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On a windy Saturday afternoon in September, approximately 100 people filled the pews of Asbury United Methodist Church in Durham. But it wasn’t a congregation that gathered under the filtered light of the stained glass windows.
“This is a justice service!” proclaimed Keith Bullard, a member of the Union of Southern Service Workers, prompting hoots and hollers from the crowd.
A colorful spread of T-shirts dotted the pews, from the bright red of the service workers and the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) to the black of Durham’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Sitting alongside members of community organizations and activists were families, neighbors, and Duke University employees, including some housekeeping workers and a few faculty members.
Duke’s East Campus was just a stone’s throw away, where locals pace the public gravel paths within the stone-wall perimeter. Inside the church, Bullard led a call-and-response.
“When I say ‘Bull City!’ you say, ‘Our city!’”
“When I say, ‘It’s time!’ you say, ‘To make Duke pay!’”
The event marked the launch of “Duke Respect Durham,” a campaign to persuade the university to give more money to the city it calls home. Most private universities are nonprofits and largely exempt from the property taxes that fund K-12 schools, public safety, and infrastructure, even as they own large swaths of land and bring in billions in revenue.
Similar campaigns have convinced Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other universities to make voluntary payments to their hometowns to support such services, also known as payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOT agreements. Duke Respect Durham, which has the support of 30 local organizations, wants the school to pay the city $50 million each year—much more than those other universities pay.
Duke sees things differently. University officials told The Assembly and INDY Week that it already contributes tens of millions of dollars to Durham through taxes and community programs. Duke’s investments have been an economic lifeline for the region, officials say, and are integral to the city’s success.
“Duke is fully invested in the future of Durham and everyone in it,” the university wrote in a statement. “Duke is part of Durham, and Durham is part of Duke.”
The school already works closely with local neighborhoods, government, police, schools, and nonprofits, the university said, and “is constantly looking for more ways we can partner to improve the city we call home.”
The Duke Respect Durham debate comes as the university celebrates its 100th anniversary, and it shines a spotlight on a complicated local history. But it also is a microcosm of town-gown debates that have played out across the country: What does a university that is a major employer and a magnet for talent owe to a community dealing with poverty, gentrification, and struggling schools?
“We are Bull City, baby. We are not easily broken,” said Christy Patterson, the vice president of the Durham Association of Educators, at the campaign launch. “So Duke, you hear me, and you hear me loud and clear: You will pay!”
Massive Footprint
At the turn of the 20th century, a few high-profile residents had a different message for Duke: Welcome to Durham.
Trinity College, then a small Methodist school in Randolph County, was looking for a new home at the behest of its president, John F. Crowell, who wanted a more urban environment.
A small collection of Durham’s most influential industrialists, including Julian Carr, Washington Duke, and Duke’s son Benjamin outbid Raleigh for the rights to claim the school. Carr donated more than 60 acres of land to cement the deal. Trinity’s Board of Trustees said Carr’s donation would be enough to “relieve the college of the necessity of ever investing in additional lands.”
That was “obviously a false prophecy,” Eric Moyen, now a professor of higher education and leadership at Mississippi State University, wrote in a 2004 dissertation on Duke and Durham’s history.
In 1924, a $40 million donation from James Buchanan Duke established the Duke Endowment and renamed the school Duke University in honor of his father, Washington. It also prompted the university to aggressively expand its campus.
When the new Duke University didn’t buy property quickly enough, J.B. Duke threatened to move the college to Charlotte. The university soon acquired 60 new pieces of property in Durham, using a shadow real estate agent to avoid local attention to its plans, according to Moyen’s dissertation, which cites documents in Duke’s archives.
“To be able to acquire as much land as we have and connect it up with the present campus seems almost unbelievable,” a Duke official wrote in a letter to Benjamin Duke, quoted in Moyen’s paper. “I also derive a great deal of satisfaction out of the fact that we were able to acquire the land without anyone knowing about it.”
Over decades, the small college grew into a global powerhouse research institution and medical center, hitting its stride in the ’70s and ’80s alongside the boom of nearby Research Triangle Park. Today, the university owns more than 3,000 acres in Durham County.
The Assembly’s analysis of county tax records found that Duke owns about 2 percent of all the property in Durham County and about 3 percent in the city of Durham. Citywide, only the city government owns more land. About half of Duke’s property in the county is Duke Forest, which includes recreational areas open to the public as well as research and teaching labs.
The value of Duke’s property and land holdings totaled more than $787 million as of 2024–surpassing each of the next two highest, Durham County and Durham Public Schools, by more than $100 million.
At times, Duke’s growth put it at odds with the city, particularly poor residents. In 1965, Duke bought property between its East and West campuses to connect the university and demolished dozens of homes to build student housing, Moyen found. Additionally, some neighborhoods where employees lived, such as Duke Forest, were governed by covenants that barred Black people from buying homes there.
Many residents viewed the university as isolated from the city, which faced economic struggles as the tobacco industry collapsed. Durham’s crime and drug problems, as well as its underperforming public schools, sparked concerns that Duke could lose prospective students and faculty to other elite institutions. Ultimately, those forces pushed the university and city closer together.
Both the community and the university paint the 1990s as a turning point. In 1996, the launch of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership brought university resources into neighborhoods surrounding Duke’s East and West campuses. The program initially involved 12 neighborhoods and today supports 14 neighborhoods with services like cultural preservation, development, and traffic and pedestrian safety.
Throughout the 2000s, the school founded more community-focused programs and made investments in real estate that helped redevelop downtown, including the American Tobacco Campus, which converted abandoned tobacco factory buildings into a bustling business district.
“You saw a pivot toward developing a very intentional partnership and relationship, investing in Durham, seeing that the fates of Duke and Durham are intertwined, and the importance of building those relationships,” said Durham County Commissioner Wendy Jacobs, a 1983 Duke graduate.
Still, tensions have flared at times. Perhaps the most famous recent incident involved the death of a proposed light rail transit system between Durham and Orange counties. Throughout the process, institutions like the state legislature and the American Tobacco Campus quibbled with the light rail plan, creating roadblocks that jeopardized the project’s viability. But it was Duke that ultimately killed the plan when officials said they would not sign a cooperative agreement with the other stakeholders, saying magnetic interference could cause problems at the hospital.
Duke’s past with the community has to come to a head at some point, Moyen said in an interview.
“History matters … especially recent history, where those individuals who are impacted by that, some are gone, but many of them are still here,” Moyen said. “Looking at it from a historic lens, how can we rectify these situations that we’ve been facing?”
The Ivory Tower
Rectifying Duke’s long history with the city was a motivation for Nate Baker when he ran for city council last fall. Baker, a Durham native and professional urban planner, grew up in the Trinity Park neighborhood adjacent to East Campus. He campaigned on a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement that he said would push Duke to contribute more to Durham.
“Duke has built its multibillion dollar endowment and its worldwide prestige in large part on its tax-exempt status in a community that needs resources,” Baker said at the September launch event. “It’s past time that Duke University strengthened its partnership with the people of Durham, that it does what’s right, and that it begins to make reasonable payments to our local governments and to the collective good.”
The majority of Ivy League institutions have agreed to voluntary payments. New York’s Cornell University owns about 4 percent of the property in Tompkins County, similar to Duke in Durham County. Following public pressure, Cornell agreed last fall to up its annual voluntary payment to the city of Ithaca to $4 million from $2.4 million. Other elite private universities including Brown, Harvard, and Princeton have negotiated increases to existing arrangements in recent years.
The amount that institutions pay in these agreements varies significantly depending on the local context, said Adam Langley, an associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, who conducted a comprehensive study of PILOT agreements in 2012. That study found that the average PILOT agreement for a higher education institution was around $813,124, and the maximum was just over $10 million.
“Duke likes to compare itself to other Ivy League institutions, other elite institutions,” said Samantha Heller, a member of the Triangle’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter who recently graduated from Cornell. “If Duke wants to honor the community in the same way that other major elite educational institutions have, they should contribute to PILOT.”
Private institutions across the country are facing such pressure because of changes in the role of universities, said Davarian Baldwin, a professor of American Studies at Connecticut’s Trinity College and the person whom activists have turned to in recent years when they want to start a PILOT campaign.
Between the 1970s and 2000s, universities and their medical centers, often called “eds and meds,” became the lifeblood of many U.S. urban communities following the decline of manufacturing, Baldwin wrote in his book In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Institutions expanded their physical footprints in cities as part of urban renewal and revitalization, often resulting in gentrification. Federal legislation changes in the 1980s allowed universities to own inventions developed through federally funded research, bolstering their incentives to produce intellectual property that could be patented, sold, or spun off into startups.
Baldwin writes that this helped universities become “new companies” in the knowledge economy, with cities as their “company towns.”
Baker reached out to Baldwin for advice before launching Durham’s PILOT campaign. Baldwin, who has advised on a half-dozen such efforts, said Duke and Durham echo dynamics he’s seen across the country.
“When you come into Durham and the Research Triangle, Duke … they’re everywhere, right? They are their own city,” Baldwin said in an interview. “There’s a shift in leverage of who controls and who makes decisions around the city of Durham.”
While this appears to be the first concerted push for a PILOT agreement in Durham, Baker said questions about whether Duke should pay more to Durham have been raised before. He pointed to a 2004 op-ed for the INDY by John Schelp, a historian and former president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, who wrote that Duke contributed to Durham “far less than what Princeton, Harvard and Brown universities pay to their host cities” and that the money “could have funded important projects in our community.”
Over the past few months, the campaign has focused on pushing that message to the Durham community. The group frequently set up a table downtown during high foot traffic events in the summer. Following the September launch event, dark blue signs popped up in neighborhoods around East Campus, with “Duke: Respect Durham” in yellow. Last week, the campaign held an event on Duke’s campus aimed at getting students and faculty involved.
On social media platforms, the campaign continues to solicit input from residents on one question: What could Durham do with $50 million?
What We Owe Each Other
The PILOT campaigners say Duke should pay Durham $50 million a year, which is their estimate of what Duke would pay in property taxes if it wasn’t exempt. But unpacking that figure is fairly complicated.
The Duke Respect Durham campaign arrived at $50 million by reviewing the university’s public tax forms, according to Abhishek Chhetri, a postdoctoral student at Duke who has helped with the campaign’s research. Duke and its health system reported in its 2022 filings that the combined book value of their properties, land, and leasehold improvements is worth $4.13 billion. Applying the combined city and county tax rate of 1.39 percent , the group calculated that Duke would pay more than $50 million in taxes, providing the basis for their ask.
That number, however, is likely too high. Figures that Duke and other tax-exempt entities provided in 990 filings represent the market value, which is generally higher than the tax-assessed value. It also includes property that Duke owns outside of Durham County, like the majority of Duke Forest and hospitals in neighboring counties.
Duke already pays taxes on properties that are not part of the university’s academic mission. The Assembly’s analysis of county tax records found that Duke paid more than $2 million in property taxes in 2024. While properties like dorms and classrooms are clearly exempt from taxes, certain commercial activities can fall into “gray areas,” said Chris McLaughlin, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor who studies local government taxes.
For example, one property makes up nearly one fourth of Duke’s tax bill: the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, a four-star luxury hotel situated on 17 acres. While the university paid $551,000 on the inn, it paid nothing on the more than 400 adjacent acres that include an 18-hole golf course and faculty swim and tennis club. While there is no precisely comparable hotel in Durham, the five-star Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, which has a comparable square footage and is situated on 10 acres surrounded by pine forest, would have been assessed a $975,000 tax bill if located in Durham.
Duke said in a statement that the university pays a rate that is determined in consultation with the county tax office. Stays at the hotel for university-related business are exempt, while all others are not.
The Assembly’s analysis of county tax data found that Duke would have been billed roughly $11 million in property taxes in 2024 were taxes applied to all of its property. However, officials from the county tax administration said that is a low estimate.
“The destinies of Duke and Durham are intertwined and interlinked.”
Nate Baker, Durham City Council member
Some of Duke’s property, including the famous Duke Chapel and all of the buildings on the East Campus, have no assigned tax value. They likely haven’t been assessed because of the age of the buildings and the fact that they are exempt from taxes.
“We do recognize that things need to be done at Duke,” said Keyar Doyle, Durham County’s tax administrator, adding that a thorough evaluation of the entire campus is on the county’s radar once it completes the 2025 reappraisal process. “But because of the lack of revenue provided from that property, it cannot take precedence over some of the immediate concerns we have.”
Tax assessors routinely don’t put many resources into assessing tax-exempt properties, said Langley, the tax expert. He said the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
If Duke weren’t exempt from many property taxes, its bill would likely fall somewhere between $11 million and the $50 million the PILOT campaigners calculated. Chhetri acknowledges the number comes with uncertainties and caveats. Still, the campaign feels its figure is justified.
“We’re not going to lowball our offer and make it easier on Duke,” Chhetri said.
Duke’s Commitment
From the fifth floor of the Mutual Tower, an iconic landmark near the heart of downtown Durham, Stelfanie Williams looked out the window of the Duke Office of Durham and Community Affairs, which she leads as its vice president.
Once one of the tallest buildings in Durham, the historic Brutalist style structure formerly was home to the oldest Black-owned life insurance company in the United States. Today, Duke is leasing its office instead of buying the building, which Williams said has been the university’s recent policy downtown so that buildings stay on the tax rolls and are available to other renters if demand for the space increases.
“It’s great to be here and be accessible and visible, but we’re also doing it with sensitivity to how we can actually support the development of downtown,” Williams said.
Williams boiled down Duke’s direct benefit to Durham into one number: $24 million. That includes the more than $2 million the university pays in taxes for non-academic buildings it owns, $7 million in taxes connected to the 2.8 million square feet of space the school leases, $4 million in direct payments for emergency services in Durham, and another $10 million it gives to local nonprofits.
Williams and two other Duke representatives pushed back on many of Duke Respect Durham’s core arguments.
Adam Klein is the associate vice president for economic development at Duke and the former head of startup incubator American Underground. (The Assembly and INDY Week have offices at American Underground.) He said large capital improvement projects, like the American Tobacco Campus business park, needed anchor tenants like Duke to be viable. There’s also the Durham Performing Arts Center, which brings in millions of dollars to the city. Duke contributed $7.5 million to its construction in 2008, but the city retained ownership.
“Duke has taken a relatively quiet role in a lot of the partnership work that it’s done downtown,” Klein said, “but it has been very present in a way that Durham is lead and Duke is secondary.”
It’s also not fair to characterize the university as a business, said Jeff Welch, who works in Duke’s Office of Translation and Commercialization, which helps Duke researchers take their research into the marketplace. Making money isn’t the office’s goal, Welch stressed. In fact, after one license expires in a few years, he said the office will not be able to cover its own costs.
Rather, the office’s chief goal is recruiting high-quality faculty and talent—something that Welch said helps Durham’s economic growth, too. In his view, that “outweighs anything that the university could produce through a PILOT program.”
“Duke is fully invested in the future of Durham and everyone in it.”
Duke University statement
There are benefits to Duke investing directly in the community, said Jacobs, the Durham County commissioner and Duke grad. Nonprofits can encounter a lot of “red tape” in government bureaucratic processes to receive funds, she said. But money coming directly from Duke “can be more accessible.”
In 2018, Duke President Vincent Price announced that stronger community partnerships would be a part of its broad strategic vision for the next 100 years, called “Toward Duke’s Second Century.” And next February, Duke will open a new Center for Community Engagement to help local organizations partner with the university.
The perception may still exist among some Durhamites that the university keeps the community at a distance, Williams acknowledged, saying that it’s “clearly a complicated history.” But she hopes that residents realize the university’s “deep commitment to partnership.”
“It’s an ongoing relationship that we have, and one that we have to consistently maintain, recalibrate, listen, understand,” she said. “Like any close relationship in your life, you’ve got to be in communion in a way. You’ve got to communicate, you’ve got to coordinate.”
The Long Road
While the PILOT campaign and Duke have not met, Williams said the university is open to a discussion. Baker said the coalition is open to it, too. He thinks the next step would be a memorandum of understanding between the university and organizers that lays out Duke’s contributions to the city, which he said would add more transparency to the discussion.
Eventually, Baker hopes that officials from the campaign, Duke, the city, and the county would all come together to discuss the possibility of a PILOT agreement.
“That’s where ultimately this thing needs to end up,” Baker said, “because at the end of the day, that’s where the negotiations will happen.”
It’s not clear how much traction Baker and the coalition have gained with other elected officials. Nida Allam, a county commissioner, was quick to sign on. A few others appear interested but not publicly committed, such as City Council member Javiera Caballero and school board member Natalie Beyer, who both attended the campaign launch in September. Some city and county leaders have spoken to university officials about additional ways to partner, two local officials told The Assembly and INDY Week.
Even if all parties come to the table, PILOT discussions often take years—and frequently come down to who is in the room and their collective willingness to reach agreement, Langley said.
“It’s kind of a long road,” Langley said, “and oftentimes these campaigns are ultimately unsuccessful for a variety of reasons.”
Whether there is a PILOT agreement or not, conversations around the relationship between the university and city remain up in the air.
Over the past year, Duke has asked the city to rezone dozens of acres on its Central Campus to the versatile University and College category, which would give Duke wide latitude for development there without additional sign-off from the city. But in two meetings, city officials expressed skepticism of Duke’s proposal and the university itself.
“It’s like your uncle who paid for you to go to college but molested you. It’s a difficult relationship,” said Mayor Pro Tem Mark-Anthony Middleton, referencing a refrain from comedian Chris Rock, to make his point.
Amid the pushback, Duke withdrew one of its zoning requests. Another request was approved in October, though a Duke official said that the school would need to do more in the future to win such approvals from the council.
“We look forward to reframing our relationship with the city of Durham moving forward in the spirit of transparency and collaboration,” said Adem Gusa, Duke’s director of planning and design.
At the meeting, Baker echoed the sentiment: “The destinies of Duke and Durham are intertwined and interlinked.”
About the data: Property data is from Durham County’s real estate billing files, and acreage excludes publicly owned roads. Government, business, and nonprofit owner names were standardized to account for inconsistent entries; ownership information is current as of August 2024. Duke’s properties include those owned by the University, its health system, and affiliates, like the Washington Duke Inn and Associated Health Services.
Disclosure: Reporter Justin Laidlaw worked for Adam Klein in a previous job at American Underground, and his girlfriend currently works in Duke University’s Community Affairs office. Ren Larson is an adjunct lecturer at Duke University, where she teaches data and investigative journalism.
Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.
Justin Laidlaw is a staff reporter at INDY Week. You can follow him on X or reach him by email at jlaidlaw@indyweek.com.
Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.