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Collaborating Rivals

Question: What three things do Dean Smith, Roy Williams ’72 and Mike Krzyzewski have in common? Answer: Each is in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Each coached multiple NCAA men’s basketball championship teams. And each has a winning record in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Doug Dibbert ’70

For the first time in decades — possibly ever — UNC and Duke will compete in a Homecoming football game in Chapel Hill, on Saturday, Nov. 7, and this issue’s cover story looks at this long rivalry.While we enjoy the generally fierce athletic competition — and it could be argued that sometimes both institutions also compete for students, faculty and patients — in many ways, our campuses have long collaborated.

Duke University was created in 1924, two years after UNC became a member of the Association of American Universities, by James Buchanan Duke as a memorial to his father, Washington Duke. For most of its first half-century, Duke was largely known as a fine, private, church-related Southern university. Most would acknowledge that it was the 15-year presidency of former Gov.Terry Sanford ’39 — who held two degrees from UNC — that catapulted Duke onto the national and international stages, aided significantly by Joel Fleishman ’55, who has held a range of senior roles at Duke since arriving there in 1971 (and who earned three degrees from UNC).

In 1988, when Paul Hardin, with undergraduate and law degrees from Duke, became Carolina’s sixth chancellor, some claimed that this was simply “reparations.” However, one-time Sanford gubernatorial aide and longtime friend Tom Lambeth ’57 boasted that “when Sanford went to Duke, that was evangelism; when Hardin came to Carolina, that was redemption.”

There are several important and obvious differences between our respective institutions, differences that suggest that much more than eight miles separates our campuses. Carolina’s “eclectic” architecture reflects a campus that has largely been built by North Carolinians over many generations; Duke’s dominant Gothic architecture reflects the early and lasting largess of an important donor.

Each fall, Carolina’s entering class, now roughly 3,900 students, reflects North Carolina’s best and brightest with a limitation of no more than 18 percent from out of state; Duke’s first-year class of 1,900 seldom exceeds 18 percent entering students from North Carolina.

While both institutions have schools or colleges of arts and sciences, medicine, nursing, law, business and government or public policy, only Duke has schools of engineering (UNC’s was moved to N.C. State in the 1930s), divinity and environment. Only UNC has schools of pharmacy, public health, dentistry, education, journalism and mass communication, information and library sciences, and social work.

Thanks to the generosity of Julian Robertson ’55, every 30 minutes a bus departs Duke Chapel destined for the Morehead Planetarium as another bus departs the Morehead Planetarium headed for Duke Chapel. And each spring Duke Robertson Scholars are in residence on the Carolina campus taking classes at UNC while UNC Robertson Scholars are living in Duke residence halls and attending Duke classes. Undergraduates who are not Robertson Scholars may take one course not available at UNC each semester at Duke.

For the past 16 years, the alumni associations of UNC and Duke have jointly sponsored a two-week educational travel program at Oxford University. Our alumni travel together, share classes and, because we often have some mixed marriages, some of our alumni even share rooms together.

Some faculty hold joint appointments at Duke and UNC, and other faculty collaborate regularly on joint research projects. Our two schools offer joint degrees, jointly sponsor seminars and coordinate purchases by our libraries, greatly expanding the research materials available to students and faculty at each school.

As then-Duke President Nan Keohane neared the end of her presidency, to celebrate the collaborations of our two universities and to recognize her leadership, then-Chancellor James Moeser hosted an elegant dinner in the Wilson Library. At that dinner, Chancellor Moeser announced that a visiting professorship, alternating between UNC and Duke, would be established in President Keohane’s name with a lead gift from the William Rand Kenan Charitable Trust. UNC later recognized President Keohane with an honorary degree, and in May, Duke awarded an honorary degree to James Moeser.

The close proximity of our two campuses that has long fostered a sharing of resources and important partnerships and collaborations on many fronts results in both UNC and Duke being stronger institutions to the great benefit of our respective students and faculty. On many days and in many ways, we celebrate and share in each other’s success — but on Nov. 7 in Chapel Hill, let’s Beat Dook!

Yours at Carolina,

Doug signature

 

 

 

Douglas S. Dibbert ’70

doug_dibbert@unc.edu

 

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