From the Duke News Service

December 3, 1999

Duke University's Fuqua School of Business will receive $8 million from an anonymous donor to match gifts creating endowed professorships and to support its new academic center, President Nannerl O. Keohane announced Friday.

The announcement was made at the regular quarterly meeting of the university's Board of Trustees. The board then approved a proposal to name the new five-story academic center for Wesley A. Magat, a Fuqua professor and administrative leader who died last March from an inoperable brain tumor.

A total of $5 million from the gift will provide matching funds of $500,000 for each million directed to endow 10 new $1.5 million professorships. The balance of $3 million will help pay construction costs of the $15.5 million academic center, which houses all faculty to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between previously separated faculty members. The center is physically linked to the existing west wing of the Thomas F. Keller Center for MBA Education and adds 70,000 square feet to the school.

"This generous gift will significantly advance Fuqua toward its goal to be a world leader in management education," Keohane said. "I am especially pleased that we will be naming our new academic center after Wes Magat, one of the truly beloved teachers at Duke. The gift supports one of the university's highest priorities: supporting the faculty members in every school, and providing them with the facilities they need to do their best work."

The university identified attracting and retaining leading faculty among the top priorities of its current fund-raising effort, the Campaign for Duke. With this gift, the Fuqua School of Business is more than halfway to its $60 million campaign goal with three years to go.

Dean Rex Adams said the gift was a "wonderfully well-targeted investment in the academic enterprise of Fuqua," and he said the decision to name the new academic center for Magat was appropriate because Magat "touched our school in every important dimension of our work."

"Every academic program we offer bears the mark of his shaping hand," Adams said. "He influenced strongly every important decision we made as a school. He connected us to the rest of the university through his service and his friendships, in ways no other person has done. But Wes's most enduring contribution to us was not his accomplishments, it was Wes himself. He was the principled core of our community, and his character and his values and his tireless commitment to his belief of what we could become have largely and pervasively defined the culture at Fuqua."

Adams said the gift's $5 million allocation to endowed chairs "will help Fuqua meet one of its greatest challenges — increasing the size and strength of our faculty."

Fuqua's faculty is among the smallest of the nation's leading business schools, with 74 tenure-track faculty, five adjunct faculty, and five visiting faculty members. "We need a critical mass of at least 100 faculty members to give us the necessary depth and breadth to achieve the goals in our long-range plan," Adams said.

He said Fuqua needs to expand the scope of the faculty at the senior level — including those scholars whose stature will in turn attract other outstanding thinkers. To accomplish this, Fuqua must increase its number of endowed professorships, which serve as incentives to attract and retain the finest faculty from around the world. The school also is aggressively recruiting top-caliber, younger scholars just beginning to make their marks.

Fuqua offers 15 endowed chairs, significantly fewer endowed professorships than other leading business schools, such as Harvard, which offers 87; Wharton, 62; Stanford, 39; Columbia, 36; and Darden, 29.

Magat was a member of the economics faculty at Fuqua for 25 years, attaining the rank of full professor in 1988. He held a joint professorship at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke and, for the last 15 years, served as the director of Duke's Center for the Study of Business, Regulation and Economic Policy.

Throughout his career, Magat took an active role in university life at Duke. He served as the first chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Resources, a post he held from 1989 to 1991. He also was a member of the Academic Council in the 1970s and '80s. He served as Fuqua's senior associate dean for academic programs from 1991 to 1997 and was a member of the faculty committee that created and designed Fuqua's innovative Global Executive MBA program, now called The Duke MBA — Global Executive, and later became associate dean for executive MBA programs at Fuqua."

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