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Mold & Wilt. A former Tennessee schoolteacher who got a Ph.D. from Harvard and became associate director of the Rockefeller-founded General Education Board. Edens has kept his two campuses (Gothic for men, Georgian for women) on a steady, upward course. He runs one of the top forestry schools in the nation, one of the ranking medical schools in the South. He has the 13th largest (1,150,000 volumes, 1,550,000 manuscripts) university library in the U.S., and though his law school is still trying to catch up, his flourishing divinity school is one of the South's principal suppliers of Methodist pulpits.
Duke physicists operate the Southeast's first 4,000,000-volt Van de Graaff nuclear accelerator. Its engineers developed an infra-red drying process for the South's textile industry, and its botanists have helped lead the fight against such tobacco plant diseases as blue mold and Granville wilt. Duke scientists established a worldwide registry for fungus diseases, successfully used the rice diet for high blood pressure, worked on every type of research from new techniques in plastic surgery to a vaccine for equine encephalitis.
Servant of All. Through its tobacco and textile research, Duke performed a duty that seems typical of Southern universities: it has made its contribution to the industrial welfare of the South. But Duke itself does not want to be the servant of one region alone. Its alumni include Vice President Richard Nixon (LL.B., '37), former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Gordon Dean (LL.M., '32) and President James Killian of M.I.T. (Trinity 1921-23). Its 5,011 students come from 41 different states and 30 foreign countries.
Except for Psychologist J. B. Rhine (extrasensory perception), few of Duke's professors have achieved popular fame. Yet, on almost any academic or Government committee, there is apt to be at least one faculty representative from Duke. Economist Calvin Hoover was one of Averell Harriman's top advisers on the Marshall Plan. Eber Malcolm Carroll, an authority on German history, served in the OSS during the war, directed the editing of captured German papers. Physicists Walter Nielsen and Lothar Nordheim played major roles at Oak Ridge. Neurosurgeon Barnes Woodhall is a ranking consultant to the Veterans Administration. Congregations throughout the East have heard the sermons of Preacher James T. Cleland, and the State Department has more than once called on the services of Political Scientist Robert R. Wilson, specialist in international law.
In spite of these distinguished scholars, the U.S. academic world still tends to look askance at its glittering Cinderella. For some reason, the canard persists that should midnight ever strike, the whole place would turn out to be a pumpkin after all. Yet, by any standard, Duke has gone far in its brief 30 years, and perhaps its greatest asset is the fact that it is so fully conscious of how far it has still to go. Slowly but surely, says President Edens, "we are developing an attitude of excellence." Given that ambition, Duke has but one major job to do: not to grow up—which it has done already—but to grow older.