President of Duke University
In 1969, Sanford became president of Duke University, a position he held for the next sixteen years. While involved in nearly every aspect of the university, Sanford primarily focused on fund-raising, athletics, and relations with university trustees. He also maintained a policy of accessibility to the students that helped defuse racial tensions. This approach helped quell student unrest over the Vietnam War early in his tenure as university president. Addressing the protests with a mixture of tolerance and determination to maintain control of the campus, he met with students and successfully avoided the campus shutdowns that plagued many of the nation's other college campuses at the time.
Perhaps the greatest controversy of Sanford's presidency was his effort to establish the presidential library of former U.S. President Richard Nixon at Duke. Sanford raised the subject with Nixon during a visit to the former president at Nixon's New York City office on July 28, 1981. Sanford continued to seek Nixon's advice on multiple issues within the months that followed. The library proposal became public in mid-August, creating considerable controversy at the university. Though Sanford enjoyed some support for his effort, most of the faculty were against the proposal, the largest concern being that the facility would be a monument to Nixon rather than a center of study. Sanford tried to engineer a compromise, but the proposal by the Duke Academic Council of a library only one-third the size of that which Nixon wanted and their rejection of a Nixon museum to accompany it, ultimately led Nixon to decline Sanford's offer and instead site his library in the city of his birth, Yorba Linda, California, where it was dedicated in 1990.
Read more about this topic: Terry Sanford
Famous quotes containing the words president of, president, duke and/or university:
“Colonel “Bat” Guano: Okay, I’m going to get your money for you. But if you don’t get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what’s going to happen to you?
Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: What?
Colonel “Bat” Guano: You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“There can only be one Commander-in-Chief. In these times, crises cannot be managed and wars cannot be waged by committee. To the ears of the world, the President speaks for the nation. While he is of course ultimately accountable to Congress, the courts, and the people, he and his emissaries must not be handicapped in advance in their relations with foreign governments as has sometimes happened in the past.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“I hate the whole race.... There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.”
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke Wellington (1769–1852)
“The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.”
—Allan Bloom (1930–1992)