Former University President Douglas Knight led an audience of 60 on a nostalgia-tinged journey through his tumultuous six-year reign as one of the University's most influential leaders and the man who set the course for Duke's rise to national prominence.
After an introduction from current President Nan Keohane, Knight recalled his tenure as University president from 1963 to 1969, as president of Lawrence College from 1954 to 1963 and his years as a student and professor at Yale University.
When Knight arrived at Duke, he said, the Board of Trustees told him they wanted to turn the University into a truly nationally-recognized institution. Encumbered by such a lofty charge, Knight faced even greater difficulties when the social activism of the 1960s set in.
"Duke was uncomfortable with the issues of black citizens in this country and their role in the University," Knight said. "None of us knew how complex the job of integration--real integration--into the University would be. [Disapproval] ran right from the Board of Trustees down, and we were well aware of it. Every time something went wrong, it was easy to say, 'You see? We told you.'"
Tensions came to a broil Feb. 13, 1969, when 67 black students took over the Allen Building and issued a set of demands to the administration, including the creation of a department of Afro-American studies, the right to establish a dormitory exclusively for black students and proportional representation of blacks within the student body.
The incident, and Knight's sympathetic response, brought about his political demise, he said.
"It was said to me, 'You have them where you want them--you can get rid of a whole bunch,'" Knight said. "By the time I had finished defending those 67 black students, I had finished my tenure as president."
One of Duke's advantages, Knight said, was that radical and violent politics remained largely absent from campus. A CBS producer once contacted him with an offer to air a story on the University--as long as he could promise a riot. Knight said that would not be possible.
"We were busy starting and continuing the work of making Duke become a truly great national university," he said. "Our real job was to keep our heads enough to keep on the real good causes, the great causes, as we dealt with all the noise."
Knight also praised the University for avoiding the mistake of the Ivy League: self-satisfaction.
"Yale has, for generations, been so pleased it is Yale that it has not realized the great mandate of a university, which is never to be satisfied with being Yale or Harvard.... In the alumni magazines at Yale, it's always about old [founder] Eli [Yale]; at Lawrence and Duke, it's always about what the grads are doing, what the big issues are in the real world."
Knight, who began his path to academia as a scholar of Alexander Pope, recalled a professor's reaction to a paper he had written about Pope as a guiding principle for the rest of his life. After a page of harsh critique, which his professor started with, "You have done those things which you ought not to have done, and not done those things which you ought to have done," the diatribe ended with a transformative line: "As far as this goes, it is the finest thing that has ever been written on the subject."
"He taught me, always, when I thought I was doing well, to think about those things... which you ought not to have done, and those things... which you ought to have done," Knight said.
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