Core Values Shaping Graduate Education at Duke University

Partnerships

Duke University brings together a number of essential partners to achieve excellence in graduate education: faculty, students, staff, and administrators. Membership in the community that constitutes graduate education at Duke is a privilege that entails responsibilities. These partners deserve to expect from one another a mutual reliance on a common set of values that unite them in purpose. Additional partners include alumni, trustees, donors and sponsors.

Core Values

The true success of graduate education resides in a thorough combination of intellectual and ethical excellence. Fostering intellectual excellence consists of educating students in the literatures and histories of their disciplines and training them to master relevant methods of inquiry as the basis for producing original contributions to their fields. At Duke University, this means a production of knowledge that connects to disciplines beyond one’s own to take full advantage of a diverse and integrated community of scholars. Duke has cultivated a culture of interdisciplinary thinking that relishes critical reflection on intellectual boundaries and fosters creative exploration that builds between and beyond existing disciplines.

Duke University expects the members of its community of learning to practice ethical behavior in all aspects of research and publication. The arc of ethical conduct includes fully accrediting the work of colleagues, all forms of collaboration, the treatment of students, responsible advising and mentoring, and all interactions with colleagues in daily work. Ethical concern extends to the importance of the public good as a condition for research and professional formation. Encouraging ethical conduct in such tasks as mentoring and advising is reinforced with incentives and recognition. Moreover, failure to uphold such standards carries meaningful consequences.

The core values of graduate education at Duke are not platitudes or airy ideals, but the concrete means of guiding our individual and collective interactions with one another. These values are therefore also the demanding criteria for measuring our performance. In the pursuit of academic excellence in a supportive learning environment, we have common responsibilities:

• To demonstrate personal and professional integrity, which includes demonstrating independent critical thinking; respecting every individual, and seeking to engage a diversity of viewpoints; and fostering academic freedom, even of those with whom we may disagree;
• To put our knowledge to the service of society, and to communicate our knowledge beyond the world of academic research where it may contribute materially to the public good;
• To assist graduate students to become excellent teachers and mentors in their own right, so that they can use those skills in whatever careers they pursue;
• To create an educational environment that is inclusive and supportive of all members of the graduate community, regardless of identity and life experience;
• To support the needs of all students equally, regardless of whether they are seeking a master’s or Ph.D. degree and regardless of their career goals;
• To recognize that because we are all more than scholars, our success depends on safeguarding students' ability to devote time to their interests and relationships outside of academics; and
• To acknowledge that graduate study can impose unique stresses on the lives of graduate students, and that all partners in the enterprise of graduate education bear responsibility to look out for the physical and mental wellbeing of everyone in our community.

Complementing these core values and responsibilities, general expectations for the various partners in graduate education at Duke are indicated on The Graduate School’s website. Many graduate programs have developed specific expectations of their faculty advisors and graduate students that are available at each program’s website and that the Director of Graduate Studies can provide. Moreover, The Graduate School’s website provides a wealth of specific resources to help with professional development, optimizing mentoring, upholding ethical scholarship and research, and navigating challenges in mental and physical health.

Additional Values Shaping Doctoral Graduate Education at Duke

Open communication as a key value means sharing goals and interests, refining them, and achieving a transparency that allows free exchange and mutual agency. Students should never be made to feel that their aims and interests are ignored or devalued. Faculty are expected to practice mentoring and advising that are attentive to and informed by a student’s career goals. These essential tasks should not be regarded as onerous forms of service, but as vital aspects of graduate education.  At the same time, PhD students must take primary responsibility for the completion of their degrees, following the core values of intellectual and ethical excellence in all aspects of their research and teaching. 

The outcomes of doctoral education continue to widen in the present day to include not only academic jobs and careers but also non-academic work in the private sector, government, and non-governmental organizations. Doctoral education in the United States has acknowledged this, and our statement of core values does too. This recognition does not to diminish our commitment to original and cutting-edge research but extends it other domains. In order to provide helpful counsel to our students in this regard, we might seek assistance when appropriate from research professors, professors of the practice, alumni in the professions, trustees, donors, and other friends of the university since many faculty are life-long academics and are not in a strong position to provide the sort of vocational counsel that some students may find critically helpful. Advising and mentoring should encourage an early and continual reflection on career goals.

Additional Values Shaping Master’s Graduate Education at Duke

Master’s education in The Graduate School provides foundational and diverse education for students and prepares them for careers in the public, private, and non-profit sectors or for further graduate study. As such, forward-looking master’s education must provide students with discipline-focused and/or interdisciplinary competencies to function as a practitioner, researcher, or scholar. To enable these competencies the programs and their faculty are expected to engage actively with students to understand their career goals. This is to provide ample career development, academic resources, and research opportunities to enable their post-graduation success in competitive public, private, educational, and academic job markets. Faculty are also expected to offer clear mentorship and advisement to encourage intellectual engagement within their programs and the larger Duke community, which will prepare students to be leaders in continuously evolving interdisciplinary workplaces.

A key goal of The Graduate School is to establish a diverse master’s student body and to provide resources for the personal well-being and intellectual and emotional safety of its students. Programs must promote an inclusive, supportive and open environment that is respectful of all academic thought and career choices for master’s degree students in pursuit of these goals. At the same time, master’s students must take primary responsibility for the completion of their degrees, research, and career development plans for post-graduation placement, following the core values of intellectual and ethical excellence in all aspects of their research and education.

(Written and approved by the Executive Committee of the Graduate Faculty, 2023, updated 2025.)