Founders' Day Talk: What Makes Duke Distinctive?

This is a forward-looking university, a place with little sense of past at its back, but we spend one hour each year viewing the present in light of the past ”on Founders' Day, which we celebrate today. One of the pleasures of Duke is that its founding is close enough that we still have living connections. I note with pleasure the presence of Mary Semans, a powerful force for good in this city and state, the grand-daughter of our benefactor Benjamin N. Duke; also Robin Chandler Duke, wife of B. N. Duke's grandson Angier Biddle Duke. More on her in a bit.

In addition to these personal links, Duke's founding is sufficiently close that we can reach back in memory with minimal strain. When I moved here a year ago and faced the task of decorating my office, I sought help from the University Archives, which were founded by another of today's honorees, Bill King. With the help of current director Tim Pyatt, I've surrounded myself with scenes of Duke's founding, such that every day is Founders' Day in the President's Office. On one side of the room I have a photo of a big locomotive belching steam as it plows its way through a massive construction site. That site is now the West Campus, which had a train track down the middle to bring Duke stone from a nearby quarry. On another wall I have the letter in which William Preston Few outlined a vision of Trinity College transformed into a great and comprehensive university, which might bear a certain person's family name if he would please send a certain number of millions. Next to it I've framed James B. Duke's curt and peremptory telegram: send me the plans.

I love these pictures. They give a daily reminder that a school that seems so permanent as we walk through it was in fact constructed, brought into being through human work. And the correspondence of President Few and James B. Duke tells me that this creation was a two-sided process, not the work of one hand. Few's dreams would have come to nothing had he not found Duke, and, through him, the means to turn that vision into reality. But Buck Duke would have had nothing to found if Few had not envisioned what this school could become.

These documents tell me that universities are created through a joint labor of envisioning and enabling; and that does not happen at one time alone. Paradoxically, the school that was founded as Duke in the mid-1920s had been founded more than eighty years earlier in rural Randolph County and had already been reconceptualized and rebuilt at least once before. John Franklin Crowell, hired to lead Trinity College in 1887 while still in his twenties, came with the notion that an emerging modernity required something profoundly different in the way of college preparation. In face of the industrialization, urbanization, and internationalization of markets that were new facts of that time, Crowell believed that colleges should prepare students to understand and act on the new social forces. He proposed a new curriculum no longer anchored in classical languages and unapplied mathematics, a new postgraduate program for advanced training, and a coordinated college for women; and he insisted that for students to learn the lessons of new times, the school would need to be physically relocated, moved from the hinterland to a place where the forces of modernity were palpably and dynamically at work.

Without Crowell's reenvisioning, Trinity would have remained a backwoods academy and lucky to survive. But like President Few, Crowell's planning only succeeded because he found partners and supporters for his vision ”above all Washington Duke, who offered to endow the school if Trinity would move to Durham. Together, Crowell, Wash Duke, and his fellow backers built a new school in a new place; and this long-running collaboration continues in our time.

For we are not yet done founding this university. Virtually every week we are dedicating a new center or building and opening new opportunities for inquiry, exploration and education. Each is the product of the conjunction of vision, ambition, and support I have been describing. Nicholas is the name of a Boston family and an Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions launched one week ago at Duke. When it opens three days from now, Nasher will be the name for both a great family from Texas and a great new museum, a home for ”and a powerful spur to ”creativity in the visual arts and all arts. One week later, we will dedicate the new Goodson Chapel in the new Westbrook Hall, breathtakingly beautiful new spaces for spiritual life that honor a distinguished trustee emeritus and a generous friend of the Duke Divinity School. In early November, Rubenstein will become the name for both a loyal alumnus and the building that doubles the activity space of the Sanford Institute for Public Policy. A week after that, "Bostock" and "Von Der Heyden" ”people, to some of us ”will begin to designate buildings to Duke students, new library spaces where knowledge can be retrieved and recombined in new ways.

This university has been lucky in its partners and has been co-created with its partners. In celebrating founding, we celebrate a shared work that is still going on.

As they continue to be created through time, one great mystery of universities is, how is it that they manage to retain their distinctive characters? The great research universities of this country have embraced many of the same goals and built many of the same facilities: libraries, labs, museums, and the rest. But this hasn't made them interchangeable or indistinguishable. So how does it happen that the things we build perpetuate the identity "Duke," while the ones someone else builds perpetuate the different identity tied to their different name?

This isn't a question that can be answered in fifteen minutes; but the answer has something to do with the history of a school's founding. In reading the autobiography of John Franklin Crowell, I've been struck that Crowell wanted to create a different kind of college: one that would build on traditional strengths but direct study toward contemporary problems and opportunities. (Crowell was hired to the Trinity presidency partly on the basis of an essay he had written on the child labor issue.) In the indenture for the Duke Endowment, James B. Duke wrote of his wish to support a form of education "conducted along sane and practical lines." (He goes on to specify that he means "sane and practical, as opposed to dogmatic and theoretical;" at first hearing you might have thought he meant sane and practical as opposed to insane and impractical, or kooky and clueless.)

I don't totally believe in the deterministic power of founders ”institutions are created by every one who serves them and uses them ”but universities do bear the stamp of their origins in a continuing way. One of the things I've found most distinctive about Duke is the real-world orientation Crowell and J. B. Duke long ago prescribed: the way academic inquiry is naturally brought to bear on real-world problems, and intelligence used to create solutions to pressing human needs. Last year, at my first Founders' Day, I gave a medal to Sam Katz, and learned that I had, as one of my new colleagues, the man who had made the key breakthrough in creating a measles vaccine ”a highly specialized research accomplishment yielding a profound and immediate human good. At dinner it was suggested to me that we could just as well have honored his wife, Professor of Pediatrics Catherine Wilfert, who pioneered in interrupting AIDS transmission from infected mothers to their babies. This summer another Dukie, Barton Haynes, was selected to lead the $350 million international research effort to unblock obstacles to the creation of an AIDS vaccine. And it seems to be my fate to come across such yoking of knowledge, application and service pretty much wherever I turn. If I have dinner with faculty from the Divinity School, for instance Greg and Susan Jones, they will just have returned from ten days in Rwanda, where they have been working on peace and reconciliation projects. If I meet a professor of Psychology, for instance Wendy Wood, she will turn out to study how habits derive psychic support from the context set by other habits, such that if one wants to disrupt one habit, it's easier if the supporting context can be disrupted. (I had a sense of this ”pardon me, shade of James B. Duke! ”from giving up smoking many years ago.) In a typical Duke way, Wendy Wood and her colleagues have taken this potentially purely academic work and applied it, brought it to bear on the problem of drug addiction and the search for effective interventions.

In a way I have come to find quite inspiring, Duke has taught me to think of the university as a problem-solving place, a place where intellectual inquiry can be mounted with subtlety and power without shutting itself into an isolated space of abstract expertise; a place where intelligence is energized by the challenges of real-world problems and exercises its powers in devising their solutions. And since students help set the character of a school quite as much as faculty, I'm not surprised to find the same institutional mark on their brows. Today we will honor a student of the Duke Class of 1982, Paul Farmer, a living bridge between advanced medical research and the poor deprived of care in the developing world. If a current student stops me outside my office, chances are I will learn, as I did from Sonny Byrd, that he spent last summer working in a burn clinic in South Africa. Or I'll find out, as I recently learned of Marcia Eisenstein, that she has devised a college advisory system for kids in Durham high schools who would otherwise lack access to such advice.

I rejoice in this institution's mixing of learning and service and I will do everything I can to support a blend so characteristic of the genius of this place. But the question is sometimes asked, what about you? I am not a doctor, or a nurse, or an environmental scientist, or an engineer, nor expert in management, finance, law, policy, or any useful art. I am a humanist, a student of literature and cultural history, the very antithesis, some might feel, of the sane and practical. So where do people like me fit in?

But that question is not as hard as it appears. My conception of useful learning was never a concept of narrow utilitarianism, and Duke's never was either. After all, even in fields whose discoveries have obvious real-world benefits, those benefits aren't reached by being "practical" in some humdrum sense. Hunt Willard, Director of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, has reminded me that scientific breakthroughs come through bursts of creativity and invention, crazy guesses that can then be validated as truth. As for the notion that the more qualitative disciplines perform no real-world service, that would be true only if we had a seriously impoverished concept of human need. Together with many others ”the need for cures, devices to administer cures, a world governed by effective policies, and so on ”humans have a no less fundamental need for self-understanding. This is another need a university can aim to meet.

To get my point, think of the main public event of recent history, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Such devastation has not been visited on the United States in the lifetime of anyone in this room. We had thought such things happened only at a distance ”long ago, as in the San Francisco earthquake, or far away, as in the Indian Ocean tsunami; but it turns out we too are susceptible to the force of natural catastrophe, even here and now. But in the scope of its devastation, this hurricane showed this university to me in a powerful new light. I'm not referring to the humanitarian efforts Duke people made for the victims of the storm, impressive though those are. I'm speaking of the way highly rarefied academic expertise turned out to be relevant to this disaster. In very short order, Duke doctors and nurses had staffed emergency hospitals on the Gulf Coast. Duke Marine Lab faculty like Orrin Pilkey were explaining to the public how the reengineering of the lower Mississippi had removed natural protections that could have been buffers against the storm. A Duke engineer, Karl Linden, alerted us that by pumping out floodwaters without testing for industrial and other toxins, we might be creating a new, manmade disaster in the act of cleaning up a natural one. When the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences wanted someone to help comprehensively locate toxins and health exposures in the storm-affected area, they guessed ”and they were right ”that Duke's Maria-Lynn Miranda, an environmentalist specializing in the spatial analysis and visual display of health data, would be the person to do the job.

It's impressive to see arcane-sounding domains of knowledge reveal their critical importance in this way. But other disciplines showed that they could be useful too on this occasion. In this land where so many things are amazing because so many people are ignorant of history, it was helpful to be reminded that this was not the first American disaster aggravated by the low elevations of major settlements. Duke's Henry Petroski reminded us that Galveston was rebuilt on manmade higher ground after the great hurricane a century ago, and that Chicago too had the ground beneath it artificially raised.

And if poetry never rebuilt a city, it could help us find words, and so bring to expression an otherwise brute experience of loss. I know something about the ephemerality of permanent-seeming things because I have read these words in Yeats: "Everything that man esteems/Endures a moment or a day." The New Orleans disaster also resonated with and found description in words from St. Paul: "We have no continuing city here." It also made me think of Vergil's Aeneid, the great poem about refugees and displaced persons and a specifically civic form of disaster, the special victimization entailed in the destruction of a city. Remember the amazing words spoken at the moment of the fall of Troy? "FuimusTroes," we were Trojans: we used to tell people who we are by telling them the name of our city, but that city has now been killed, so we can only speak that identity in the past tense.

I was particularly mindful of The Aeneid because that work has such a strong sense of the meaning of defensive structures like walls or levees: the way human community is secured by them, and the particular horror that arises when they are breached. Wherever the refugee Trojans go in The Aeneid, the first thing they want to do is rebuild their violated walls. When they visit someone else's city, they are mortally pained by the sight that others already have the rebuilt defenses they still lack: "How fortunate these are/Whose city walls are rising here and now!" In empathy, we could say for our still-displaced fellows from New Orleans what Aeneas says for the Trojan exiles: "O God . . . grant a home/And walls to weary men, grant us posterity/And an abiding city." Aeneas too bore the burden of having to be a founder ”he had to found Rome because his city was no more. "For years/They wandered as their destiny drove them on/From one sea to the next: so hard and huge/A task it was to found the Roman people."

This Founders' Day, we celebrate the fact that Duke University was founded, and we remember that it is still capable of being built, through the labor of living men and women, toward greater visions of what a university can be. This university was founded to put intelligence to human use, not in a narrow sense, but in a way that draws on all our capacities and speaks to all our needs. I presume this is what James B. Duke meant when he expressed his wish "to make provision . . . for mankind along physical, mental and spiritual lines." That large work is still our work. Let's have the strength to do our part.

Note: Quotations from The Aeneid are from the translation of Robert Fitzgerald, published in 1980. John Franklin Crowell's Personal Recollections of Trinity College was published in 1930.