Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James Buchanan Duke established The Duke Endowment, prompting the institution to change its name in honor of his deceased father, Washington Duke.

www.duke.edu

The University is organized into two undergraduate and eight graduate schools. The undergraduate student body comes from all 50 U.S. states and 106 countries. In its 2009 edition, U.S. News & World Report ranked the university's undergraduate program eighth among national universities, while ranking the medical, law, and business schools among the top 10 in the country. Duke University was ranked as the thirteenth best university in the world in the 2008 THES - QS World University Rankings of universities worldwide.

Duke's research expenditures are among the largest 20 in the U.S. and its athletic program is one of the nation's elite. Competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the athletic teams have won nine national championships, including three by the men's basketball team.

Besides academics, research, and athletics, Duke is also well known for its sizable campus and Gothic architecture, especially the Duke Chapel. The forests surrounding parts of the campus belie the University's proximity to downtown Durham. Duke's 8,610 acres (35 km²) contain three contiguous campuses in Durham as well as a marine lab in Beaufort. Construction projects have updated both the freshmen-populated Georgian-style East Campus and the main Gothic-style West Campus, as well as the adjacent Medical Center over the past five years.

History

Duke started as Brown's Schoolhouse, a private subscription school founded in 1838 in Randolph County in the present-day town of Trinity. Now, those grounds are occupied by Braxton Craven Middle School, named after the second president of the same name. It is the only all sixth-grade school in North Carolina. The school was organized by the Union Institute Society, a group of Methodists and Quakers, and in 1841 North Carolina issued a charter for Union Institute Academy. The academy was renamed Normal College in 1851 and then Trinity College in 1859 because of support from the Methodist Church. In 1892, Trinity moved to Durham, largely due to generosity from Washington Duke and Julian S. Carr, powerful and respected Methodists who had grown wealthy through the tobacco industry. Washington Duke gave what was then known as Trinity College a $100,000 endowment in 1896, with the stipulation that the college "open its doors to women, placing them on an equal footing with men."

In 1924, Washington Duke's son, James B. Duke, established The Duke Endowment with a $40 million ($434 million in 2005 dollars) trust fund. The annual income of the fund was to be distributed to hospitals, orphanages, the Methodist Church, three colleges, and Trinity College. William Preston Few, the president of Trinity College, insisted that the university be named Duke University, and James B. Duke agreed that it would be 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 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.

Engineering, which had been taught since 1903, became a separate school in 1939. In athletics, Duke hosted and competed in the only Rose Bowl ever played outside California in Wallace Wade Stadium in 1942. Increased activism on campus during the 1960s prompted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at the University on the civil rights movement's progress on November 14, 1964. The former governor of North Carolina, Terry Sanford, was elected president in 1969, propelling the Fuqua School of Business's opening, the William R. Perkins library completion, and the founding of the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs.

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. Duke University Hospital was finished in 1980 and the student union was fully constructed two years later. In 1986, the men's soccer team captured Duke's first NCAA championship, and the men's basketball team followed with championships in 1991, 1992, and 2001.

Research

Duke University’s research expenditures topped $490 million in 2004. In the 2005 fiscal year, Duke University Medical Center received the fifth-largest amount of funding from the National Institute of Health, netting $349.8 million. Duke's funding increased 14.8% from 2004, representing the largest growth of any top-20 recipient. Throughout history, Duke researchers have made several important breakthroughs, including the biomedical engineering department's development of the world's first real-time, three-dimensional ultrasound diagnostic system and the first engineered blood vessels. In the mechanical engineering department, Adrian Bejan developed the constructal theory, which explains the shapes that arise in nature. Duke has also pioneered studies involving nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and complex systems in physics. In May 2006, Duke researchers mapped the final human chromosome, which made world news as the Human Genome Project was finally complete.

Reports of Duke researchers' involvement in new AIDS vaccine research surfaced in June 2006. The biology department combines two historically strong programs in botany and zoology, while the divinity school's leading theologian is Time's 2001 "America's Best Theologian," Stanley Hauerwas. The graduate program in literature boasts several internationally renowned figures, including Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt, and Alice Kaplan, while philosophers Robert Brandon and Lakatos Award-winner Alexander Rosenberg make Duke a leading center for research in philosophy of biology

Campus

Duke University owns 220 buildings on 8,610 acres (35 km²) of land, which includes the 7,200 acre (29 km²) Duke Forest. The campus is divided into four main areas: West, East, and Central campuses, and the Medical Center. All the campuses are connected via a free bus service that runs frequently throughout the week. On the Atlantic coast in Beaufort, Duke owns 15 acres (61,000 m2) as part of its Marine Lab. One of the major public attractions on the Duke Campus is the 55-acre (220,000 m2) Sarah P. Duke Gardens, established in the 1930s.Duke students often refer to the campus as "the Gothic Wonderland," a nickname referring to the Gothic revival architecture of West Campus

Reputation

In the 2009 U.S. News & World Report ranking of undergraduate programs at doctoral granting institutions, Duke ranked 8th (tied with the University of Chicago and Columbia University). In the past decade, U.S. News & World Report has placed Duke as high as third and as low as eighth. Duke was ranked the 13th-best university in the world in 2007 by the THES - QS World University Rankings. Duke was ranked 32nd best in the world and 25th-best nationally by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2008. The Wall Street Journal ranked Duke sixth (fifth among universities) in its "feeder" rankings in 2006, analyzing the percentage of undergraduates that enroll in what it considers the top five medical, law, and business schools. A survey by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2002 ranked Duke as the best university in the country in regard to the integration of African American students and faculty.

In U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Graduate Schools 2009," Duke's medical school ranked 6th for research and tied for 41st for primary care, while the law school ranked 10th. Among business schools in the United States, the Fuqua School of Business was ranked 12th by U.S. News & World Report in 2009 and 8th by BusinessWeek in 2008. The graduate program for the Pratt School of Engineering was ranked 30th by U.S. News & World Report and 2nd by The Princeton Review in 2006 among national engineering schools. In the rankings of doctoral programs by U.S. News & World Report in its 2008 edition, Duke ranked 1st in literary criticism and theory, 5th in ecology and evolutionary biology, 5th in biomedical engineering, tied for 12th for doctoral programs in the sciences, tied for 21st in mathematics, tied for 25th in computer science, tied for 29th in physics, and ranked 38th in chemistry.

Political science, sociology, history, economics, and cultural anthropology departments also frequently rank in the top 20 of their respective disciplines among U.S. universities. The Philosophical Gourmet Report placed Duke's philosophy program as the 27th best in the nation in 2006, while ranking Duke as the best program in the U.S. in philosophy of biology.

Academics

Undergraduate -- Trinity College

Undergraduate -- Pratt School of Engineering

Graduate and Professional

Schools and Departments

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
The Graduate School
Fuqua School of Business
Divinity School
School of Law
School of Medicine
Nicholas School of the Environment
School of Nursing
Pratt School of Engineering
Departmental directory

Duke University was ranked 13th in the 2008 THES-QS World University Ranking