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Associate Provost

Noah Pickus is associate provost at Duke University, with responsibilities in academic strategy, global initiatives, educational innovation, and policy engagement. A faculty member at Duke for 25 years, he served as vice-chair for the university’s 2017 academic strategic plan and managed the Duke 2030 strategy team, as well as cross-university initiatives in health system organization, experimental and collaborative learning, continuing and online education, and state-wide leadership training. As the Nannerl O. Keohane director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, he led a signature university-wide interdisciplinary program for ten years and oversaw its expansion in research and high impact undergraduate programming. He also currently serves as dean for academic strategy and learning innovation at Duke Kunshan University, where he previously led curriculum design and faculty hiring as dean of undergraduate curriculum and faculty development.

Pickus has led several other educational ventures. As chief academic officer for Minerva Project, he managed a 40 person team that provided curriculum design, instructional training, data collection and analysis for online and in-person teaching in the U.S., Mexico, Asia, and Europe. As the founding director of the Institute for Emerging Issues under former Governor James B. Hunt Jr. at NC State University, he established a university-based venture in shaping public debate and public policy. He also co-directed the Arizona State University-Georgetown University Academy for Innovation in Higher Education Leadership Intensive Program, a training ground for entrepreneurial academic leaders.

Formerly a faculty member at Middlebury College and an American Council on Education fellow at Franklin & Marshall College, Pickus has written widely on innovation and globalization in higher education including (with Kara Godwin) Liberal Arts & Sciences Innovation in China (Center for International Higher Education). His book The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (with Bryan Penprase) is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. It tells the inside story behind the launch and development of eight innovative new colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America. It captures the dramatic quest by academic entrepreneurs to re-imagine education across the globe.

A professor of the practice at Duke, his previous work focused on immigration and citizenship.  He is the author of True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton University Press) and Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield), and he co-directed the Brookings-Duke Immigration Roundtable. He received a bachelor’s degree from the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and a doctorate in politics from Princeton University.

Selected Higher Education Publications and Conversations