ONCE upon a time, so the story goes, Duke University wanted to hire a famous scholar. Since it had a good deal of money, it offered a dazzling price, then sat back and waited for results. Sure enough, the famous scholar was too tempted to refuse. "Accept with pleasure," he replied, "but where is Duke University?"
In its 30 years as a university, Duke has suffered more than its share of taunts. Created almost overnight by the great Duke (Bull Durham, Lucky Strike) tobacco fortune, it arrived, like Cinderella, dressed for the ball. But what lay beneath the fancy facade? Today, Duke is in a better position to answer that question than ever before. If not yet out in front, it is giving its older sisters in the South an increasingly lively race.
"Well, There It Is." In a sense, wealthy (endowment: $20 million plus an annual income from the Duke Endowment Trust) Duke is really not at all the parvenu it seems. Long before its Gothic towers rose on the empty fields along the western edge of Durham, N.C., the town already had a solid little liberal arts college named Trinity. Said the Trinity catalogue in 1892: "The society of Durham is cultured and elegant." Even more important, elegant Durham also had money. Tobacco Tycoon Washington Duke poured thousands into
Trinity ("Well, there it is," he once exclaimed after plunking down another gift. "I never expect to give another dollar to it, and I wish I had never put a dollar into it"). His sons, Benjamin Newton and James Buchanan Duke, carried on the family tradition. Then, in 1910, Trinity got a new president who happened to have some ideas of his own on how to use the Duke money.
Shy, fidgety William Preston Few had a. sort of double vision. No dream was big enough for him, and no detail was too small ("I notice that there are lights that burn continuously in the library. Please find out where this fault is and have it remedied at once"). In 1921, thinking he was about to die of pneumonia, he wrote out a complete plan for turning Trinity into a full-fledged university, and just before lapsing into a coma, told his wife: "Put this in an envelope...and see that it gets to J. B. Duke." When he recovered, he kept on with his plan, and soon J. B. found himself doing just as Few had hoped. Cigar in mouth and cane in hand, J. B. picked out an 8,000-acre site next to Trinity, chose his type of architecture ("I've seen the Princeton buildings. They appeal to me."), ordered a chapel with 77 stained-glass windows and "the best medical center, by golly, between Baltimore and New Orleans." In December 1924, a year before J. B. Duke died, the new university was born.
In spite of Few's stature, the university met derision from the start. Some wag suggested that it change its motto from Eruditio et Religio to Eruditio, Religio et Cherooto et Cigaretto. Under Few's less able successor, President Robert L. Flowers, the situation grew worse: though Duke was already beginning to build up a solid faculty, its reputation as a playboy's haven lived on. It was not until 1949, when rangy (6 ft. 2½ in.) Arthur Hollis Edens took over, that it began to come back into its own.