DM: Why has outreach to Durham been a priority for you?
RB: Duke grew out of what was once upon a time a small college, Trinity College, in Randolph County. It was either going to go out of business, or it was going to have have some new life. At that point the decision was made to move it to Durham. There was financial support here, and a piece of land was given to us that’s now our East Campus. So since 1894, the history of Duke and the history of Durham have been completely intertwined.
Intertwined for us because Durham is the ecosystem we live in. Intertwined for Durham because we’re the biggest employer by far in this town. And yet the relation between Duke and Durham remained a little unthought out up until the early 90s. My predecessor Nan Keohane did a great job in just helping to be more mindful and intentional about what Duke did in Durham.
I think a lot of universities reached that moment in their evolution at about the same time. Partly because that was a tough time for cities in most places, and universities realized they weren’t going to be able to count on the health of their surrounding organisms if they didn’t make more of a conscious effort to increase that health. It’s about the same time that Penn became much more involved in Philadelphia. Yale became much more involved in New Haven. It was just not something you could take for granted. So in the first phase of the neighborhood partnership there was a lot of work, a lot of neighborhood rebuilding in Walltown, Trinity Heights and elsewhere.
We’ve worked with the schools in an evolving way.
As you know, we’re a big medical operation, so we’ve been very very active in trying to understand how we can contribute to the growing health of the city of Durham.
And Duke played a role in the economic development of downtown. Our idea was, if somebody has a good project, we would like to commit enough space in it so they have our commitment so they can take our commitment to the bank and get financial support. That was very important for American Tobacco. Now we have almost 2,000 workers working in downtown Durham.
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