An Inspirational Duke Professor’s Last Lesson

In the spring of his senior year at Duke University in 1994, Jay Woffington figured he was headed to law school. Then he took Tony Brown’s leadership class. 

Brown prodded Woffington relentlessly about his beliefs and how he could most make a difference. Woffington was so stirred by Brown’s class that he ditched law school and embarked on an eclectic and successful career that has included serving as president of an international digital marketing agency, executive director of a nonprofit professional theater, and CEO of a brewery with iconic Cincinnati brands such as Hudepohl. 

Brown emphasized reflection—and action. He wanted the students to live their values. 

“It’s not just philosophy class,” Woffington told The Assembly. “It’s also not just therapy. He’s going to say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”

Brown was a professor in what is now called the Sanford School of Public Policy from 1993 until his retirement in 2021. (He took a three-year break in the middle to lead a Duke-UNC Chapel Hill scholarship program.) Brown taught 2,300 students over his career. Many of them say he changed their lives. 

“If I could name one person who has had the most impact on my life from Duke, it would be Tony Brown. He modeled mentorship for me,” Lori Cashman, the founder of a venture capital firm, said in 2022 when she and her husband gave $1 million to Duke. Part of the money established an innovation fund at the Sanford School in honor of Brown and his wife, Teddie, who also worked there. 

Brown emails his former students regularly. Last September, he delivered some bad news: He’d been diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer that had spread to his liver. (He later learned that the cancer started in his esophagus.) 

His oncologist said that with chemotherapy, he likely could live for 18 months, possibly a year or two more.

“We experience tears of gratitude for our lives and our friendships,” Brown wrote, “not tears of sadness.”

His former students have rallied around him. Over two recent weekends, 100 of them traveled from around the country to meet with him at Duke, to reflect on their lives since college, and to recharge with their Friends of Tony community. They ranged in age from their 20s to their 50s. 

Brown, though 82 and retired, was as engaged and energetic as always—questioning, challenging, connecting, inspiring. 

A Winding Path to Academia

By his own account, Brown, who grew up in Connecticut, was an indifferent college student. He started at Duke, dropped out, enrolled at Southern Connecticut State University, transferred to the University of Connecticut, won a campus beer-chugging event, dropped out, returned, and eventually received a degree from UConn in 1965.

It was there that he met Teddie, whom he credits with changing his life. They’ve been married for 59 years. 

Brown succeeded in business, rising to become chairman and CEO of Covenant Insurance Company in Connecticut for nearly a decade. He told me that he had a people-oriented leadership style and that he was never motivated by money or achievement. Being CEO was “a shiny object,” he said, but he wanted something more fulfilling. 

He thought he might want to be a college president, but a short stint in administration at his alma mater convinced him otherwise. Then he worked for two years as chief operating officer of Credit Suisse First Boston’s global equity business. He was nearing 50 and didn’t really know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. 

He landed at Duke in the spring of 1993, teaching a business leadership class. Within two weeks, he knew. “That first class was magical,” he said. The following year, he joined the faculty as a professor of the practice. He never left. 

He wanted his class to be not just his students’ best class, but their best Duke experience. He was consumed by teaching. He never wanted to be on some strategic planning committee. He taught courses in enterprising organizational change, social entrepreneurship, moral development, socially responsible businesses, and public-private collaboration. 

He said his classes were a combination of Socrates (“The unexamined life is not worth living”) and action. Students had to (1) Think deeply; (2) Get in the game; and (3) Be part of a community. They often had to complete a “real results” project, typically in Durham. Among other things, his students created Camp Kesem, a summer camp for children whose parents have cancer, and Student U, a nonprofit that supports Durham Public School students seeking to become the first in their families to attend college. 

While other Duke classes typically involved a professor imparting a body of knowledge, Brown’s former students say his classes were more about prodding them to clarify their beliefs and take action. 

“The energy was palpable in the classroom,” said Caroline Brown (she is not related to Tony), a 1998 graduate and former Justice and Treasury department lawyer who now practices national security law in Washington, D.C. “It was a different sort of class, a hands-on sort of class.” 

Brown never considered himself a motivated high-achiever (he calls himself “a small potatoes guy”), but his students were typically driven. Duke is among the most prestigious and selective universities in the world. Many undergrads are on a path toward finance, consulting, law, or medicine. Brown urged them to be willing to go against the grain. 

Parker Gilbert, who graduated in 2017, said Brown’s class was different from every other class he took at Duke. “He helped me get comfortable with taking risks,” he said during a break at one of the recent weekend events. Gilbert, who lives in San Francisco, is the co-founder and CEO of Numeric, an AI accounting startup. 

Julia Parker Goyer, who graduated in 2007, is a policy research scientist in San Jose, California for the College Board, a nonprofit that helps students in their transition to higher education. She played varsity tennis at Duke, was a Rhodes Scholar, and has a doctorate from Harvard. At Duke, she created a program that sends college athletes to rural communities in Vietnam to work with middle-school-aged children. 

She majored in psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience, but heard good things about Brown’s class and enrolled—the only public policy class she took. She returned to Duke this month to reestablish her connection to him.

“Tony is a unique teacher and personality,” Goyer said. “I don’t think Tony sees himself as an academic. He’s more interested in personal relationships and conversations and trying to help you become your best self.”

24 Hours With Tony

Brown’s relationship with many of his students was just beginning when they graduated from Duke. He estimates he’s friends with about 1,000 of them. Many touch base with him at key moments of their lives, personal and professional. When they heard he was ill, they wanted to see him again. 

In May, two dozen of his former students traveled to Duke for an event called “24 Hours at Duke with Tony Brown.” In June, another 75 attended a similar event. Woffington, one of the organizers, described the original concept as a “pre-wake” for Brown. But Brown flipped the script. 

“I’m glad to be here, of course,” Brown said with a wry smile on the evening of Friday, June 13, as he stood in the commons at the Sanford School and addressed the alums mingling in front of him. He held a Diet Coke and wore jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt, and red running shoes. 

He said he didn’t want the weekend to be about him. He wanted it to be like his old classes. Brown distributed handouts titled “Change Model Definition” and “The Innovation and Problem-Solving Analysis Process.” On Saturday, there were breakout sessions led by alums on “Leading and Loving Through Family Transitions” and “Friends at Work: The Hidden Engines of Great Companies.” 

“I’m not here to say goodbye,” Brown said. “We’re not doing a pre-wake. We’re going to go fast. I need your A game.”

In the closing session on Saturday afternoon, Brown led a discussion about how the group could continue without him. He always wanted his classes to consider themselves a team and to work together. Now there’s a whole community of former students who are bound by their affection for Brown and by their connection to each other. 

“Tony’s alumni are pretty amazing,” said Yoav Lurie, an entrepreneur and investor who graduated in 2005 and now lives in Boulder, Colorado. “Many of my friends from Duke are through Tony.” 

After Duke, Lurie and another “Tony alum” co-founded a software company for utilities to help customers manage their energy use. Now he’s chairman of WattBuy, a clean energy marketplace platform. 

“Find great people. Engage them in your vision,” Lurie wrote recently in Duke Magazine. “Lead with clarity. And celebrate their wins. I first learned these things at Duke, and they have guided me ever since.” 

During a break in “24 Hours at Duke,” Lurie sat just a few yards from Brown’s old office, where the door was always open. Back then, there were two chairs outside the door, often filled with students waiting for some time with Brown. They didn’t have to schedule an appointment; they could just pop in. 

“He came here to shape young people,” Lurie said. “Everything else was a mechanism to get there. [The classes] gave you permission for the rest of it.”

A Tree Grows in Durham

Brown considers himself spiritual but not religious. He doesn’t pray. He says he’s agnostic about God’s existence, but he’s a longtime member of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Durham. He shares church members’ values, he said, if not their faith. But he’s open to the possibility that God is present and said some recent signs were pointing him in that direction.

“My relationships with my students can’t just be explained by me being a good teacher,” he said. 

At the start of the most recent weekend at Duke, Brown told the group he could have three months, or he could have three years. Either way, he wanted to steer the alums toward the future and what they could do to renew their efforts to work on their most important priorities. 

The weekend energized him. “Our Gathering was a huge source of meaning to my life,” he wrote attendees two days later. “I couldn’t be more grateful and fulfilled. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

He’d also received a good report from his doctor. The cancer in his stomach and liver had shrunk. The chances he could live beyond the original 18-month prediction had improved. But, he wrote, he had to continue to face the reality that his prognosis could flip.

After attending the most recent weekend retreat at Duke, I saw Brown again the day after the relatively upbeat report from his physician. He was in full Tony mode, holding court over coffee at the Washington Duke Inn, introducing me to an old friend, and talking about the future. 

In the mid-1990s, Brown served on the Sanford School faculty with Terry Sanford himself, the former Duke president who created the program that now bears his name. Sanford had an outrageously full life: World War II paratrooper, lawyer, state legislator, governor, university president, author, U.S. senator, two-time candidate for U.S. president. He kept working on projects until he died at 80 in 1998.

At his funeral, his lifelong friend Dickson Phillips said that if Sanford was confronted with the end of existence, “the thing to do would be to plant a tree, to write a book, or start building something worthwhile.” Brown was so moved by Phillips’ eulogy that he regularly showed video of it to his students. 

He told them recently that he still wants “to plant trees, to start new things”; some of his alums call him “Tony Appleseed.” One of his new things is a podcast with alums and other friends, “At the Table with Tony.” 

On the first episode, he chatted with former student Dan Kimberg, a 2007 alum. Brown told him he had no regrets and no bucket list; he was going to continue to lead his life as he always had. 

“I defined the life I wanted to live,” Brown said, “and I’m living it.” 

He wanted his students to be able to say the same. He taught them about organizational relationships, change models, and core leadership principles. But to the students, his most important lessons—the ones they’ll always remember—were about how to live.