The Duke Endowment will give $5.7 million to Johnson C. Smith University to support new programs on the west Charlotte campus.

JCSU officials said the gift will be among the largest in the school's history.

The grant, announced today, will support the university's Metropolitan College and its Center for Applied Leadership and Community Development. It also will be used to help JCSU’s recruitment efforts.

Neil Williams, a Duke trustee, said the gift was a vote of confidence in JCSU's new direction.

"This school is relevant to a lot of people today," he told a group of students and faculty assembled in the Mary Joyce Taylor Crisp Student Union. "It's relevant to the community. ...What it needs is resources."

The Duke Endowment was established in 1924 to strengthen communities in North Carolina and South Carolina by "nurturing children, promoting health, educating minds and enriching spirits," according to its Web site. The endowment has about $2.6 billion in assets, placing it among the 20 largest in the nation.

The endowment over the years has given Johnson C. Smith more than $85 million, Williams said, but no single gift was larger than the one announced today. The endowment also provides substantial support to Duke University, Davidson college and Furman University in South Carolina.

“This was James B. Duke’s dream, to be entirely focused on the states of North and South Carolina,” Williams said.

Parran L. Foster III, who chairs JCSU's board of trustees, said the Duke gift will “make a big difference in where we go and how we get there."

"It gives us an opportunity to re-establish this institution to where it once was," he told reporters after the announcement. "Johnson C. Smith had the opportunity in the past to educate some of the most capable young, black scholars in the country.”

Ronald Carter, the university’s president, has said he wants to return the school to its former status.

Trustees voted earlier this year to raise JCSU’s admissions standards to increase its graduation rate, which had fallen to about 60 percent. As a result of the new standards, enrollment is down 20 percent this year, to about 1,200 students, or 300 fewer than normal.

Part of the Duke grant will be used to offset revenue lost because of lower enrollment, Carter said. University officials say they expect the numbers to eventually bounce back.

Williams said the Duke Endowment began talking with JCSU trustees more than a year ago about the grant, even before Carter was approached about taking the job. The Duke officials encouraged the university’s trustees to look for “transformative leadership,” he said.

At today’s announcement, Williams said Carter has been the embodiment of that desire.

“There is, in the eyes of all children, a Santa Claus,” he said, “but Santa Claus does not usually come unprompted... This (grant) is a vote of the highest confidence in the current leadership.”
 

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