The Hart Leadership Program was founded in 1986 at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy with a generous gift from Milledge A. Hart III and his family.  As the first endowed leadership program for undergraduates in country, we began offering classes in 1987.  Since then, more than 8000 Duke undergraduate students have taken our courses and participated in our experiential learning programming.  We have worked with hundreds of community partners in North Carolina, across the United States, and around the world.  Highlights of our recent history include: 

• Pioneering the use of Research Service Learning (RSL) to help students develop leadership skills. From 2002-2006, HLP partnered with the Kenan Institute for Ethics to implement a campus-wide RSL initiative called Scholarship with a Civic Mission, which was funded by a FIPSE grant from the U.S. Department of Education. 
• Contributing to a national discussion and participating in research about the role of undergraduate leadership studies in higher education.  Our pedagogy of leadership education has been profiled in several books, including Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility (Colby et al., 2003), Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World (Parks, 2005), and Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement (Colby et al., 2007). The Chronicle of Higher Education has called the Hart Leadership Program one of the best-known leadership programs in the country.
• Participating in a five-year study, the Forum on Excellence in Higher Education. The study was coordinated by Professor Richard Light of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Graduate School of Education. Duke joined 14 other colleges and universities in the study, including Harvard, MIT, Georgetown, Middlebury and Wellesley. The themes of the Duke project were developing a robust culture for undergraduate research, and civic and political participation.

 Click here to view an interactive timeline of our history »