Brodhead said $148.6 million of the $300 million goal has already been given or pledged, including $100 million to be used to encourage other donors to provide endowment funds for financial aid that will be matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

Brodhead is scheduled to outline the new initiative Thursday evening in a speech at the Washington Duke Inn to more than 330 current Duke scholarship students, financial aid donors, university trustees and officials. In an interview Thursday morning, he said the fund-raising effort will increase to more than $1 billion –- roughly one-quarter of Duke’s total endowment –- the amount reserved for scholarship support for students who “would not otherwise be able to afford to study at Duke.”

In October, Brodhead announced that $75 million had been committed to match new gifts for financial aid by The Duke Endowment, a Charlotte-based charitable trust established by DukeUniversity founder James Buchanan Duke in 1924. The gift was the largest in the Endowment’s 81-year history and the largest ever received by Duke University for any purpose.

The hosts for Thursday evening’s program will be award-winning broadcast journalist and former CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, a financial aid recipient during her undergraduate years at Duke, and the initiative’s co-chairs, Duke alumni Sally Dalton Robinson and G. Richard Wagoner Jr. During the event, they planned to identify four donors who have pledged a total of $25 million to match new gifts, bringing the matching funds to $100 million. The four donors are:

-- Kevin R. and Gayla J. Compton;

-- Bruce Karsh, a Duke alumnus and trustee, and his wife Martha;

-- Robert K. Steel, a Durham native, Duke alumnus and chairman of the university’s board of trustees, and his wife Gillian;

-- Karl von der Heyden, a Duke alumnus and vice chairman of the university’s board of trustees, and his wife Mary Ellen.

According to Robinson, a trustee emerita from Charlotte, and Wagoner, a current Duke trustee who is chairman and CEO of General Motors Corp., the $100 million to be used to match new gifts on a dollar-for-dollar basis is the largest amount ever available to Duke University donors for matching purposes.

Brodhead said the university has been engaged since January in a “quiet phase” of the new initiative. He predicted that the availability of “unprecedented matching funds” would spur new contributions to enhance Duke’s financial aid endowment.

Duke undergraduates Mary Reid Ervin and Carly O’Connor, co-chairs of the Financial Aid Initiative Student Advisory Council, are scheduled to present to Brodhead Thursday evening a statement of support that had been signed by more than 2,500 students. It reads, in part, "Many of us, many of our classmates and many of Duke's most accomplished alumni could not have attended Duke if it weren't for the university's commitment to financial aid -- and without financial aid students, Duke would not be Duke."

Provost Peter Lange, the university’s senior academic officer, says new financial aid resources will ensure the university’s long-term ability to maintain a “need-blind” admissions policy while continuing to strengthen its academic and other programs.

“Over the past decade, Duke’s support for financial aid had been the fastest growing component of the university’s operating budget, growing by 100 percent. This commitment to financial aid has enabled Duke to enroll a much more socially and economically diverse student body while significantly increasing the intellectual quality of our students. The two are not unrelated,” Lange said.

Duke is among a small number of schools across the country with a need-blind admissions policy that admits students without regard to their ability to pay. It commits to provide a four-year financial aid package to meet the demonstrated financial need of qualified students.

Some 40 percent of Duke’s undergraduates receive need-based aid from the university in financial aid “packages” that consist of grants, loans and work that average about $28,000. Of that, $21,000 is in outright grants from the university. Last year, Duke invested about $129 million in financial aid: more than $50 million for doctoral students, $19 million for professional school students and $59 million for undergraduates. Approximately three-quarters of the money for undergraduates went to students based on their financial need, with the balance used for athletic scholarships and a limited number of merit scholarships.

“While Duke already has enlightened aid policies and already funds undergraduate, graduate and professional student aid in hefty sums, at Duke, far, far less of our aid budget comes from restricted endowments than is the case at our strongest rivals,” Brodhead said in an interview. “Duke meets its aid commitments out of the same pool of funds that supports most everything else here, including academic programs. And what this means is that, in lean years or hard times, Duke’s need to fund student aid will be in competition with its need to fund the programs that would make top students and faculty want to come here in the first place.

“I want to keep Duke accessible to talented students in all foreseeable futures and I want to prevent any future collision between two fundamental imperatives: our obligation to social openness and our obligation to academic excellence. The success of the Financial Aid Initiative in raising permanent support for financial aid is crucial for this university’s future health,” Brodhead said.