About Duke University

One of the world’s leading research institutions – and one of North Carolina’s largest employers

Duke University enrols 17,325 students across 10 schools and colleges, runs 10 university-wide research institutes, and employs more than 48,000 people across all its locations.

Like every institution of its scale, Duke runs on policy. But at Duke, responsibility for the policy governing academic life sits not with human resources – it sits with the Office of the Provost and its Office of Faculty Affairs. The distinction is deliberate: HR administers staff employment, while faculty appointment, promotion and tenure are matters of academic governance.

Faculty Affairs owns the Faculty Handbook – the document defining how 4,236 faculty members, 1,655 of them tenured or on the tenure track, are appointed, promoted and granted tenure.

The challenge

A governance document trapped inside a PDF

The Faculty Handbook is not reference material anyone reads once. It covers appointments, promotion and tenure, research compliance, conflict of interest and the procedures behind every faculty personnel decision – and it is consulted at the moments that matter most in an academic career. When a department opens a search. When a junior faculty member assembles a tenure dossier. When a chair needs to know whether a leave affects a tenure clock.

Duke operates on a shared governance model established in 1972, under which faculty and administration jointly steward academic affairs. In the university’s own words, the handbook exists to create “the mutual understanding of our faculty and our administration” regarding those policies.

A document carrying that weight was being distributed as a single PDF file.

Nothing could be found quickly. Finding a clause meant opening the file and searching within it – assuming you had the current version.

Nothing could be updated in isolation. Changing one policy meant reissuing the entire handbook.

Nothing could be linked to. A chair could not send a colleague the tenure clause. Only the whole document.

Across 10 schools, each with its own structures and bylaws, the handbook had to say the same thing to everyone – and prove what it had said, and when.

Before

  • Documentation format: One PDF document
  • Structure: Sequential file
  • Finding a policy: Search within the file
  • Updating a policy: Reissue the whole handbook
  • Linking to a clause: Not possible
  • Proving what it said: Dated by file version
  • AI access: None – a PDF cannot be queried

After

  • Documentation format: 42 individually addressable articles
  • Structure: 6 handbook chapters · 10 research policy chapters · 13 appendices
  • Finding a policy: Instant search across two manuals
  • Updating a policy: Revise one article, logged in a revisions record
  • Linking to a clause: Every article has its own address
  • Proving what it said: Article-level revision history
  • AI access: Machine-readable index · open in ChatGPT or Claude

The solution

Published on Duke’s own domain, structured as a book

Duke moved its faculty governance onto Document360, publishing at policies.provost.duke.edu – the university’s own domain, under Duke’s own branding.

Category manager – structured as a book, not a file

Duke rebuilt the handbook hierarchically: 6 handbook chapters, 10 research policy chapters and 13 appendices, 42 articles in total. Breadcrumbs and previous/next navigation keep it reading as a continuous document rather than a pile of disconnected pages.

Two manuals, one workspace

The Faculty Handbook and the Duke University Research Policy Manual sit side by side on a single site – distinct bodies of governance, one place to find them.

Version control built for documents that must be provable

Duke maintains a dedicated revisions record for each manual, with every article carrying its own revision date. For a handbook that defines how tenure is granted, knowing exactly what the policy said and when it changed is the entire point.

Public knowledge base – open to everyone who needs it

The handbook is published without a log-in. Faculty, chairs, coordinators and prospective hires reach it directly – no credentials, no access request, no barrier.

Full-text search across the whole corpus

Instant search from any page, on a keyboard shortcut.

Machine-readable publishing – governance an AI can answer from

The complete handbook is published as a machine-readable index at policies.provost.duke.edu/llms.txt. Every page offers “Copy as Markdown for LLMs”, and every article carries “Open in ChatGPT” and “Open in Claude” buttons. A department chair facing a question about tenure timelines can send the chapter straight to an AI assistant and ask it directly.

A PDF cannot do this. A PDF cannot be queried, cannot be reasoned over, cannot answer a question posed in plain English. Duke’s faculty governance is no longer merely published. It is queryable.

Conclusion

What happens when policy stops being a document

Duke’s story reflects a pattern now common wherever documentation carries governance weight – universities, regulated industries, professional bodies. Institutions move away from version-locked, distributed files toward live, searchable, individually addressable knowledge bases, and the reasons are consistent: policy must be findable in seconds, updatable without reissue, citable clause by clause, and provable as of a given date.

Duke’s content did not change. What changed is that it can now be found, cited, proven and – uniquely – read by both the people and the machines that need to answer questions from it.