From the Duke News Service

Feb. 25, 1999

Christy King Mack, a Greensboro native, and John J. Mack, a Mooresville native, are contributing $10 million to The Campaign for Duke, university President Nannerl O. Keohane announced Thursday.

The five-year Campaign for Duke, announced Oct. 3, seeks to raise $1.5 billion and to date has surpassed $800 million.

John Mack is a member of the Duke Board of Trustees and president and chief operating officer of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., the global investment banking giant headquartered in New York.

"Christy and John Mack are energetic, public spirited and intellectually alive people who have achieved great success in life but have never forgotten their North Carolina roots," Keohane said. "They are committed to Duke and are helping us build new strengths while undergirding the endowment for our generous and costly financial aid program. Duke is indeed fortunate to have friends who know its many dimensions and who are eager to help us in so many ways."

Keohane said that the gift is double the amount the Macks first outlined to her. "Those who know them aren't surprised, however. It is characteristic of John and Christy to help Duke as much as they can."

Their gift supports programs ranging from athletics and academics to residential and community life, as follows:

• $3 million for financial aid to North Carolina students through the Christy K. and John J. Mack Family Scholarship Endowment Fund. In keeping with the Macks' emphasis on opportunity for deserving young people, minority students will be given preference. Duke gives preference in admissions to North and South Carolinians, who typically represent about 15 percent of the undergraduate student body. Under its "need blind" policy, admission decisions are made without regard to a student's financial circumstances, and financial aid is awarded to all students demonstrating need, thus enabling them to attend Duke.

• $1.1 million for the football program, including $100,000 for a feasibility study and master plan for athletic facilities.

• $500,000 for the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Initiative, Duke's program to aid seven Durham public schools and 12 neighborhoods, which Christy Mack toured with Duke officials last fall. It is the largest gift in the program's three-year history. The initiative has brought more than $3 million in corporate, federal and foundation funds and hundreds of student, faculty and staff volunteers into community-based programs in housing, health, education and economic development. Duke has committed to raising $10 million to support the initiative as part of the Campaign for Duke.

• $500,000 for next steps in enhancing residential life at Duke, where attention is focused on new housing arrangements for West Campus that will build upon the highly successful first-year experience on all-freshman East Campus.

• $250,000 for the Integrative Medicine Program, which has won acclaim for work in bringing "mind, body and spirit" approaches together in treatment of patients.

• $3.6 million, principally for discretionary purposes, but including generous support of the Duke Annual Fund and gifts to the Fuqua School of Business.

The $10 million gift includes one of the earliest commitments to the campaign, $1 million donated in 1996 during its "quiet phase" to create a scholarship fund to assist students from Mooresville and Iredell County. The scholarship is named in memory of Alice Azouri Mack, John Mack's mother, who had a strong belief in the importance of education and a love of North Carolina and Duke.

"Helping people of all backgrounds get a leg up is what motivates our giving," said Christy Mack, one of five children born to a Greensboro physician and his wife. Her husband is the youngest of six boys whose Lebanese-immigrant parents ran a wholesale grocery business in Mooresville. John Mack recalls that "only a few families in my hometown could afford to send their kids to Duke. That helps account for our emphasis on financial aid."

His own opportunity came when he earned a football scholarship to Duke. The 1968 graduate took advantage of his opportunity academically, athletically and otherwise, managing to balance extracurricular activities and work at a small brokerage house, where he earned $365 a month.

He went from Durham to his first job on Wall Street, working as a municipal bond trader and salesman with Smith Barney. Today, he is a leader on Wall Street, where he was a key figure in the $10 billion merger in May 1997 that created Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. The firm has more than 47,000 employees in 399 branches worldwide and a reported net income of $3.276 billion for 1998.

John Mack is a member of the steering committee for The Campaign for Duke and the steering committee for the Fuqua School of Business, which he served as a member of its Board of Visitors from 1994 to 1998. He was Fuqua's commencement speaker in 1995 and last year received its Thomas F. Keller Distinguished Leadership Award.

Christy Mack, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill graduate, is a member of the Board of Visitors of Trinity College, in which 85 percent of Duke's undergraduates are enrolled. She also has been a supporter of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Greensboro Children's Museum, and Exploris, a global communications museum and education system for children that will open this fall in Raleigh.

Both are deeply involved in civic, health and education affairs in New York. He serves on the executive committee of the board of trustees of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, the University Hospital for Columbia and Cornell. He also is a trustee of The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and serves on the International Advisory Panel for the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Christy Mack's many activities include serving as president of the board of trustees of Rye (N.Y.) Country Day School, and as a charter board member of the New York Presbyterian Hospital Infant & Child Care Center. She also serves on both the Advisory Work Group for the Development of Board Structure and Strategic Plan and the Capital Campaign Steering Committee of the New York Presbyterian Babies and Children's Hospital. The list of interests on her biography concludes with the words, "everything Duke."

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