Duke University owns 3,300 acres in Durham County and pays just over $1 million in annual property taxes while the vast majority of its assets are completely exempt from local property tax.
Whenever Duke faces scrutiny, we always hear someone say that without Duke there would be no Durham.
This is backwards.
Without the generosity of Durham citizens there’d be no Duke University today.
It was a Durham citizen who saved Trinity College from bankruptcy more than 100 years ago. (Julian Carr was also a white supremacist who helped fund the white mob in Wilmington in 1898.)
It was Durham citizens who banded together and donated free land and money to move the struggling rural college to West Durham.
A Durham citizen donated the land under East Campus as a gift. Durham citizens pooled money and donated Southgate dorm as a gift.
It was a Durhamite, born and raised in Durham, who donated $40 million to add the brick buildings to the East Campus quad and then buy the land and build the gothic West Campus.
And it was a Durhamite who established the Duke Endowment, filling the university’s coffers for a century.
The Duke administration needs an attitude change because without Durham, there’d be no Duke.
Whenever Duke faces scrutiny, we always hear someone say that without Duke there would be no Durham.
This is backwards.
Without the generosity of Durham citizens there’d be no Duke University today.
It was a Durham citizen who saved Trinity College from bankruptcy more than 100 years ago. (Julian Carr was also a white supremacist who helped fund the white mob in Wilmington in 1898.)
It was Durham citizens who banded together and donated free land and money to move the struggling rural college to West Durham.
A Durham citizen donated the land under East Campus as a gift. Durham citizens pooled money and donated Southgate dorm as a gift.
It was a Durhamite, born and raised in Durham, who donated $40 million to add the brick buildings to the East Campus quad and then buy the land and build the gothic West Campus.
And it was a Durhamite who established the Duke Endowment, filling the university’s coffers for a century.
The Duke administration needs an attitude change because without Durham, there’d be no Duke.
-John Schelp
Old West Durham