The story
Founded by James Buchanan Duke in 1838.1
Beginnings
Duke first opened in 1838 as Brown's Schoolhouse, a private subscription school founded in Randolph County, North Carolina, in the present-day town of Trinity. Organized by the Union Institute Society, a group of Methodists and Quakers, Brown's Schoolhouse became the Union Institute Academy in 1841 when North Carolina issued a charter. The academy was renamed Normal College in 1851, and then Trinity College in 1859 because of support from the Methodist Church.
In 1892, Trinity College moved to Durham, largely due to the generosity of Julian S. Carr and Washington Duke, powerful and respected Methodists who had grown wealthy through the tobacco and electrical industries. Carr, already a "long-time trustee and the largest benefactor of the college" having donated $10,000 ($358,300 adjusted for inflation) in 1887, donated a 62-acre tract of land known as Blackwell Park valued at $50,000 ($1,792,000 adjusted for inflation) for the original Durham campus, which is now known as East Campus. At the same time, Washington Duke gave the school $85,000 ($3,046,000 adjusted for inflation), $50,000 of which "for the erection of the main central Building" and " the remainder to be applied to the Endowment Fund"—later augmenting his generosity with three separate $100,000 contributions in 1896, 1899, and 1900—with the stipulation that the college "open its doors to women, placing them on an equal footing with men." As noted by Duke's Department of History in 2018: "Duke and Carr chose to... support an educational institution in a state where education had not been a priority. Both men also supported women’s rights."
Duke would accelerate its mission to become a global university in 1910 with the promotion of William Preston Few as the new president of Trinity College, who sought to establish the university as a southern counterpart to Yale and Harvard.
In 1924, Washington Duke's son, James B. Duke, established The Duke Endowment with a $40 million trust fund. Income from the fund was to be distributed to hospitals, orphanages, the Methodist Church, and four colleges (including Trinity College). Few, who remained president of Trinity, insisted that the institution be renamed Duke University to honor the family's generosity and to distinguish it from the myriad other colleges and universities carrying the "Trinity" name. At first, James B. Duke thought the name change would come off as self-serving, but eventually, he accepted Few's proposal as a memorial to his father. Money from the endowment allowed the university to grow quickly. Duke's original campus, East Campus, was rebuilt from 1925 to 1927 with Georgian-style buildings. By 1930, the majority of the Collegiate Gothic-style buildings on the campus one mile (1.6 km) west were completed, and construction on West Campus culminated with the completion of Duke Chapel in 1935.
In 1878, Trinity (in Randolph County) awarded A.B. degrees to three sisters—Mary, Persis, and Theresa Giles—who had studied both with private tutors and in classes with men. With the relocation of the college in 1892, the board of trustees voted to again allow women to be formally admitted to classes as day students. At the time of Washington Duke's donation in 1896, which carried the requirement that women be placed "on an equal footing with men" at the college, four women were enrolled; three of the four were faculty members' children. In 1903 Washington Duke wrote to the board of trustees withdrawing the provision, noting that it had been the only limitation he had ever put on a donation to the college. A woman's residential dormitory was built in 1897 and named the Mary Duke Building, after Washington Duke's daughter. By 1904, 54 women were enrolled in the college. In 1930, the Woman's College was established as a coordinate to the men's undergraduate college, which had been established and named Trinity College in 1924.
According to Duke University Human Rights Center, the school's "policy in the 1920s excluded Blacks from admissions and also restricted Blacks from using certain campus facilities such as the dining halls and dorm housing... In 1948, a group of divinity school students petitioned the divinity school to desegregate – the first concerted effort to push for the desegregation of Duke's admission policy."
Expansion and growth
Engineering, which had been taught at Duke since 1903, became a separate school in 1939. The university president's official residence, the J. Deryl Hart House, was completed in 1934. In athletics, Duke hosted and competed in the first Rose Bowl ever played outside California in Wallace Wade Stadium in 1942; the second such game was played in Arlington, Texas, in 2021, moved as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. During World War II, Duke was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a navy commission. In 1963 the Board of Trustees officially desegregated the undergraduate college.
Duke enrolled its first Black graduate students in 1961. The school did not admit Black undergraduates until September 1963. The teaching staff remained all-white until 1966.
Read the full text
Increased activism on campus during the 1960s prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at the university in November 1964 on the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. Following Douglas Knight's resignation from the office of university president, Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, was elected president of the university in 1969, propelling The Fuqua School of Business' opening, the William R. Perkins library completion, and the founding of the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs (now the Sanford School of Public Policy). The separate Woman's College merged back with Trinity as the liberal arts college for both men and women in 1972.
Beginning in the 1970s, Duke administrators began a long-term effort to strengthen Duke's reputation both nationally and internationally. Interdisciplinary work was emphasized, as was recruiting minority faculty and students. During this time it also became the birthplace of the first Physician Assistant degree program in the United States. Duke University Hospital was finished in 1980 and the student union building was fully constructed two years later. In 1986 the men's soccer team captured Duke's first National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship, and the men's basketball team followed shortly thereafter with championships in 1991 and 1992, then again in 2001, 2010, and 2015.
Duke Forward, a seven-year fundraising campaign, raised $3.85 billion by August 2017.
Recent history
In 2014, Duke removed the name of Charles B. Aycock, a white supremacist governor of North Carolina, from an undergraduate dormitory. It is now known as the East Residence Hall.
On August 19, 2017, following the violent clashes at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from the entrance to Duke University Chapel, after having been vandalized by protesters.
In August 2020, the first undergraduates from Duke Kunshan University arrived for their study abroad on Duke's campus. Due to COVID-19, Chinese Duke undergraduate and graduate students unable to travel to the United States were reciprocally hosted at Duke Kunshan campus.
Rape hoax against lacrosse players
In 2006, three men's lacrosse team members were falsely accused of rape by convicted felon Crystal Mangum, which garnered significant media attention. On April 11, 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players innocent. Cooper stated that the charged players were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse." The District Attorney, Mike Nifong, was subsequently disbarred, while Duke administration and faculty were condemned for their actions against the falsely accused.
In December 2024, Mangum admitted, during a December 11, 2024 podcast interview, that she "made up a story that wasn't true" about the white lacrosse players who attended a party where she was hired to be a stripper.
Research misconduct
On November 9, 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher Anil Potti, along with Joseph Nevins, had engaged in research misconduct including falsifying data and fraud, a case 60 Minutes described as "one of the biggest medical research frauds ever". Potti engaged in scientific misconduct while a cancer researcher at both Duke University's Medical Center and School of Medicine. He resigned in November 2010 after Duke put him on administrative leave, terminated the clinical trials based on his research and retracted his published data.
Despite Duke University becoming aware of the suspicions of research misconduct by 2008, when a medical student working with Potti and Nevins withdrew his name from the research and submitted a memorandum entitled "Research Concerns" to the administration, the administration denied any misconduct and convinced the student not to report his experiences to the funding agency, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Duke later falsely claimed that there had not been a whistleblower involved in the issue. Duke settled lawsuits by eight patients harmed by Potti, which was speculated "to be substantial, given the depth of the research misconduct and damaging evidence discovered in the lawsuit, including a whistleblower who alerted Duke to the misconduct in 2008 but went ignored."
In 2019, Duke paid $112.5 million to settle False Claims Act allegations related to scientific research misconduct. A researcher at the school was falsifying or fabricating research data in order to win grants for financial gain. The researcher was arrested in 2013 on charges of embezzling funds from the university. The scheme was exposed by the allegations made through a lawsuit, filed by a whistleblower, who had worked as a Duke employee, and discovered the false data.
In response to the misconduct settlement, Duke established an advisory panel of academics from Caltech, Stanford and Rockefeller University. Based on the recommendations of this panel, Duke Office of Scientific Integrity (DOSI) was established under the leadership of Lawrence Carin, an engineering professor with experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The establishment of this office brings Duke's research practices in line with those at peer institutions like Johns Hopkins University.
From Wikipedia’s article on Duke University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5