On May 5th, 2025, eighty-three Duke students arrived at Shanghai Pudong International Airport for a 10-day immersion program in China’s Jiangsu Province (one of our writers, Alejandro Nina Duran, participated in this trip). Staff members from Duke Kunshan University (DKU) introduced the students to China’s 4,000-year-old history, offering a glimpse into the classical art of Kunshan and the rich cultural heritage of Beijing. Students were treated to a smorgasbord of traditional Chinese foods and once-in-a-lifetime experiences, like climbing the Great Wall and exploring Beijing’s LED cityscape. Everything seemed to be going as planned. So far, so good.
And then came the controversy. Former Duke student Jacqueline Cole, who participated in the DKU trip the year prior, wrote a scathing op-ed alleging that the trip “paraded” American students as “Part of China’s PR Campaign.”
On May 15th, as dozens of Duke students departed Beijing International Airport for home, House Republicans John Moolenar and Tim Walberg penned a letter to Duke University President Vincent Price, urging the closure of DKU and alleging a “direct pipeline between U.S. innovation and China’s military-industrial complex.”
Provost Alec Gallimore disagreed. In an October email to the Duke community, introducing the faculty-led Global Priorities Committee, Gallimore argued that the university has been standing silently yet firmly with DKU, maintaining its commitment to the DKU project even in the face of the Trump administration’s assault on elite universities and international student visa restrictions.
But this project in global education, so optimistically initiated in 2013, is increasingly looking like a casualty of our new world order and its recoil from globalization. Other institutions, like the University of Michigan, have withdrawn from China amid pressure from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, so why not DKU?
Now seems like as good a time as ever to take stock of DKU—not from a particular partisan or national interest, but to assess whether this project is accomplishing the goals of its founders, and, if not, whether it is likely to survive long enough to prove otherwise. Duke students are now wondering: Will our Blue Devils on the other side of the Pacific persevere?
Last September, The Lemur’s investigative task force, comprising May Lou, Alejandro Nina Duran, and Jane Mo, set out to explore these questions with the aim of better contextualizing the DKU debate. Over the last six months, the three-person team interviewed a range of administrators, professors, faculty, and domestic and international students to conduct a nuanced investigation into the complexities of the Duke-DKU venture and to cast DKU’s story in a new light.
“Try first, ask questions later.”
To fully understand the uncertainty surrounding DKU’s future and its relationship with Duke, we need to tell the long and surprising story of Duke’s relationship with China.
While Duke Kunshan University was established in 2013, Duke’s ties to China can be traced back to its Trinity College era. In 1881, the college welcomed its first international student: Charles Soon, a Chinese man who would later emerge as a key revolutionary figure and become the father-in-law of two Republic of China presidents—Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. More than 120 years after Charles Soon enrolled, and more than two decades after China’s embrace of reform and opening-up, China began to strive further, testing the possibilities of what its higher education system could become. Since 2004, Chinese universities have partnered with overseas universities to open new campuses in China; these universities are known as joint venture universities (JVUs). With the tides of reform, reopening, and globalization, joint venture universities were more than just educational projects—they were also political ones. Universities in Western countries started to frame overseas campuses as academic and cultural ventures that would benefit their own students, exposing them to new worldviews and preparing them for the global context of 21st century business and culture. For China, education was the bridge towards establishing the institutional legitimacy needed to entice the international community to invest in China’s ambitions. Around 2010 and 2012, the Harvard Center Shanghai in Fudan University and NYU Shanghai were founded. Duke would soon follow suit.
In the spirit of that time, the idea of DKU made a lot of sense. In the 2000s, China’s economy was rising at a speed and scale rarely seen in modern history. The tides of globalization were surging, and many believed in the idea of a “global village.” American universities sought to build their international presence.
Blair Sheppard, the former dean of Fuqua, believed that , “to be a future leader in business, cultural fluency in China is essential,” according to Professor Paul Haagen’s description. Thus, he envisions a Fuqua campus in China.
The enthusiasm of Duke administrators was matched by that of the Kunshan government. Then, a small city near Shanghai, Kunshan, displayed ambitions far beyond its size. The local government became very entrepreneurial in its efforts to attract foreign investment. So much so, their enthusiasm bled into a “try first, ask questions later” approach that caught the attention of Duke University, says Peter Lange, former provost of Duke University, who was instrumental during the 2011 joint venture planning stage.
As these two currents converged, the alignment of incentives between DKU leadership and the Kunshan government smoothed the path of collaboration. While the planning progressed, according to Lange, Duke began to identify a growing range of strategic interests tied to its expansion in China. Beyond business, Duke saw a Chinese campus as an asset in areas such as climate change research and broader international engagement. On the other side of the table, the Kunshan government was not satisfied with hosting merely a Fuqua branch campus. It wanted a full Duke.
Sheppard brought the initiative to build a Duke-like institution in China to then-Duke President Richard H. Brodhead. President Brodhead named Sheppard Senior Advisor to DKU-Duke Development, and he would spearhead a bold new “node” in its vision of a globally networked university: a full college campus in Kunshan, China, just west of Shanghai.
At the time, Duke was not as internationally recognized as many of its elite peer institutions. In most of East Asia, it was the Ivy Leagues, MIT, and West Coast schools such as Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Cal Tech that were seen as the crème de la crème of American education. And although Duke was making inroads in Singapore and China, according to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, it ranked 35th in the world in 2010, behind the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Inevitably, there was internal skepticism, but the fervent pursuit of global ambitions ultimately prevailed. Sandy Williams, the Dean of Duke Medical School at the time, who helped found the Duke-NUS medical school alongside Lange, saw that Duke was not “hedging their bets” but rather establishing a “firmer basis” for actualizing these interests. Duke Kunshan was understood as a long-term strategic investment by Duke to ensure that Duke is on track to become “a global university.” The project promised deeper engagement with Asia, access to China’s booming talent pool, and a chance for Duke to transcend the parochial limits of Durham. Brodhead framed DKU as both cautious and visionary—a step-by-step experiment in global higher education that would secure Duke’s relevance in a rapidly shifting world. Two years later, in 2013, Duke Kunshan University opened its doors to the world.
A Flagship of Joint-Venture Universities
More than a decade since its inception, DKU has become a vital hub of academic, cultural, and diplomatic exchange where students and faculty engage internationally—a form of Duke’s investment in the community.
Interviews with faculty members and students across both campuses indicate that Duke’s Chinese campus at DKU has earned Duke significant symbolic and reputational capital abroad. DKU has increasingly positioned itself as a unique option: a pathway for students, both Chinese nationals and international students, to experience an American liberal arts education within China.
This appeal has translated into measurable growth. Between 2018 and 2024, DKU’s undergraduate population doubled, according to the university’s official milestones. Over the same period, the number of international students continued to rise. DKU saw 8,006 international undergraduate applications for the Fall 2026-2027 school year, which DKU has described as a “36% jump from a year earlier,” which has set a high for international demand. This is the eighth consecutive year the university has set a new high for international demand.
Students such as Shivam Mani, a former DKU student and then Duke transfer, and others have had conflicting opinions on the institution. Born in California and now studying Chinese semiconductor industrial policy in the UK, Mani shared the thinking behind his original decision to attend DKU as a “very positive” opportunity because “you got a lot of people attending the school who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to attend a school like Duke or experience China.”
Institutionally, the pipeline between DKU and Duke has remained stable. DKU undergraduates are offered the opportunity to spend a semester on Duke’s Durham campus during their junior year, helping to fill in the vacancy left by more than half of Duke students who study abroad during their junior year as well. While opinions on Duke’s campus about DKU remain complex, in fall 2025, over 1,900 students were evenly split when asked whether DKU students were “Cool” or “Not cool” on the anonymous campus forum Fizz—a dissonant result for a liberal campus. Student-led organizations such as the Kunshan Student Ambassador Council have actively facilitated dialogue and exchange. Administratively, Duke has continued to express satisfaction with DKU’s teaching and research output.
International metrics appear to support this confidence. DKU received an overall five-star rating in the QS Stars system, a ranking of institutional strengths and weaknesses run by a British higher education analytics firm, earning the highest-level recognition in teaching quality, campus facilities, employability, academic development, and global engagement.
The university has also begun to produce high-profile academic outcomes. DKU recently received its second Schwarzman Scholar. Students and faculty affiliated with DKU have also received Erasmus Mundus scholarships, Clare Hall Visiting Fellowships, and other internationally competitive awards. The Rhodes Trust has even held dedicated information sessions at DKU, a gesture that signals recognition within elite global academic networks.
The Letter
National security concerns are paramount in the political critique of institutions like DKU. The congressmen’s claim of a national security threat was most strongly evidenced in two regards. In considering the implications of DKU, they looked towards the downstream effects of the research and education. “Duke Kunshan University researchers have published papers with Chinese defense scientists from firms, including Huawei, Tencent, and Lenovo, that are at the forefront of Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy. Many DKU graduates have gone on to work at these companies.” But the same article the letter cites also states that these students were side by side with peers who instead joined the world’s top foreign-exchange programs, including Schwarzman, Rhodes, Yenching, and McCall MacBain, or joined companies such as Google, McKinsey, the World Health Organization, and AstraZeneca.
As for specific transfers of Duke technology to DKU, $25 million in Pentagon funding for military surveillance went to Duke researchers in 2012. The United States rejected the technology later in 2016, which prompted the Principal Investigator to relocate to China and join Duke Kunshan University, a move that the letter describes as undermining the original taxpayer’s intent “to strengthen America’s technological and defense capabilities.” The letter did not mention any more recent technological transfers.
Heightened Scrutiny, Changing Tides
At the national level, DKU’s development has unfolded against a backdrop of deteriorating Sino-US relations. Since the outbreak of the Sino-US trade war in January 2018, bilateral ties have not returned to their previous tightness. Despite this broader geopolitical chill, Chinese authorities have continued to signal support for the Duke–DKU initiative.
In May 2018, just before DKU welcomed its first undergraduate class, Duke President Vincent Price made his inaugural presidential trip to China. During that visit, he met with officials from China’s Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, and State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, an unusually high-level reception that demonstrates Beijing’s interest in the project.
That support later became codified in policy. In 2021, DKU and its ongoing development were formally incorporated into the “Overall Plan for the Construction of the Hongqiao International Open Hub” as well as Jiangsu Province’s 14th Five-Year Plan and its long-term development goals through 2035.
The Duke venture had an additional ambition: to capture the talent emerging from China’s youth population, and this prediction proved consistent with the nation’s trajectory. But perhaps more revealing is how DKU graduates themselves have come to understand their place within global higher education. Among students at DKU, a half-exaggerated but telling popular claim is that Duke graduate schools function almost as a “safety school.” This sentiment reflects how DKU has enabled students, many of whom might not otherwise have entered international academic circuits at the undergraduate level, to navigate international academia with preparedness and fluency.
According to former provost Lange, DKU’s competitiveness and its rigorous curriculum in the sciences have transformed the Kunshan campus. DKU’s ability to promote international intellectual engagement and a sense of multiculturalism in both China and Durham has been a vital asset to Duke. In this sense, the House Republicans’ characterization of DKU as a “direct pipeline between U.S. innovation and China’s military-industrial complex” compresses the complex, triangular relationship between Duke, DKU, and China into a narrow national-security lens. But the desk of global academia, as many at Duke argue, has room for far more than defense and homeland security alone.
Associate Vice Provost, Global Administration and the head of Duke Office of DKU Relations, Valerie Hausman underscores the principle of Duke within the world, highlighting that the school “view(s) international engagement as an important investment in our students and faculty.” As for what that means for DKU, Hausman, from her seat on the Ambassador Council, expressed confidence in the venture’s value: “Programs such as Duke Kunshan University (DKU) are one expression of this broader commitment, creating opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural learning and collaboration.”
Before the onset of the Trump administration’s second term, when elite universities increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of political scrutiny, DKU’s trajectory appeared largely ascendant. Institutional partnerships were expanding, enrollment was rising, and international recognition continued to accumulate, at least on the surface.
“A Duke with Chinese Characteristics”
Establishing a university in an entirely different cultural and political environment is not something that can be achieved overnight—nor would it ever be possible to fully replicate Duke in Kunshan.
In what some scholars have described as a new Cold War era, American higher education initiatives in China have found themselves caught between two forms of pressure. On one hand is Chairman Xi Jinping’s increasing emphasis on censorship and academic surveillance; on the other is mounting scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers following the Second presidency of Donald Trump, particularly House Republicans. Under pressure, several leading universities, including the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, have recently shuttered their joint-venture programs in China, citing concerns about Chinese partner institutions’ involvement in Beijing’s military modernization efforts. Claims by House Republicans that DKU’s academic programs serve as “channels through which sensitive U.S. technologies and research expertise are transferred to the PRC” underscore the sensitivity and opacity that characterize the Chinese government’s relationship with universities.
Former Provost Lange, along with Mani and many DKU students interviewed, rejected these accusations as overstated or “bullshit,” as Mani put it. They argue that if specific research raised legitimate concerns, it could be modified or discontinued. To them, DKU’s characterization as a national security threat was unreasonable.
Still, as Haagen and many concerned faculty members have noted, the idea of simply transplanting Duke into Kunshan has never been realistic. One issue is the starkly different political culture.
At DKU, censorship has manifested itself in often discreet or socially permissible ways. A DKU student interviewed spoke about how censorship embedded itself in social situations, such as avoiding “sensitive topics like Tibet,” where mainly Chinese students would say, “put your phone away, don’t say it in Chinese or don’t say the name Xi Jinping too loudly.” Though these comments were made in “half serious and half joking” ways, there was still a palpable sense of fear of reprisal among the Chinese population at DKU.
Inside the classroom, however, students reported a comparatively greater sense of security when expressing criticism or dissenting views. Students noted that, through tools such as VPNs, they retain access to academic resources, including Canvas and the Duke Online Library, that are nearly identical to those available in Durham. One student further emphasized that the absence of recordings and explicit classroom confidentiality norms allowed DKU students, particularly Chinese students, to “say what’s on their mind and freely criticize whatever they want to criticize, without fearing that what they say will travel beyond the room.”
It is perhaps under these conditions that the exchange between DKU and Duke has remained uneven. Each semester, about 250 DKU students travel from Kunshan to Durham, while, according to members of the Classes of 2025, only one Duke junior has chosen to study abroad at DKU. This asymmetry raises a central question that The Lemur cares about: as more Chinese students are practicing the “American way,” but few Duke students acquire the kind of Chinese cultural literacy that Professor Blair Sheppard once envisioned, what does this imbalanced cultural exchange say about the success or failure of the venture?
DKU administrators we spoke with were reluctant to discuss issues of academic freedom and asked not to be named in this article. Although the letter claims that DKU is operating in conjunction with the CCP, Duke and DKU administrators have repeatedly stated that DKU operates independently. At the same time, concerns persist that the Chinese Ministry of Education’s political guidelines and restrictions on foreign materials have affected DKU’s academic environment.
These pressures have led to a push to “narrow [the] political space in which institutions like DKU operate,” Haagen said. However, Haagan’s view on the Kunshan project has gained clarity since his initial uncertainty. “I have remained attentive to how Duke has upheld academic integrity within these constraints.”
Whether Duke’s institutional spirit truly resonates in the halls of DKU remains an open question, one that is continuously evolving and actively debated by faculty and students on both sides of the Pacific.
The Central Question Revisited
On the wall of Duke’s Perkins Library is a quote from President Brodhead: “This school has always taken pleasure in what it was, but kept reaching for the further thing it could become.”
Duke has, over the course of a century, undeniably grown into a vital engine of talent and one of the most important universities in the country. It absolutely takes great pride in these achievements, yet it is also animated by an irrepressible sense of ambition—Duke is never satisfied
Duke, with distinct geographical and historical factors compared to the other Top10 institutes, must chart its own course toward becoming a globally renowned university, moving from training generations of leaders in medicine, engineering, law, public policy, and athletics for the American South, to welcoming and cultivating extraordinary, youthful minds from around the world, and ultimately becoming a new hub of global academic and cultural exchange.
Duke Kunshan University emerged from this ambition. It is, without question, a bold and consequential step—one that perhaps most clearly embodies Brodhead’s vision of “reaching for the further thing it could become.” It is a project that feels both visionary and risky, and one that will likely be remembered as a defining institutional gamble of Duke’s second century.
DKU has a unique role in expanding access to international education. In our conversations with many DKU students, we were struck by the importance of DKU’S With generous financial aid and the unique promise of a liberal arts education within China. The university has offered a pathway into the “international narrative” for students who would otherwise have remained peripheral to it. It also undoubtedly built a strong bridge between the two major players in the new world.
Of course, DKU’s limitations are real. Academic freedom operates within constraints. Cultural exchange remains uneven. From Durham, it is easy to catalogue DKU’s “imperfections.” DKU is not a mirror image of Duke but a hybrid shaped by political realities, historical timing, and rapidly changing global flows.
On January 28th, 2026, DKU announced that its Class of 2030, the first admissions cycle since House Republicans targeted DKU, had received a record 8,006 international undergraduate applications, a 36 percent increase from the previous year and the eighth consecutive year of record-breaking international demand. The applications, filed by thousands of international applicants amid mounting geopolitical uncertainty, may be attributed in part to ongoing visa uncertainties and the transformation of geopolitics in the last year. The continued popularity of DKU raises the important question of whether the shortcomings obvious from Durham matter only within Durham.
In an age when internationalism is—sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly—receding, DKU, an artifact of globalization’s golden hour, inevitably draws scrutiny. Will the wave of such globalization return? We don’t have an answer. But, for the moment, DKU endures, and its endurance makes one thing clear: Duke remains watching, waiting, dreaming of going beyond.
Alejandro Nina Duran, May Lou, and Jane Mo are the members of the Lemur Investigative Team that researched and wrote this article over the course of five months.
