New Duke

With its gaunt Gothic spires surrounded by vast reaches of dark green forest, North Carolina's Duke University wears the look of a wealthy medieval fief--and in the '50s it was the scene of a power struggle that would have done credit to a Teutonic duchy. That was the reign of a lanky, brush-browed Tennessean named Arthur Hollis Edens, Duke's third president, and it should have been a time of peaceful expansion under an ambitious $80 million, ten-year program approved by the trustees. Instead, Edens came into conflict with his vice president and chief academic officer, Chemist Paul M. Gross, who saw himself as better fitted to ad minister the expansion plan. Both faculty and trustees split into opposing camps, and the sterile strife went on until 1960, when Edens resigned and Gross was relieved of his administrative duties (but stayed on as professor of chemistry).

As president pro tern, the trustees appointed Dr. Deryl Hart, chairman of the Duke Medical School's department of surgery. Hart quickly sutured the faculty wounds, proved so capable an administrator that he was confirmed as president. Late last year Hart, on reaching 68, announced his retirement. Last week he stepped down, a new president took office, and Duke finally seems ready to shape a new course toward excellence.

"The Epic Tradition." At 42, lean, cigar-smoking Douglas Maitland Knight is the youngest president in the 39 years since the great Duke tobacco fortune created the school with a $40 million endowment. Despite his youth, Knight brings broad experience from both large university and small college, East and Middle West. Born in Cambridge, Mass., he studied at Yale, got a Ph.D. in English literature in 1946, then stayed on to teach for eight years. His tough junior seminar on "The European Heroic and Epic Tradition" ran the gamut from Homer to Joyce, with time out for ten-minute sherry breaks: it won a "four-bell must" recommendation from the usually harsh Yale undergraduate course critique.

In 1953 Wisconsin's small but prestigious Lawrence College tapped him as its new president, after Nathan Pusey moved on to Harvard. At Lawrence, Knight doubled the book value of the physical plant, similarly increased the school's endowment by 150% . A popular president, he ran an informal school, managed to teach "Epic Tradition" to advanced students in alternate years despite his heavy administrative duties. Then came the call from Duke.

Knight's arrival completes a transition from the old to the young on Duke's Durham, N.C., campus. In the past few years, new deans took charge of the schools of medicine, divinity, forestry, engineering and law, as well as the graduate school of arts and sciences. The university had been losing faculty members to better-paying campuses, but in 1960 the Duke Endowment put up an extra $1,000,000 from discretionary funds to raise salaries. The sum was matched, mostly by alumni, in two years, and Duke has now begun to pick up valuable scholars from other campuses. To head its growing oceanography department, Duke netted Zoologist Robert Menzies from the University of Southern California. From Wellesley, to become dean of Duke's Woman's College, came Political Scientist M. Margaret Ball.

"Much Has Been Given." Knight assumes command of an impressive physical plant, currently valued at $83 million and adorned by a set of new buildings: a $4.700,000 biological sciences building, a $1,700,000 law building, a $2,600,000 apartment project for married graduate students. A new $2,200,000 medical building will house the Duke Center for the Study of Aging plus a diagnostic and treatment unit. Earlier this month Duke awarded a $1,200,000 contract to build a 188-ft., 350-ton oceanographic research ship--a seagoing laboratory-classroom that Duke will share in a cooperative venture with about 25 other universities and colleges.

"No great university ever has everything it wants," warned Knight in his first speech. "The fact remains that much has been given us, and much will be expected. We dare not be satisfied until we are a national force in every field which legitimately concerns us." With his New England and Middle Western background, Douglas Knight should know how to forge a national force from his growing but still regional university.

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