Athletic success, academic growth

More than anyone, two people have shaped Duke's destiny in the 1990s: Nan Keohane, the outsider president who has led the University to new financial and academic heights, and Mike Krzyzewski, the insider basketball coach who has propelled the team and the school to unheard-of national prominence.

These two individuals, who have never been mistaken for best friends, differ sharply in their temperament, goals and leadership style, but are strikingly similar in their commitment to Duke's excellence.

Krzyzewski's most stunning achievements bookend the decade-the national championships in 1991 and 1992 and the near-misses of 1998 and 1999. For the national public, he is Duke, the embodiment of a university committed to both athletics and academics.

But for the academic world, Keohane is Duke's most visible figure. The president didn't even arrive from Wellesley College until 1993, but since then, she has created the all-freshman East Campus, launched a $1.5 billion fund-raising campaign and spearheaded a long list of academic and administrative initiatives.

When asked to name the most important administrative decisions of the decade, Keohane listed three crucial endeavors: the hotly debated East Campus change, the formation of the rapidly expanding Duke University Health System and the creation of the interdisciplinary Nicholas School of the Environment.

These two individuals, who have never been mistaken for best friends, differ sharply in their temperament, goals and leadership style, but are strikingly similar in their commitment to Duke's excellence.

Krzyzewski's most stunning achievements bookend the decade-the national championships in 1991 and 1992 and the near-misses of 1998 and 1999. For the national public, he is Duke, the embodiment of a university committed to both athletics and academics.

But for the academic world, Keohane is Duke's most visible figure. The president didn't even arrive from Wellesley College until 1993, but since then, she has created the all-freshman East Campus, launched a $1.5 billion fund-raising campaign and spearheaded a long list of academic and administrative initiatives.

Keohane's goal has been increasing the amount of money available, and she explained the University's more public focus on fund-raising as a result of several factors, including "the buoyant national economy, which gives us opportunities to pursue fund-raising that were not so evident in less prosperous times and the well-grounded view that many potentially significant donors... are more willing to give if they form a personal relationship with the CEO, which means that fund-raising is a visible part of my own work," she wrote in an e-mail.

For several years now, the rewards from the massive fund-raising effort have been pouring in, with major gifts renaming Duke's environment and engineering schools and others creating programs such as the Bass chairs and the University Scholars.

Even with all of its success in the last 10 years, the University's academic stature, medical center and fund-raising prowess have never claimed number one in their respective rankings.

But Krzyzewski's basketball program, with its five Final Fours and those two national championships, has been all the way to the top. The team's worst year, 1994-95, was during the absence of its mastermind, but the program has bounced back in the late 1990s.

Men's basketball is Duke's primary claim to fame, the way the University gets its name and its reputation into the national consciousness. "They're on TV more than Clinton...," said Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy. "You have Dick Vitale screaming about Cameron [Indoor Stadium] x number of times a year."

Throughout the decade, the ups and downs of the men's basketball team more or less controlled the campus' attention from October through March, creating an incredible sense of common purpose across the University.

Vice President for Student Affairs Janet Dickerson came to Duke from Swarthmore College in 1991, and her initial impressions of the hoops-crazed campus reflect the community's single-minded devotion to the sport.

"I was told that I wouldn't really understand Duke fully until I lived through a basketball season. True!!" she wrote in an e-mail. "It was truly exhilarating, but scary as well. Like everyone, I bought championship t-shirts and became a noisy, crazy Duke fan."

This Cameron Craziness is often manifested in bonfires, and the excitement of basketball eventually turned into a point of controversy for Keohane. In 1998, students held a protest bonfire and chanted expletives about the figurehead of an administration that had banned all bonfires.

Keohane also took a significant amount of heat from students and alumni for her decision to move forward with the all-freshman East.

This transformation, implemented in 1995, led to some of the defining trademarks of student life in the latter half of the decade: all-you-can-eat meals at the Marketplace and weekend buses to West Campus packed with party-goers.

But what actually happens at those parties has changed dramatically, as regulations created in the middle of the decade essentially killed the on-campus, open keg party, let alone a keg party on a weeknight.

With the exception of Cameron, said Wasiolek, Trinity '76, "I think the campus is quieter. I don't know what that means. I don't have a real analysis of that, but I do think it's quieter."

At the same time, Wasiolek said, "The whole notion of drinking to get wasted, of drinking to lose total control, seems in my opinion to have moved more toward the norm than the exception."

In many ways, students' daily lives have been transformed, too. At the beginning of the decade, the campus had no coffee shops, no bagel shop, no national fast food chain, no World Wide Web, no e-mail.

From a different perspective, however, little has changed, Dickerson said. "I recall the first student meeting I attended in the fall of 1991.... The main issues of concern were parking, the need for recreational and other social space facilities and, to some extent, alcohol policy. Despite our progress, these are still our issues."

The University has also struggled throughout the decade with issues of race. The elimination of a high-ranking black administrator's position, the mistaken arrest of a black freshman and continuing student concern about intolerant attitudes and racial prejudice marked the decade.

Although the student body has become significantly more diverse, administrators and students are still working to improve campus climate. The growth of a more integrated social scene, the creation of the Office of Institutional Equity and the designation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a University holiday have all been steps forward.

Despite this movement, Brodie said, there are still several important steps to be taken. "There has not been the hew and cry across the board for such things as expansion of minority faculty...," he said. "That has not evoked the tremendous institutional concern it evoked in the '80s or early '90s."

The University extended itself in several different directions in the 1990s, reaching beyond its traditional boundaries.

Physically, Duke renamed and renovated the Memorial Gym on East Campus and built the Wilson Recreation Center to accommodate students' growing interest in exercise and recreational sports.

The other major facilities constructed during the decade include two new dormitories on East, the Levine Science Research Center, the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and several buildings in the Medical Center.

On the athletic front, emerging from the shadow of the extremely visible men's basketball program, the rest of the athletic department grew up in the 1990s, with women's sports experiencing the most remarkable transformation.

At the beginning of the '90s, "Women's sports were just kind of here," said University Secretary Allison Haltom, Woman's College '72, "and all of a sudden we've had a real burgeoning of women's sports."

The women's golf team won a national championship last year, and the women's basketball team barely missed, losing in the final game to Purdue. More institutionally, the University has added women's lacrosse and women's rowing and is in the process of increasing its athletic scholarships for women from 35 in 1989 to more than 100 early in the next decade.

And the quality of these athletes and the sports they play has also improved dramatically, Kennedy said. "I think women college athletes today are significantly better than they were 10 years ago, and there are significantly more real good athletes," he said.