The Timid Generation
Duke University probably would like nothing so much as to be utterly Ivy League. But, of course, it is in North Carolina and, for better or worse, North Carolina is not Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut or even New Jersey. No, Duke is not Ivy League, not even Ivy League with a drawl. For miles beyond the 7,000 acres of pleasant pine stands named Duke Forest there are other pine woods, unnamed, and they are laced with innumerable squiggles of sylvan roads leading to settlements of fundamentalist fiddlers and secret sunlit glades full of steaming distilleries of white lightning. The Bible Belt holds up the moral pants of the region, some radio stations feature programs of smite-the-devil evangelism and it is not unusual to dial in on such witnessings as that of a woman yelping gleefully that she prayed and—"Instantly, brother! Instantly!"—a growth the size of a hen's egg vanished from her shoulder. In North Carolina, Demon Rum is allowed in public only if you semismuggle your own bottle (usually concealed in a paper bag) into a restaurant that is licensed to serve setups to "brown-baggers." Legal though drinking is, the furtive logistics required tend to discourage any true enjoyment of it outside your own hall closet, which, they say, is exactly what the state's Baptist-oriented legislature figures the Lord has in mind.
Duke gets along all right in North Carolina, for a sizable percentage of the people in the state are neither fundamentalist nor particularly folksy. And those who care most about Duke have an affinity for airs and values that are as Ivy as they are Tarheel. For example, when they come down for The Game at Duke each November against the University of North Carolina the dead-grass parking lots around the old stadium in Durham are aswarm with flocks of cashmere jackets and tweedy plaid skirts—sort of mini in concept, but quietly appealing instead of thigh revealing—and almost everyone is munching something like deviled ham sandwiches from the tailgates of station wagons, or maybe mixing martinis, illegally, of course, on the roofs of low-slung, high-priced sports cars. It could be Cambridge.
But it is Durham, N.C., a thriving, workaday community with a hard-selling chamber of commerce. Durham has its share of up-to-date urban problems, such as traffic jams, public housing and a resistance to total racial integration that reflects not so much red-neck bigotry as it does a far broader U.S. malaise—the smug white citizen's passive but immovable resentment at having his suburban inertia threatened, taxed or tilted ever so slightly because of a black man's needs. Durham is built of, from, by and because of tobacco. Each day the factories founded by the Liggetts, the Myers and the Dukes produce a colorful river of 14.5 million cellophane-wrapped Chesterfields, Pall Malls, Lucky Strikes and the like. Each package is stamped with the warning that smoking may be hazardous, even though the town would sink in ruin if everyone believed it.
Durham's calendars are filled with Kiwanis Club luncheons and Methodist Sunday School affairs, and the layers of its social strata are quite rigidly defined. It is a place that seldom tempts the emotions, the morals or the imaginations of the people who live there. Of course, that is true of a lot of college towns—and noncollege towns, too—and Duke University does not necessarily suffer from Durham's lack of distinction anymore than Yale does from New Haven's.
Yet at Duke there is an air of docility, a feeling of acquiescence to the sturdy, placid mood of Durham. Oddly enough, the atmosphere is somehow unsettling because of its very calm. These are supposed to be the Sacrilegious '60s, the years of youth in rebellion, the decade when all the values and all the valuables accumulated by the Over 30s are supposed to be under siege by blazing young dissidents. This is, by headline acclaim at least, the era when a man can hardly respect a dollar—let alone worship it—without being accused by some bearded child of committing a crime of moral turpitude. These supposedly are the years when people can smell the very fabric of the American Way smoldering in the ashes of every draft card destroyed. At any rate, there are precious few pulpits or editorial pages or polished-prose magazines that have not recently propagated an alarmed message about youth in revolt. But if this era of revolt is not all slick-paper myth, then it is something that has passed Duke University by, flowed around it, like an army skirting a city to which it can return and lay siege any time it pleases.
Because the emotional detachment pertains to all aspects of campus life, sport, too, has dimmed at Duke.
It may be no horrendous loss, but the heady Saturdays of constantly winning football teams at Duke are almost surely things of the past. When Wallace Wade, now 75, retired to his cattle farm 18 years ago, he took with him a bit more than his memories. With Wade as coach there were sellouts almost every week in the 45,000-seat Duke stadium, which is now named after Wade. People came for hundreds of miles through the North Carolina piney woods to see a clash between teams that might well be among the best that year. No more. As a matter of economic policy, Duke seldom plays more than four games a year at home. In 1967 there were just three in a 10-game schedule. The reason is that the team usually does not draw more than 27,000 or so people for home games. On the road, Duke does much better at the box office, thanks to the fact that nearly all of its alumni live away from North Carolina.
Under Wade, Duke football teams compiled a dazzling 110-36-7 record, and in 1941 he presided over what is likely to be the proudest achievement ever for Duke football. His team got the Rose Bowl bid that season but, as everyone too old to burn draft cards will remember, 1941 was not a good year—particularly after Dec. 7. Everyone was suddenly worried that the Japanese might bomb, strafe or invade the West Coast, and the military flatly canceled all large public gatherings, even the Rose Bowl. But Wallace Wade had come to like those Rose Bowl games; he had coached in four others. Since the East Coast was not considered to be under siege, he called California and suggested that the game be played at Duke. Thus, for the first and only time, the Rose Bowl was played outside of California and bucolic little Durham became Pasadena East for a day.
Duke rented bleachers from every school within trucking range and enlarged the stadium to 57,000 seats. Local residents threw open their homes to spectators, and even the drinking press was taken care of with a supersecret bar upstairs in an old Durham mansion. Wade handled most of the logistical details himself and, as he admits now, he overdid the impresario bit and underdid his coaching, for his team was upset by Oregon State 20-16.
To be sure, there have been good football teams since Wade left. Duke twice has been to the Orange Bowl and once to the Cotton Bowl. Yet in the past five years something exceedingly average has happened; the team record has dropped to 24-24-2. Not only, they say, will Duke never again play host to a bowl game, it may never again play in one.
Part of the blame for this has been placed on the ultra-Ivy League background of Dr. Douglas M. Knight, who was hired as Duke's president in 1963. His arrival immediately made Duke football loyalists suspicious that a de-emphasis would be forthcoming. Then when Bill Murray, Wade's successor, quit in 1965 there was a wave of disappointment, for the new coach was not Bear Bryant or Darrell Royal or even Ace Parker, who had been Duke's backfield coach since 1947. The new man was bright, congenial Tom Harp, who once played quarterback at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, a school known to people outside New Concord largely because during John Glenn's space orbits the president of Muskingum would go on television to tell eager viewers how John's folks were feeling. And where was Tom Harp coaching when Duke hired him? In the Ivy League—at Cornell. Worse, his record in five years there was 19-23-3, and he was best known beyond Ithaca as the coach who had his players make a pyramid by climbing on each other's shoulders one Saturday in an attempt—unsuccessful, at that—to thwart a field goal by Princeton's never-miss kicker, Charlie Gogolak.
Since his arrival at Duke, Harp has convinced almost everyone that he does not intend to sit by idly while the school's football Blue Devils are converted to a nice, bland Ivy green. But, like topnotch colleges all over the country, Duke is beset by a certain ambivalence about how—or if—it can meld its admirable commitment to academic excellence with its longtime involvement in big-budget, big-recruiting, big-time college football.
As Glenn E. (Ted) Mann, Duke's sports-publicity chief for 30 years, puts it: "This is not de-emphasis at all. Duke is undertaking what I call a noble experiment. We are trying to keep our academic standards way up. At the same time we are trying to maintain a first-class football schedule, and that means playing a lot of schools that do not have such rigid entrance requirements. It's hardly equal competition, you know. But it just might work."
Maybe. Certainly Duke is committed to playing some tough teams for a long time to come. "Our schedule is complete through 1978," says Athletic Director Eddie Cameron. "We've got the Big Ten and schools like Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech and the service academies all the way through. You sure can't call that de-emphasis."
Playing tough teams and beating tough teams are two quite different things, and Dr. Robert Rankin, chairman of the Duke Athletic Council, says quite candidly, "Sure, when the administration raised the entrance requirements here a couple of years ago Eddie Cameron and I said we could live with them. Which we can. But I think from now on Duke may consider itself as having a relatively successful football season when it ends up with a 5-5 record. And I don't think we'll be getting many bowl invitations on that basis."
If you can get Duke undergraduates to talk about football at all—at the Celestial Omnibus or the "Yewjee" (University Grill) or in their fraternity parlors—they admit that they might work up a little resentment over the prospect of constant mediocrity on the football field. But should they begin to fret, the annoyance always quickly subsides under a salve of thoughts about basketball, for this winter Duke is once again a substantial factor in the national basketball scene.
Since Vic Bubas, the young, poised and polished coach who used to be assistant coach at nearby North Carolina State, arrived at Duke eight years ago he has amassed an impressive 196-52 record, and this year's team, which periodically edges its way into the top 10, is not going to hurt that won-lost average at all. At the start of this season it seemed that Bubas—one of the country's hardest-working, sweetest-talking recruiters—might have to wait until next year when some of his formidable freshmen could move up to the varsity. But suddenly last December, Mike Lewis, a senior center who is currently Duke's most-admired athlete, developed into an uncommonly good basketball player. The rest of the team meshed well around Lewis, and Duke's cramped and antiquated 9,000-seat gymnasium began to have an occasional full house (though by no means was it crammed to the rafters for game after game; there were five capacity crowds in the 10 games). "We go ape over basketball," says Bill Clifton, a senior from Waco, Texas. "And Vic Bubas is as close to an idol as there is on campus. But I suppose if the team were losing no one would care about basketball, or about Bubas either." It is a harsh thought, this suggestion that nobody would ever bother to hang Vic Bubas in effigy, but probably true.
Though turmoil—sports-oriented or otherwise—is rare these days at Duke, this is not because the students are lacking in imagination or energy or devilment or individuality. When they gather in their hangouts they argue as loudly as anyone else about Lyndon Johnson and the morality of Vietnam and the yeas and nays of marijuana. They dress with an almost determined dowdiness, the men wearing what look like Army surplus outfits, the coeds coming in neat, but far from Fifth Avenue, fashions.
True enough, the campus newspaper, the Chronicle, is run by a provocative faction of precocious junior journalists who gave all of page one of their Homecoming Day edition to stories and pictures of last fall's protest at the Pentagon, relegating everything about the fraternity-house decorations, queens and alumni affairs to the back page. But this was done partly sardonically, if partly in genuinely liberal concern over the Washington march. Yet most Duke students are a long way from fitting the popular conception (or maybe misconception is the word) of the militant Now Generation. "I would say that, at most, 10% of the student body is involved—at all—with what is going on beyond their own lives," says Alan Ray, associate editor of the Chronicle. And Tami Hultman, a pretty blonde minister's daughter from Cambridge, Md., says, "Most of the people here want to avoid conflict, and it isn't very hard for them to do it."
Around Duke there is an aura of well-mannered, upper-middle-class detachment, since that is Duke's particular mode these days. There are not enough pot smokers or antiwar pickets or beards or even Humphrey Bogart cultists to make the atmosphere seem a great deal different from the oft-deplored years of the '50s when the so-called Silent Generation was sitting around, mum and disenchanted. Duke is still very big for the Greek system and, even though fraternities and sororities are becoming much-maligned anachronisms at many other schools around the U.S., approximately 50% of Duke's students are members of some Alpha or Omega club, with a full portion of secret trappings and ritualistic vows, things that campus cynics refer to as "mystic goodies."
"We don't necessarily take the ritual stuff very seriously," says Bill Goodwin, a senior Phi Delta Theta, "but we think the system works fine and lets kids be closer to their—uh—brothers than they'd be if they just lived in a bunch of dorms without some tie."
More often than not, when members of the Duke student body do get aroused, it will be over a totally parochial issue, such as having the opposite sex in their rooms (men now can) or having liquor in their rooms (everyone can; the girls were allowed to this year) or getting Playboy magazine on the campus newsstands (it is, as of a year or so ago). And last fall there was a campus-wide referendum that created some agony and antagonism. It had to do with a dictum issued by the student government, which is controlled by an activist-liberal segment that came to power largely because many of the more conservative students did not bother to vote in campus elections. The referendum was on a ruling that no university-affiliated student organization should be allowed to hold social affairs at segregated off-campus facilities. There are still numerous whites-only spots in Durham that are very good for fraternity parties, including the Hope Valley Country Club, which numbers quite a few of Duke's faculty and administrators among its members, not excluding Basketball Coach Bubas, Football Coach Harp, Athletic Director Cameron and President Knight. In the referendum the students voted the measure down, arguing that they were not really segregationists, but that they just did not like their "individual rights" being trampled by "those goddam radicals" in the student government. A short time after the referendum Duke's minute population of Negroes—about 70 of the school's 4,622 undergraduates—staged a study-in outside President Knight's office and, eventually, the administration overruled the vote and outlawed organization off-campus parties at segregated places. By then the student body had cooled off, and accepted the new policy meekly.
"I think a lot of kids here feel impotent," says Abbie Doggett, a senior from Lakeland, Fla. "The reason is that things have gotten so big—on a national scale—that kids feel they can't really influence anything themselves. Most of them really aren't segregationists but, on the other hand, they are not involved in trying to push for lots of progress in civil rights either."
Many students at Duke seem to be plodding patiently along, doggedly heading for some impenetrable postcollege cubbyhole—back to Daddy's baling-wire factory or into the womb of corporation law, or to a selling job where a man is paid a guaranteed salary rather than paid by commissions. They seem to have put a low ceiling on their ideals, to have leaped into weary adulthood at a discouragingly early age. They seem unalterably sensible and strangely self-protective.
Let it be perfectly clear that this is by no means a phenomenon at Duke alone. Dr. Jack Preiss, a cool Duke sociologist who has taught at Brown and Michigan State and who likes to brighten his office with huge posters of W. C. Fields and Allen Ginsberg, says, "If anyone has to give labels to generations—and no one does, of course—I guess I'd call this the Timid Generation. The kids seem to constrict themselves, shut things out and go about their business with a quiet anxiety. You have to push them, cajole, almost coerce them into saying what they think. They live day to day, without too many plans—in a creative sense, I mean—and they seem to have no direction, nothing that they find worth fighting for. Life seems unmanageable, and people simply become more and more adept at avoiding being hurt or embarrassed. They have a whole set of masks for appropriate occasions, and their major concern is that they're wearing the right mask at the right time. Nothing turns anyone on. Hell, a football game is like a cricket match, like a day at Newport, gentle and sedate. Kids learn to survive by not being different."
Whatever the case may be elsewhere, Duke students themselves agree that there is just enough complacency, just enough of a veneer of sophistication, just enough pressure from studies to keep their university in a relatively constant state of rest. President Knight, 46, a rumpled, scholarly Yale man who used to serve sherry in class when he taught English there 14 years ago, says, "There is not a great deal of preoccupation with protest here, and that, I think, reflects the background of the students. You do not have many demonstrations with real mob violence at Princeton or Yale either. It is not that our students feel they are so genteel that it is beneath them to crusade, it is just that their attitude toward violence is to abhor it; it is an alien form. I think the tone, if I may use such a word, at Duke is really quite fine; it is a lively, diversified place. For example, our football players are not considered just gladiators, they are also excellent students and fine young men. Our students are not inclined to take what you might call an extremely doctrinaire approach toward anything. We are quite a diverse place, and I think the one-sided question is not really an acceptable part of the dialogues within our student body."
A term that is frequently used around Duke—along with "diversity"—is "national university," which is accurate enough, since no more than 25% of the students and alumni are from North Carolina. There are plenty of people who call Duke the Harvard of the South. Although the university administration and the alumni love the title, they usually disclaim it with fairly credible modesty, saying, "Oh, no, heh-heh, there is only one Harvard."
Duke is almost as selective as the Ivys and nearly as expensive, too—roughly $3,300 a year for everything, compared to around $3,750 at Harvard or Yale. It is almost as cosmopolitan, its enrollment coming from every state in the nation, although there are more from the U.S. Southeast than any other quadrant of the country. When it comes to getting the kind of superlative student every private school cherishes—choir singer, class president, mathematics genius, A student, high school quarterback and Euripides-reader all wrapped up in one—Duke often finds itself competing head-on with the Ivy League. Nor does it always lose, because a Duke degree in engineering or law or medicine or the sciences or liberal arts is possibly as useful as one from Brown, Cornell or Columbia, if not from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
Duke's reputation for academic excellence is relatively new. There was a time in the late '20s and early '30s when it was best known as a school full of heavy-drinking, fun-loving Ernie Fraternie types. There was a time, so the story goes, that the school offered a gigantic salary to a celebrated scholar, and the professor replied, "Accept with pleasure. But where is Duke University?" There was a time when Duke was best known either for the occult experiments in extrasensory perception of Dr. Joseph Rhine or for the magnificent "Iron Dukes" of Wallace Wade. There was a time in the late '40s and '50s when it was known for the golfing feats of Mike Souchak or the sprinting brilliance of Dave Sime or the quarterbacking skills of Sonny Jurgensen. And there was a time when it was known as the best minor-league baseball training ground outside the American Association because Jack Coombs was the coach and, though no one could prove it, a lot of people guessed that the major leagues ultimately put more money into athletic scholarships than Duke's most-celebrated athlete, Dick Groat, earned in his first couple of seasons in the majors.
There was also a time when Duke was best known as a nice little Methodist school named Trinity College. But that was before 1924, the year that Tarheel Tobacco Monopolist-Millionaire James Buchanan (Buck) Duke offered up a $40 million endowment to create—"Instantly!"—a university named after his family and patterned after Princeton. His reason for selecting Princeton was a definite one: "The buildings there appeal to me." Buck Duke was one of those rugged geniuses spawned by capitalism who spent all of his life accumulating a massive fortune, but seldom found either the time or the desire for anything much more recreational than looking up from the old balance sheet and lighting another cigar. He usually shunned publicity, but when he did pop for a reporter he would answer secret-of-my-success questions by saying things such as, "I worked from early morning until late at night, and I was always sorry to leave off at night." And just before his money changed Trinity College into Duke University, he said for publication, "I don't believe that a college education does a man much good in business."
A John Harvard he was not, but a stout, brimstone-bred Methodist Buck Duke did remain—at least on the surface. Oh, there was a nasty divorce scandal in 1906 involving his wife and a 66-year-old socialite who was president of a mineral-water bottling company, and the fact that Duke himself peddled tobacco for profit did not endear him to many old-line Methodists in the church. Yet, it had long been Duke policy to be sure that there was a Methodist church near every cigarette factory the company built, and for years the Duke philanthropies—including those of Buck's daddy, Washington, and his older brother, Benjamin—had been used to fund such charities as backwoods Methodist churches, orphanages and aid to retired preachers and their families. And, of course, little Trinity College.
The origins of the school can be traced back to the 1830s, when some Quakers and Methodists in central North Carolina built a log cabin and hired a schoolmaster for $200 a year and all the firewood he could burn. In 1892 the whole college simply packed up and moved 65 miles to the snuff-cigar-cigarette-and-chawin'-tobacco center of Durham. It seemed an odd choice at the time for a straitlaced little church school, because Durham was known to be full of sin and tobacco dust; but old Washington Duke had donated $85,000 to underwrite the transfer, and that was good cause enough to move.
A lot of people at Duke nowadays tend to refer to their school as being "young," largely because they consider it to have been born full-blown from Buck Duke's moneybags. If you ask about famous alumni, the usual samples offered are Richard Nixon, who went to the law school only, and Author William Styron, who was ordered to Duke as a World War II V-12 student. But little old Trinity had its great men and great moments, too. Samuel F. Mordecai, the renowned legal scholar, was the first dean of its law school; James Killian, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a student at Trinity in the early '20s; and four Trinity alumni have served as U.S. Senators.
It was also Trinity College that won one of the first intercollegiate football games ever played south of the Mason-Dixon line, a Thanksgiving Day event in 1888 in which the Methodists defeated the University of North Carolina 16-0. In 1891 Trinity not only went undefeated and untied—something that Duke has never managed—but the team also racked up the highest single-game score in Trinity-Duke history, annihilating Furman University 96-0, a total that included one touchdown by the town depot agent, who played center. Four years later football was banned at the school because of "professionalism" (a charge that apparently had some merit). Trinity also played the first basketball game held in North Carolina—against Wake Forest—in 1906. Even the name Blue Devils predates Duke. In 1922 some of the livelier students on campus decided that any team known by such meek nicknames as The Methodists or The Blue and White was starting off with one foot in defeat. At the time, the school was full of doughboy-veterans who much admired a particularly efficient French fighting outfit called Les Chasseurs Alpins and nicknamed the Blue Devils. The college paper started calling the team Blue Devils, and today even North Carolina Methodists have gotten used to it.
But it is Dec. 11, 1924, the day Buck Duke's money officially created The Duke Endowment, that people tend to consider as the real birthday of the school, proving once again that fortunes talk louder than heritage in the annals of American success. There are separate boards of trustees for the university and for the $614 million endowment itself, which includes other recipients (orphanages, Methodist ministers, hospitals, Davidson College and Furman and Johnson C. Smith universities). Although Duke is generally considered to be filthy rich, it ranks no higher than 29th among colleges in total endowment (Harvard is first, University of Texas second). Nevertheless, around campus it is the trustees of the endowment, rather than the university, who are referred to as The Big Board, because ultimately they dictate the university's big-money policies.
There has been scurrilous talk over the years—notably in Europe, where the American millionaire is viewed as a cross between Machiavelli and King Tut—that Buck Duke built his university because his son had flunked out of Yale and Daddy wanted him in a school he could call his own. That is not true, because Buck Duke had just one offspring, a daughter named Doris, who was called The Richest Girl in the World before most tabloid readers ever heard of Barbara Hutton. Some people also insist that Duke tried to donate all his money to Princeton University on the major condition that the trustees change the name to Duke-Princeton or, if they absolutely insisted, merely to Princeton-Duke; but that, too, is generally pooh-poohed as apocryphal.
Duke's admiration for Princeton is obvious in the look of the university he ordered up. Although he died in 1925 before work had really begun, his wishes were clear, and by 1930 an ant colony of carpenters, stonecutters, stained-glass-window designers and quadrangle landscapers had transformed a section on the outskirts of Durham (roughly a mile west of the original Trinity campus) into Duke's dream.
It is a perfectly lovely place, though if you know its rush-order origins you can't help but feel that the beauty of it all is a bit self-conscious. The basic design is rigid Gothic gingerbread set on drafting-board quadrangles of green, all loomed over by a chapel centerpiece that has 77 stained-glass windows, a 50-bell carillon and a suitably soaring tower patterned after Canterbury Cathedral in England. New buildings are not in the same instant-ancient mold, and the architectural style ranges from brick-industrial to a kind of modern Gothic that is not at all unbecoming. The campus seems to be in a state of almost perpetual construction, and President Knight has launched a $102.8 million fund-raising campaign that will serve to finance a progressive look on campus—both architecturally and academically—for a long time to come. The original Trinity location, called East Campus, is mostly Georgian architecture, and the dorms there are for girls, who are called East Beasts.
While his university was still just a philanthropic idea, Duke said: "It will start as a completed thing. Other universities have had to grow piecemeal; we are ready to start a fully planned, completely coordinated plant." Within a short time after the name change, a hymn to Dear Old Duke was composed to create instant lumps in throats: And tho' on life's broad sea / Our fates may far us bear / We'll ever turn to thee / Our Alma Mater dear. A nice sober Latin slogan was adopted: Eruditio et Religio (cynics enlarged it to read, Eruditio et Religio et Cherooto et Cigaretto). There was a bit of absurdio, too, in a pair of statues that are still second only to the chapel as campus focal points. One portrays Buck Duke, nearly as bald as a basketball, wearing a baggy suit, leaning on a cane and, yes, holding a cigar in one upraised hand. The other statue is of Buck's daddy, "Old Man Wash," seated in a chair, with legs crossed and looking for all the world like a wrinkled, aged pelican who has just swallowed all the kingfish in his river.
Over the years things have gone well for Buck Duke's university. And even though it may not be exactly seething with youthful dissent over materialism, war or even air pollution, the caliber of its formal education can scarcely be knocked. Yet as its standards of scholarship have gone up and up and up, some of the zing has gone, too, of the good old years when a college education was seen as something more—or maybe less, depending on one's viewpoint—than a commodity for economic survival. Something of the spirit is missing; maybe even a phrase as corny as "that old school spirit" is apt.
Indeed, it is very much to the point and, in a way, rather poignant to ask undergraduates at Duke just who they have for heroes now—who are the people they particularly admire, people they would consider worthy of profound respect or even emulation by their generation. The answer is no one. There are no heroes at all. Not Bobby Kennedy or Bob Dylan or the Beatles or Albert Camus or J. D. Salinger or Carl Yastrzemski or Stokely Carmichael or General Westmoreland or Timothy Leary or President Knight or Charlie Brown or Moshe Dayan. Not even Vic Bubas. And the fact is that even if Duke were not in North Carolina, and even if it were in the Ivy League, that void might still exist. For the Timid Generation does not reside at Duke alone.
NINE PHOTOS
STUART SMITH
PHOTO
STUART SMITH
The goal was achieved: an instant university with a Princeton look.
"I don't believe that a college education does a man much good in business...."
JAMES BUCHANAN DUKE
BILL CLIFTON
"We go ape over basketball...but if the team were losing I suppose that nobody would care about it."
ROBERT RANKIN
"From now on Duke may consider itself as having a relatively successful football season when it ends up with a 5-5 record."
DOUGLAS KNIGHT
"It is not that our students feel they are so genteel that it is beneath them to crusade, it is just that they abhor violence."
ABBIE DOGGETT
"Things have gotten so big—on a national scale—that kids feel they can't really influence anything themselves."
EDDIE CAMERON
"We've got the Big Ten and the service academies scheduled through 1978; you sure can't call that football de-emphasis."
ALAN RAY
"At most, 10% of the student body is involved—at all—with what is going on beyond their own lives."
BILL GOODWIN
"We think the fraternity system works fine and lets kids be closer to their—uh—brothers than if they lived in dorms."