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| Come together: Partners
from campus and community gathered at the Lyon Park School,
clockwise from left, Sam Miglarese and Mayme Webb of Duke, The
West End's Mary Davis, Michael Palmer of Duke, Leigh Bordley
of Partners for Youth, and Luther Brooks, pastor of Walltown's
St. James Missionary Baptist Church |
| photo:Les Todd |
 uke
University can be easily found on various maps. It floats as a dot
in the north-central part of a state map. It becomes clearer on a
regional map, as the dot resolves itself into a larger square, sometimes
with an accompanying square for Duke Medical Center. On a small city
map, the squares double, one for East Campus, one for West. In its
most highly resolved form, a detailed map shows streets and stadium,
boundaries and buildings.
But there is a level of detail between the ambiguous square
and the stone-by-stone footprint, and because city maps rarely show
the boundaries of neighborhoods, it is a map that few at Duke readily
visualize. If west central Durham were a body, the Walltown neighborhood
would be at its head, the neighborhoods of the West End would be the
vital organs, and Duke’s campuses would lie about where the heart
would be. Duke is surrounded, not just by city streets and shops and
restaurants and bars, but by twelve distinct, history-bearing, emerging
or re-emerging entities whose presence affords both challenge and
opportunity—just as Duke itself affords both challenge and opportunity
in return.
When Trinity College relocated from Randolph County in
1892, its setting in Durham (the present-day East Campus) must still
have seemed bucolic despite its new, relatively urban milieu. First
engravings from the period show little more surrounding the school
than fields, trees, and an occasional house. As the decades progressed,
campus views show the construction of avenues and streets, homes,
a hospital. Still, the appearance of print and painting is calm and
pastoral.
The earliest views of West
Campus combine the somewhat isolated feel of Trinity’s younger
days with a hubbub of construction. But maps of the 1920s and 1930s
suggest that the isolation is misleading. While the long stretches
of Campus Drive and Chapel Drive wind through thick trees, without
today’s urban reminders of stop signs and stoplights, Durham
was thriving beyond the forest. Whole neighborhoods of mill workers,
tobacco hands, shopkeepers, and schoolteachers were established and
growing, anchored by churches and businesses, often centered on a
school. They were segregated by race and class, but each brought a
sense of history to its inhabitants and so helped to comprise the
larger picture of Durham.
Yet for decades, it rarely seemed as
though that picture had anything to do with the larger picture of
Duke University. Over time, Duke earned various reputations in the
city—largely as employer or landlord, sometimes acknowledged
as benefactor. When the university’s educational mission came
to mind, it was seen as a gift for privileged children who came and
left without giving a thought to much beyond the college walls. When
there was not overt hostility between town and gown, there was often
suspicion and mistrust that even the best-intentioned of community
initiatives had difficulty overcoming.
The problem was still noticeable enough to trouble Nannerl
O. Keohane when she assumed the presidency at Duke in 1993. Her first
day on the job included meetings with community leaders, and early
in her tenure, she announced the necessity of and support for new
Duke-Durham partnerships. Programs began to appear, grants began to
be announced, one by one, each a splash into the bucket. But that
bucket was wobbly and leaking, as senior vice president for public
affairs and government relations John Burness recalls.
“Durham was in a very difficult, challenging position,”
Burness says. In the several years before President Keohane’s
arrival, the tobacco and textile industries had declined or met their
demise; the crime rate skyrocketed as a serious drug problem took
root in a cradle of interstates and poverty; and the Durham city and
county schools were merging, leading to all sorts of questions about
resources and demographics. In the meantime, Duke’s reputation
was growing in the opposite direction, as the university had spent
those years amassing top professors, research dollars, and an ever
more selective pool of students. Despite Duke’s ups and Durham’s
downs, however, Burness points out that “our fortunes were entwined.
It wasn’t good for anyone if Duke was successful and Durham was
not.”
“Some people thought that Duke could leverage unlimited
resources and that whereever there was a problem in Durham, Duke ought
to help,” Burness says. “Others said that Duke’s efforts
to help were so unfocused they weren’t having an impact.”
But how could Duke be responsible for all of Durham? Should
it be? As the master plan of 1994 was formulated, the questions were
debated, until finally it was agreed that “enlightened self-interest”
defined the university’s involvement. “We decided that Duke
can’t solve all the problems of Durham. But we felt we had an
obligation to work with the neighborhoods near campus. Stress on those
neighborhoods had a direct impact on Duke—and problems are more
visible across the street than four miles away.”
As Burness puts it, new community involvement was seen
as an investment, not a cost. During the half-decade since Duke’s
trustees committed to that investment, the small splashes of help
have become a steady stream. And thanks to a significant change in
philosophy, that stream has been channeled into a reliable water supply
that may eventually run on its own.
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| Making her move: Cynthia
Henderson, center, leads students at a Walltown Children's Theater
dance workshop |
| photo:Matt Barton |
Duke decided to turn to the communities
it wanted to work with to determine how best to work with them. It
doesn’t sound like the most radical idea ever proposed for town-gown
relations, but it’s decidedly different. Before the commitment
to community became firm, the city’s view of Duke’s largesse
could be dim. “The perception in Walltown once was, ‘They’ve
got all the money and we’re going to do it the way they say do
it or else they’re not going to do it at all,’ ” says
Luther Brooks, pastor of St. James Missionary Baptist Church on West
Club Boulevard. “That perception is long gone. They’ve really
taken the approach of, ‘What can we do to help you make your
community better?’, which really makes it work. They’ve
also, in my opinion, taken a behind-the-scenes role, so as not to
play the ‘I’m out front, look at what we’re doing for
these poor people over there’ part.”
“It’s a form of failure if you come in from
the outside and try to fix things, address things for them, because
it won’t take root,” says Michael Palmer, Duke’s director
of the Office of Community Affairs. “It’s like throwing
a seed on cement. Outsiders can’t go into a neighborhood or a
community and make anything happen. You have to nurture what you already
have, and that’s what we can work on, those specific issues which
the communities articulate as their issues.”
And so the Neighborhood Partnership Initiative was born,
bringing together the dozen Duke-related Durham neighborhoods of Burch
Avenue, Crest Street, Lakewood Park, Lyon Park, Morehead Hill, Old
West Durham, Tuscaloosa-Lakewood, West End south and east of West
Campus; and Trinity Heights, Trinity Park, Walltown, and Watts Hospital/Hillandale
east and north of East Campus. Today the initiative and the ideas
behind it are solidly established, with an entire section of the $727-million
“Building on Excellence” strategic plan devoted to “support
for Duke’s outreach” and “reconfirming our commitment
to partnerships with Durham.”
The earliest fruit of those partnerships ripened in Walltown,
north of East Campus, where the thriving neighborhood of earlier years
had given way to drugs and crime, a plague fueled by transitional
housing and absentee landlords. Community Affairs director Michael
Palmer drives through the neighborhood with the confidence of a man
who knows each street, and many of the folks who live on those streets.
The Rhode Island native has been director for two years, but spent
the twelve years before that in Durham county government. His tour
commentary touches not only on the projects with which Duke has been
involved, but also on the social challenges facing the neighborhood
and on the people who are facing them.
• continues on page two.
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