A first?

It appears that there's some popular demand for elaboration on the Duke-UNC, Durham-Chapel Hill comparison, so I'll oblige in the next day or so. In the meantime, it'd be helpful to hear why folks like Mark C. think there's no question the Duke-Durham relationship is worse.

Ray - some don't remember what "Deep Throat" said: FOLLOW THE MONEY!

Hey Ruby, why did she call you "Judy" on the flier?

Ray,

As a former Durham resident (23 years ending in 1995) I'll testify that Duke set the worst example of corporate citizenship I've ever seen.

Oh, no! You mean like "Jew-dy"? That's really, really awful. If that's what they were going for, that's the nastiest part of the whole thing.

My thought on that poster is that the design seems pretty sophisticated, so it wasn't just any chump with photoshop.

Is there any possibility of some national funding or backing of this?

If that's what they meant by Judy, that was entirely inappropriate. Wow.

On the other hand, my new favorite thing to call people is the "penis of the piedmont" :)

See, this is the difference (the flyer) between negative attacks and personal attacks. Honestly, I think what Dan is alleged to have done is really bad and could/should have cost him the election. But, this stupid poster would have been reason enough for me to vote FOR HIM.

Negative politics works, even if we don't like it, but trashy, personal attacks don't.

BTW, if they called you Judy because you are Jewish and then made a Nazi reference, I'd like to see the book thrown at them for some weird sort of hate speech.

Here's a down payment on my take on the Durham-Duke vs. Chapel Hill-UNC comparison, addressing some background issues:

The first thing one has to keep in mind when assessing town-gown relations in the two cities is context. Duke is a big player in Durham, but it's (very roughly) two-thirds the size of UNC, and the city itself is far larger than Chapel Hill. So Duke's relative impact on the city is smaller. Folks in Durham don't obsess about town-gown matters nearly as much as people do in Chapel Hill.

Second, some of the major infrastructure stress points that affect Chapel Hill-UNC relations aren't issues in Durham. The key one there is transportation. The major roadways serving Duke (15-501 Bypass, Erwin Road, NC 147) aren't clogged to the degree that NC 54, MLK and Fordham Boulevard are in Chapel Hill. Partly that's a function of Duke's being smaller than Chapel Hill, and partly that's a function of the roads around Duke just having more capacity. Duke is, I'd guess, rather less dependent than UNC on out-of-town labor. So there's not nearly as much pressure on elected officials in Durham as there is in Chapel Hill to find solutions to intractable transportation problems in ways that might compromise neighborhoods and that certainly will cost boatloads of public money.

Third, the economic environment in the two communities is totally different. Chapel Hill's economy is centered on the university but to be blunt, UNC's prestige really doesn't add much to it on the margins. If UNC's peers were Penn State or Nebraska-Lincoln rather than UC Berkeley and UCLA and Michigan, the town would make out just as well. So town leaders really don't feel that the university's recent investments add all that much to the community.

Durham, on the other hand, is still trying to recover from the collapse of its downtown manufacturing base. Duke in relative terms has been just as aggressive about expansion as UNC. That investment is very welcome in Durham: It means jobs and vitality in places there otherwise might not be any. One need only look at the American Tobacco complex, for the moment the symbol of Durham's renaissance. It would never have been built without Duke's commitment to lease a large fraction of the office space there. Same is likely true of the West Village complex. Then contrast those examples with Chapel Hill, where UNC's off-campus leasing is a target of criticism, not praise.

Ray, good assessment. As I said earlier, "follow the money!"

Mark, I think that one big difference is that only a small element of the population in Durham is of the opinion that Duke has much personal and direct impact on them, and as a result, they are not attentive to the school except when things like the lax case arise.

UNC and Chapel Hill are much more personally connected, more so than the other cities where UNC institutions are located. None of the other locations came about solely because of a UNC institution being there - they all had histories, industries, and other things to anchor them. Elizabeth City is a good example on the small end and Raleigh on the large end.

And I always hear people all over NC say that no other city government always seems to be "at war" with their university as is the case in Chapel Hill. Inaccurate?

Another difference is that Duke grads aren't a huge percentage of the population in Durham like UNC grads are in Chapel Hill. I still think Chapel Hill loves UNC more than Durham loves Duke. I'm thinking of the average Durham resident, who is more likely to route for the Tar Heels come basketball season.

Coach K has said he's never been to Chapel Hill outside of a basketball game because he fears for his life (well, that's not exactly how he put it), but I can't imagine Roy not going to Durham. Partly a product of the towns' relatives sizes, but also because there are plenty of Tar Heels in Durham and at Duke. I was always amazed how many Duke faculty and staff route against their employers' team come sports season. Heh.

So, this isn't town gown in a formal sense, but more about how the local residents feel about the school. And there's a lot of animosity in Durham towards Duke.

Do you all really think the average Chapel Hill or Carrboro resident feels similarly towards UNC?

Fred, you said,

And I always hear people all over NC say that no other city government always seems to be “at war” with their university as is the case in Chapel Hill.

Are you talking to folks in local governments? Because I feel like the folks who I talk to around the state are more likely to get misty eyed at the mention of UNC. Especially in the winter time.

(And, by the way, have I mentioned how excited I am for basketball season?)

I do stand corrected, partly, on the leasing issue. The examples I was thinking of (at Timberlyne and Chapel Hill North) date from the late 1990s and were purchases, not leases. Chalk that one up to senile decay. It's been a lot of years since I wrote about those cases.

But ... I'd submit that the issue still cuts Duke's way. UNC's preference for buying stems from the fact that it has to get a bunch of people (BOT, the system office, the Council of State, etc) to sign off on real estate deals. Most of the people in its chain of command prefer that state money be spent on property, if at all, to acquire assets, not lease them. Duke being a private school, it can be a lot more flexible and a bit less bureaucratic in its approach.

As for Mark's point about the lacrosse case, there's a lot of ins and outs to that and I don't think it cuts the way folks in the parachute media think.

Oh my gosh, I assumed KR was Kirk Ross too!! How quickly we forget ...