Education: Neighbors

Bought and paid for by the Duke Endowment, a loft. bronze statue stood last week in the Manhattan studio of Sculptor Charles Keck. It shows the late, great Tobaccoman James Buchanan (“Buck”) Duke in frock coat, baggy trousers, clodhoppers. In his right hand is a cane; in his left, a cigar.

On the campus of the university at Durham, N. C., which “Buck” Duke endowed with his name and fortune, students gazed disapprovingly last week at a huge, empty pedestal, set squarely in front of Duke’s $1,000,000 Gothic Chapel. The pedestal will be capped, next Commencement, with the Duke statue. Last month the Archive, Duke’s literary magazine, placed the statue in its Hall of Infamy “because it is in extremely bad taste, because the cigar in his hand is the keynote to its vulgarity, because it will be an object of ridicule to all who see it … because were Mr. Duke alive he would per-haps have the modesty to ask that it be placed elsewhere.* Recently 300 students begged the university to reconsider.

Discreetly silent was Duke’s faculty.

But not frail, goateed President William Preston Few, who can thank “Buck” Duke for blowing up his tiny Trinity College into big Duke University. Snapped grateful President Few: “The glory of this university is that it is built in accordance with carefully made plans. These, in all essentials, are apt to be followed to the end. I have a profound appreciation of what Mr. Duke has striven to do for Education and Humanity, and I would do honor to his good deeds in any way, however conspicuous.”

With that off his chest, President Few could take time last week to preen himself on a stroke both neighborly and shrewd. Only twelve miles of rolling red hills and scrubby pines separate the Gothic halls of Duke from the Georgian Colonial buildings of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If the two neighbor universities could share their facilities and faculties, both might grow faster. This obvious idea first cropped up at a dinner club organized a few years ago by Duke and North Carolina professors. Soon the professors were holding joint seminars, lecturing to each other’s classes. In 1933 President Few and President Frank Porter Graham of North Carolina appointed a joint committee to systematize the cooperation.

Last fortnight the committee had its report ready. But the universities had not waited. Just completed was a $10,000 joint card catalog which would enable students to work with books from both libraries. The committee proposed that graduate students in one university be credited for courses taken in the other. Some classes would be consolidated, professors interchanged.

Pleased with the alliance was President Graham because North Carolina is struggling to hold its standards in the face of crippling budget cuts. Pleased was President Few for, though Duke is very rich, its riches are largely in Southern utility securities and what, in view of the New Deal’s power program, they will be worth tomorrow not even wise Dr. Few can foretell.

*Not modesty but dignity prompted Tobacco-man Duke’s Daughter Doris, honeymooning at the Taj Mahal in a private railway car with her Husband James Henry Roberts Cromwell, to protest last week: “I’m a married woman now. ‘Tobacco Queen!’ What a name!”