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Buildings. Duke moved last Autumn out from Durham and up the broad asphalt avenue to the clearing in the forest. The women's college took possession of the old Trinity campus with several new buildings added. The first spring in the clearing finds everything there completed— 31 separate structures—except the great chapel which is rising opposite where the asphalt avenue sweeps into the clearing. The long axis of the campus is at right angles to the avenue, with the hospital at the right end as you enter and dormitory quadrangles opening off the left end, beyond the long double row of lecture halls, library, students' union, auditorium. Behind the chapel is the stadium. All is modern, thoroughly equipped, efficient. In the students' union are shiny dish-washing and potato-peeling machines. In the theatre is the latest cinema for 150. The stadium seats 35,000. Architect of the whole scene is Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia, who frankly and freely drew upon the best features of Oxford and Cambridge for his inspiration. The net result is a synthesis of extraordinary completeness and perfection, incongruous though a brand-new medieval community may seem in a Carolina forest.
Students. Possessed of dignity as well as wealth, Duke does not call itself the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or Princeton of the South. It is and means to be Duke University, second to none, with the flower of the land coming to it from all the States. The present student body, some 1,200 male undergraduates and some 1,100 students in the women's college and schools of Medicine, Nursing, Law, Religion and the Graduate School, is drawn from 40 States.
Duke students are not yet distinguishable from their contemporaries at other inland institutions. They paint DUKE on their slickers, have "dates" with the coeds, occasionally buy a fruit jar of corn liquor. They talk hopefully of their teams (their baseball team beat Cornell last month; they are proud of their new football coach, Wallace Wade). The local Greek-letter fraternities have no houses of their own, but the members of different brotherhoods are allowed to bunch themselves in the dormitories for a sort of "house plan" life—Kappa Alpha in Kilgo House, Sigma Alpha Epsilon in Craven House, etc. etc.—some of them with faculty members in residence.
Faculty. An amiable president is Duke's Dr. William Preston Few. Tall, lank, Vandyke-bearded, he waves cheerily to one & all as he strolls about his campus. Once an English professor, he became president of Trinity College in 1910. His campus nickname: "Sis." His fellow townsmen remember that when the children of Benjamin Newton Duke were young—Mary, and "Angy" (Angier), who fell from a yacht tender at Newport in 1923 and was drowned—Dr. Few used to ride with them in their ponycart. Like many another Duke official, he is a Rotarian. A friend of North Carolina's hard-bitten little Methodist ex-Senator Furnifold McLendel Simmons, he was like him a leading Hoovercrat. Many North Carolinians believe Dr. Few to be a shrewd, astute politician backed by the Duke Endowment, heading a powerful lobby which could swing the election, for example, of a Methodist bishop, or aid in such an appointment as that of Hoovercrat Frank R. McNinch to the Federal Power Commission.