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Perhaps because my college situation was the same as Duke's, I made an assumption. I went to Stanford, and we had much the same relationship with East Palo Alto that Duke has with Durham. It is my understanding from friends that the Yale/New Haven situation is the same.

I agree that there is a serious drinking problem at Duke - but from what I hear and read, it is a problem that affects colleges/universities across the nation.

I do agree with your assessment of what would have happened had there been no "cry of rape."

Perhaps it is a characteristic of self-proclaimed "elite" universities. Across the South, though, a situation like Duke's is an exception. Even Furman, which is a private school with a suburban campus, is closer to Greenville than Duke's urban (in part) campus is to Durham. It may have a lot to do with the city as well.

It should not be that surprising in the case of Duke, I suppose. Most of the Duke student body (though by no means all) grew up in affluent suburbs not unlike those to the south and west of Duke's campus. Whether the suburb was in New Jersey or Florida, they wetre not anything like the urban core of Durham.

I remember there was always a gauntlet of aggressively panhandling bums to run right off campus and just out of the reach of Duke Public Safety Officers. They would accost students walking to off-campus apartments or to nearby Ninth Street (shops and restaurants around some old tobacco warehouses and a former cotton mill). The students would usually give something to these bums because they were afraid of them and because they probably seldom encountered such people at the mall when they were growing up. I was not so soft a touch. There was this one guy we called the Sergeant Major because his line was he had been a Sergeant Major in the Marine Corps and had fallen on hard times. It was a pretty good racket. One day he came up to me stinking of booze and drunk as a coot. He was holding a prepackaged sandwich like it was a dead skunk. He said someone had given it to him when he hit them up for money. He tried the old Sergeant Major line on me and actually said - while he held the dead-skunk-sandwich - that he had not eaten for three days. I told him I hoped he never really was a Marine because he would be a disgrace to the Corps in his present state. He showed no anger or shame (which leads me to conclude he was no more a former Marine than I was Zimbabwean Royalty), just dumbfounded amazement. I guess I was the first one that ever told him where to go for his panhandling.

I would go work on a Habitat for Humanity house near an apartment I lived in just off campus as sort of physical therapy to help me make it through law school. As I would walk to the house through about three blocks of the bad neighborhood that started just across the street from my building, someone would always offer to sell me crack. They could think of no other reason a white guy would be walking through their neighborhood.

That gives you some idea of why Duke is isolated from Durham. Duke and Durham represent cultures perhaps more different that the United States and Mexico.