Nature & Nurture | Campaign News

Reids Establish Professorship Focusing on Impact of Human Population

Whitelaw and Elizabeth Brooks Reid have established the Reid Professorship Fund with a commitment of $1.5 million to the Nicholas School. The Reid Fund will allow the Nicholas School to attract a distinguished professor whose research focuses on the environmental impact of human population.

  “Whitie and I have had strong interest in environmental issues for many years,” says Mrs. Reid, a Duke alumna (WC’53), a Duke parent (Gina T’84), a trustee emerita of Duke, an emerita member of the Nicholas School Board of Visitors and a former career counselor and academic adviser at the State University of New York at Purchase.

  “As a docent in the Education Department at the Bronx Zoo, I learned how fragile the earth’s ecosystems are and how widespread wildlife habitat destruction is due to expanding human population,” says Mrs. Reid. “Humans suffer equally because of mismanagement and exhaustion of arable land, destruction of forests and over-fishing the seas, with the result that many of the earth’s people face a constant struggle for mere survival.”

  “Population is the key to most of the problems facing the world today,” adds Mr. Reid, Yale ‘36, a former editor and president of the New York Herald Tribune and president of Reid Enterprises. “If it continues to grow at current rates, the need for food, energy, housing, schools and health care will grow exponentially. Unchecked, that need could lead to a shortage of resources for sustaining life on our planet.”

   “Through the Reids’ generosity, the Nicholas School is poised to make an impact in population studies,” says Dean William H. Schlesinger. “How we tackle these issues may well determine whether our population faces a fate similar to that of a small population of reindeer, added to an island off the coast of Alaska in the 1940s. Their rising population, in a trajectory similar to our own, soon ate all their available food supply, and the population crashed. For us, our island is planet Earth and we must manage our home well.”

  Early in the Campaign for Duke, Mrs. Reid established the Elizabeth Reid Endowment Fund, which provides fellowship support for students at the Nicholas School. “The Reids are a true blue Duke family,” says Peggy Dean Glenn, associate dean of external affairs. The Reids’ gift allows their relationship with Duke to extend beyond the two generations educated here and touches the lives of countless students for generations to come.”