Knight, Douglas M(aitland) 1921-2005

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KNIGHT, Douglas M(aitland) 1921-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born June 8, 1921, in Cambridge, MA; died of complications from pneumonia, January 23, 2005, in Doylestown, PA. College administrator, educator, and author. Knight was a former president of Duke University who later became president of the Questar Corporation. A student of English at Yale University, he earned his B.A. in 1942, an M.A. in 1944, and his Ph.D. in 1946. He was then hired by Yale to be an assistant professor in 1947. In 1953 become president of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He remained there until 1963, when he was chosen to be the fifth president of Duke University. Though Knight is often remembered for the fact that he resigned in 1969 in the face of overwhelming student protests on the campus, he was also recognized for his many accomplishments while president. Among these were establishing new programs in forestry management and biomedical engineering, creating joint M.D-J.D. and M.D.-Ph.D. degrees, constructing a new library wing, bringing in important research equipment and almost 200 million dollars in gift and grant money, and proposing construction of what has since become the university's Central Campus. After leaving Duke, Knight was hired to be vice president of the Educational Development Division of RCA. He was then president of Social Economic and Educational Development, Inc., (SEED) from 1973 until 1976. Finally, from 1976 until 1999, he served as president of Questar, a company that manufactures high-tech lenses for use in medical, industrial, and aeronautical applications. Here he was credited as coinventor of the Questar long-distance microscope in 1981 and was a co-patentee of the stereo microscope in 2001. In his later years, he served as chair of Questar from 1999 until 2001, then was its senior consultant. In 2004 he also accepted a post as curator for the Knight-Braymer Library at Duke University. Knight's old university honored him and his wife in 2003 by renaming the president's house the Douglas M. and Grace Knight House. Knight was the author of several books, ranging from the poetry collection The Dark Gate (1971) to more scholarly and nonfiction works, such as The Federal Government and Higher Education (1960), Street of Dreams: The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s (1989), and Education and the Civil Order: A Memoir of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (1996). His memoir, The Dancer and the Dance: One Man's Chronicle, 1938-2001: Yale, Lawrence, Duke, Questar: The Individual, the Community, the Educated Life, was published in 2003.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Knight, Douglas M., The Dancer and the Dance: OneMan's Chronicle, 1938-2001: Yale, Lawrence, Duke, Questar: The Individual, the Community, the Educated Life, Separate Star (New York, NY), 2003.