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The Complicated Politics of Hating Duke
By CHRISTINA REXRODE Wall Street Journal
March 16, 2016 2:54 p.m. ET
Sallie Krawcheck had just taken over Citigroup’s Smith Barney unit when she got a call from the business school at Duke University. The school thought Krawcheck, a rising star on Wall Street, would be a perfect graduation speaker.
After she politely turned them down, Krawcheck remembers, the organizers asked her if she’d like to speak at Duke the following year. Krawcheck realized the callers weren’t getting the point: “I said, ‘No, you don’t understand, I’m never going to speak at your graduation.’”
As the NCAA men’s basketball tournament begins, Duke, a No. 4 seed in the West region, will aim to add yet another national-championship trophy to the five it has won since 1991. But every year, without fail, the sight of Duke’s players in their crisp white uniforms draws out the same strong emotion in many people: intense, unrepentant loathing.
This animosity isn’t limited to the basketball court—it seems to spill over to the entire institution. Mike Reiss, a writer for “The Simpsons” who attended Harvard, estimates he has visited more than 300 college campuses. “Whenever I go to a school, I ask, ‘Which school do you hate?’” Reiss said. In large swaths of the country, he said, “it’s always Duke.”
Duke spokesman Michael Schoenfeld offered the following comment: “Since even the people who claim to hate Duke acknowledge that our basketball team is successful, our students are exemplary, our faculty make discoveries that save lives and our coach has led the U.S. national team to gold medals in the Olympics, I’d call that a good start.”
Some Duke hate, like Krawcheck’s, is driven by an allegiance to a rival school: In her case it’s North Carolina, her alma mater. Other haters say they cooled to Duke because of some off-putting incident, such as the time in 2009 when Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, chided President Obama after he picked another school to win his NCAA Tournament bracket. (Krzyzewski said he was joking.) Some haters take a macro approach, lumping basketball in with the school’s “Collegiate Gothic” architecture, its “Blue Devil” mascot, and its famously caustic student fans. But the loudest jeers are often reserved for Duke’s players, who many find to be entitled, sneaky, or simply the kind of people they disliked in high school. In 2015, ESPN aired a documentary about one of Duke’s former players, Christian Laettner, which was called: “I Hate Christian Laettner.”
By 2012, Brad Miller, a five-term Congressman from North Carolina who attended North Carolina, had already declared he wasn’t running for re-election. So around tournament time, when a reporter asked him about Duke, he decided to let his feelings fly. If the Blue Devils were playing the Taliban, he said, he’d be compelled to cheer for the latter. The comment prompted a lot of hate mail, Miller said. But a fair number of people reached out to thank him for making a brave stand against all things Blue Devil. “I’d never vote for a Democrat,” one person said, “except maybe you.”
Now out of public office, Miller said he’s not really sure why his comment was such a big deal to people. “It was obviously a joke,” he said. “Duke and the Taliban weren’t even on each other’s schedules that year.”
During his time in public office, including eight years as Kentucky’s state treasurer, Jonathan Miller, a Harvard graduate who had adopted Kentucky as his favorite team, decided it would be in his best interests to conceal his loathing for the state’s other basketball power, Louisville. But he felt no pressure to extend the same courtesy to the Blue Devils. When you’re from Kentucky, he said, “There is no cost in hating Duke.”
Every March during management committee meetings at Playboy Enterprises, things can get pretty tense between the CEO Scott Flanders and the general counsel Rachel Sagan, who went to Duke. It’s not just that Flanders would prefer to see Indiana win—he went to law school there—it’s that he can’t bear to see anything good happen to the Blue Devils.
Asked why he hired a Duke grad in the first place, given his leanings, Flanders said: “I have a fiduciary duty, so I have to bring in the best talent available, even if it’s annoying talent.”
Jim Everett, a basketball walk-on at North Carolina from 1999 to 2001, actually had a chance to work out his Duke hatred on the basketball court. But even now, as the head of U.S. equity trading for Citigroup, he still can’t let it go. While he visits Chapel Hill to recruit Tar Heels for the bank, he says he refuses to visit the school down the road. “There’s too many of them up here already,” Everett said, referring to the number of Dukies on Citigroup’s trading floor.
A Citigroup spokesperson disputed Everett’s characterization that the company employs “too many” Duke graduates.
Not everybody hates Duke, of course. In a recent online poll by Yahoo Sports asking people for their opinion about the school, 38% of respondents said they were fans. Nevertheless, another 38% said they weren’t fans, and Duke was also the school the largest number of people said they would “hate” to see win.
Since she turned down Duke’s speaking offer around 2003, Sallie Krawcheck left banking to run the women’s group Ellevate Network. But time has done nothing to soften her view of the Blue Devils.
Two years ago, Krawcheck says, she was having lunch with Lesley Jane Seymour, then the editor of More magazine, who happened to mention that her daughter was thinking about attending Duke. Krawcheck flew into action. “Lesley, you cannot let your daughter go to Duke,” she said. “My god, their symbol is the devil.”
“I wish I could say I was doing it in a joking way,” Krawcheck said, “but I was serious.”
About two days later, Krawcheck saw Seymour’s editor letter in the magazine, in which she mentioned attending Duke. By way of apology, Krawcheck decided to do something drastic. “I took a picture of myself in a Duke cap and sent it to her.”
Asked what it felt like to wear Duke’s colors, Krawcheck called the experience “the grossest thing I’ve ever been through.”
For the record, Seymour’s daughter chose to attend Colby College.
—Christina Rexrode attended the University of North Carolina.
Write to Christina Rexrode at christina.rexrode@wsj.com
By CHRISTINA REXRODE Wall Street Journal
March 16, 2016 2:54 p.m. ET
Sallie Krawcheck had just taken over Citigroup’s Smith Barney unit when she got a call from the business school at Duke University. The school thought Krawcheck, a rising star on Wall Street, would be a perfect graduation speaker.
After she politely turned them down, Krawcheck remembers, the organizers asked her if she’d like to speak at Duke the following year. Krawcheck realized the callers weren’t getting the point: “I said, ‘No, you don’t understand, I’m never going to speak at your graduation.’”
As the NCAA men’s basketball tournament begins, Duke, a No. 4 seed in the West region, will aim to add yet another national-championship trophy to the five it has won since 1991. But every year, without fail, the sight of Duke’s players in their crisp white uniforms draws out the same strong emotion in many people: intense, unrepentant loathing.
This animosity isn’t limited to the basketball court—it seems to spill over to the entire institution. Mike Reiss, a writer for “The Simpsons” who attended Harvard, estimates he has visited more than 300 college campuses. “Whenever I go to a school, I ask, ‘Which school do you hate?’” Reiss said. In large swaths of the country, he said, “it’s always Duke.”
Duke spokesman Michael Schoenfeld offered the following comment: “Since even the people who claim to hate Duke acknowledge that our basketball team is successful, our students are exemplary, our faculty make discoveries that save lives and our coach has led the U.S. national team to gold medals in the Olympics, I’d call that a good start.”
Some Duke hate, like Krawcheck’s, is driven by an allegiance to a rival school: In her case it’s North Carolina, her alma mater. Other haters say they cooled to Duke because of some off-putting incident, such as the time in 2009 when Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, chided President Obama after he picked another school to win his NCAA Tournament bracket. (Krzyzewski said he was joking.) Some haters take a macro approach, lumping basketball in with the school’s “Collegiate Gothic” architecture, its “Blue Devil” mascot, and its famously caustic student fans. But the loudest jeers are often reserved for Duke’s players, who many find to be entitled, sneaky, or simply the kind of people they disliked in high school. In 2015, ESPN aired a documentary about one of Duke’s former players, Christian Laettner, which was called: “I Hate Christian Laettner.”
By 2012, Brad Miller, a five-term Congressman from North Carolina who attended North Carolina, had already declared he wasn’t running for re-election. So around tournament time, when a reporter asked him about Duke, he decided to let his feelings fly. If the Blue Devils were playing the Taliban, he said, he’d be compelled to cheer for the latter. The comment prompted a lot of hate mail, Miller said. But a fair number of people reached out to thank him for making a brave stand against all things Blue Devil. “I’d never vote for a Democrat,” one person said, “except maybe you.”
Now out of public office, Miller said he’s not really sure why his comment was such a big deal to people. “It was obviously a joke,” he said. “Duke and the Taliban weren’t even on each other’s schedules that year.”
During his time in public office, including eight years as Kentucky’s state treasurer, Jonathan Miller, a Harvard graduate who had adopted Kentucky as his favorite team, decided it would be in his best interests to conceal his loathing for the state’s other basketball power, Louisville. But he felt no pressure to extend the same courtesy to the Blue Devils. When you’re from Kentucky, he said, “There is no cost in hating Duke.”
Every March during management committee meetings at Playboy Enterprises, things can get pretty tense between the CEO Scott Flanders and the general counsel Rachel Sagan, who went to Duke. It’s not just that Flanders would prefer to see Indiana win—he went to law school there—it’s that he can’t bear to see anything good happen to the Blue Devils.
Asked why he hired a Duke grad in the first place, given his leanings, Flanders said: “I have a fiduciary duty, so I have to bring in the best talent available, even if it’s annoying talent.”
Jim Everett, a basketball walk-on at North Carolina from 1999 to 2001, actually had a chance to work out his Duke hatred on the basketball court. But even now, as the head of U.S. equity trading for Citigroup, he still can’t let it go. While he visits Chapel Hill to recruit Tar Heels for the bank, he says he refuses to visit the school down the road. “There’s too many of them up here already,” Everett said, referring to the number of Dukies on Citigroup’s trading floor.
A Citigroup spokesperson disputed Everett’s characterization that the company employs “too many” Duke graduates.
Not everybody hates Duke, of course. In a recent online poll by Yahoo Sports asking people for their opinion about the school, 38% of respondents said they were fans. Nevertheless, another 38% said they weren’t fans, and Duke was also the school the largest number of people said they would “hate” to see win.
Since she turned down Duke’s speaking offer around 2003, Sallie Krawcheck left banking to run the women’s group Ellevate Network. But time has done nothing to soften her view of the Blue Devils.
Two years ago, Krawcheck says, she was having lunch with Lesley Jane Seymour, then the editor of More magazine, who happened to mention that her daughter was thinking about attending Duke. Krawcheck flew into action. “Lesley, you cannot let your daughter go to Duke,” she said. “My god, their symbol is the devil.”
“I wish I could say I was doing it in a joking way,” Krawcheck said, “but I was serious.”
About two days later, Krawcheck saw Seymour’s editor letter in the magazine, in which she mentioned attending Duke. By way of apology, Krawcheck decided to do something drastic. “I took a picture of myself in a Duke cap and sent it to her.”
Asked what it felt like to wear Duke’s colors, Krawcheck called the experience “the grossest thing I’ve ever been through.”
For the record, Seymour’s daughter chose to attend Colby College.
—Christina Rexrode attended the University of North Carolina.
Write to Christina Rexrode at christina.rexrode@wsj.com
