sat down and started thinking through what’s next for Duke, and by the way, what’s next for higher ed, is that we’ve invested in facilities. We do a lot of stuff. But at the end of the day, you have to invest in your people.

09:22:34:20 – 09:22:59:19

Vincent Price

All your value is wrapped up in your people. You’re only as good as your graduates. And Duke graduates are spectacular. Your teaching and research is only as good as your faculty. Your alumni are actually the change-makers out there. Your staff, the vast under-appreciated workforce that allows faculty and students to do all of their work,

09:22:59:21 – 09:23:29:19

Vincent Price

historically at Duke, [is] deeply under-appreciated. I mean, there’s another whole history there of labor relations not having always been what we’d like them to be. So, let’s start there. That’s the people proposition. And we have an opportunity to attract the very best minds, the very best workers, the very best students and faculty. So let’s do that, and let’s turn our energies toward those areas where we can make a real difference.

09:23:29:21 – 09:23:53:17

Vincent Price

And so science and technology is the turn we’re making as an institution. With respect to the educational mission, this is a moment where the educational project is transforming itself. And the question is, are we going to sort of ride it, or are we going to thoughtfully navigate it and manage it? And it remains remarkable.

09:23:53:18 – 09:24:27:23

Vincent Price

And this is probably a good thing, how much the educational project has remained the same, even as everything else has changed so radically. Because there are some core values and principles we’re holding on to there. But just embracing technology. And I think what it has come to, that second plank, that sort of idea that we really need to transform education, is leaning on the deep strength of Duke, which is teamwork and experiential learning, and learning

09:24:27:23 – 09:24:52:00

Vincent Price

by doing. [Those] sort of pragmatic virtues of the institution that have been there the whole time. And when you have a diverse student population and a diverse faculty, and we are increasingly diverse, and you find ways to leverage it through teamwork, good things happen. And you can push the research mission down into the very first classes a student takes when they come to Duke.

09:24:52:02 – 09:25:12:03

Vincent Price

Then what? If you have a diverse community, how do you manage as a strong community? And I like to think of [how] if given all the resources we have, we can’t be the healthiest, happiest, friendliest, smartest community [then] we’re not doing it right. Because if with all those resources, if Duke can’t do it, I don’t see how Durham does it.

09:25:12:03 – 09:25:38:09

Vincent Price

I don’t see how North Carolina does it, et cetera. So, thinking through community — what community means, what it means for the student experience — that led to what is now QuadEx and those interventions. But also we do regular culture surveys of students, faculty, and staff, to make sure they’re feeling rewarded by their work. And just leaning hard into community.

09:25:38:11 – 09:26:04:22

Vincent Price

The fourth piece really is the partnership piece. Partnering with purpose, not just in Durham but [also] throughout the state. We’ve got to find ways to connect to the rural parts of Carolina, especially Eastern Carolina. Interestingly, if you look at where Duke is, we are all over the state, we’re out in Beaufort, but then there’s a whole series of counties [where] we’re not as active or present.

09:26:05:00 – 09:26:33:06

Vincent Price

So how do you think about things that students love? DukeEngage – the super popular program. But if you look at where students like to go, they like to go to exotic places. So let’s think about forming partnerships where we can do the most good, with the least and most reasonable expenditure of time and money [Ann: And risk.]. And risk.

09:26:33:08 – 09:27:02:06

Vincent Price

And then you have this — coming back to the people proposition — when you think about those alumni, amazing alumni, I’m sitting next to one. Sadly, I am not one. I feel like an honorary member. But, just an extraordinary collection of people. And I’ve often times thought that if you take any question, any problem, and you start by asking, “What does Duke have?” You tend to look at the faculty.

09:27:02:08 – 09:27:32:18

Vincent Price

And what you realize when you start looking carefully is that we have more than meets the eye, usually because it’s in places you wouldn’t expect to find it. You have to look over all ten schools, it’s amazing what we have. But then if you look out into that network of now 200,000 people, or you extend it to the friends of Duke and the networks where we’re collaborating, I mean, it is orders of magnitude more expertise, knowledge, opportunity. All of those things.

09:27:32:20 – 09:27:53:12

Vincent Price

So if you could mobilize that and sync it with what we’re doing. I mean, my gosh, you would see a quantum leap, literally, in your impact. So that’s an exciting proposition. So those five pieces, they came together as that strategic vision. It’s at a high enough level where it helps us think about these initiatives

09:27:53:12 – 09:28:15:00

Vincent Price

we’ve launched – the Climate Commitment, QuadEx, the Forever Learning Institute in the case of alumni affairs. All of these things, they fit together as part of that larger framework. And what I like about it is [that] they don’t just tap into one of those five things, they typically tap into all five.

09:28:15:03 – 09:28:41:09

Ann Pelham

Across all of them. You mentioned climate change, QuadEx. I’ve got a list in front of me. Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, investments in science and technology, and ways to make the Duke education more affordable. Those are all cross-cutting, and all those things. Science and technology, 

09:28:41:09 – 09:28:42:01

Ann Pelham

could you talk about that a little?

09:28:42:03 – 09:29:03:13

Vincent Price

Sure. So, again, as part of my looking in at Duke during the transition, there were conversations in my very first meeting with the committee about science and technology. And I think there was a sense, frankly, in the committee that we ought to go out and get a scientist to be our president, you know.

09:29:03:15 – 09:29:04:15

Ann Pelham

Just to make a statement?

09:29:04:18 – 09:29:39:12

Vincent Price

Well, no, no, understandably. Because the institution, the origins of Trinity College and the strengths, the traditional strengths built at Duke were largely in the humanities and social sciences. We rose to eminence on those fields. Medicine, of course, because of the investments in the hospital and the clinical work in the state stood out as does the science piece. A relatively small school of engineering [of] high, high, high quality, but small. And engineering tends to be known in places where it’s very large.

09:29:39:14 – 09:30:01:19

Vincent Price

And here we are in the 21st century, and for the past 40 years [there have been] transformational technological developments. So how does Duke make its move and think in a Duke-like way about all of that? That is the right question. And it’s the big question. And we’re kind of the complement, by the way, of a place like Stanford University.

09:30:01:19 – 09:30:26:02

Vincent Price

Stanford grew on the strength of applied science. And when it rose to prominence, it started backfilling in a way. Not backfilling, that’s not the right word. But strengthening the humanities, the social sciences, et cetera. So, to be a full, rounded, high-quality university, you need to do this. And vitalize all of the things you’ve been doing, as you lean into science and technology.

09:30:26:02 – 09:30:58:04

Vincent Price

So we worked with Sally Kornbluth, the provost, and the deans, [worked] with Duke Health very closely, to think about signature areas of science where we should invest. How can we develop a model where we lean on our interdisciplinary strengths to recruit the right kinds of scientists to Duke? How do we build a foundation in data science that supports all of the sciences?

09:30:58:06 – 09:31:28:15

Vincent Price

That work has been super exciting. It has been impactful, deeply impactful, already. And I think now that we’re zeroing in on certain areas of science where we have achieved a requisite level of distinction and can become understood as the place to be in quantum computing, in certain areas associated with immunology, lean on those strengths.

09:31:28:17 – 09:31:34:05

Vincent Price

We’ve always had historical strengths in bioengineering, et cetera. So how do we drive that forward? So that’s been fun.

09:31:34:06 – 09:31:35:11

Ann Pelham

You have a cluster, right?

09:31:35:16 – 09:32:01:17

Vincent Price

You do. And that’s what we’ve been doing. We had a strategy early on. It’s colloquially being known as sort of the best athlete model. Which is, you’re less focused on strategically identifying an area of science than [you are] opportunistically looking for the very best scientists you can find in whatever field. And by recruiting them, they attract attention.

09:32:01:17 – 09:32:26:18

Vincent Price

They bring along students and other scientists. And now you have the gravitational pull and you can move in those areas. It’s not “either or.” It’s a “both and” strategy. And will continue to be. But I think we’re — I don’t think, I know  — in a much better position today, seven years in, to lay down bets in specific areas, around specific clusters of scientists, than we were when I arrived.

09:32:26:20 – 09:32:58:08

Vincent Price

So that’s truly exciting. And then the need to think about artificial intelligence and how we advance data science in a deeply interdisciplinary way is producing a lot of very creative thinking about a different approach to computing and a school for computing that would essentially be virtual – would span all ten existing schools. Marshal everything from the fundamental science behind it

09:32:58:10 – 09:33:28:10

Vincent Price

— as we’ve done in the area of quantum computing, for example, where we’re laying down bets on this trapped ion technology — to the most applied areas . . . public policy, legal issues surrounding it. Think about the substantive applications of artificial intelligence in domains where it can assist in promoting human health, building economic wealth, help us manage our own portfolio and live up to our value commitments respecting climate.

09:33:28:12 – 09:33:41:15

Vincent Price

So Duke is going to do this, and do it so much better than any other university, because of the creative approach we’ve taken. But the infrastructure we’re building on was already there because of the Science and Technology Initiative.

09:33:41:17 – 09:34:02:17

Ann Pelham

So, just to put it in old-fashioned terms, computer science has been one of the most popular majors at Duke. And what it sounds like you’re saying is that this approach will allow a student in any discipline, with any major, to have an opportunity to be literate in data and . . .

09:34:02:18 – 09:34:06:03

Vincent Price

Not just an opportunity, they will have to.

09:34:06:05 – 09:34:06:18

Ann Pelham

Okay [laughs].

09:34:06:20 – 09:34:31:05

Vincent Price

Today they have to. Because they walk around with their brains in their pockets. We all do. And you have to understand those technologies to live the best life. That’s what the liberal arts are, right? These are the skills a person requires to live a good and decent and productive life in a free society.

09:34:31:07 – 09:35:08:22

Vincent Price

So there’s nothing more liberal arts-oriented than a really deep education in technology right now. And so I think it’s consistent with all those core values. But it has different layers to it. So every student, regardless of what they study — the same way we’re approaching climate change — it’s just not responsible to think about what you do professionally, what you do as a consumer, what you do raising a family, doing anything, without being thoughtful about your environment and how you’re affecting it.

09:35:09:00 – 09:35:46:22

Vincent Price

So we’re driving attention to climate change into every part of the curriculum. And so we’re doing the same with technology, specifically with artificial intelligence. It’s a similar kind of move. Then there’s a layer which is for those people in fields where they want to go deeper. So someone who studies literature or philosophy and wants to think deeply about the philosophical kind of implications of approaches to addressing climate change. Or what artificial intelligence means for human intelligence, the soul . . .

09:35:47:00 – 09:36:12:08

Vincent Price

they can go deeper, and think about how their technical expertise or their knowledge in this domain can be linked to their professional interests. And then there’s a third layer, which as a research institution we need to be at the vanguard of this. So within those areas of computer science, electrical engineering, public policy, you name it.

09:36:12:10 – 09:36:34:20

Vincent Price

For those people who say, “This is how I will make an impact on the world, it will be through an artificial intelligence.” They can go deep, and they can go deep quickly. They don’t have to warm up to it and go out and get a PhD. They can dive in as an undergraduate. So that’s the way we’re thinking about how we build out those initiatives.

09:36:34:20 – 09:36:55:00

Vincent Price

And we started to build that out in the Center for Computational Thinking. All of that has fed into our thinking about a computing school approach. And frankly, the Climate Commitment is doing many similar things. And logically, structurally at least, it’s built in very, very similar ways.

09:36:55:01 – 09:36:56:18

Ann Pelham

It’s almost three dimensional.

09:36:56:19 – 09:36:58:03

Vincent Price

Yea.

09:36:58:05 – 09:37:07:22

Ann Pelham

Which is a different way to think about a university, which often is structured with departments that seem almost flat in the way they exist.

09:37:08:02 – 09:37:39:18

Vincent Price

It’s one of the challenges. Universities, we work at points of friction. So we’re at all of these fault lines. Which is what makes it hazardous duty, but also what makes it fun. So one of those frictions is between the past and the future, as we live in the present. We are deeply conservative. Not politically conservative. But we

09:37:39:20 – 09:38:05:05

Vincent Price

have libraries. We invest in archeology. We preserve works of art and literature. And we are fundamentally in the past. It’s a huge part of what we do. We never turn our backs on the past. And the anxieties that build up sometimes, as you turn your attention to the future, is that we’ll do just that.

09:38:05:07 – 09:38:19:02

Vincent Price

I think that’s a fair criticism. Right now it’s sweeping the country. There are all kinds of harebrained political decisions that, you know, [say that] only STEM majors should be paid for by public educational institutions. It’s ridiculous.

09:38:19:04 – 09:38:21:12

Ann Pelham

[Crosstalk]

09:38:21:12 – 09:38:51:07

Vincent Price

It’s got to be anchored in this sense of history. So that’s one of those tensions. Past and future. Again, there’s a way you can fold them on each other, and it becomes truly exciting. Another one is between, in the moment, the sort of ambition and desires of youth and demands for change, and the wisdom and experience of age and the sort of leavening sensibility that we bring to the equation.

09:38:51:07 – 09:39:24:21

Vincent Price

We, meaning you and I sitting here [laughs]. But I think that again, universities haven’t navigated that balance all too well. We’re sort of absorbed in the youth and vitality of the moment. We’re not acting like adults. But that’s what universities really can do really well. And then another is building out human knowledge in a way that simultaneously goes deep but doesn’t lose — the forest for the trees problem.

09:39:24:23 – 09:39:53:17

Vincent Price

And the mistake is in thinking that everybody has to be a generalist. This is so not the case. You know, we hire people who are obsessed with arcane problems. But they are so whip-smart. We just say, “Come on down and we’ll get out of your way. Just go for it.” Because that problem, which may seem arcane and useless to us, may be the thing that produces the next great discovery.

09:39:53:19 – 09:40:18:13

Vincent Price

And that person shouldn’t be bothered with the social applications of what they [doing, they should] just get to work. And students who want to go there, go there. But we also have to be thinking about how you pull knowledge from one of those silos to the next. It’s a “both and” proposition, and it’s hard to get right. Duke does this better, in my humble opinion, than any other institution, certainly any institution I’ve been involved with.

09:40:18:15 – 09:40:22:11

Vincent Price

But honestly, I think that is kind of in the DNA of the place.

09:40:22:14 – 09:40:24:22

Ann Pelham

I was just thinking the same thing, the DNA.

09:40:24:23 – 09:40:50:04

Vincent Price

Yeah, because we’re well-rounded. We’re pretty balanced. That’s where the athletics piece comes in. You could say that a typical Duke person might be sort of a jack of all trades. But the thing is the master of none part, you never want to have associated with you. You can be a master of a trade, and a kind of jack of all trades. At least to have a perspective that’s broad enough to understand where you fit in.

09:40:50:06 – 09:41:08:04

Vincent Price

And that takes work. It has to be consciously built into the educational project. It has to be surfaced for faculty you’re trying to recruit. Because if that’s not the sort of community they want to be part of, they should go to some other university. So I think things are working really well here.

09:41:08:06 – 09:41:31:20

Ann Pelham

You spoke about honoring the past. And I give you a lot of credit for recognizing the centennial as an opportunity to celebrate the past and also to look ahead to the future. I think you called it a gift to Duke. I was here 50 years ago, and no one was paying any attention to the half century celebration of Duke.

09:41:31:20 – 09:41:50:01

Ann Pelham

So, hats off to you for acknowledging it. I love the banners everywhere. Even the font is great, on the 100. What do you hope to get for Duke, and its future, and its community, out of this focus on the centennial?

09:41:50:03 – 09:42:33:22

Vincent Price

Well, universities are complex places. And like society generally, there’s a lot of centrifugal energy that pulls people off to do their things. And just as in society generally, if you don’t have countervailing centripetal forces that pull people together, bad things happen. As you know, as a journalist, our media system was faulted from the 1950s through the 1980s, roughly, for being overly centripetal. Mainstreaming opinions, et cetera.

09:42:33:22 – 09:43:01:08

Vincent Price

Well, now there is no center. It is entirely centrifugal. So to have something like a centennial as a way for every person in the community, in any role, to draw attention, common attention, it’s worth its weight in gold. And so that is a gift. The question is what do you do with the attention?

09:43:01:10 – 09:43:36:22

Vincent Price

So the second level of the gift is, okay, once people are paying attention, then how can we start conversations that enrich and enliven the work of the university, draw attention to the strategic vision we have, inspire greater things, and deepen those emotional ties that people typically at Duke already bring with them? Do it in an honest way

09:43:36:22 – 09:44:05:04

Vincent Price

so it’s not just a marketing thing. It’s an educational project. So that’s just fantastic. You could come up with other vehicles to do that, but there’s nothing quite like a moment in time, in this case a full year of time, to step back and think about those 100 years. What they meant to this place [and] what people here have accomplished in those hundred years.

09:44:05:06 – 09:44:35:06

Vincent Price

And I also like the fact that it’s, as you know, a centennial, but it’s the founding of Duke University. It’s not the founding of the institution. So it’s a fantastic metaphor for a new and radical change in the institution, but also an extension of the existing institution. Trinity College. And that feels like the moment we’re in right now.

09:44:35:10 – 09:44:51:00

Vincent Price

It just feels right for the moment. The actual story that we’re all following about that moment in 1924, it feels oddly very modern to me.

09:44:51:02 – 09:45:16:15

Ann Pelham

It is. And I thank you for bringing the Board of The Duke Endowment together with the Duke Board of Trustees for the first time, it turned out. And their habit, I think it was their duty, [was] to read aloud the Indenture [of Trust] of James B. Duke every year was quite an interesting exercise and moving in so many ways.

09:45:16:17 – 09:45:37:09

Ann Pelham

And I think the thing about the centennial that has so much promise is the ability to carry forward that community-building element and that recognition of the traditions that’s so much part of this year. In other words, it doesn’t end just because the centennial year has ended.

09:45:37:09 – 09:46:00:15

Vincent Price

No, it is like an anniversary moment where you renew your wedding vows. And that Indenture is — it’s long and legalistic. You’ve heard it read, and we will read it again, I assure you. But it’s an impressive document, because James B. Duke was a wise investor. He thought of his philanthropy.

09:46:00:17 – 09:46:36:11

Vincent Price

He approached it really as an investor. And he’s quite explicit in explaining why he’s putting his money behind these things. Why he’s creating The Endowment, why he’s creating Duke University, why he’s focused on this section — meaning North and South Carolina. And it is inspirational, and again, very modern. There’s a section late in the Indenture where he says people will wonder why have I chosen these specific things, and why am I choosing to focus just in this section.

09:46:36:13 – 09:47:11:12

Vincent Price

And his explanation is [that] this is how you make the bigger difference. You have to focus. And in his case, education was clearly the vehicle to everything else for economic development in this region. Not just any form of education, but education that was professionally-angled, that leaned into science. You know, a school of chemistry, a precursor of engineering, was very high in his list of must-dos. The first four-year school of medicine.

09:47:11:14 – 09:47:45:06

Vincent Price

So he saw not just Duke, but the other institutions — Davidson, Furman, and Johnson C. Smith [colleges and universities] — as vehicles for that. The interest in healthcare, just the understanding that without a healthy population the hopes for economic prosperity wouldn’t survive. His interest in the rural church because spiritual poverty is a different kind of poverty that’s going to impede progress.

09:47:45:08 – 09:48:24:23

Vincent Price

And for him and the family connections, the recognition that the rural church was essentially the primary social service agency for most of North and South Carolina. And then children and families. So you look at this, it’s a very progressive agenda. Not progressive in the current political context, but it’s a statement of faith in the future that this part of the country, which was impoverished relative to where he was living in New York and New Jersey, that he could lift that whole region and that would be his life’s great work.

09:48:24:23 – 09:48:47:13

Vincent Price

And he would achieve this through Duke University and the Duke Endowment. It’s an amazing document. So again, that is a gift. I mean, it is literally the gift that created the whole enterprise. But revisiting it and understanding it, in its historical context and in its present day implications, is super powerful.

09:48:47:15 – 09:48:57:23

Ann Pelham

In the Indenture some 30% of The Duke Endowment, he declared, should go to Duke University every year. 

09:48:58:04 – 09:49:01:02

Vincent Price

Which we studiously keep track of.

09:49:01:04 – 09:49:30:21

Ann Pelham

I’m not surprised. So it’s been a great partnership all along the way. So, to talk about your time at Duke without bringing up the pandemic and Duke’s experience there, and the amazing success of balancing safety against experience, which would be a real loss. So if you could take a few minutes and just talk about that, and the experiences that you managed to preserve for the students.

09:49:30:23 – 09:50:01:05

Vincent Price

None of us saw it coming, but fortunately at Duke we saw it coming a little sooner than others because of [Duke] Kunshan [University] and our campus there. So we had to take some measures to address what was pretty clearly going to be a problem at DKU [Duke Kunshan University], flip instruction to virtual instruction.

09:50:01:06 – 09:50:28:11

Vincent Price

There was a diaspora. Students were told to go home, et cetera. And that was not easy. I mean, this is a fledgling university, just a few years into its undergraduate life. Very traumatic, but managed as almost all DKU things are managed, in close concert with staff at Duke, figuring out how to do all these things.

09:50:28:13 – 09:51:07:18

Vincent Price

So when in the spring of 2020 it became increasingly clear that we would have to deal with this as an institution, that flip to virtual learning and everything was made a bit easier through that sort of test we had been through with DKU. So that was an interesting moment. I would say, too, that the decision that our basketball team made to not compete in the ACC championships,

09:51:07:20 – 09:51:43:20

Vincent Price

happened right after the suspension of some NBA games. And, again, our access to a lot of NBA executives, executives in general, gave us an opportunity to see what other large organizations were thinking and how they were going to start managing through all this. It was a very, very complicated time. And I do remember clearly, because, as you may recall, we played the UNC game in Cameron, and we filled it with 9,000 screaming people.

09:51:43:22 – 09:51:59:08

Vincent Price

And for a virus spread largely through, you know, aspiration and respiration. Oh, my gosh. This is not good. So we were white-knuckling it for a couple weeks after that game.

09:51:59:13 – 09:52:00:14

Ann Pelham

Super spreader event.

09:52:00:14 – 09:52:36:16

Vincent Price

Yeah, it could have been. It was not. Thank goodness. So the first part of it was just getting through the end of that semester, and I think we were already ahead of other institutions just because we had a little bit more experience and could see things coming maybe a bit sooner than other folks did. But the real difference was that summer. Because – and this is where Duke shows its strength – we as a leadership team can find people across the campus who are the experts, and know what they’re talking about, and pull them together.

09:52:36:18 – 09:53:11:03

Vincent Price

Faculty from Biology, folks from Duke Health, decision-makers in the Provost’s Office, the President’s Office. [We] spent a lot of time, a lot of time, just learning. What do we know? What are other people doing? What are other people experiencing? And the first critical move was to invest in supporting testing and spending money to buy the robots required to do the testing. And the leadership,

09:53:11:03 – 09:53:12:21

Vincent Price

I mean, having a vaccine institute?

09:53:12:21 – 09:53:14:04

Ann Pelham

Yes, bit of a help.

09:53:14:04 – 09:53:40:18

Vincent Price

Bit of a help. Extraordinary talent, thoughtful people. That investment was so right-timed. Because once we were in the thick of it we were doing 25,000 tests a week, all internally. And, so that was a big plus. The other thing is, I just talked to the students [at] convocation and, you know, the surest way to getting it right is to be honest about getting it wrong.

09:53:40:20 – 09:54:11:02

Vincent Price

The fear and anxiety about this was so strong, and the impulse to shut everything down was so strong. When we started talking as a conference within the ACC about competing, I was on the very conservative that continuum. It really worried me and frightened me. And I will say sitting here today, I’m so glad that my colleagues there pushed me.

09:54:11:04 – 09:54:38:22

Vincent Price

And maybe not always based on the science, but just as a desire, like, we need to play ball. We need to play ball. But many of them, based on the science. But this is where having a football team matters. Because the football players — it’s a big squad — they come back over the summer, as do other athletes. And those fall athletes were, for us, a critical test of our systems, right?

09:54:39:02 – 09:55:05:01

Vincent Price

The testing systems, single rooms and dormitories – actually, we put them in hotels. We spent a lot of time over the summer acquiring hotels, master leasing hotels, just preparing for what it would take to put all the students in singles. All predicated on figuring out how to do it. But the first real test was when we had students here.

09:55:05:03 – 09:55:20:03

Vincent Price

The second big test we had was our graduate students working in laboratories. They never left. They worked the whole time. So between those two — that is, having new students arrive from all over the country, test them at the front end, house them, retest them on a regular basis — we had an outbreak.

09:55:20:09 – 09:55:22:06

Ann Pelham

You’re talking about Fall 2020, at this point?

09:55:22:06 – 09:55:45:15

Vincent Price

Fall 2020. Summer 2020. With the football players, we had an outbreak. We could identify it; we could shut it down. And then you have over the summer all of these grad students in laboratories coming and going, faculty coming and going – no incidents. A lot of testing. Again, which is why the investment in testing made a huge difference, because you wouldn’t know that it was working if you weren’t testing everybody.

09:55:45:17 – 09:56:05:21

Vincent Price

But we were testing everybody. I’m like, “This is actually doable.” And that gave us the confidence to say, “We’re going to bring everybody back.” Then, given the timing of it all, we were early. So I will say that was another big white knuckle moment for us because we didn’t have the benefit of seeing how this was going to fly elsewhere.

09:56:05:21 – 09:56:11:17

Vincent Price

And it didn’t go well at NC State or UNC, as you may recall.

09:56:11:19 – 09:56:15:03

Ann Pelham

[Inaudible] just the fall semester?

09:56:15:05 – 09:56:49:09

Vincent Price

You know, maybe a third of the classes were face-to-face. We had provisions for online instruction. We had all the systems in place. The faculty was challenging. The faculty, I would say, as a constituency was the most unhappy about our bringing students back. Because they’re looking at their peers. Their peers are not UNC and NC State, but the Ivy League, Stanford, and those campuses announced [that] they [were] not bringing students back.

09:56:49:11 – 09:57:20:04

Vincent Price

That took a lot of work and a lot of conversation with the faculty through the Academic Council. And again, this is how an institution shows its strength. We got through that. Not because everybody agreed. Nowhere near that. But people were willing to at least extend a bit of trust. And then, thank goodness, we did manage the arrival of the new students, some outbreaks that we could stop.

09:57:20:06 – 09:57:41:01

Vincent Price

And then once I think the community saw, “Hey, this actually works,” then there was a sense of, “Okay, we can trust these folks.” Not everybody was happy, and some people felt it was way too restrictive. I completely understand that. Some people, to this day, probably feel that it was foolish to have attempted it. But I think we did it right.

09:57:41:01 – 09:58:01:06

Vincent Price

We did not force any of the faculty if they didn’t want to teach face-to-face. And we were hoping that we could support about a third of the courses face-to-face. And it turned out that actually matched roughly what the faculty was interested in doing. So there was a lot of good luck there, too.

09:58:01:08 – 09:58:11:06

Vincent Price

But it was for the community, I think, a powerful moment. I just remember how well the students did.

09:58:11:06 – 09:58:12:07

Ann Pelham

The Duke Compact.

09:58:12:07 – 09:58:39:11

Vincent Price

Yeah, they were so thoughtful, so understanding. And we have to remind ourselves, the conversation in most of the country, was how no one could trust a 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old to do the right thing. They were just going to infect communities everywhere. And sadly, in some college towns, that’s exactly what happened.

09:58:39:12 – 09:59:02:17

Vincent Price

But here the sense was, look, Durham needs these students. Local restaurants need these students. Economically, they’re vital. We had set up a $5 million fund to support businesses in Durham. Stelfanie and her staff managed that very well. The city and the county ultimately matched that investment. That was critical to keep the economy of the region flowing well.

09:59:02:18 – 09:59:26:11

Vincent Price

Unprecedented, high levels of collaboration between the County and Duke Health on managing public health through the pandemic. People really got together and worked together. Durham did well. Durham did the right things. And Duke did the right things, sort of side by side. But none of it would have worked if the students didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.

09:59:26:11 – 09:59:46:15

Vincent Price

And they absolutely did. And it was weird because when the coast was clear to go out for a haircut — do you remember how crazy this was? You couldn’t go out for a haircut. Annette cut my hair several times. Did a good job, by the way, too. Much better than I could ever do for her.

09:59:46:17 – 10:00:15:14

Vincent Price

But when I went out eventually for a haircut, people were so — as I walked around — people would come up to me and thank me for our Duke students. Because we had these blue masks so they were identifiable. “There’s a Duke student.” And it’s like an out-of-body experience for a college president to walk around the town and have people thanking you for the behavior of your students.

10:00:15:14 – 10:00:35:17

Vincent Price

It’s usually not the conversation people have. The students were just amazing. They played a lot of spike ball. You know, they figured it out. They had fun. But they did everything we asked them to do. Well, [Vice Provost and Vice President of Student Affairs] Mary Pat [McMahon] would say not everything. But virtually everything. 

10:00:35:17 – 10:00:36:21

Vincent Price

[Laughs]

10:00:36:23 – 10:00:40:00

Ann Pelham

And then the vaccine came along, and the rest is history. 

10:00:40:02 – 10:00:58:04

Vincent Price

Well, the vaccine is another good story. So the initial idea about the vaccines was, let’s move them out as quickly as we can. And Duke Health System was so solid, so efficient. It was sort of like the testing system with [Vice President for Administration] Kyle Kavanaugh’s leadership and the work that Mary Pat and the team did. It was amazing.

10:00:58:04 – 10:01:20:07

Vincent Price

We had these vans driving around doing tests. Well, Duke Health, when we rolled out vaccines, we were nowhere near the largest health system in North Carolina. We were dispensing far more vaccines than any other health system in North Carolina. They recalculated how they would distribute vaccines. But boy, they came and they went.

10:01:20:07 – 10:01:41:06

Vincent Price

It was amazing. I had a woman on a Saturday morning when we started – we used the Karsh Center here as a vaccination site. And Saturday morning, there’s a knock on the door, and I look outside and the dogs are barking and I see a FedEx truck drive away. And I think, “Oh, a FedEx driver left a package here.”

10:01:41:08 – 10:01:56:16

Vincent Price

I open the front door and there is a FedEx package. The truck is driving away, but there’s a woman standing there – an elderly woman. And I’m thinking, was she handling the package, or she’s no longer in her truck? And she said, “I’m here for my vaccine.”

10:01:56:18 – 10:01:58:16

Ann Pelham

At the Hart House [president’s residence]?

10:01:58:18 – 10:02:03:13

Vincent Price

At the Hart House. I said, “That’s fantastic, you’re on the right street. Not exactly [the right location].”

10:02:03:15 – 10:02:04:16

Ann Pelham

[She was] trying to get [there].

10:02:04:17 – 10:02:32:16

Vincent Price

Continue down the road, right down the road. But that was the very first day, I believe, that we started vaccinating. So it was an interesting time. And our scientific colleagues, the faculty who were part of the group that helped us survey the students, the OIT – development of the app that they created — I mean, just an incredible team effort.

10:02:32:18 – 10:02:54:08

Vincent Price

And the CDC asked us several times to publish papers on how we did that. It was a good moment. A hard time for everybody, but I think it built a sense of quiet confidence that this is a place that works. You know, we’re pretty functional. We can figure this out. But it [will] only work if everybody does their part.

10:02:54:10 – 10:03:19:20

Ann Pelham

I think we can’t end this conversation without giving you a chance to talk about what is, I guess you could say, a fairly chaotic and challenging time in collegiate athletics. And you bring some expertise with you on that topic. Could you talk a little bit about it, and where you see Duke now, and where the possible future might take us all?

10:03:19:20 – 10:03:51:23

Vincent Price

Sure. So one of the various ways that America is exceptional is in the creation of this alliance between higher education and athletics. And actually the creation through that bond of much professional sport. Some people forget, it’s not like we had a National Football League or National Basketball Association and colleges started playing. It’s just the opposite.

10:03:52:01 – 10:04:17:04

Vincent Price

Big time sports came out of college. And it’s been a product of American higher education for more than 100 years. John Franklin Crowell, a wonderful president, the president of Trinity College, [who] moved the college to Durham, was essentially fired over football. Because he was the football coach, he loved football. The Methodists who controlled the board, not so much.

10:04:17:06 – 10:04:37:09

Vincent Price

And they banned football after he left, for 25 years. So it’s been controversial for a long time. If people have recently seen or read [The] Boys in [the] Boat, you can’t help but be stunned by the large crowds that were following college crew.

10:04:37:10 – 10:04:37:19

Ann Pelham

Yes.

10:04:38:00 – 10:05:01:12

Vincent Price

[Inaudible], events, radio broadcasts. And my former institution was a major independent in football. And the stadium there was the site of the first radio broadcast of a sporting event. A sporting event, period. It was a college game. And the first televised broadcast of a sporting event, [was] a college game. So it is entertainment.

10:05:01:14 – 10:05:33:18

Vincent Price

It is a business. It is, weirdly in some ways but very powerfully, attached to the educational enterprise. And it is our Olympic system. It’s what allowed the U.S. just to come home from Paris with more medals than any other country in the world. It’s all those things. I love it. It was one of the, and continues to be one of the, major attractions of being at a place like Duke. To commit to excellence, on the field, on the court, as well as in the classroom.

10:05:33:20 – 10:06:06:14

Vincent Price

It’s powerful. Not easy to do. And doing it right takes time, energy, a steadfast commitment to your core values, et cetera. So right now, obviously, it’s a major shake-up. Because the business side of this has become so large. Mainly football. It’s 80% of all the revenues, tied up in football. I am very concerned about the directions it’s taken.

10:06:06:16 – 10:06:41:23

Vincent Price

Because at a place like Duke where we actually believe in scholar athletes, you don’t want to go down this road of having athletes who are merely attached to a college as a kind of marketing gimmick, right? Because the whole enterprise is intercollegiate athletics. So we’re trying to preserve that in an environment right now where NIL [Name, Image, and Likeness], which was court mandated without a lot of thought.

10:06:42:01 – 10:07:13:13

Vincent Price

And it is interesting because a viable market for Name, Image or Likeness — which is what NIL stands for — makes perfect sense. We’ve had athletes here at Duke for years who had significant value attached to their name, their image, and likeness. And the [Ed] O’Bannon case, which is one of the cases that came out of UCLA, probably a legitimate concern that an athlete [was] prevented from making money.

10:07:13:15 – 10:07:42:20

Vincent Price

It’s a restriction on trade. And we backed ourselves into a lot of bad practices. You won’t let tennis players teach tennis lessons. It’s a little draconian. This doesn’t make sense. We let musicians teach music lessons. So the kind of hyper-regulatory structures were nobody’s friend. But the overcorrection has been so dramatic. Because there’s a handful of athletes every year who have legitimate value attached to their name, image or likeness.

10:07:42:22 – 10:08:09:05

Vincent Price

But now it’s a floodgate just to pay athletes. And it’s mandated. So the question is, how do you do it? And that’s what we’re struggling with. We’re working through this. How do you recognize that you have a student, they’re engaged in activities that are generating commercial activity for the institution and creating value for the institution.

10:08:09:07 – 10:08:38:15

Vincent Price

How can they participate in that in a reasonable way? That’s not a bad thing to be doing, but the context in which we’re doing it is just crazy. Mainly driven by court cases or misguided legislation, and no longer with any antitrust protections. So it’s a tough world. But the thing about Duke is, what I love about our institution is, we have one of the best athletic directors in the country [in] Nina King.

10:08:38:17 – 10:09:07:06

Vincent Price

We have coaches who are not avaricious. It’s not like they’re just out there saying, “I need money to do X, Y and Z.” They want to do right by their programs and their athletes, but do it in a thoughtful way. And we recruit a different kind of athlete because we’re in a relatively small number of institutions — one of a relatively small number of institutions — that can deliver on that promise of the highest quality educational experience and the highest quality athletic experience.

10:09:07:08 – 10:09:37:02

Vincent Price

And so we’re drawing students who want that. They do want to participate in opportunities to make money, and they should. That’s not exactly pay-for-play, which is where the whole system is headed. So we’ll have to figure this out. We also have donors at Duke who are distinctive, because they don’t harass us the way donors at other universities do. Meaning they don’t Monday morning quarterback us

10:09:37:02 – 10:10:01:23

Vincent Price

in the case of football. They don’t want to be the general manager of the basketball team. And there are a lot of people out there who are supporting universities who orient to the university that way. And that’s not our donor community. They want to do right by Duke. So there’s been a lot of healthy conversation about how Duke retains its core values.

10:10:02:00 – 10:10:31:19

Vincent Price

But we don’t give up. You know, we don’t throw the baby [out] with the bath. It would be a terrible tragedy to start cutting sports, eliminating football. People, without thinking about it, say, “Well, just cut football.” But football is — that’s where all the revenues are. So without it, how do you support all those other activities? We’re able right now, because of the commercial activity, to subsidize all these other sports.

10:10:31:21 – 10:10:51:00

Vincent Price

And that’s a wonderful thing. So I just want to retain that ability to cross subsidize, but not at the expense of the educational venture. So everything I’ve seen to date at Duke makes me feel heartened.

10:10:51:02 – 10:10:56:21

Ann Pelham

Well, certainly one thing we can be sure of is that it’s not going to stay the same. It’s going to keep changing.

10:10:57:01 – 10:11:21:15

Vincent Price

No, but that was true — I had a colleague years ago who studied sports journalism. And he was quite interested in journalism around football in the early part of the 20th century. And there was a lot of debate then about – these are not real students. These are just ringers brought in to play football.

10:11:21:20 – 10:11:46:12

Vincent Price

And it was a brutal sport. They didn’t have the gear they have today. And it’s a fairly brutal sport, even with all the gear as students wear today. But the interesting difference was [that] all the ringers were in medicine or law, because those were not [considered] real [or] serious subjects. So it shows you how in some ways, the world has not changed.

10:11:46:14 – 10:12:15:09

Vincent Price

That is, the professionalism of athletics. The [idea that they’re] not serious students. But what’s weird is that they’re in the schools that we now think of as the top of the academic — the pinnacle of academic accomplishment. Then, the university was a liberal arts college with forays into professional work. A different world. So many things stay the same.

10:12:15:09 – 10:12:18:00

Vincent Price

Many things change quite dramatically [laughs].

10:12:18:02 – 10:12:29:14

Ann Pelham

Well, I’m sure Duke is going to keep changing. If you’re looking at the next century, or Duke 200 years from now, what would you expect to see?

10:12:29:16 – 10:13:13:08

Vincent Price

Well, there’s a humility around Duke that I think we will retain. One of the reasons we have flourished is we have prevented ourselves from ever feeling too full of ourselves. And that’s partly given our heritage here in the South. I think that’s a very positive thing. At the same time, as this part of the country prospers and rises and grows in significance, and as Duke’s ability to quietly get things done becomes more and more and more widely recognized — it’s already happening.

10:13:13:10 – 10:13:50:16

Vincent Price

We stand out for not just excellence, but true eminence as an institution. And then [we] find ways to spread the wealth intellectually with respect to how we interact with communities, and become what the Indenture hoped Duke University would be — this powerful convener, a vehicle for economic and social and cultural and spiritual prosperity.

10:13:50:16 – 10:14:26:08

Vincent Price

I just can’t believe that Duke won’t just be a better version of Duke. We might adjust things here or there. Duke Blue kind of migrated from a navy to this wonderful electric blue we have today. Has it changed the true-blue quality of Duke? No, it hasn’t. It’s just given us more opportunities to wear a wider array of clothing. Because the throwbacks can look navy, and all the modern stuff

10:14:26:08 – 10:14:52:05

Vincent Price

bright blue. So that will continue to change. I can’t predict exactly which ways those features at the institution will shift a little bit. But the trajectory we’re on of increasing prominence. Not at the cost of deep connection partnership [and] ability to do right by a wide range of people. We will be more accessible.

10:14:52:05 – 10:14:55:22

Vincent Price

I think just a better version of Duke.

10:14:56:00 – 10:15:16:04

Ann Pelham

So I’m going to get a little personal. Your wife, Annette Price, has been a great partner for you as you lead Duke. You have two adult children, and, of course, Marlowe and Cricket. No. Yes. Marlowe and Cricket. Get the names right, Ann. And so could you talk about your family? You have two adult children. 

10:15:16:06 – 10:15:19:10

Ann Pelham

And why is that an important part of your life?

10:15:19:12 – 10:15:49:00

Vincent Price

Well, it’s an important part of every parent’s life. The move to Duke came at a time when our kids were more or less launched. We were able, Annette and I, to come down here with the dogs. One of the early reads on the sort of fundamental decency of this part of the world was just how dog crazy people were.

10:15:49:01 – 10:15:53:11

Vincent Price

You know, we put up a fence around part of the yard at Hart House for the dogs.

10:15:53:11 – 10:15:54:07

Ann Pelham

They’re doodles, right?

10:15:54:07 – 10:16:10:14

Vincent Price

They’re doodles. And the number of people who comment on the fence and said, “Hey, I see a fence is going up at the house. You’ve got dogs.” Two parts of that. First I thought, “Wow, they’re paying attention to that house.” So I’m kind of in a fishbowl that they even notice that there’s a fence going up.

10:16:10:14 – 10:16:30:07

Vincent Price

But the fact that they were so eager to know if we had dogs, I thought, was a great commentary on just how decent the place is. But I didn’t come from a family with a lot of Duke connections. My inauguration was for me personally and for us, me and Annette, just a wonderful moment.

10:16:30:09 – 10:16:33:17

Vincent Price

I’m one of eight siblings in my family.

10:16:34:15 – 10:16:59:13

Vincent Price

They were all here. Sadly, my parents are no longer alive, and were not alive to be here for that. But my Uncle Greg, who just this past week passed away at age 94, he came. And this may sound maudlin, but he so loved that inauguration experience that he’s being buried in the suit he bought for my inauguration.

10:16:59:13 – 10:17:01:15

Ann Pelham

That’s great.

10:17:01:17 – 10:17:13:12

Vincent Price

There’s something about this place. It really is magical. And so what I’ve loved about it is the way our immediate family — of course, they have Duke gear and are wearing it all the time.

10:17:13:14 – 10:17:13:19

Ann Pelham

The right colors of blue.

10:17:13:19 – 10:17:36:02

Vincent Price

Yeah. They’re all in on Duke. But it’s everybody in the family. Once you start paying attention to Duke, you just fall in love with it. And that’s been a joy for me to see. So the seamless sense of love you have for family, so easily transferred to a love of Duke, and vice versa, is powerful.

10:17:36:02 – 10:17:59:19

Vincent Price

And of course, that’s what Duke is. We were named for a family. We are closely connected to the Duke family historically. We have so many siblings going to school here right now. It’s amazing. The Sansostis from Pittsburgh, I don’t know if you’ve met them. All five of their sons have attended Duke.

10:17:59:21 – 10:18:32:04

Vincent Price

And very different people. Siblings, oftentimes in most families they’ll go to very different institutions, but they all have [had] a similarly good experience at Duke. It speaks well of the place. So that piece of it, that sense of family and easy bonding to Duke has been amazing for me. I haven’t experienced anything like that elsewhere in higher ed.

10:18:32:06 – 10:19:03:07

Vincent Price

And I would say too as I’ve traveled around following our teams when we compete, the turn out wherever we go for Duke is just remarkable. And the fan base that loves Duke not because they’re alumni of Duke University, but [because] they just like to follow Duke football [or] basketball. A lot of it is basketball, right? They are just the nicest people in the world.

10:19:03:07 – 10:19:35:09

Vincent Price

So, you can index how well you’re doing by the friends you keep. Duke keeps fabulous friends. And that just gives me a sense of great pride. When we played last in Madison Square Garden — it was toward the end of the game, and I saw Grant Hill. Went over to say hi to him literally in the closing minute.

10:19:35:11 – 10:20:00:12

Vincent Price

And as I’m chatting, I hear all this noise as the game ends. And it took me a while to recognize it, but people were stomping their feet and shouting, “our house, our house, our house.” And it’s Madison Square Garden. Not many universities can fill Madison Square Garden. But to have the fans call it “our house” is an amazing thing.

10:20:00:14 – 10:20:09:03

Vincent Price

So there’s a sense of bonding to the place that is amazing. Because we don’t have enough alums to fill Madison Square Garden. Not even close.

10:20:09:05 – 10:20:17:12

Ann Pelham

Well, thank you for your time today. And thank you for saying “yes” when Duke said, “Please be our 10th president.” It’s great to have you.

10:20:17:12 – 10:20:51:03

Vincent Price

I would have been insane not to. And I’m so grateful. Annette and I are both so grateful for this opportunity. I’ve been so fortunate to have been associated with a lot of great institutions of higher learning.

10:20:51:05 – 10:21:10:20

Vincent Price

And I just felt like I was sort of buffeted about by fortune. And I’m the luckiest guy on the planet, because it always worked out for me. But the absolute best luck I’ve ever experienced was being asked to be part of the Duke community. It has been spectacular. I have saved the best for last.

10:21:10:22 – 10:21:12:21

Ann Pelham

Great. Thank you very much.

10:21:12:22 – 10:21:13:06

Vincent Price

Thank you.

10:21:13:10 – 10:21:14:08

Ann Pelham

Appreciate it.