For forty years, the Duke University Talent Identification Program has offered academically gifted youth across the U.S. and beyond access to some of the finest educational resources in the world. The Summer Studies Program, an immersive three-week precollege experience for junior high and high school students, constituted the central pillar of TiP's programming. As they watched late-night movies in residence hall lounges, met and engaged with youth from around the world, and took immersive courses in topics from geology to Monsters in the Modern Imagination, Summer Studies students got a taste of life at a top-tier university.

But those of us who've experienced TiP's Summer Studies Program know that, beyond and more significantly than the dazzling offerings in its course catalog, TiP gave us something else: the feeling of being completely accepted, many of us for the first time. While the educational and material resources of Duke TiP can't be overstated, families return generation after generation and countless TiPsters become TiP staffers because of the singular and powerful draw of the TiP community. More resonantly than anything else, Duke TiP has given us one another.

In a statement issued in early October, the Executive Vice Provost of Duke University announced that TiP's annual talent search would be suspended permanently. The Summer Studies Program would be replaced in the short term with a series of online courses and in the long term with "new programs that serve a broad cross-section of talented youth and precollege learners while sustaining the sense of community that TIP has built over the past 40 years."

While this statement leaves just enough ambiguity to permit a sense of hope, the Duke University Chronicle confirmed on October 13th that Duke will be laying off 75 year-round TiP staff on Jan 6, 2021. The program has no plans to re-hire. 

In other words, Duke TiP's Summer Studies Program is slated to end permanently. 

We cannot let this stand.

As stakeholders in the TiP community who've given our time, our finances, and our talents to Duke TiP--and to whom TiP has given a vested interest in its future--we deserve transparency. We demand to know in plain terms why Duke plans to terminate one of its most lucrative and beneficial enrichment programs.

Further, we will not let TiP become relegated to online-only programming or altered in mission and impact to become anything less than it was. "Sustaining the sense of community that TiP has built" means sustaining TiP itself, even if by another name.

We must know that Duke TiP will continue to be a place where talented students, whoever they are, can come to find one another, and in so doing, find themselves.

Duke TiP has transformed lives for forty years. Don't let it stop now.