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Don't be disrespecting my man Terry Sanford.

RANT COMING ON. Some of you may want to skip this...

I was there when Terry Sanford was there. One of Terry Sanford's last duties was to shake my hand to award me the final of my three degrees from Duke. Terry Sanford was a friend of mine.

You don't know Terry Sanford and you don't know what you are talking about.

Duke's admissions process is now and has been "needs blind". The applicant's credentials are examined and you are in or out based on that alone without reference to financial status. If you had any idea what credentials are required then you could not possibly support the statement that they "never worked a day in their lives". And strictly academic credentials - a 1600 SAT and class valedictorian, all by themselves, won't get you in either. You have to show that you have a life away from the books and something to add to the university. Everybody who is there gets in against long odds and it's quite an accomplishment to do so.

After you are admitted, Duke will work to put together a financial aid package that will allow you to attend based on their estimate of your families finances. People that are well off enough to pay the full freight are asked to do so. The reason tuition is so high is that the tuition from those paying full freight is used to offset the tuition for those who can't.

If you are not admitted on the first go, in a very small number of cases - being the child of a big donor, a Duke legacy or an athlete - will get you flagged for a second look. In each case the person who is accepted is able to do the work but may not have credentials quite as high as those accepted initially. As a practical matter, it does no one any good for one of these "second looks" to fail out. (e.g. hey Mr. Donor Dad - we failed out your kid. Can we have some more money?) I know people (alums) who have given significantly to Duke and whose kids did not get in.

People like you piss and moan about the small number of slightly-less-qualfied big donor's kids getting in, but those people are paying for the education of many many other kids who could not afford to go. I think it's a good compromise. If you look really hard, then yes, you can find a student who is a true screw up and should not have gotten in but those are very few and far between.

And as far as the athletes are concerned, all you have to do is to look up the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) of Duke athletes on the NCAA web site. The lax team has a 100% GSR. And I can tell you first hand that there are no "gut" majors for these people to slide through. And if you think that the lax team members got to the level of athletic ability they needed to get recruited by a top 5 program by "not working a day in their lives" come on down and I'll have you put through a lax practice.

Furthermore, as I have said here repeatedly, if Terry Sanford were Duke President, this incident would have been resolved in about two weeks. Among other things he was an FBI Special Agent and a WWII paratrooper. Not to mention the minor achievement of being Governor before and Senator after being Duke President. Terry Sanford was beloved by the students (who called him "Uncle Terry") and the lax team members would have trusted him and spilled their guts to him. Having gotten to the bottom of the matter he would have then NOT thrown the team under the bus and he had the horsepower to squash Mike Nifong before he could even get started.

Sanford's predecessor was Douglas Knight, a fine academic but a President who had no idea how to handle the campus unrest of the 60's. Terry Sanford kept the campus from being burned to the ground. Douglas Knight is a cautionary tale for current president Dick Brodhead.

Thank you LB. And I have news for Smoothtalker; I am a Duke grad and my husband is a Duke grad. My parents were children of Arkansas sharecroppers and lucked out when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the army offered my dad a way out. 30 years, OCS, two degrees, watching every penny and 30 moves later he was able to send me to Duke. I have no memory of any TV from 1975-1985-I didn't watch it, I studied or read or played sports, did extracurriculars, or performed community service. My husband is 2nd generation Italian immigrant stock. His father learned how to be an insurance adjuster when he came back wounded from Korea. My husband not only got academic scholarships to Duke, he got them for his private high school as well. Both stipulated that he work first in the high school front office and, at Duke, in the kitchens. Incidentals were paid by loans that we have just finished paying when we refinanced our house. Most of the people we knew had similar stories or more difficult ones. There were some rich kids and those often paid the frat dues, meal cards, and parking fines of their buddies. I never really knew who was rich and who wasn't because it was all about being there--it was an experience to cherish and we all knew it.

As far as the ultra privledged are concerned; the daughter of Mary Biddle Duke Trent Semans--the director and president of the endowment--had to go to summer school every summer to stay in.