Duke . . . Don’t call it the ‘Harvard of the South’ in Durham!
As one of America’s premier universities, many students think of Duke in the same general grouping as other leading schools such as Harvard. While the similarities are undeniable, there are also some fascinating and little known differences. Age is one. While Duke can trace its history back to 1838 and the founding of Union Institute, the outstanding university we know as Duke in Durham, NC didn’t actually exist until after 1924! That’s almost three centuries after Harvard was founded! Nearly all of the colleges a high school student might consider along with Duke are at least a century older.
Duke is well known for its diverse student body but it’s not a recent tradition. Washington Duke, a southern tobacco magnate, gave a large endowment to the school in 1896 with the provision that the school "open its doors to women, placing them on an equal footing with men." It was considered a radical idea at the time!
A few years later, Washington Duke’s son, James Duke donated an enormous endowment to the university and the Duke we know today was created. The gift, estimated to be worth nearly half a billion dollars in today’s money, propelled an aggressive building and development program. Not surprisingly, the school was also renamed from Trinity College to Duke University.
The Duke campus isn’t just beautiful, it’s enormous. The campus includes a preserve known as the Duke Forest which contains more than seven thousand acres of open space available to the Duke community.
Many people refer to Duke as “the Harvard of the South” but don’t say that in Durham. They prefer to think of Harvard as “the Duke of the North”!
|