DUKE UNIVERSITY

ONCE upon a time, so the story goes, Duke University wanted to hire a famous scholar. Since it had a good deal of money, it offered a dazzling price, then sat back and waited for results. Sure enough, the famous scholar was too tempted to refuse. "Accept with pleasure," he replied, "but where is Duke University?"

In its 30 years as a university, Duke has suffered more than its share of taunts. Created almost overnight by the great Duke (Bull Durham, Lucky Strike) tobacco fortune, it arrived, like Cinderella, dressed for the ball. But what lay beneath the fancy facade? Today, Duke is in a better position to answer that question than ever before. If not yet out in front, it is giving its older sisters in the South an increasingly lively race.

"Well, There It Is." In a sense, wealthy (endowment: $20 million plus an annual income from the Duke Endowment Trust) Duke is really not at all the parvenu it seems. Long before its Gothic towers rose on the empty fields along the western edge of Durham, N.C., the town already had a solid little liberal arts college named Trinity. Said the Trinity catalogue in 1892: "The society of Durham is cultured and elegant." Even more important, elegant Durham also had money. Tobacco Tycoon Washington Duke poured thousands into

Trinity ("Well, there it is," he once exclaimed after plunking down another gift. "I never expect to give another dollar to it, and I wish I had never put a dollar into it"). His sons, Benjamin Newton and James Buchanan Duke, carried on the family tradition. Then, in 1910, Trinity got a new president who happened to have some ideas of his own on how to use the Duke money.

Shy, fidgety William Preston Few had a. sort of double vision. No dream was big enough for him, and no detail was too small ("I notice that there are lights that burn continuously in the library. Please find out where this fault is and have it remedied at once"). In 1921, thinking he was about to die of pneumonia, he wrote out a complete plan for turning Trinity into a full-fledged university, and just before lapsing into a coma, told his wife: "Put this in an envelope...and see that it gets to J. B. Duke." When he recovered, he kept on with his plan, and soon J. B. found himself doing just as Few had hoped. Cigar in mouth and cane in hand, J. B. picked out an 8,000-acre site next to Trinity, chose his type of architecture ("I've seen the Princeton buildings. They appeal to me."), ordered a chapel with 77 stained-glass windows and "the best medical center, by golly, between Baltimore and New Orleans." In December 1924, a year before J. B. Duke died, the new university was born.

In spite of Few's stature, the university met derision from the start. Some wag suggested that it change its motto from Eruditio et Religio to Eruditio, Religio et Cherooto et Cigaretto. Under Few's less able successor, President Robert L. Flowers, the situation grew worse: though Duke was already beginning to build up a solid faculty, its reputation as a playboy's haven lived on. It was not until 1949, when rangy (6 ft. 2 1/2 in.) Arthur Hollis Edens took over, that it began to come back into its own.

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.

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