John F. Burness serves as Senior Counsel to Widmeyer higher education clients and as a member of the firm’s Higher Education Advisory Panel. Burness has nearly forty years of expertise in crisis communications, media relations, the federal government and the relationship between universities and their host communities. He served as the senior public affairs leader at prestigious public and private institutions including Duke University, Cornell University, the University Illinois and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Serving for 17 years as Duke’s senior vice president, Burness directed government relations, led communication of the unprecedented successes of the campus and addressed worldwide media attention related to the university’s crises. Burness currently holds the position of Visiting Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy of Duke’s Terry Sanford School of Public Policy.

A prolific speaker, Burness also shares his expertise by serving as trustee of two institutions–Franklin & Marshall College and Durham Technical Community College– as a member of the Eisenhower Foundation Fellows selection committee, in founding and leadership roles in Washington—based higher education associations and in a consulting capacity for more than 20 colleges and universities. Honors received include the 2009 RIAS Kommission Fellowship in Berlin, Germany; election as an honorary life member of the North Carolina Press Association and naming of a Durham elementary school science center in his honor.

A graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Burness has done graduate work at Stony Brook and Boston University and pursued doctoral study in higher education management at the University of Maryland.