THE CHRONICLE
DUKEENGAGE from page 1 very deeply with open eyes and rediscover what mattered to us,” Mlyn said. “What mattered to us was that Duke was a campus that was deeply civically engaged in a variety of ways.” Mlyn, who was the director of the Robertson Scholars Program at the time, led the taskforce. The Big Idea began with a suggestion related to increasing study abroad options, he said, but it evolved into a program centered on civic engagement and service learning. President Richard Brodhead had arrived at Duke only two years prior, and upon learning about the immersive summer opportunities available to merit scholars, he asked about the possibility of expanding that set of opportunities to the entire student body. “We wanted something that was big enough to impact students, the communities we serve and the culture of the University,” Mlyn said. “We felt like giving students experiences was the way to go.” As DukeEngage was conceived, admin-
THREAT from page 1 cleared so very quickly... sending a notice to [upwards of] 50,000 people didn’t seem to be necessary,” Cavanaugh said. On Tuesday, a DukeALERT sent at 7:45 a.m. notified the student body of the initial bomb threat at the Bryan Center. Cavanaugh noted that officials thought the Bryan Center threat might not be credible from the start. When Thursday’s call came in, threatening a bomb in the Great Hall, the similar nature of the two calls suggested the threats’
FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 | 3
istrators also hoped to promote a readjustment of the Duke culture paradigm. The impact on culture is hard to measure, Mlyn said, but it could mean something as simple as influencing conversations between students in their residence halls and on the bus. DukeEngage also presents Duke as a place that cares for how students grow, said Edward Skloot, professor of the practice of public policy and director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society. Skloot is also a member of the DukeEngage National Advisory Board. A pillar of the brand DukeEngage may have helped to alleviate some negative conceptions of Duke after the lacrosse scandal. “DukeEngage has redefined Duke’s place in the American higher education landscape,” Mlyn said. “This was an effort to rediscover what this University believed in. That’s what we did.” But beyond lacrosse and perhaps more importantly, DukeEngage has provided the University with a first-mover advantage in the higher education marketplace in
terms of civic engagement, making Duke increasingly unique among its peers. In many ways, the program set the standard for service learning integration in higher education. “Increasingly, higher education needs to embrace putting the learning we do in the classroom into the real world,” said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education. “DukeEngage is one of the premiere ways we can do this.” DukeEngage has shown itself to be a strong part of the Duke brand, as made evident in the admissions process. As the number of applications to Duke rose from 2007 to 2013, administrators have pointed to DukeEngage as one of the main reasons for the surge. For the first time in 2010, DukeEngage surpassed men’s basketball as the leading reason why students want to come to Duke, as noted in their application essays. The program continues to elicit excitement among prospective Blue Devils. Among a random group of 11 admitted high school seniors interviewed for this story, eight identified DukeEngage as a
main reason they applied to Duke. Ten of those 11 seniors said they knew about DukeEngage before they applied to Duke. “Nearly a quarter of my ‘Why Duke?’ essay was about the program,” Amanda Sullivan, an accepted high school senior from New York, wrote in an email April 4. Duke admissions staff, including Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag, could not be reached for comment as to how they promote DukeEngage to high schools and prospective students. But the program is featured prominently on the admissions website. The program has also captured the attention of other universities, who contact DukeEngage to ask how the program was built, Mlyn said. He declined to mention specific universities. Still, no university has been able to replicate a program on the same scale of DukeEngage. “Duke is known for this,” he said. “It’s the largest program of its kind in the world—not in terms of money spent on civic engagement but money spent on direct student experience.” The reporter participated in DukeEngage South Africa-Durban 2012.
possible lack of credibility to officials. “There was a sense that this was a hoax on Tuesday,” Cavanaugh said. “The report in terms of the call was exactly the same type of call that came in. The location was different, but the sense was that this was absolutely a false alarm.” Cavanaugh declined to give further details on the respective phone calls, citing a pending criminal investigation. Sophomore Sofia Manfredi, who was in the Great Hall at the time of the evacuation, said that she was not informed of the bomb threat but merely asked to leave.
Manfredi noted that she and her friends had speculated a bomb threat as the cause of their forced departure. “I figured that that’s what it was, but I was surprised because they had told us about the one on the Bryan Center a few days, so it seems strange that they would not tell us about this one,” Manfredi said. “It definitely was a little weird.” Cavanaugh said that the police physically searched for any sign of bombs, used technology that detects explosive devices and had dogs who could identify the scent of these devices. Given all these resourc-
es, no bomb was found, and the site was deemed safe. He also outlined the process through which the University considers the credibility of a threat. “Every [threat] is assessed individually and relies on information that we receive from external law enforcement and our own police, and a combo of those factors are what’s taken into those assessments,” Cavanaugh said. “We look at the totality of the information and based on that, make a decision on what actually needs to be done.”
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