Duke University

• 1. Introduction

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  Duke University spent more than $1.5 billion on research in 2024. It began in 1838 as Brown's Schoolhouse, a private subscription school in Randolph County, North Carolina. Today the private university in Durham holds an endowment of $11.9 billion, which makes it the twelfth-wealthiest private academic institution in the United States. That distance, from a country schoolhouse to a research giant, raises several questions. Who paid for the climb, and what did they ask in return? Why do its buildings look centuries old when most went up in a single burst? Who was kept out, and how did that change? And what happened when the institution itself was caught in serious mistakes?

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• 2. Methodists, Tobacco and a Name

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  In 1841 the state of North Carolina issued a charter, and Brown's Schoolhouse became the Union Institute Academy. A group of Methodists and Quakers, the Union Institute Society, had organized it. The academy took the name Normal College in 1851. It became Trinity College in 1859, thanks to support from the Methodist Church.

  In 1892 Trinity College moved to Durham, and two wealthy Methodists made the move possible. Julian S. Carr had already given $10,000 in 1887. He now gave a 62-acre tract called Blackwell Park, valued at $50,000, which became the original Durham campus and is now called East Campus. Washington Duke, whose fortune came from tobacco and electrical power, gave $85,000. Of that, $50,000 was set aside for the main central building and the rest for the endowment fund. He added three further gifts of $100,000 in 1896, 1899, and 1900.

  A 2018 statement from Duke's Department of History praised both men for backing education in a state where it had not been a priority.

  William Preston Few became president of Trinity College in 1910. He wanted the school to stand as a southern counterpart to Yale and Harvard. In 1924 Washington Duke's son, James B. Duke, set up the Duke Endowment with a $40 million trust fund. Its income was to go to hospitals, orphanages, the Methodist Church, and four colleges, Trinity among them.

  Few insisted that the school take the Duke name, partly to separate it from the many other institutions called Trinity. James B. Duke first worried that the change would look self-serving. He finally accepted it as a memorial to his father. Few stayed on as president, and the endowment's money soon began reshaping the ground itself.

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• 3. The Stone That Looks Old

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  In 1925 the university bought a quarry in Hillsborough. The man who spotted it was Frank Clyde Brown, the university comptroller, who oversaw the planning and building of the Gothic campus. James B. Duke had first suggested stone from the Princeton quarry. Plans changed to a local source in order to cut costs. The goal was a look "that made it look like the university was growing out of the ground, like it had been here forever."

  Brown judged the local stone far warmer and softer in color than Princeton's, and expected it to look much older. Duke stone is said to show seven primary colors and seventeen shades. One line quoted in the source says that Duke became a great university in part because it looked like one from the start.

  Julian Abele designed much of West Campus. He was one of the first prominent African-American architects, and he served as chief designer in the offices of Horace Trumbauer. The founders chose the Collegiate Gothic style after visiting the University of Chicago, Yale, and Princeton. East Campus was rebuilt from 1925 to 1927 in a Georgian style instead. Most of the Gothic buildings stood finished by 1930. Duke Chapel followed in 1935, on the highest ridge of West Campus. It seats 1,600 people, and at 210 feet it is one of the tallest buildings in Durham County.

  The rock itself is far older than any building. Duke stone is a bluestone, a metamorphic rock called phyllite, from the Carolina Slate Belt. Geologists think it began about 650 million years ago in the Iapetus Ocean off the coast of Gondwana. A chain of volcanic islands known as Carolinia produced the original material.

  The rock was later reshaped when Carolinia collided with Laurentia, starting around 375 million years ago. That collision coincides with the Acadian orogeny, which built the Appalachian Mountains. Duke stone holds no fossils, but corals and trilobites elsewhere in the Carolina Terrane show that the formation came from somewhere other than the main North American landmass.

  Today the quarry covers 5 acres inside Duke Forest. New work on campus must follow strict rules: 20 percent of the stone is split face and 80 percent seam face. The cost of quarrying and masonry has pushed the university to use a mix of bricks that imitate the stone's colors. Another set of rules, written in the university's earliest decades, shaped who could walk through those buildings.

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• 4. Who Was Admitted

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  In 1878 three sisters, Mary, Persis, and Theresa Giles, received A.B. degrees from Trinity College in Randolph County. They had studied with private tutors and in classes alongside men. After the 1892 move to Durham, the trustees voted to admit women as day students.

  Washington Duke's 1896 gift came with a requirement that women be placed "on an equal footing with men." Only four women were enrolled at the time, and three were children of faculty members. A residence for women opened in 1897 as the Mary Duke Building, named for his daughter. In 1903 Washington Duke wrote to the trustees and withdrew the provision, calling it the only limitation he had ever attached to a gift. By 1904-54 women were enrolled. The Woman's College was set up in 1930 as a coordinate of the men's undergraduate college. It merged back into Trinity in 1972.

  Race followed a slower and harder path. According to the Duke University Human Rights Center, a policy in the 1920s excluded Black applicants and barred them from certain facilities, including dining halls and dormitories. In 1948 a group of divinity school students petitioned to desegregate admissions, the first concerted push of its kind.

  The first Black graduate students enrolled in 1961. The trustees officially desegregated the undergraduate college in 1963, and Black undergraduates arrived in September of that year. The teaching staff stayed all-white until 1966. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on campus in November 1964 about the progress of the Civil Rights Movement.

  In 1969, dozens of Black students took over the Allen Building. Around 8 a.m. they asked everyone inside to leave and barricaded themselves in. Their complaints included what one official called a "white top and a Black bottom" power structure, high attrition rates, and the lack of a Black studies department with real power. Their underlying demand was "to be taken seriously as human beings and to be treated as any respected human being would be treated."

  Provost Marcus E. Hobbes complained that the students "wanted to run the University." The university called the police. The students left before officers entered, with trenchcoats over their faces, since many understood that unarmed students could be badly hurt. White students and faculty had formed a human shield around the building, and a brawl broke out between police and students. A handful of students went to the hospital.

  President Vincent Price later called the takeover "one of the most pivotal moments in our university's history." He said the protesters had changed the place for the better. The campus they fought over had also grown well beyond its Gothic core.

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• 5. Forest, Lemurs and Sea

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  Duke Forest, established in 1931, covers 7044 acres in six divisions just west of West Campus. It is the largest private research forest in North Carolina. Researchers use it for studies of forest carbon, aquatic life, weather, and animal behavior, and more than 30 miles of trails are open to the public.

  Inside the forest sits the Duke Lemur Center, founded in 1966 on 85 acres. It is the world's largest sanctuary for rare and endangered strepsirrhine primates, a group that includes lemurs, galagos, and lorises. It houses nearly 300 animals of 25 different species.

  The Sarah P. Duke Gardens, begun in the early 1930s, lie between West Campus and Central Campus. Its more than 50 acres are split into four sections. One of them, the H.L. Blomquist Garden of Native Plants, is devoted to flora of the Southeastern United States. The W.L. Culberson Asiatic Arboretum holds plants from Eastern Asia. About 5 miles of paths and allees run through the gardens.

  Farther away, on Pivers Island at Beaufort, the Duke University Marine Laboratory stands 150 yards across the channel from the town. Duke's interest in the area began in the early 1930s, and the first buildings went up in 1938. Faculty there work in oceanography, marine biology, marine biomedicine, marine biotechnology, and coastal policy.

  The university also runs a hospital. Duke University Hospital opened in 1930 and now has 957 acute care beds. In early 2012 the Duke Cancer Center opened next door, bringing together nearly all of Duke's outpatient clinical care. In all, the university owns 256 buildings on 8693 acres, linked by a free bus service. In May 2014 the marine lab dedicated its newest building, the Orrin H. Pilkey Marine Research Laboratory.

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• 6. Reckonings

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  In April 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges against three men's lacrosse players and declared them innocent. They had been accused in 2006 by Crystal Mangum of a rape that never happened. Cooper said the players were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse." District Attorney Mike Nifong was later disbarred. Duke's administration and faculty were condemned for how they treated the accused. In December 2024, Mangum said in a podcast interview that she "made up a story that wasn't true."

  A different failure unfolded inside the medical center. On the 9th of November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity found that cancer researcher Anil Potti had committed research misconduct, including falsifying data. The program 60 Minutes called it one of the biggest medical research frauds ever. Duke had learned of suspicions by 2008, when a medical student working with Potti withdrew his name from the research. He submitted a memorandum titled "Research Concerns."

  The administration denied any misconduct and persuaded the student not to report to the funding agency, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Duke later claimed falsely that no whistleblower had been involved. Potti resigned in November 2010, after being put on administrative leave. Duke ended the clinical trials and retracted the published data. It settled lawsuits from eight patients Potti harmed.

  In 2019 Duke paid $112.5 million to settle False Claims Act allegations about research misconduct. A researcher had falsified or fabricated data to win grants, and was arrested in 2013 on charges of embezzling university funds. A whistleblower's lawsuit exposed the scheme. In response, Duke gathered an advisory panel of academics from Caltech, Stanford, and Rockefeller University. On its advice the university created the Duke Office of Scientific Integrity, led by engineering professor Lawrence Carin.

  The university also reexamined the names and monuments on its grounds. In 2014 it removed the name of Charles B. Aycock, a white supremacist governor of North Carolina, from an undergraduate dormitory. The building is now the East Residence Hall. On the 19th of August 2017, after the violent clashes at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed from the entrance to Duke Chapel. Protesters had vandalized it. Beyond Durham, a very different kind of expansion had already begun.

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• 7. Reach and Research

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  In April 2005, Duke and the National University of Singapore signed an agreement to create Duke-NUS Medical School. Its first class entered in 2007, and its curriculum is based on that of Duke's School of Medicine. Sixty percent of its students come from Singapore, and 40 percent from more than 20 other countries. A governing board oversees the school, and a Duke representative on that board holds veto power over any academic decision.

  Duke Kunshan University opened in 2013 in Kunshan, China. It is a partnership between Duke, Wuhan University, and the city of Kunshan. Undergraduates earn degrees from both Duke Kunshan and Duke. In August 2020 the first Kunshan undergraduates arrived in Durham. Because of COVID-19, Chinese Duke students who could not travel to the United States were hosted at the Kunshan campus in return.

  The National Science Foundation ranked Duke ninth among American universities for research spending in 2022, at $1.39 billion. In fiscal year 2021 Duke received $608 million from the National Institutes of Health, third in the nation. Two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry belong to Duke researchers. Robert Lefkowitz shared the 2012 prize with Brian Kobilka, a former affiliate, for work on cell surface receptors. Paul Modrich shared the 2015 prize for the mechanism of DNA repair.

  In May 2006, Duke researchers mapped the final human chromosome, marking the completion of the Human Genome Project. The biomedical engineering department built the world's first real-time, three-dimensional ultrasound diagnostic system, and the first engineered blood vessels and stents. The university was also the birthplace of the first Physician Assistant degree program in the United States.

  Students have set records too. Duke engineering students hold a Guinness World Record, set in July 2018, for the most fuel-efficient vehicle. Their fuel cell car reached 14,573 miles per gallon equivalent. In 2019 they won a second record for an all-electric vehicle at 797 miles per kilowatt-hour. Another measure of Duke's public life is far louder than a laboratory.

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• 8. Blue Devils and Tents

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  William H. Lander and Mike Bradshaw, editor-in-chief and managing editor of the Trinity Chronicle, began the 1922-23 school year calling the athletic teams the Blue Devils. Before that, the teams had been known as the Trinity Eleven, the Blue and White, and the Methodists. The student newspaper kept using the new name, and through repetition it stuck.

  Today Duke's athletic association runs 27 sports for more than 650 student-athletes. The teams have won 17 NCAA team championships. The women's golf team leads the count with seven titles, in 1999, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2014, and 2019. From 2000 to 2005 its record was 796-45-3, a winning percentage of .945. It also won 13 consecutive ACC championships from 1995 to 2008.

  Still, men's basketball draws the most attention. Mike Krzyzewski, known as Coach K, led the team for 42 years, from 1980 to 2022. The men won five NCAA championships, in 1991, 1992, 2001, 2010, and 2015. Krzyzewski also coached the USA men's national team from 2006, winning Olympic gold in 2008, 2012, and 2016. Jon Scheyer was named his successor in 2021.

  Students known as the Cameron Crazies show their support by tenting. They camp on the grass near Cameron Indoor Stadium, in an area called Krzyzewskiville, or K-Ville. Tickets to varsity games are free for students, so they line up for hours, often overnight. For a mid-February game against rival North Carolina, the most eager begin before spring classes start. Tents are capped at 100, each holding up to 12 people.

  A bench-burning tradition began in 1986, with bonfires after certain basketball victories. In 1942, Duke's Wallace Wade Stadium hosted the first Rose Bowl ever played outside California. The second such game was played in Arlington, Texas, in 2021, moved because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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