The Early Years The question of Nixon’s legacy at Duke began as a question of how the University would honor an alumnus who, while successful, was incredibly politically polarizing. In 1954, while serving as vice president, Nixon was invited to speak at commencement. Typically, the faculty award honorary degrees to graduation speakers—but professors balked at the idea of granting a degree to such a highly political figure, particularly a conservative one. Some specifically took issue with his involvement in the McCarthy hearings and his campaign practices, including the allegations of financial fraud levied at him during the 1952 election. It was the first time the University tried to distance itself from Nixon, and ultimately, he decided not to speak at the ceremony. When Nixon was elected president in 1968, some felt the accomplishment was worthy of recognition by Duke, prevailing campus political beliefs notwithstanding. A bipartisan group of law students raised money to commission a portrait of Nixon, which was presented to the School of Law in 1969. But others were less pleased with Nixon’s win—The Chronicle, the daily student newspaper, printed a black border the morning after the election. “A front page black border is a
newspaper’s traditional symbol of mourning,” editors wrote. “Today, after the election, The Chronicle displays it.” Nixon was re-elected in 1972 in a landslide victory. But less than a year later, he was at the center of investigations regarding the Watergate scandal. And in 1974, he became the first and only president to resign. From there, Duke’s relationship with Nixon grew more bitter. A group of students stole the Nixon portrait and hid it in the ceiling tiles of a campus elevator. When the portrait was retrieved, the University locked it in a vault for safekeeping—and did not take it out for decades.
A Question of History Nearly 30 years after the controversy over Nixon’s honorary degree, the former president sparked another heated faculty debate—this time, one that garnered national headlines and questioned Duke’s values and duties as an institution. In the summer of 1981, Nixon began discussing possible locations for his presidential library, which would house documents and artifacts from his time in office. Duke was high on the list and the University’s president, Terry Sanford, was interested. Many faculty, however, were not.
Some felt Nixon’s library would be an incredible step forward for Duke scholarship—giving the papers from one of America’s most fascinating presidencies a permanent home in Durham. But others thought hosting the library would be committing a moral transgression, not winning a research jackpot. “Let the issue be defined, I say, as Duke’s choice between assisting historical scholarship on the one hand—and on the other hand accepting the moral, spiritual, social and political significance of the honor conferred upon Richard Nixon through this act and this structure forever upon our campus,” psychology professor Norman Gutman wrote at the time. Opponents noted that presidential libraries are typically memorials to their namesakes, and not traditional research institutes. The Nixon library, like other presidential libraries, would include a museum—and some faculty members feared that the museum could become something more akin to a tribute than an honest look at the Nixon presidency. “For every serious scholar who visits the libraries to conduct research, there are a thousand tourists who come to look at the shrine and its artifacts,” read a 1981 Academic Council report on the library negotiations. The faculty weren’t wrong. In 1980, 1.7 million people visited presidential libraries, according to the Christian TOWERVIEW MAGAZINE
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