Do you realize the school has a wall that encloses the entire campus? And it's not a metaphorical wall. It's a wall built of gothic Duke stone that the founders used in an attempt to look like Princeton.First of all, Duke does not have a wall that encloses "the entire campus," unless it's invisible or I somehow don't notice it when I go to my office every day. Duke does have a wall around East Campus, a very imposing wall that averages, I would guess, two feet in height. And does not even enclose that space because there are these fancy things called roads that lead in and out of that part of campus (there's even a road that goes under the wall). If this were a metaphorically-useful wall, the roads would at least be gated. But they are not.
Second of all, it's not built of gothic stone, because Duke's neo-gothic flourishes are on West Campus. It's of a piece with the Georgian architecture that dominates East Campus, which sub-a: rips off the University of Virginia if it steals from anything and sub-b: was built and planned back when it was Trinity College and long before it was called Duke.
Third of all, Duke's obsession with the Ivys notwithstanding, Duke's West Campus architecture, like Princeton's and Chicago's, was part of a turn-of-the-20th century general trend towards the neo-gothic. Those Princeton buildings that look so much like Duke's pre-date them by about 30 years, if that.
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