Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Perspective

For Duke alumni, pride and loathing

It was with dismay though not total surprise that talk at the annual alumni weekend often turned to "the lacrosse thing."

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published April 30, 2006

DURHAM, N.C. - Spring is the time of year when Duke University seems most at home in its Southern surroundings. The azaleas on campus burst forth in glorious hues of pink and magenta, giving life to the cold gray walls known to generations of students as "the Gothic rock pile."

Last Sunday, as the annual alumni weekend drew to a close, hundreds of Duke graduates wandered among the flowers, reluctant to leave a place that provided some of the happiest and, yes, wildest days of their lives. So it was with dismay though not total surprise that talk often turned to "the lacrosse thing" - allegations that white players on Duke's lacrosse team raped a black woman they hired to strip.

"It's what happens when young men drink too much and have lapses in judgment, just like I had lapses in judgment when I was a young man here," said one alumnus from California. Like many of the Duke grads, he was white, trim for his age and wore a tag that identified him by year of graduation - in this case, '66.

I am from the class of '71, and we were chatting not as reporter and interviewee but as fellow Dookies, wondering what the lacrosse scandal will mean for the university - our university.

Of course, '66 stressed, he had never done anything like what the players are accused of doing. But how could anyone who went to Duke in the '60s forget the drunken parties and lewd gyrations to the sound of that legendary band, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts?

Now, four decades later, Duke president Richard Brodhead had a "tiger by the tail," as '66 put it. He thought Brodhead was handling the scandal well - setting up committees to review the suspended lacrosse program, Duke's handling of the case and its relations with the community, 45 percent black, beyond its walls.

Still, '66 said, "it's a tragedy."

"There are no winners and losers, only losers."

The national media, consumed with a story involving sex, race, class and privileged athletes, has gone so far as to ask, "Can Duke's Image Survive?" The school's reputation is undoubtedly tarnished, but it has long been hard to pin an image on a place with such a split personality.

Duke has its roots in North Carolina's most reviled and lucrative crop, tobacco. In 1924, James B. Duke, president of the American Tobacco Co., established a trust with $6-million going to Trinity College, a small Methodist school. It was renamed in memory of Duke's father, Washington.

Today, a statue of Washington Duke in his easy chair marks the entrance to East Campus. As an old joke goes, he'll rise if ever a lady of unquestioned virtue walks by.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Duke's modest origins, West Campus - dominated by the cathedral-like "chapel" - was built in a monumental Gothic style more suited to a medieval European city than the piney woods of North Carolina. Further reflecting what some see as an overweening pretentiousness, the school adopted a Latin motto meaning "Knowledge and Faith," later altered by students to:

"Eruditio, Religio et Cigaretto."

For much of its history, Duke has been best known for its championship basketball and more offbeat claims to fame: professor J.B. Rhine's experiments with ESP; the Duke Hospital rice diet; the Law School's decision to temporarily block from view the portrait of its most famous and disgraced graduate, Richard Nixon.

When I entered Duke in 1967, about half the students were from other parts of the country. But the social life was still dominated by a Southern aristocracy. There was a Callaway, of Georgia's Callaway Gardens. And a Miss South Carolina, who went on to marry U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, 43 years her senior. And the namesake son of revered Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry.

Although it boasted of high academic standards, Duke then - as now - worshiped big-time athletics in a way unheard of at the Ivy League schools it strove to emulate. Long before lacrosse became popular, Duke nourished the hope that its struggling football team would one day achieve the glory of Blue Devil basketball.

Doing his part to ensure the team stayed enrolled was the professor who taught Broadcasting 100. It was widely known that every football player was guaranteed an A, no matter how ill-prepared or chronically late to class. I took Broadcasting and got a B; the running back who snoozed next to me aced the course.

But others at Duke - then as now - had little use for sports and the attendant boosterism and rowdiness. In the spring of my freshman year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and hundreds of students staged a sleep-in to protest Duke's paternalistic treatment of its black employees, most of them in menial jobs earning minimum wage.

For days, as a steady drizzle turned the lawn outside Duke Chapel into a muddy bog, they huddled under plastic sheeting and sang We Shall Overcome. A few dozen later took over the president's home he was out of town and spent the night sleeping among stacks of Yachting magazine.

The president's reading material was "a perfect example of Duke's elitism," as I wrote in the school newspaper, the Chronicle.

That protest in 1968 drew national media attention and was a milestone in Duke's evolution from a good "Southern" school into an internationally respected institution. The administration, overwhelmingly white, agreed to raise wages, to hire more black professors, to enroll more black students.

These memories and more came flooding back last week when I returned to Duke for a conference on national security and the war on terror.

In the years since I left, Duke has achieved enormous renown. The Times of London ranks it as the world's 11th best university. Its law, medical, engineering and business schools are among the top in the nation. Its student body is increasingly diverse: 14 percent Asian-American, 11 percent African-American.

But some things hadn't changed much. It was hard not to notice that most of the conference participants were white; all of those checking us in and cleaning our rooms were black.

My old dining hall, now the "Marketplace" with gourmet coffees and an oatmeal bar, was decorated with large framed photos of Duke through the years. Of the scores of faces pictured, all but one were white.

For some reason, Duke's energetic alumni association never caught up with me, and it was only after the conference that I realized the class reunions were in full swing. So I strolled around campus, where the lacrosse scandal was never far from mind.

"It's a black eye, for sure," said a class of '81, white and a Georgia lawyer. "But I think the same thing goes on all over the country. We're not that special."

Nearly everyone had heard of wild fraternity parties with strippers and triple X-rated movies. They acknowledged, and bemoaned, a culture that tolerates binge drinking and boorishness, especially among top athletes living unsupervised off campus.

Most, though, were shocked to think a Duke student could commit a terrible crime. And most no longer knew what to believe, as defense lawyers seemed to punch hole after hole in the prosecution's publicly stated case.

"Being a woman, I sympathized with the accuser at first," a black alumna from the class of '96 told me. "I said, I'm not going to my reunion. But it's just three guys and not the whole university. I was given great opportunities here so I decided to come."

Now working in local government in Washington, D.C., she thought the many committees set up in the scandal's wake smacked of "just another government commission. I hope something good comes of it."

We talked while combing through piles of Duke T-shirts in the campus bookstore. It stayed open all weekend to accommodate the crush of former students who still take enough pride in their school to want "Duke University" emblazoned on everything from baby bibs to ice chests.

Thanks to a 20 percent discount for alumni, items were flying out of the store, especially those with a basketball motif. But I noticed there was still a full rack of one type of bumper sticker.

It read: "Support Duke Lacrosse."

Susan Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 30, 2006, 07:59:33]