Education: Duke's Design

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Such signs, splashed on freight cars, railroad stations and blank walls, warn visitors to North Carolina of their approach to super-collegiate Duke University. Duke has one of the most spectacular football teams, one of the most Gothic campuses in the U. S. Its students are fanatically fond of football. They are also fanatically reverent toward the man who gave their university its name, its Gothic campus and its football team—the late Tobaccoman James Buchanan ("Buck") Duke.

Last week Duke University published an expensive little book* by English Professor William Blackburn, detailing how thoroughly Dukensian the University is. Buck's father, old Washington Duke, who founded the Duke tobacco dynasty, got small Methodist Trinity College to move to Durham from a North Carolina village in 1892 by giving it $85,000, made it co-educational five years later by giving $100,000 more. When, in 1924, Buck Duke made little Trinity the tenth richest university in the land (endowment today: $30,000,000), it was glad not only to take his name but also to let him reshape it to his heart's desire.

Buck picked the site for his university (on Durham's outskirts), decided its architecture should be Gothic, even selected the stone for its buildings, a greenish-grey rock quarried in nearby Hillsboro, which he chose because it resembled Princeton's building stone. Buck directed that the campus should be dominated by a great Gothic chapel. When he saw the architect's plans, he ordered them changed, the 210-ft. tower moved to a commanding position in front.

Not until seven years after Buck's death was the chapel completed, but it fulfilled his wishes in every detail. A $1,000,000 structure, it looks like a cathedral (its tower was modeled after Canterbury Cathedral's Bell Harry Tower), has 77 costly stained-glass windows, a 50-bell carillon. Off the transept is a memorial room in which Carrara marble figures of Washington Duke and Sons Buck and Benjamin lie in state. Below is a crypt for members of the Duke family. What Professor Blackburn fails to mention, but what no visitor can fail to see, is a ten-foot statue, smack in front of the chapel, of baggy-trousered, clod-hoppered Buck Duke, holding a big cigar (see cut).

This was too much even for Duke's reverent students. When it was being built, they mocked its "vulgarity," stood a fraternity initiate on the empty pedestal for a whole day with a cigar in his hand. Duke's President William Preston Few had the statue put up anyway, proclaimed himself proud to "do honor to [Buck's] good deeds in any way, however conspicuous."

Lank, goateed President Few, an old Southern gentleman who traces his distinguished ancestry back to the Revolution, had been head of little Trinity for 14 years before Buck Duke histed him to eminence. He followed Buck Duke's instructions to the letter (excerpt from Buck's indenture: "I advise that the courses at this institution be arranged, first, with special reference to the training of preachers, teachers, lawyers, and physicians, because these are most in the public eye, and by precept and example can do most to uplift mankind. . . .").