News

By Thom Smith

After 15 years, Ervin Duggan has said farewell to Palm Beach and to his legacy, the Society of the Four Arts. His successor, David W. Breneman, a professor in economics of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, has big shoes to fill. If he’s as good at telling stories, he’s got the job licked.
A decade before Paul Simon sang of being “branded a communist ’cause I’m left-handed,” Duggan endured a similar rebuke from a beloved but unforgiving uncle.
    “It was pretty much expected that I, as most of the men in my family had done, would attend the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, in Charleston,” Duggan explained. “But I didn’t want to go there. An acquaintance had gone to Davidson, in North Carolina; so one day, without having seen it or knowing anything about it, I told my mother I wanted to go to there. She was surprised, but finally she said I should visit a neighbor, a former chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, who had gone to Davidson.”
    The justice wrote a letter and next fall, the aspiring lawyer left Manning, a sleepy town upriver from Charleston, for the wide world of North Carolina. On his first trip home, Duggan couldn’t wait to share with his prominent family all that he had learned.
    “One of my classes was in advanced mathematics, and I was explaining that in Boolean algebra, two plus two does not necessarily equal four,” Duggan recalled. “My uncle, who was sitting at the dinner table, threw up his hands and said, ‘I knew it … he goes off to that liberal school and becomes a communist.’ ”
    Duggan laughs about it now, speaking lovingly of his uncle and assorted relatives and acquaintances of similar political bent, confident that education will help folk who harbor similar misguided sentiments become wiser.
    For nearly 15 years, as president of Palm Beach’s Society of the Four Arts, Duggan was committed to education, and that will continue as he returns with wife, Julia, to Davidson to join its lifelong learning program.  
    They’ll split time among the on-campus apartment, their retreat in the north Georgia mountains and in South Florida: Son Ned, his wife, Rabia, and granddaughter, Maisie, live in Miami.
    “And we want to travel,” Duggan says with the anticipation of a high-schooler taking his first trip to New York.
    Another story:
    In the ’50s, a new band director joined Manning High School and it quickly became the best in South Carolina and ultimately won a national competition in New York.
    “When we got home, I was in the kitchen telling everyone about the trip,” Duggan recalled. “We had a black maid, who was standing in the back hall, and after I finished, she said, ‘Maybe someday our school will have a band.’ That stuck with me.” (In 2009, the Manning High School band marched in Barack Obama’s first inaugural parade.)
    Indeed. At “liberal” Davidson, Duggan became editor of the campus newspaper, and in that capacity he became an outspoken champion of desegregation. The Washington Post took notice and after graduation, Duggan became a reporter, but as often happens in Washington, few jobs are permanent. In 1965 he became a staff assistant to President Lyndon Johnson (Secretary of State Dean Rusk was a Davidson alum.) He wrote speeches and helped draft the Public Broadcasting Act. He served as national editor of The Washingtonian magazine, headed special projects at The Smithsonian, worked on Jimmy Carter’s staff, was appointed by George H.W. Bush to the Federal Communications Commission and spent nearly six years as president of Public Broadcasting Service.
    In 1996, during and because of his tenure at PBS, Duggan spoke at Harvard’s Kennedy Center and then flew south where 18 hours later the town’s favorite son served as grand marshal at the 17th annual Clarendon County Striped Bass Festival. He rode in a convertible that bore his name — Irving Dugan.
    “It proves you can’t go home again,” he said.  
    Despite increasing PBS’s revenue 70 percent, he resigned in 1999 amid controversy over fundraising mostly by the larger stations. He always remained positive about the national role of public television.
    Then a headhunter approached him about the Four Arts. He’d never seen it, knew nothing about it, but just as with Davidson, he jumped at the opportunity. At first, some board members were wary — a Washington liberal in Palm Beach? — but at an introductory dinner he immediately won over the skeptics. Duggan seized the opportunity, and the Four Arts has blossomed from a small, almost exclusively Palm Beach organization to a thriving regional institution.
    “The only place I know like it, and it’s on a much larger scale,” Duggan said, “is the Smithsonian. We function as a museum, but we are not a museum. We have a park-like campus, but we are not a park. We have libraries, but you can’t say the Four Arts is a ‘library.’ We show films, but we are not a movie theater.
    “What we are most like is a small, liberal arts college with the entire community at the student body.”
    That concept gave birth to the Campus on the Lake, which grew into a program of lectures, workshops, classes and trips exploring art, music, literature, drama and the art of living well that boasts 7,000 members
    “It’s a gift to the entire community,” Duggan says; he has similar plans for Davidson.
Ah, the stories he will tell.