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[Identification of item], Alumni Affairs Records, University Archives, Duke University.
The Alumni Affairs Records were received by the University Archives as a transfer in 1948-2002.
This collection is partially unprocessed: materials may not have been ordered and described beyond their original condition.
Encoded by Jill Katte, February 2005
This finding aid is NCEAD compliant.
Since 1838, Duke University has had two locations and five name changes, but one of its oldest components has been an active alumni association. The Trinity College Alumni Association was founded in 1858 by President Braxton Craven, with forty-one alumni on record. In the 1890s, when the proposal to relocate Trinity College to Durham was announced, opposition to the plan was widespread among alumni. The Alumni Association, however, listened to the arguments for relocation with an open mind and decided to put the interests of "a greater Trinity" above personal considerations. In 1891, a year before the move, the College's charter was amended to require that one-third of its trustees be alumni of the College. This tenet remains a requirement of the University's bylaws today, twenty-seven of Duke's thirty-seven trustees are alumni, and five are past presidents of the Alumni Association.
Within a decade of the move to Durham, both men and women enrolled in dramatically increasing numbers from the North, the South, the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and abroad (especially Japan). Today's Duke Alumni Association represents more than 110,000 members from every state in the USA and more than seventy countries.
Just as the pool of alumni has dramatically grown and changed over the last 150 years, so has the role of the Alumni Association. From an association intended to foster friendships and maintain an ongoing affiliation between alumni and the university, the Alumni Association now also provides educational and travel opportunities, along with many university and community services. It disseminates information about university activities and issues to alumni and friends of the university, and produces its own sources of revenue to help support its programs.
These changing roles are expressions of an ongoing review by Alumni Association leadership and members of the alumni community. They illustrate the Alumni Association's ability to recognize the university's continually changing needs and its own opportunities to contribute to the Duke community.
[Historical note from http://dukealumni.com]
Records contain class files, administrative materials, fundraising materials, alumni publications records, subject files, photographs, video and sound recordings, and an index to Duke students who served in World War II. Materials include reunion information, correspondence, reports, programs, clippings, and printed matter.
These and related materials may be accessed under the following subject headings in the Duke University Libraries online catalog.
Missing Class of 1964, 1970, 1980, and 1981.