Why do people hate Duke?

<p>^ I’m talking about on CC and not schlubs on facebook.</p>

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I highly doubt this is true but I haven’t been on this site nearly as long as you have. I’ve always been very clear about my heirarchy of American universities for undergraduate education:</p>

<p>Tier 1- HYPSMC</p>

<p>Tier 2-the other 5 Ivies, Chicago, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and Duke</p>

<p>Tier 3-every other top 30 USNWR school plus NYU</p>

<p>I think you can draw finer distinctions if you want to but the real vigilantes here are the state school boosters who always recommend their alma mater because its the cheaper option even when private schools are occasionally a better bargain after Financial Aid comes in.</p>

<p>If I or any other Blue Devil has recommended Duke over a peer school, it’s for a very specific business. For instance, if one intends to work on Wall Street, then choosing JHU over Duke would be an unwise idea despite their similar academic standings. I would be the first to recommend Northwestern over Duke if a poster is interested in a Performing Arts or Broadcasting career.</p>

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That’s because Stanford is only a sports school on paper. People don’t pack the stadium like they do at The Big House at Michigan, The Swamp at Florida, Allen Field house at Kansas or Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke and cheer on their teams like their lives depended on it. There isn’t a culture or recurring traditions surrounding Stanford athletics in the same way that there is at other high-power athletic programs.</p>

<p>I bet most Stanford students/alumni could care less about their Fiesta Bowl invitation and the hoopla surrounding it since they aren’t an established football program since they were terrible for much of the 2000s. It takes time for that sort of culture to build.</p>

<p>Duke Basketball is a unifying element of the undergraduate experience for students here just like Notre Dame Football is for their undergrads. Stanford has no equivalent manifestation and its wrong for us to harp on it to prospective students as one of its “strengths”.</p>

<p>“I think you can draw finer distinctions if you want to but the real vigilantes here are the state school boosters who always recommend their alma mater because its the cheaper option even when private schools are occasionally a better bargain after Financial Aid comes in.”</p>

<p>The state school boosters of the top publics recommend their schools because they offer comparable academics to many other top tier schools. This includes, "the other 5 Ivies, Chicago, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and Duke. Many of the top offerings at Berkeley and Michigan could easily be recommended over a school like, just using one example, Duke. For example, if a student were looking for a strong overall engineering program, I would certainly suggest Cal or Michigan over Duke.</p>

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<p>You don’t seem to have real data other than random morsels of information on threads, so feel free to quote the following in support of Duke: the basketball prowess (and subsequent scandal) do not harm Duke in the academic community. Rather, what harms Duke in the academic community is the relative paucity of renowned, highly-cited professors who are the leaders in their “niche.” That is ultimately what determines prestige and shows why schools like Notre Dame can have recognition (for sports) but not prestige of the likes of HYPSM.</p>

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<p>Whatever dude.</p>

<p>I"m reading alot about frats, hoops, etc. What’s it like to be a woman at Duke?</p>

<p>I wonder what Stanford alumni Jim Plunkett or Gene Washington would say about the accuracy of some of the comments in this thread? What would Duke graduates Jack Marin and Jeff Mullins add?</p>

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<p>What a great and convincing retort!</p>

<p>I guess you know more about what I was saying than I do (I guess the Duke-arrogance thing is even worse than I thought).</p>

<p>Yeah, plenty of people hate on Duke outside of CC, but that’s mostly b/c of BB and Duke being seen a school full of rich kids.</p>

<p>USC, UM, ND and the entire SEC (due to all the “SEC, SEC” chants) gets a lot of “hate”, but that’s b/c sports as well (though USC also gets the spoiled, rich kid hate) - don’t see those schools getting much flack here on CC (hmmm - could it possibly b/c their posters aren’t as annoying).</p>

<p>Heck, NU gets flack from other B1G school fans as being the spoiled, rich kids or the “nerds”, so let’s not pretend like the hate directed towards Duke outside of CC is anything special.</p>

<p>Within the B1G, dOSU gets plenty of hate being the corrupt, SEC-like school within the conf. and Iowa gets plenty of hate for having the most obnoxious fanbase who ■■■■■ other school’s sports boards and repeatedly brag about how they “travel well.”</p>

<p>Since NU FB has owned the Hawkeyes, Iowa fans like to come up with every excuse in the book as to why the losses to NU are flukes and how Iowa has more “tradition” and all the other crap.</p>

<p>But then when the shoe is on the other foot (Iowa owning Penn St.), they tr to argue how all that stuff doesn’t matter when PSU fans bring up it.</p>

<p>Trying to have it both ways; hmmm. sounds awfully familiar…</p>

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<p>Yes - you haven’t been on this site as long as I (and others), and we can attest to who have been most vocal about demeaning schools like Cornell, JHU, etc.</p>

<p>And then again, let’s not forget all the posts about how great Duke is in all sports (Dookies somehow alway seem to overllook FB, and even you tried to make Duke FB better than what it has been historically by saying Duke FB has been better than UM BB).</p>

<p>Dookies actually had the gall to say that Duke was better than NU in lax! lol</p>

<p>Yeah, NU doesn’t have a men’s lax team, but get back to me when Duke has won a couple of championships in lax, much less 6.</p>

<p>"Tier 1- HYPSMC</p>

<p>Tier 2-the other 5 Ivies, Chicago, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and Duke</p>

<p>Tier 3-every other top 30 USNWR school plus NYU"</p>

<p>A little stingy with your tiers aren’t you, goldenboy?</p>

<p>Gulp, I guess that Boston College is relegated to the – yipes – FOURTH tier, since it’s number 31!!!</p>

<p>Duke is awesome, get over it
especially bme</p>

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Ah, Duke arrogance. So powerful and strong that it even affects UNC down the road, the school phonyreal98 attends.</p>

<p>I’d like to express my viewpoint as to why many (not all) North Carolinians may dislike Duke. If you go to Duke, you’ll be living in NC, so it might be worth considering.</p>

<p>When we (of NC) hate Duke, it’s because of A) the basketball rivalry with UNC or B) the perceived elitist attitude (again, the fact that Duke considers itself superior to UNC, which is impossible if one is to believe that UNC is truly the greatest university there is - yes, we’ve seen the rankings… :D).</p>

<p>People in NC are really proud of UNC, and don’t appreciate it when Duke students perpetuate the sports rivalry that bleeds into something bigger (yes, I’m aware UNC students are half the cause there!). Also, Duke has done some stuff to upset the town of Durham (see Princeton Review’s Bad Town-Gown Relations list). Outside of that, the average NC student can’t get into Duke, and that leaves a bitter taste in our collective mouths :D</p>

<p>Also, Duke and the Duke family name just screams old money. My area’s power company is Duke Energy, someone named Duke owns everything… It seems tobacco money, the Old South, anything that most people aren’t really a fan of that has to do with NC, can be linked back to Duke. Also, Mike Posner-types.</p>

<p>None of the above is really correlative with my actual opinion, I’d probably have applied to Duke if it wasn’t so expensive and if it was stronger in my major than UNC.</p>

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<p>The Dukes aren’t “old” money. The old money in the South is mainly in the coastal lowlands. Charleston has lots of old money. Piedmont industrial towns like Durham are more recent upstarts. James Buchanan “Buck” Duke took over his father’s small tobacco business in 1880 and turned it into a near-monopoly after acquiring the patent to the first automated cigarette-rolling machine in 1895 and buying out his chief competitors. From there he branched out into textiles, electricity, and coal. Duke was more of a Gilded Age “robber baron” than true old money; fellow monopolists John D. Rockefeller (oil), J.P. Morgan (finance), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Andrew Mellon (finance), and Leland Stanford (railroads) were his contemporaries. And his late-in-life and testamentary philanthropy benefited not only Duke University (originally Trinity College, renamed after a large gift from the Duke Endowment, Buck Duke’s charity) but also Davidson College and Furman University.</p>

<p>A better reason to hate Duke University: Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon got his law degree there. Without a doubt Duke Law’s most famous alum. Come to think of it, quite possibly Duke University’s most famous alum.</p>

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There was a very interesting article recently in Duke Magazine about Nixon and his presidential library. Duke’s president wanted it badly, but most of the professors were dead set against it. Personally, I think Duke Law is far more embarrassed by Tucker Max.</p>

<p>Thankfully Duke has people like Sylvia Earle, Paul Farmer, and Melinda Gates to balance it out.</p>

<p>To Duke’s credit, Nixon was a very smart crook.</p>

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<p>Well, now that you mention it, there’s a guy who typifies all my stereotypes about Duke.</p>

<p>Duke started being ‘hated’ for their dominant basketball team, and now pretty much any school that is either in the ACC or a top school hates Duke, especially most southern people. I even saw a book at a bookstore in North Carolina called ‘Duke Sucks’. The only phrase that sums up this hate is ‘haters gonna hate’. Many people do not think of Duke as a top school because it is not an ivy (sports scholarships are too important to them), however they were recently ranked the 7th school in the nation long with MIT and Penn. So really, who do people hate Duke? Some out of jealousy, and others because, well it’s Duke. And everyone hates Duke. It’s just tradition.</p>

<p>Here’s the description for Duke Sucks:</p>

<p>In the ranks of NCAA college basketball, Duke University is like something scraped off the bottom of a shoe. It’s like a nasty virus you catch from a door handle at a public toilet.</p>

<p>No team in sports is as uniquely hated as those smug, entitled, floor-slapping, fist-pumping, insufferable Blue Devils. The loathing has almost reached the level of a religion. Christian Laettner is a punk. Amen. The Cameron Crazies are obnoxious. The Plumlees are worthless times three. Coach K is a jerk. Kumbaya.</p>

<p>The team is dogged by an intense hatred that no other team can match—and for good reason. Millions of hoops fans and March Madness aficionados around the world are not imagining things. Duke really is evil, and within the pages of Duke Sucks, Reed Tucker and Andy Bagwell show readers exactly why Duke deserves to be so detested. They bruise and batter the Blue Devils with fact after fact, story after story, statistic after statistic. They build an airtight case that could stand up in a court of law.</p>

<p>So sit back in your “I Hate Duke” t-shirt, and in true Duke fashion, force someone poorer than you to do your work as you crack open the ultimate guide to Duke suckitude.</p>

<p>check it out here: <a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Sucks-Completely-Evenhanded-Investigation/dp/1250004632”>http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Sucks-Completely-Evenhanded-Investigation/dp/1250004632&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;