Vincent E. Price

It was one of the lowest moments in my childhood. Our fifth-grade class had been marched down to the school nurse’s office for routine eye examinations, and I was standing in front of the wall chart with a hand over one eye. I could only make out a single, big E at the top—the rest of the letters were blurred into a whirl of grayish shadow below, and all I could do was string together random guesses as to what they might be.

A century ago, in the fall of 1919, America’s colleges and universities were on the cusp of their first great expansion. Prior to the First World War, fewer than 50,000 bachelor’s degrees and 1,000 doctorates were awarded annually in the U.S.; by 1930, those numbers would more than double. In 1919, the first postdoctoral fellowships in the sciences were established by the National Research Council with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation; these new programs would revolutionize research.

When I visited Durham’s Lakewood Elementary last month, the smart students in Ms. Ledwith’s first-grade class were having a spelling contest. Divided into teams of five, they raced each other to spell green, week, feet, and—perhaps for the benefit of their visitor—Duke.

This past July, as I was preparing to make my first visit to the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, Director Andy Read warned me that our island campus there is a little “saltier” than Durham. A few weeks later, rounding the harbor like a buccaneer on Duke’s sixty-five-foot research catamaran, I understood what he meant. We weren’t on West Campus anymore.

My wife, Annette, and I were bounding down the Duke Forest trail, our dogs pulling us between squirrels and startled birds, when our guide called for us to stop next to an ordinary-looking beech tree. “Look closely,” she said. “They’re dancing.”

One evening this past winter at an event celebrating the opening of the brandnew Rubenstein Arts Center, I watched from a few feet away as the dancers of the American Ballet Theater performed in the “jewel box,” the center’s glass-enclosed second-floor dance studio. The lights were low, but from my chair under the towering windows, I was close enough to see the sweat on the dancers’ brows and the intensity of their muscular movement.

As I tried and failed and tried again to get the IV needle into the artificial arm, it occurred to me that this looks much easier on TV. No wonder nurses need training. The arm was one of the projects in development at the Pratt School of Engineering’s new Design Pod, a makerspace that’s home to an innovative new course for first-year engineering students.