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Page 7 text:
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DUKE UNIVERSITY CROSSING THE THRESHOLD THE 19 86 CHANTICLEER CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 ACADEMICS 33 EVENTS 49 ATHLETICS 97 HEADLINES 177 RESIDENTIAL LIFE 193 PERSPECTIVES 225 THE CLASS OF 1986 273 POSTSCRIPT 353 CHRISTOPHER G. CAPEN EDITOR
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Page 8 text:
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r U K E INTRODUCTION In the heady talk of Sun Belt pros- perity in the late twentieth century, it is all too easy to forget that things were vastly different in North Carolina and the South in the early decades of the century. Poverty — stark and perva- sive, affecting both whites and blacks — characterized most of the South after the Civil War and up until the time when World War II finally began to bring changes. The massive economic fact of that poverty together with the region’s persistent sectional defensive- ness guaranteed that the South would lag behind in many aspects of the na- tion’s development. In higher education the most revolu- tionary change came in other parts of the nation when the idea of the modern research university, an idea imported from Germany, inspired the establish- ment of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It opened its doors in 1876, and within the next three decades in the Northeast, Midwest and Far West either older colleges reorganized and transformed themselves into research universities or new institutions (such as Chicago and Stanford) were launched. While Johns Hopkins is in the border state of Maryland, in the rest of the entire South as late as the 1920s there was not a single major research univer- sity. True, there were stirrings in state- supported universities in Chapel Hill, Charlottesville and Austin, stirrings that augured well for the future of those institutions. But they too were then only in the early or take-off stages. In the mid-1920s William Preston Few, the scholarly professor of English who had become president of Trinity College in 1910, sold the idea of organiz- ing a new university around Trinity College to James B. Duke. Few’s dream was an audacious one, for he meant for North Carolina and the South to have a voluntarily supported, major research university, one that would generously but rigorously serve students from its own region as well as those from other regions who might wish to come to it. From Methodist-related Trinity Col- lege, Duke University inherited several salient characteristics. Trinity early set out to transcend the old-style, often bit- ter sectionalism that engulfed so much of the South after the Civil War. That it succeeded in its courageous course is best illustrated in the Bassett Affair of 1903, where the college stood up for academic freedom, as well as for a pro- fessor who had uttered “racial heresies” according to prevailing orthodoxies. With financial support coming large- ly from James B. Duke’s father and older brother, Washington and Benja- min N. Duke, Trinity early began to insist that it wished to measure itself by national rather than regional stan- dards; to stand out as academically strong when compared to other institu- tions in the most poverty-stricken sec- tion of the nation was not good enough — either for Trinity or, ultimately, for North Carolina and the South. Trinity also wanted its sought-for excellence to be of the utmost possible service to the people of its region as well as to those who were welcomed from other parts of the country. All of this fitted well with the t hinking of the Dukes, for they were unusual Tar Heels in their day: while they were staunch Methodists, they were also nationally minded because of their far-flung business interests, and they were rich Republicans in a sea of mostly poor Southern Democrats. Managing with great sensitivity and skill to oversee the transformation of the old liberal arts college, whose roots went back to 1838, into a modern re- search university, Few also managed to keep the loyalty and support of the col- lege’s largely Methodist alumni and friends. And he shared with James B. Duke the happy task of planning for the construction of the extensive new facili- ties that the university would require. As the plans began to take shape for a new university to be organized around an old college, the president, William Preston Few, prophesied in September,
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