Tobacco & Erudition

One day in the '20s, Tobacco Tycoon James Buchanan Duke (Bull Durham, Duke's Mixture, Lucky Strikes) stood upon a hill three miles west of Durham, N.C. and silently gazed out over the wooded acres about him. Finally he turned to his companion and said: "This is the place."

This week, on the site picked by blustery "Buck" Duke, the university which bears his name was inaugurating its new 48-year-old President Arthur Hollis Edens (Duke's third), and accepting congratulations on a hectic and happy first quarter-century.

Slickers & Roadsters. Benefactor Duke had put up an initial $6,000,000 to provide a new 8,000-acre campus for Durham's Trinity College (provided it changed the name to Duke). He wanted the architecture to be Gothic ("I've seen the Princeton buildings. They appeal to me"). He ordered a huge chapel with 77 stained-glass windows, a 50-bell carillon, and a tower modeled after one at Canterbury. He wanted schools of medicine, law and divinity. He planned a hospital with 416 beds, a stadium big enough for 35,000 spectators, a student union complete with the latest potato-peeling and dish-washing machines.

Buck Duke; who died in 1925, had thought of just about everything. Counting subsequent Duke endowment funds (and previous family gifts to Trinity), the Duke benefactions amounted, in time, to more than $50 million. The only thing that money couldn't buy overnight was a solid academic reputation.

The first students included an overlarge share of well-heeled Joe Colleges who wore bright yellow slickers, drove fast roadsters, drank corn liquor, and splurged their allowances on the coeds of the old Trinity campus. Some off-campus wags suggested that Duke change its motto from Eruditio et Religio to Erudiiio, Religio, et Tobacco.

It took the school a while to outgrow the gibe. But the Duke of President Edens had much to boast of besides its millions. In the past decade, it had doubled in size (to 5,211 students), and as enrollments swelled, standards had been raised to keep out all but top-ranking applicants. World War II finally eliminated the flashy roadster; the veteran drove out the playboy.

Polio & Pellagra. Meanwhile, the medical school had become one of the nation's leading research centers for polio, pellagra and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The Duke physics department bristled with such nuclear names as Henry W. Newson, wartime chief physicist at Oak Ridge, and Lothar W. Nordheim, formerly of the physics division at Oak Ridge.

Today Duke has the 14th largest university library in the U.S., the second biggest university hospital in the South, a first-rate university school of forestry, and law and divinity schools that are rapidly moving into top rank.

To President Edens, however, Duke should go even farther. The Tennessee-born president, onetime-teacher in a one-room schoolhouse who rose to become associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board, wants to make Duke's graduate schools stronger still. "Our intellectual resources in the South," says he, "exceed all other resources. Yet none of these resources has been more neglected at the highest level." Founder Duke had wanted his university to be one of the nation's top producers of "preachers, teachers, lawyers and physicians, because these . . . can do most to uplift mankind." President Edens will be working on that.

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