BIG MEN ON CAMPUS.(Richard H. Brodhead)

In the summer of 2003, a search committee from Duke University set out to find a successor to its departing president, Nannerl Keohane, and decided upon the dean of Yale College, Richard H. Brodhead. Duke had long striven for a place among the top tier of American universities, and selecting a new leader from among the "upper Ivies" affirmed Duke's arrival.

For Brodhead, though, the decision was the most difficult of his life. He had come to Yale from Andover in 1964, at the age of seventeen. After taking a degree in English literature, he had stayed on for his postgraduate work and a career in teaching. He had had offers from other schools over the years, including university presidencies, but New Haven held him fast. He was a gifted teacher; his English-literature courses were student favorites. Even after his move into Yale's administration, Brodhead remained so thoroughly the literature professor as to embody the type--shy, prone to a slight stammer, but speaking in long, elegantly formed passages, filled with literary allusion.

The man charged with bringing Brodhead to Duke was Robert K. Steel, a trustee and chairman of the search committee, who was a Duke graduate and a native of Durham, North Carolina, where Duke is situated. Steel, then a vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, was a man of forceful personality and overflowing confidence, a driven achiever who liked having a clear goal. Steel knew how much his 1973 Duke degree had appreciated in value, and, regardless of what outsiders thought, he was convinced that Duke's destiny was to set its own standard. Steel and his committee vice-chair, the Duke law professor Sara Beale, met Brodhead at a small restaurant off Interstate 95 in Connecticut and put the school's case to him. Steel knew something about the Ivy League (he teaches a class at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government), and he believed that the rich and venerable old schools were a bit sclerotic. Duke was young and willing to take risks, and, as Steel would say, "We're in a hurry."

Steel talked to Brodhead about the ways in which Duke and Yale were similar--their size, the balance of teaching and research, their professional schools, and so on--and about one big difference: sports. Yale, with the rest of the Ivy League, had long ago given up big-time football, and competed in all sports with non-scholarship student athletes. Duke means to contend at a championship level in sports across the board, and to do so without compromising academic standards. It is an audacious proposition--only two other private institutions, Stanford and Northwestern, even try it--and the undertaking alone attests to Duke's vigor, and its idea of itself. Duke's basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, who is known on campus as Coach K and has won three national championships with smart, disciplined players, exemplified the ideal.

"Is that something you want to be part of?" Steel asked.

On June 28, 2004, Duke's ninth president moved into his new office, in the Allen Building, near the university's main quad. As Brodhead was getting settled, Joe Alleva, Duke's athletic director, rushed in with urgent news: the Los Angeles Lakers had offered Coach K the job of head coach, and Krzyzewski was thinking of leaving Duke.

After forty years in the academy, Brodhead, on his first day in the new job, was facing a crisis wholly foreign to him. But he understood that losing the star coach would be a disastrous beginning, and he took Krzyzewski to dinner and desperately sought common ground. There was no way that any school, even Duke, could compete monetarily with the N.B.A. (the Lakers had reportedly offered Krzyzewski forty million dollars), but Brodhead did have one edge: his status as an academic heavyweight. He told the coach how highly valued he was at Duke, not just for his winning but for his talents as a teacher, and if Krzyzewski stayed he would retain his auxiliary position as a "special assistant" to the president. As the days passed, Brodhead found himself joining the crowds of students chanting "Coach K, please stay!" and helping to fill a human chain forming the letter "K" outside Cameron Indoor Stadium. On July 4th, Krzyzewski made his decision: he would stay. But he waited until the next day to relieve the president of his agonies.