Below:1968: Students protesting the death of King march to the President's House with a list of demands; Knight, above, invited them in, but negotiations stalled

Photos: Duke University Archives

oug Knight calls them the dark years: a troubled time of soul-searching and redefinition that followed hard on the heels of his forced resignation as Duke University's fifth president and turned into a permanent break from his lifelong commitment to an academic career. Swept up in the roiling political and social currents of the late Sixties, the Yale-educated scholar and former president of Lawrence College found himself exiled from a community that had brought him emotional sustenance and intellectual joy since he was a child.

The memories of what had happened at Duke were so painful that Knight could not bear even to visit a college campus--not even for the graduation of his third son. He was neither the first nor last university president to suffer from the chaos of the period. In fact, more than seventy colleges and universities lost their chief executives in the late Sixties and early Seventies, including Rice, Penn State, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Civil-rights and antiwar protests on campuses led to riots, arson, and, at Jackson State and Kent State, the deaths of students.

But, in some significant ways, he and the institution itself--not just the times--were out of joint. Despite Knight's exceptional academic pedigree and his ambitions to make Duke a nationally recognized institution, his leadership drew harsh criticism from conservative alumni, student activists, and powerful trustees. He proved to be no match for the forces that led to his resignation in 1969: entrenched, behind-the-scenes power struggles that had forced out Duke's third president, Hollis Edens, only three years before; The Duke Endowment's unprecedented financial and political authority over and meddling into the university's affairs; the nonviolent yet disruptive Silent Vigil of 1968; the takeover of the Allen Building by black students the following year, during which reactionary Durham residents with shotguns circled the campus, and state police arrived with tear gas; the bomb scares and death threats.

In another era, Knight might have left a legacy of erudite gentility. Instead, he was "thrown into waters he couldn't swim in, and there were quite a few sharks swimming there with him," says William Anlyan, chancellor emeritus of Duke Medical Center. Terry Sanford, who followed Knight as president, brought to the job sharply honed negotiating skills and political experience as governor of North Carolina. Sanford's sixteen-year run as Duke's president eclipsed Knight's many accomplishments.

In a new memoir, The Dancer and the Dance (Separate Star, Inc.), Knight explores how the forces that shaped the national debate manifested themselves during his tenure at Duke. "My whole training and experience to this point had been based in a concept of the university and of liberal education totally grounded in mediation, critical discourse, civility, and the restraint of uncontrolled dogmatism," he writes. "Now I found that I was required to set all this aside. As a result, I spent--overspent--my energy where I did not want to put it, and so the action of the late Sixties was for me a divided action. I was pulled between what I knew the university needed over the decades and what the times demanded immediately. It was a schizophrenia with only one inevitable outcome, and I would reflect on its meaning for years, always in the recognition that my whole career had put me in a place and point of time from which there was no honorable escape."

Time has healed some of the deepest wounds. Enduring relationships with Durham friends and colleagues helped, he says. So did writing a cathartic chronicle of his presidency and the era, Street of Dreams: The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s, published in 1989 by Duke University Press. Last April, Knight and his wife, Grace, came back to Durham for the renaming of the President's House, which was built under Knight's leadership. Now called the Douglas M. and Grace Knight House, it was designed by Alden Dow, a protÈgÈ of Frank Lloyd Wright, and is used to entertain thousands of guests a year.

At the dedication ceremony, President Nannerl O. Keohane remarked that Knight "is and was a poet and scholar, and the breadth and sensitivity of his thinking informed not only his public pronouncements as the CEO of a rollicking, feisty, ambitious Southern institution of higher education, but also the work he undertook behind the scenes as a collaborative leader and administrator."

Despite the messy ending to his tenure as Duke's fifth president, Knight launched an impressive number of initiatives. When Ernest Brummer's widow donated much of her husband's collection of medieval art to Duke, Knight made a home for it by transforming an old science building on East Campus into the Duke Art Museum. The move was not without controversy; some in the Duke community criticized the initiative from both financial and philosophical standpoints, arguing that the university shouldn't spend money on something as frivolous as the arts. But Knight recognized the collection's importance and quietly persisted.

Knight also oversaw the addition of a phytotron and a hyperbaric chamber, and construction of a major wing for Perkins Library that increased capacity more than fivefold. Convinced that the men's and women's campuses should be better integrated, he proposed creating a transition between the two by adding student housing, now Central Campus.

On the academic side, Knight established the joint M.D.-J.D. and M.D.-Ph.D. degrees, the School of Business Administration, and interdisciplinary programs in biomedical

engineering and forestry management. He secured an $8-million, Ford Foundation matching grant, the terms of which required the university to approach fund raising in a more sophisticated and strategic way. It worked: During his six year term the university brought in $195 million in gifts and grants, triple that of the entire preceding six-year period.

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans '39, Hon. '83, the great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, attended the naming ceremony for the Knight House. She says she is a "great admirer" of Knight. "Doug had not been honored in a way that he should have been, and a great deal of credit goes to Nan Keohane for recognizing his contributions to the university."

During Knight's presidency, Semans served on the boards of trustees of both Duke University and The Duke Endowment. She says it is hard to imagine in this era of twenty-four-hour media coverage the level of secrecy and the number of back-room deals that were the norm at Duke and other institutions at the time. The relationship between the university and The Duke Endowment was particularly complicated because of the overlap in governance on the institutions' trustee boards, as well as Duke's position as a designated beneficiary of the Endowment. From the moment he was inaugurated, "Knight was in a bad situation made worse by the crossover of power" between the two, says Semans.

In Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas: The Duke Endowment 1924-1994, Duke history professor emeritus Robert F. Durden chronicles the establishment and growth of the charitable trust created by James B. Duke. A bylaw passed in the mid-Thirties during William Few's presidency called for at least three Endowment trustees on the university's executive committee. As a result, figures such as Norman A. Cocke and Thomas L. Perkins simultaneously served on the boards of Duke University, The Duke Endowment, and Duke Power Company and exerted tremendous personal and political power. Cocke and Perkins were among those on the executive board of the university's trustees who were instrumental in forcing Hollis Edens to resign as president of Duke after a bitter internal dissent over his leadership led by chemist Paul Gross, Edens' vice president for education. (During Terry Sanford's administration, there was a deliberate move to put distance between the two boards. At Sanford's request, the composition of the university's board of trustees was reconfigured to include alumni and students. In addition, Endowment chair Archie Davis recommended that Endowment trustees should not also serve as trustees of any of its beneficiaries, which include academic institutions: Duke, Davidson, Johnson C. Smith, and Furman.)