Start with Scrooge McDuck, swimming in gold coins. That’s the first image you get when you hear that the Duke University endowment, having recovered from the collapse of the investment market during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, reached a high mark north of $12 billion. Twelve billion dollars, as a pile of wealth, is more wealth than entire countries have (Fiji is estimated to have about $9 billion; Liberia, $11 billion).

Mike Krzyzewski called Shane Battier. This was in the summer of 1999. Krzyzewski was approaching the midpoint of his peerless career at Duke, and Battier, too, was halfway through his own stellar tenure at the school. But the situation at the time was one of unease. The Blue Devils had just had one of their best seasons ever and yet had ended it by losing a national championship game they were favored to win. Krzyzewski, meanwhile, had just had hip replacement surgery.

Steve Schewel ’73, PH.D. ’82 used to carry in his wallet a picture of Terry Sanford holding a bullhorn, addressing a crowd of students who in 1970 had staged a sit-in on the traffic circle. In the wake of the Kent State shootings two days before, Schewel, then a freshman, had joined the crowd that stopped traffic to protest the war and the shootings.