Investing in Excellence: A Campaign for Tuck

More important than the dollar figure is what these dollars make possible. Thanks to your gifts, today Tuck has the world's best residential campus for MBA education. Campaign dollars enabled us to construct the stunning new Achtmeyer, Raether, and Pineau-Valencienne halls. These buildings, together with the recently-renovated Buchannan Hall, Whittemore and Byrne halls, and the traditional complex, give us an enviable, state-of-the-art living and learning environment with ideal space for that distinctive blend of academic study and personal interaction that goes to the heart of the Tuck experience.

Your generosity has made it possible to expand Tuck's faculty of thought leaders and create enriching new ways for students to learn from them. The campaign has increased our ability to offer small-scale learning opportunities—such as with the new Research-to-Practice Seminars—that bring students into closer contact with their professors and afford deeper insights into faculty members' knowledge and expertise.

Your gifts have broadened access to a Tuck education for qualified students from all over the world. New endowment raised through the campaign has significantly expanded funding for student scholarships, enabling us to attract an increasingly bright, diverse, and competitive class of students to Tuck and provide them with the financial support they need to flourish here.

The outpouring of support for Investing in Excellence is vitally important for the future of Tuck. Especially heartening was your support over the campaign's final two years, during which you pushed us past our campaign goal despite the challenging economic climate. Your gifts elevate those qualities for which Tuck is best known: a focus on full-time MBA education; close personal relationships forged in an invigorating, human-scale learning environment; and unparalleled levels of interaction with faculty who are leaders in their fields. Your generosity keeps Tuck on track toward the goal we aim for continuously: to offer the absolute best MBA education, preparing smart, caring, ethical leaders for a world that needs more of them.

When you set a goal of being the best, you do so knowing that it is not something that can simply be achieved and checked off a list. It is an ongoing process driven here by an uncompromising commitment to excellence and an equally uncompromising commitment to an intimate and compelling type of learning that is distinctively Tuck's. So as we enjoy the advances that have been made possible by Investing in Excellence and celebrate the ways the campaign has made a great school greater, we also look to the future. Striving to be the best means continually exploring opportunities to broaden access—access to a Tuck education for top students from anywhere, and access of those students to the finest professors and the groundbreaking courses they teach.

It is immensely gratifying to end a campaign on so high a note. It is gratifying because of what it means for Tuck students of today and tomorrow, and gratifying for what it says about the commitment of Tuck's alumni. Your consistent support at levels exceeding those of other business schools highlights the fact that while you may only be enrolled in Tuck classes for two years out of a long and productive life, Tuck is part of you, and you are part of it, forever.

Thank you for making Investing in Excellence a rousing success. Thank you for your vital role in advancing Tuck's mission. And thank you for your extraordinary commitment to this unique and outstanding school.

—Paul Danos, Dean
June 2010