Executive Summary

As we plan within the Divinity School as well as across Duke University, it is imperative that we attend to the broader ends of education as they are embodied in both intellectual excellence and moral character. Even as the Divinity School is enriched by the academic and cultural resources of Duke University, we also enrich the academic and spiritual ethos of a university whose mission is to foster Eruditio et Religio. With this mission in mind, it is the aim of the Divinity School to heed the Gospel’s summons to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This transformative renewal is a defining characteristic of discipleship, which is another way of naming the broader ends of education as they are conceived within the Divinity School.

By definition, discipleship requires leadership, and over the next decade a particular kind of leadership will be necessary if the Divinity School is to advance both its own mission and the mission of the University. For the purposes of this strategic plan, we have identified this leadership as “transformative.” Such a designation is in keeping with our previous strategic plan, Transforming Ministry, in which we emphasized the transformative character of our work as a professional school that trains people who have identified ministry as a vocation. In this plan, we shift the emphasis from ministry as such to the leadership that is an integral component of the transformative character of ministry.

Vitally faithful, highly effective Christian congregations make a transformative difference in their communities, and we are convinced that effective pastoral leadership strengthens such congregations. Over time, profound synergies develop between effective pastors and vital congregations, creating ever stronger contexts in which pastors, congregations, and wider communities flourish. We are equally convinced that ineffective pastoral leadership weakens congregations and stunts the transformative potential that congregations hold for the health of wider communities.

We believe that supporting and sustaining transformative leadership is crucial, whether we are focused on congregations or on other institutions. Over the next ten years, Duke Divinity School is poised to exercise significant influence in equipping leaders of religious institutions, as well as religious leaders of nonreligious institutions, with important theological insight and skills for their vocations. In this regard, we seek to be an active participant in fulfilling Duke University’s overall goal, articulated in the charge to the 2005–06 planning steering committee: “to be among the small number of institutions that define what is best in American higher education. Certainly Duke can learn from other institutions, but we must also set our own sights and help set the standards for others. This is what leadership means.”

Executive Summary

Duke Divinity School aims to be an agent of transformation for the church, the world, and the academy. Part of this aim is embodied in our aspiration to be consistently evaluated as one of the premier institutions of theological education in the world. However, achievement in attaining educational excellence in our formal degree programs is only one part of our aspiration.

More broadly, our aim toward excellence can be defined by four complementary measures:

1. our academic research and teaching;
2. our preparation of men and women for leadership in the church and other institutions, both through our degree programs and through lifelong learning;
3. our engagement with major issues in church and society; and
4. our role in strengthening the broader academy, especially in theological education.

Executive Summary

Faculty

The Divinity School includes some of the most distinguished theological educators in the world. Moreover, we have significant synergy within our faculty, with leading faculty working not only at the top of their own disciplines but also as creative leaders in cross-disciplinary research and conversation. In the past five years, we have retained a primary focus on theological education for Protestant ministry (as is our heritage and primary mission), but we have also broadened our focus within the faculty to include a significant Roman Catholic presence and new areas of research, such as Theology and Health Care, Afro-Christian Life and Thought, Pastoral Leadership, and Gender, Theology, and Ministry.

Our growing strength in these fresh areas of research has created both a demand and a responsibility for us to find ways to educate students in these areas at the doctoral level. We have thus developed a Doctor of Theology program, whose interdisciplinary focus on the ministries and practices of Christian communities will significantly enhance our intellectual peaks of excellence. At the same time, we will preserve and build on our research strengths in more classical areas through the shared Ph.D. program in Religion. Continuing to develop these complementary doctoral programs in strong ways, in the latter case in cooperation with the Department of Religion, will be pivotal for the Divinity School’s ability to sustain its reputation as an intellectual leader in theological education.

During the next five to seven years, the Divinity School will face six to eight faculty retirements, including at least four or five holders of distinguished chairs. In addition to replacing these key intellectual leaders, we will need to

1. build on our strength in African American faculty,
2. strengthen our women faculty,
3. recruit faculty of Latino/a and Asian backgrounds,
4. find creative ways to maintain a strong presence of tenured and tenure-track faculty focused on preparing men and women for leadership in fields of Christian ministry, and
5. maintain a healthy balance between tenure/tenure-track positions and other regular rank positions.

Students

Over the past five years, the Divinity School has significantly improved the quality of our degree-seeking student body. In 2000, we set five-year goals for both inquiries and completed applications. We met those goals within three years, and by fall 2005 our completed applications totaled more than 650 (compared to 331 in 1999), exceeding our goal by more than 60%. Our yield on completed applications has also increased, as have the general indicators of quality (such as undergraduate GPA). Our student body continues to be among the youngest of any theological school in the United States.

We are seen as a school with a strong focus on Christ and the church and as a community that welcomes people from diverse theological, ecclesial, and political perspectives. We have a denominationally diverse student body, and we have discovered a need to increase our programming for students to prepare them for ordination within their diverse traditions (and even within our own United Methodist tradition). We seek to provide a dynamic center for intellectual study, theological education, spiritual formation, and social engagement, and we are intentional in our efforts to attract the students who will be most likely to succeed not only in the classroom but also as parish and community leaders.

The most significant reason prospective students opt for another school continues to be financial aid. Because of the Divinity School’s small endowment relative to other theological schools (we are currently eighteenth in endowment size, well behind our competitors), other schools use financial aid as an inducement that we often are unable to match. This presents a significant vulnerability as we look to the future.

It is also important to note that last year we taught more than 2,500 people in our various continuing education programs. These programs are important building blocks for our emphasis on transformative leadership.

Staff

Over the last five years, the staff at the Divinity School has increased significantly. Previous strategic plans have had little, if anything, to say about the staff, no doubt because the role of the staff in the life of the school was proportionally small. However, the size of the staff has increased significantly in recent years. It will be important over the next five years to continue to recruit and retain excellent staff and to develop strong relationships between the staff and the faculty, especially by enhancing the opportunities for the staff to become more deeply integrated into the mission and work of the school.

Diversity

The Divinity School has made significant progress in the area of faculty diversity, especially in relation to African and African American faculty appointments (five appointments since the last strategic plan, including a senior African American scholar as Director of the Institute on Care at the End of Life.) These appointments are integral to our growing intellectual strength in Afro-Christian Thought and Life in Global Context and will significantly enhance our ability to attract outstanding African American faculty in the future. We have also added seven women to our faculty since the last strategic plan, and two women have been promoted to the rank of full professor, the first women to hold that rank in the Divinity School. We have also significantly enhanced our diversity through the presence of international faculty from Uganda, New Zealand, England, Germany, South Africa, and the Philippines. The greatest area of need with respect to diversity are persons of Latino/a and Asian backgrounds.

Overall, 20% of our students are from ethnic minorities; 13% are African American. We did not meet our target from the last strategic plan with regard to African American students (20%), but we also did not anticipate the emergence of two accredited theological seminaries at historically black schools in North Carolina (Shaw and Hood). Our goal for this plan is a more modest goal of 15%. We have been only minimally successful in recruiting international students and students from other ethnic minorities, particularly Latino/a, and we need to focus more effort on recruiting such students.

Unlike other schools of Duke University, the Divinity School must also address Christian denominational diversity. We are expected, as a result of our affiliation with the United Methodist Church (and their substantial financial contributions), to maintain at least 50% United Methodist faculty/senior staff and 50% Master of Divinity (M.Div.) students. This means that we must attend to denominational affiliation in our recruiting, and it also serves as a constraint on our capacity to increase diversity in other ways.

Programs

Duke Divinity School has undertaken several major initiatives in recent years to enhance our intellectual strengths, improve our capacity to recruit faculty, and strengthen our leadership with external constituencies. Most notably, these undertakings have included the Institute on Care at the End of Life (ICEOL) and initiatives in Theology and Health Care, Pastoral Leadership, the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, and a newly emerging Center for Reconciliation. These programs have provided major strength and momentum for the Divinity School, and we will need to deepen their capacity as we look to the future. Because of the many ways in which they either do or can build bridges from the classroom to the parish and the world, and from the world and the parish to the classroom, these initiatives are a key aspect of our focus on transformative leadership and are significant embodiments of the fourfold measure of excellence discussed above.

Interdisciplinarity

The most substantial interdisciplinary initiative Duke Divinity School has undertaken is the Institute on Care at the End of Life, which includes major relationships with the Medical School and the Nursing School (as well as the Health System more generally). Our Program in Theology and Medicine has established significant interdisciplinary links both within Duke and in programmatic outreach. We have also developed a dual-degree program with UNC’s School of Social Work, and our new Th.D. program promises to offer significant new opportunities for interdisciplinary work, especially at the interface of Theology and Health Care and Theology and Social Work. We have developed ties with the Nicholas School for a proposed joint professorship (we cosponsored a visiting professor from Edinburgh in the spring of 2005), and we hope to find funding for that in the near future.

Internationalization

The Divinity School has a long history of international partnerships. We maintain a distinction between Comprehensive Partnerships, in areas of the world with which the Divinity School intends to foster relationship on several levels, and Focused Partnerships, in areas designated for more limited contacts. We currently have two primary areas identified for Comprehensive Partnerships: sub-Saharan Africa (especially South Africa and the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa) and Latin America (especially Peru and Brazil). In addition, we continue relationships with such places as the University of Erlangen, Canterbury, and Haiti through Focused Partnerships. We anticipate that the Office of Black Church Studies and the Center for Reconciliation will provide heightened visibility and strategic direction for our international partnerships as we move into the future.

Infrastructure and library

With the completion of the Westbrook Building and Goodson Chapel, Duke Divinity School is now well positioned in terms of facilities. The Divinity School library is excellent, having undergone a major renovation in the last decade. It will continue to develop its outstanding collection, especially in relation to new initiatives such as the Th.D. program, the Institute on Care at the End of Life, and emerging emphases in the Department of Religion. We will need to think carefully about the library’s role as a resource for changing research patterns in relation to information technology; the library has been and will continue to be an important leader in this work.

Information technology and communications

Over the past five years, the Divinity School has significantly strengthened its communications efforts, and we are well positioned to continue to strengthen the Divinity School’s visibility through communications in the next five years, even with relatively limited financial resources. We have made significant progress in the use of technology in the classroom and in our Web presence to external constituencies. However, we continue to lag behind other professional schools at Duke in terms of both capacity and financial resources in this area. A committee that worked through the fall on issues of information technology identified four key challenges we need to address:

1. how best to use our new technologically sophisticated space;
2. how to meet the evolving technological needs of our students, faculty, and staff;
3. how to meet the demands on technology that come with increased enrollment, a growing faculty and staff, and the expansion of interdisciplinary centers, institutes, initiatives, and programs; and
4. how to continue to serve and foster a growing external audience through the use of information technology.

Finances

The Divinity School is currently financially constrained, though relatively stable. Major budget issues loom on the horizon as we plan for the future. Our small endowment and low tuition, combined with the allocated costs of being a part of Duke University, are cultivating an instability that will be very important for the Divinity School to address adequately during the next five to seven years. Our ability to increase tuition is limited by the market, insofar as we already have the highest tuition among United Methodist seminaries, and we are near the top of all divinity schools with a sizable M.Div. student body.

Addressing the Divinity School’s long-term financial stability will require a threefold strategy:

1. recalibrating our low tuition relative to the rest of the University, taking into account the basic costs of being a school of Duke University;
2. making a significant push in development, especially to enhance financial aid and to increase the availability of unrestricted funds; and
3. planning and managing the budget carefully. In addition, we will need to secure substantial new external support to achieve some of our most significant ambitions for the Divinity School and its various programs, initiatives, and centers.

Executive Summary

Faculty excellence

Four of our seven designated peaks of excellence are unchanged from the previous strategic plan: Interpretation of Scripture, particularly theological interpretation and the history of interpretation; Theological Ethics; Pastoral Leadership; and Wesleyan Studies. Two of the seven strengths named in the previous strategic plan have been modified to account for changes in the faculty (and in programs) that have altered their trajectory — “Racial Reconciliation” is now Afro-Christian Thought and Life in Global Context; and “Theology and Medicine” is now Theology and Health Care, especially care at the end of life. We have also added Gender, Theology, and Ministry as a new peak of excellence in order to register our growing strength in the area of gender studies. These are areas in which we will seek both to maintain and to build strength, even as we also attend to specific areas of specialization and desires for diversity in the faculty that might not fit perfectly within any of these seven designated peaks.

Creating coherence and distinctiveness in the undergraduate experience

Duke Divinity School has had limited contact with undergraduates in recent years because the Department of Religion is the primary locus for teaching undergraduates. However, fundamental to our vision of a future built upon the theme of transformative leadership is the assumption that the leaders involved will not always be ministers, and the communities transformed will not always be churches. The Divinity School thus has a significant interest in engaging the myriad future leaders who pass through Duke University as undergraduates.

The Divinity School has long been involved in teaching undergraduates through ad hoc involvement of faculty. In light of President Brodhead’s emphasis, we have begun conversations with Dean McLendon and others about ways in which Divinity faculty might contribute more directly to the teaching of undergraduates. In addition, we are exploring ways in which some of our programmatic initiatives, such as the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Center for Reconciliation, can offer research and internship opportunities for undergraduates.

Translation of knowledge for the service of society

Our focus on transformative leadership will make this University theme a major hallmark of the Divinity School’s work over the next five to ten years. We will exercise leadership in this area in three ways and contribute to the University’s overall focus in a fourth.

1. We are undertaking a major initiative to enhance this work through our Th.D. program.
2. We anticipate that our Center for Reconciliation will be a significant programmatic initiative focused on translating research in a variety of disciplines across the University into strategies for helping cultivate conflict resolution, reconciliation, and healing in local communities, as well as across the world.
3. Our emerging initiatives focused on leadership will bear directly on translating knowledge for the service of society.
4. We anticipate playing a strong role in the development of the University’s Global Health Initiative.

Strengthening the role of the arts

Duke Divinity School’s new building gives significant prominence to the visual arts, which we highlighted in the fall of 2005 in a series of sermons and reflections on “Art as Evangelism.” We anticipate that this series will be published as a book. Our Center for Theological Writing has focused attention on the arts as written word, especially by sponsoring events featuring gifted authors who include matters of faith in their writing (e.g., the January 2006 visit of Marilynne Robinson, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead). We also hope to have a concentration in our new Th.D. program on Imagining Christian Life through the Arts, but we will need to be able to make at least one additional faculty appointment before we will be ready for such a concentration.

Executive Summary

The Divinity School will focus its energy and initiatives over the next five years on achieving the following goals:

1. Enhance the faculty through aggressive recruitment and retention, especially by developing our intellectual strengths;
2. Strengthen our recruitment and formation of students for transformative leadership in their ministries;
3. Create programs and practices to sustain and develop the Divinity School staff;
4. Develop a major initiative focused on forming leaders for the church, the world, and the academy, especially through a new Th.D. program, and develop other postgraduate and custom education programs designed to strengthen pastoral, congregational, and institutional leadership;
5. Cultivate the Wesleyan tradition through initiatives in scholarship and curricula, student recruitment, leadership development, and strategic partnerships;
6. Advance key program initiatives in the areas of Theology and Health Care (particularly the ICEOL), Pastoral Leadership, Reconciliation, and the “houses of studies” programs, focusing on cultivating synergies among the programs, especially in areas of leadership development, constituency relations, strategic planning, and operations management;
7. Develop initiatives and relationships that contribute to, and enhance, the University’s emphases and broad themes;
8. Increase strategically our use of information technology through enhanced staff, integration of technology into teaching and learning, and programmatic outreach with diverse external audiences;
9. Create long-term financial strength and stability for the Divinity School’s overall budget, including aggressive fund-raising for priorities and enhanced financial aid for students.

Executive Summary

Goal 1: Enhance the faculty and develop our intellectual strengths

• Strategy 1: Develop a long-term plan for replacing distinguished faculty who will retire in the next five years.
• Strategy 2: Look intentionally, in each faculty search, for faculty who can enrich our strength in one or more of the intellectual areas we have identified as key for our intellectual leadership, and also be mindful that peaks of excellence are not static, as is evident from a comparison of our current strengths and those identified in the previous strategic plan. Truly intentional hiring will seek to balance our current strengths with the ever present need to diversify further our faculty in all ranks, and also to remain self-critical about our intellectual trajectory amid the complexities of a rapidly changing global culture.
• Strategy 3: Develop a clear rationale for the use of “practice of” appointments.
• Strategy 4: Implement “alternative course load” strategies to support our work with external constituencies.
• Strategy 5: Streamline the faculty’s committee responsibilities and provide additional support for research.
• Strategy 6: Cultivate the emerging leadership of younger faculty through mentoring and the creation of structured opportunities.
• Strategy 7: Strengthen our commitment to doctoral education, both through the shared Ph.D. program and through the new Th.D. program.

Goal 2: Strengthen our recruitment and formation of students

• Strategy 1: Strengthen our Admissions Office with more visible off-campus recruiting and a focus on the Th.D. program.
• Strategy 2: Develop new criteria for evaluating applications for admission, especially for our M.Div. program, to focus on capacities for leadership.
• Strategy 3: Improve our financial aid offerings.
• Strategy 4: Improve the ethnic diversity of the student body.
• Strategy 5: Improve our recruitment and formation of United Methodist students, and support and enrich the denominational diversity of Duke Divinity School.
• Strategy 6: Foster greater coherence and synergies among our programs of field education, spiritual formation, and the curriculum, focused especially on forming leaders for the church, the world, and the academy.

Goal 3: Sustain and develop the staff

• Strategy 1: Cultivate staff leadership.
• Strategy 2: Encourage participation of all employees in the school’s vision and mission.
• Strategy 3: Be attentive to the development needs of all employees.
• Strategy 4: Develop more structured arenas for the staff to develop collegial relationships and opportunities for cross-cutting collaborations.

Goal 4: Develop a major initiative focused on forming leaders

• Strategy 1: Implement and develop fully our recently approved Th.D. degree program.
• Strategy 2: Develop an initiative for Thriving Rural Communities that will be a national model for the role of the church in strengthening rural America.
• Strategy 3: Develop strategic partnerships that will advance leadership education for the church.
• Strategy 4: Continue to build models for formative education and offer them to wider audiences.
• Strategy 5: Develop, toward the end of this five-year strategic plan, a comprehensive national program for Christian leadership education.
• Strategy 6: Develop a communications plan for increasing our visibility in transformative leadership, especially through enhanced use of the Web and other information technology.

Goal 5: Cultivate the Wesleyan tradition

• Strategy 1: Strengthen scholarly contributions by nurturing synergies within the Divinity School faculty, offering leadership to Wesleyan scholars around the world, and enhancing the curriculum.
• Strategy 2: Become more intentional about recruiting and forming students for leadership in the Wesleyan tradition.
• Strategy 3: Offer programs designed to improve the quality of leadership within traditional United Methodist structures.
• Strategy 4: Identify and cultivate strategic partnerships to advance the Wesleyan tradition.

Goal 6: Advance key program initiatives in transformative leadership

• Strategy 1: Design a process to ensure that each program initiative is planning strategically each year.
• Strategy 2: Develop an ongoing structure for the interrelations of these projects with one another.
• Strategy 3: Adapt existing models of training, development, and formation for the needs of new constituents and on specific issues.
• Strategy 4: Enhance the leadership development of the people involved in the program initiatives themselves.
• Strategy 5: Ensure that these programmatic initiatives are linked to, and support, the intellectual work of the faculty and teaching in the classroom.
• Strategy 6: Cultivate synergies in programmatic initiatives by creative and compelling communication with external constituencies.

Goal 7: Contribute to, and enhance, Duke University emphases

• Strategy 1: Contribute to the undergraduate experience by offering courses, research opportunities, and international travel opportunities.
• Strategy 2: Enhance the translation of knowledge for the service of society through programmatic development as well as scholarly reflection on the intersections of knowledge and practice.
• Strategy 3: Strengthen the role of the arts by developing initiatives within the Divinity School as well as participating in, and hosting, events sponsored by the larger University.
• Strategy 4: Contribute to interdisciplinarity by building on our intellectual strengths in theology and health care, cultivating our partnership focused on the environment, deepening our connection to ethics initiatives, and initiating relationships related to reconciliation and leadership.
• Strategy 5: Strengthen the Divinity School’s internationalization as an integral feature of our own mission, as well as by participating in larger University strategies.
• Strategy 6: Enhance the Divinity School’s diversity, focusing especially on strengthening the presence of African Americans, while also enhancing the presence of Latino/a and Asian faculty, staff, and students.

Goal 8: Increase strategically our use of information technology

• Strategy 1: Design a plan for the optimal use of technology that serves our mission.
• Strategy 2: Invest in information technology staff.
• Strategy 3: Invest in new technology.
• Strategy 4: Utilize fully and maintain our current technology.
• Strategy 5: Integrate these enhanced uses of information technology into the school’s overall plans for communications.

Goal 9: Create long-term financial strength and stability

• Strategy 1: Develop a model for recalibrating the tuition that needs to be charged to Divinity School students, and the financial aid added to support those students, in order to enable the Divinity School to meet its core expenses for the future.
• Strategy 2: Enhance significantly our fund-raising for financial aid, both through enhanced annual fund giving and by exceeding our $10 million endowment goal in the Financial Aid Initiative.
• Strategy 3: Secure significant new funding in both expendable and endowment gifts for the core purposes of the Divinity School, including our major programmatic initiatives, endowed professorships, and other key activities of this strategic plan.
• Strategy 4: Manage the budget carefully for cost savings and synergies, while simultaneously looking for potential new revenue streams.

Executive Summary

We have developed two academic investment proposals, submitted separately.

Many of the goals and strategies we have outlined will not require major new funding. Even so, we face critical financial challenges that accompany our ambition to be consistently evaluated as one of the premier institutions of theological education in the world. We need constantly to find the right balance among outrageous ambition, bold planning, and prudent budgeting.

Executive Summary

Duke Divinity School is poised to exercise transformative leadership as an institution. We believe that this leadership is significant for the United Methodist Church and the wider church, for the Carolinas and the wider world, and for Duke and the wider academy.

Our strategies for the next five years aim to transform conceptions of ministry and leadership by emphasizing the need for rigorous education, strong formation, and engaged social witness. Further, we believe that our goals and strategies will enable us to emphasize the ways in which ministry transforms people’s lives—and the ways in which lives so transformed can themselves become transformative; this is what transformative leadership is about.

This is a critical time for theological education, and for Duke Divinity School. If we keep our sights high, we believe that we have an opportunity to build on strength and pursue a compelling vision. We hope to achieve the goals we have identified and to move even more ambitiously into the future, ever in service to the claims of Christ.