Victor Strandberg’s desk is framed by a mosaic of newsprint. He can see it while he works.
When he arrived at Duke, Strandberg, professor of English, got into the habit of clipping memorable images and mounting them on posters that were once neon orange and have since faded to manila.
For 43 years now, the collage has inched its way across the wall.
Four Kennedy brothers with boyish grins, Heather Sue Mercer making a field goal for the Duke football team in 1995, former President George W. Bush making his “Mission Impossible” speech—Strandberg has watched it all unfold, “from the local to the immense,” in his time at the University.
“It’s almost completed,” Strandberg, 74, remarked, pointing to the few empty spots he has saved.
At 85 years of age, Duke has reached a curious crossroads—finally old enough to possess some of the history suggested by its Gothic spires, yet still young enough that a professor like Strandberg can see more than half of its development over the course of his career.
A baby among its Ivy League peers, Duke has grown dramatically over the past half-century. As foreign partnerships and graduate schools have sprouted, the constancy of a few devoted faces has kept the campus grounded, Provost Peter Lange said.
“We’re the youngest on the list,” said Lange, who has been at Duke since 1981. “I consider that flexibility and the sense of youthful willingness to try new things to be one of our really great assets as compared to those schools that are about three times as old as we are. But in a place which has undergone so much change, that continuity of these people is very healthy and important to have.”
Strandberg is a member of a select club of faculty members who have taught at the University for more than 40 years. Professor of Economics Craufurd Goodwin and Professor of Chemistry James Bonk have him beat, clocking in at more than half a century.
Goodwin has been at Duke for 54 years. Before verifying the count on his fingers, he could have sworn it had been longer—he has spent almost all of his adult life on Main West Quadrangle.
Like Strandberg and Bonk, Goodwin said it was the promise of sun that lured him to North Carolina.
In 1955, the 21-year-old wanted to spend a year as a graduate student in the United States before returning to his native Quebec for law school.
The decision to come to Duke was “pure happenstance,” Goodwin said. Flipping through the pages of LIFE magazine in the throes of a long Montreal winter, his eyes lingered over a snapshot of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens in full bloom.
Goodwin said he can still remember the oppressively hot August day when he arrived in Durham for the first time.
“I remember the heavy scents of tobacco and magnolia and other things that were blooming, and it was just a very different feel from Canada,” he said.
A university in bloom
Goodwin could sense big things were in store for Duke, and he said the University has blossomed exactly as he hoped it would.
The Duke that Strandberg first knew was very much a Southern school, not yet on the radar of the rest of the country, much less the rest of the world.
“This was a relatively provincial school, considered one of the best in the South. Now it’s one of the best in the world,” Strandberg said. “It has sprung from its launching pad to spectacular heights.”
Bonk carries on a conversation the way he addresses a group of students—slow and steady, occasionally delivering a joke to draw the listener back in. He is the consummate teacher, having taught an introductory chemistry course for 30 years to more than 30,000 Dukies.
“You get a feel for a large group after a while, you look across the room and it’s almost like a sixth sense—you can tell when the light bulb goes on,” he said. “When people are able to understand a relatively complex mathematical subject, that has always brought me great joy.”
Bonk came to Duke because it was first and foremost a teaching institution. But without a serious interest in research, he might not have been hired today.
Duke’s transition to a major research institution has contributed to the rise of “Darwinian competition” for tenure among faculty members, Strandberg said.
“Among young people, there are pressures I never had to face when I came up,” he said.
Robert Behringer, James B. Duke professor of physics, said competition among students has both increased and decreased since he enrolled at Duke as an undergraduate in 1966. Although the acceptance rate is a fraction of what it once was, the standard academic load was five courses and students routinely had 8 a.m. classes on Saturdays, he said.
Dr. Joanne Wilson, a professor of medicine specializing in gastroenterology, was one of three women and the only black student in her class when she enrolled in the School of Medicine in 1969. Since that time, the University has become more diverse—but not as much as the idealistic Wilson had hoped.
“I kind of expected the country as a whole to be further along,” she said. “I was expecting in 40 years that someone’s race would not even be a commentary.”
There are times when Strandberg feels he is still at the same University he arrived at 43 years ago. Main West Quad, perhaps the heart of Duke, remains essentially unchanged—the trees are just taller.
But then he remembers Science Drive. Strandberg said the pace of Duke’s expansion beyond its West Campus core makes him feel as if he knows less and less about his workplace with each passing year.
“Duke has grown far beyond my capacity to encompass it,” he said.
A lifetime bond
Shock and awe were the only feelings that Sue Wasiolek, dean of students and assistant vice president for student affairs, registered when she first visited campus as a newly accepted student in 1969.
“I had macaroni and cheese and blueberry pie for lunch in the Great Hall, and I remember it being one of the most delicious meals I had ever had,” she said. “I don’t know that the food was as delicious as I remembered it, but I was just overwhelmed by the entire experience.... I was starstruck. I was looking around with my mouth open, trying to imagine myself being here.”
Forty years later, Wasiolek has trouble imagining her life apart from Duke. She has been away for just nine months since coming to Duke as a wide-eyed freshman, and she returned quickly.
Wasiolek accepted a job at a law firm in 1994. She consciously thought she had left Duke for good, but she filed for a leave of absence rather than terminating her employment—on some level, she now realizes, she must have known better.
“When I tell people about my tenure at Duke, I always say I never left because that nine months was almost to me like a sabbatical,” she said. “I’ve always considered what I do here at Duke a way of life, whereas practicing law to me felt like a job.”
There was a time when everyone thought President Richard Brodhead would be at Yale University forever. Brodhead arrived in New Haven as a 17-year-old freshman and spent 40 years of his life there, staying on as a graduate student, a professor and then a dean.
Brodhead figured out early on that he wanted to spend his time “living in universities,” but he never tried to imagine what shape that life might take.
“I’m telling you the truth when I say I’ve never given one second’s thought to what the whole of my life would look like,” Brodhead said. “I take my life one second at a time. I’ve never tried to plan 10 years ahead. Year by year you do what seems most interesting and most gratifying. That led me to stay at Yale, and that same logic led me to start a new life at Duke.”
If someone had told a 28-year-old Bonk that he would still be at Duke 50 years later, he would have been overjoyed, he said. Bonk has never married, but he fell in love with Duke early on and has found a family here.
In half a century, Bonk has never strayed from Duke’s campus. He hopes he never does.
“Obviously there will be a health issue someday, and you never know how that’s going to turn out. But if it doesn’t get too bad I’ll just keep going until one day the class will have to carry me out,” he said with a smile, his eyes sparkling a shade of Duke blue.
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