Gloria Charmian Duffy (born September 4, 1953) is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive. Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. From 2010 to 2017 she led the fundraising, acquisition, financing, design, entitlements and construction of the club's first headquarters building, at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The grand opening for the club's new building took place on September 12, 2017. The building received a 2016 California Heritage Council award for historic preservation. She is the "voice" of the Commonwealth Club radio broadcast, heard weekly on 230 stations throughout the US, which has been on the air continuously for 101 years, since 1924.
In February, 2022 Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi appointed Duffy to be a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. The Strategic Posture Commission submitted its report to the Congress and the Executive Branch in October, 2023.
Early life and education Duffy's mother was Gloria S Duffy, a pioneering radio broadcaster in Missouri, Denver and San Francisco, as well Fashion Director of San Francisco's City of Paris department store and a philanthropist. Beloved in her community, Gloria Senior was a board member of United Way of the Bay Area and the American Red Cross Northern California Coastal Region, and a recipient of the Red Cross's Clara Barton Award for outstanding humanitarian service and volunteer leadership. She died in 2022. Gloria Jr. attended public schools in Lafayette, California, and began working in her family's real estate and land development office while a student at M. H. Stanley Middle School in 1965. She also taught sports to developmentally and intellectually challenged kids at Las Trampas School, through Futures Explored in Lafayette. She graduated from Acalanes High School in 1971, completing a full curriculum of life science courses. She excelled in Spanish, receiving a medal for her proficiency from the National Society of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Blueprint. While a student, she was on the Lafayette School District's Drug Education Committee. She also co-founded, with her classmate Dr. Donald Goff, the Lafayette Youth Services Commission, which marked its 50th anniversary in 2021.
Duffy holds a 1975 A.B. degree magna cum laude from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where her general studies track was science and human values, her major was interdisciplinary studies, she was a College Scholar and she was co-editor-in-chief of The Occidental Weekly, the campus newspaper. She was on the college's Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee.
Duffy holds a doctorate, an M.Phil. and an M.A. in political science, from Columbia University in New York, where she was a Presidents' Fellow, studied with the late Marshall D. Shulman, and was a research assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski. She was also research assistant to Dr. Gordon Adams. Her master's thesis was on the impact of US and Soviet policies in Iran and Iraq in the early 1970s on the two countries' Kurdish populations, completed with support from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., where she was a Humanitarian Policy Studies Fellow in the summer of 1976.
After completing her coursework at Columbia at the end of 1976, Duffy worked as a resident consultant at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California and then as Communications Director at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C., before returning to academia to complete her Ph.D.
In 1980, Dr. Coit Blacker invited Duffy to become an Arms Control Fellow at Stanford University's Arms Control Program. Duffy held a Hubert H. Humphrey Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, from the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which supported the preparation of her Columbia University doctoral thesis while at CISAC, on the impact of US domestic politics on the non-ratification of the SALT II Treaty. She was one of four female fellows Blacker recruited, notable in the largely male international security and arms control field, including Condoleezza Rice, who later became National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State; the late Janne Nolan, and Cynthia Roberts. Duffy and Rice lived together in a rented house in Palo Alto. Nolan began calling the group "the Fellowettes," a name that stuck and the group became life-long friends and colleagues.
Career
Duffy has had a varied career, including research, journalism, education, business, management, scientific collaboration and research funding, philanthropy, public service at the local and national levels, defense and arms control policy, international arms negotiations, conflict resolution and real estate management and development. She has founded, been President/CEO and chaired the board of a number of projects and organizations, including as the CEO of three organizations for a total of 46 years. Organizations she has founded, co-founded, of which she has chaired the board or was President and CEO include the Lafayette Youth Services Commission, Global Outlook, Ploughshares Fund, the World Forum of Silicon Valley, CRDF Global, the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy and the Commonwealth Club of California.
RAND Corporation From 1977 to 1978, Duffy was a Resident Consultant at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. RAND was supporting the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) for the US Department of Energy. Duffy authored a study for INFCE of Soviet nuclear exports and non-proliferation policies.
Arms Control Association From 1978 to 1980 she was Communications Director of the Arms Control Association, in Washington, D.C. and editor of its publication, Arms Control Today, which she and her colleagues improved and upgraded.
CISAC at Stanford Duffy has been associated for 45 years with CISAC (in its early years called The Arms Control Program) at Stanford, returning as a fellow in residence from 1985 to 1987 and from 1995 to 1996, teaching, participating in several policy research projects and leading one of them, and editing/authoring two books. She was on the Board of Visitors, renamed the International Advisory Board, of the Freeman Spogli Institute, of which CISAC is a part, at Stanford for 22 years. She reflected on the early history of CISAC, the impact of its work and her colleagues including physicists Dr. Sidney Drell and Dr. Wolfgang Panofsky, Dr. Condoleezza Rice and the other "fellowettes," Dr. Blacker, China scholar Dr. John Lewis, Secretary of Defense Dr. William Perry and others at CISAC at its 25th anniversary commemoration in 2009. She also spoke about the impact of the Arms Control Program's founder, and CISAC's first co-director, Dr. John Lewis, at a conference commemorating his legacy, held at Stanford in January, 2018. She was also proud to co-chair CISAC's 40th anniversary celebration, in 2024, with her life-long colleague Dr. Blacker.
Ploughshares Fund
In 1982, Duffy become the first executive director of a start-up organisation, Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation initiated in San Francisco by philanthropist Sally Lilienthal, former Nixon Administration official Lewis H. Butler and others. Ploughshares Fund works directly and provides grants to individuals and institutions working to diminish the threats of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation. She was executive director, 1982–1984, setting up initial grantmaking guidelines and procedures, helping to shape the funding priorities and process, and undertaking a number of special projects. During her tenure, Ploughshares funded a project between the US Natural Resources Defense Council and the Soviet Academy of Sciences to establish and collect data from seismic stations near the Soviet Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, demonstrating that seismic monitoring of low-level nuclear tests was possible. Demonstrating the verifiability of a low-threshold nuclear test ban enabled the United Nations to adopt the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996. In the years since, she has been on both the board of directors and the advisory board of Ploughshares Fund. She is currently a member of the advisory board.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
From 1984 to 1985, Duffy worked with Ruth Adams at the MacArthur Foundation in the creation of its International Peace and Security Program. In 1992 to 1993 she returned to the Foundation to assist in creating a funding program in the former Soviet Union and in the establishment of its Moscow office. She was in the 1980s and 1990s on the selection committee for the International Peace and Security Program's research and writing grants.
Global Outlook
In 1985, Duffy founded the independent research institute Global Outlook, based in Palo Alto, California which focused on US-Soviet relations and international security in the nuclear age. She was its president and CEO until 1993. Global Outlook undertook research, public policy advising and public education on issues including arms control treaty compliance and dispute resolution, the political psychology of the nuclear arms race, the sources and implications of "new thinking" about international relations under the Gorbachev leadership in the Soviet Union and verification of a chemical weapons treaty. Global Outlook also worked with new parliamentary leaders in the former Soviet countries to assist in their transition to civil society and civilian oversight of national security.
Books authored by Global Outlook staff included Compliance and the Future of Arms Control by Gloria Duffy, Greg Dalton, Matthew State and Leo Sartori; Minds at War by Steven Kull, and Burying Lenin by Steven Kull. Global Outlook's project on arms control compliance led to a 1987 hearing before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the validity of cases the Reagan Administration was making that the Soviet Union was cheating on arms control agreements, at which Duffy and other Stanford and Global Outlook experts testified.
Between 1991 and 1993, Global Outlook held six consultations among parliamentary leaders of the new Independent States and American national security and arms control experts, Members of Congress and Congressional staff members. Topics included the role of parliamentary committees in oversight of national security, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and control of nuclear exports, the transition from defense economies to peacetime productivity, legislative oversight of the defense budget, war powers and legislative oversight and the arms trade in a transitional economy. The reports from the conferences were published by Global Outlook.