For Sally Kleberg, Nicholas School Board member emeritus and long-time donor, caring for the land is a birthright, woven through generations of her South Texas family. Part of the fifth generation of the family that founded King Ranch, a 170-year-old family-owned ranch in Texas, Sally was taught early that survival depended on deep respect for nature and the people who worked the land.
Her father, Richard M. Kleberg Jr., returned from law school at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1930s to work under his great-uncle at the ranch. There, he learned the business while his father was serving in Congress in Washington, D.C.
When the ranch was being expanded to foreign operations, Sally’s father was charged with managing the main operations in Texas.
“Dad was left to run the cattle and horses pretty much on his own,” she said. “It was all about how you take a raw piece of nature, make it productive, leave it better than you found it.”
Sally learned the business by living it every day. She remembered attending shareholder meetings starting at age 18. She also absorbed lessons in resilience during a seven‑year drought in the 1950s, watching her father burn prickly pear cactus to feed the cattle to keep them from starving.
The family’s survival depended on creativity, grit, and respect for nature. “It’s all about the land and everything that lives on it, and how hard it is to keep it together,” Sally said.
A World Expands: Education and Global Perspective
Sally’s experiences during the tumultuous decades of the 1950s and ‘60s shaped her life. She went to school at Saint Mary’s Hall in San Antonio, where she discovered the excitement of learning, and later enrolled at Duke University, drawn by its blend of intellectual rigor and the strong sense of identity and community at the Women’s College.
“We had our own administration, we had our own women’s organizations,” she said. “It was very rare, especially in the South, to have a women’s school in a major research university.”
Her first year at Duke coincided with a moment of historic upheaval. 1963, the year Sally came to Duke, saw the March on Washington for civil rights, as well as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “The world turned upside down,” she said.
Between her freshman and sophomore years, Sally persuaded her parents to take the money they saved for her debutante ball gown and put it toward a seven‑week trip across the globe. “I said, ‘If you’re going to spend that kind of money on me, I want to learn about the world instead.’”
Sally joined 11 other young college women and two older female chaperones on an eye-opening journey to explore 11 countries over seven weeks. Their travels stretched from Hong Kong to Beirut, India to Egypt.
“It solidified my interest in experiential learning as a component in formal university and graduate education,” she said, “Something that is offered regularly in the Nicholas School at Duke.”
She saw the early realities of the Vietnam conflict: tanks and helicopters poorly hidden under camouflage netting. “We’re being told by the federal government that we only have advisors over there,” she said. “And we’re seeing the lie.”
She stood in awe at King Tut’s tomb, traveled down the Nile at sunrise, and met the Dalai Lama, who was then a teenager living in exile.
“It opened my eyes,” she said. “Talk about an education!”
When she stepped into Notre Dame Cathedral after months of traveling the globe, she burst into tears. “It was like coming home,” she remembered.
Shaping the Duke Alumni Network
Sally and her future husband, Kip Espy, moved from Durham in 1964 to attend the University of Texas at San Antonio. Upon their arrival, they discovered that Duke alumni in Texas were scattered, with no organized network.
With the help of their Duke friends, Bonnie and Trent Harkrader, Sally and Kip began reaching out to other Blue Devils in central and south Texas in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bonnie played an especially critical role by drawing on her strong network of Duke nursing and medical contacts.
“We just started making a list of people we knew from Duke,” Sally recalled. “We started having gatherings.” That grassroots effort eventually became a crucial node in Duke’s early capital campaigns.
This work also connected Sally to the emerging leadership of the university. The 1960s and ’70s were a period of growth for Duke’s alumni relations, and Sally’s instinct for building community and relationships made her an invaluable early partner.
“We were part of capital campaigns from the beginning,” she said. “That’s how it all started.”
Sally played a formative role in the creation, expansion, and modernization of Duke’s alumni community during a time when the university was still defining what alumni engagement could be. Her work with the early Texas alumni groups laid the groundwork for what would become a strategic model for Duke’s regional presence.
At the time, Duke lacked a fully developed alumni association. Staff were few, records were incomplete, and alumni tracking was limited. Much of the early relationship‑building depended on volunteers like Sally.
Her efforts helped establish a network of Duke graduates in central and south Texas — one of the regions least represented in Duke’s alumni footprint at the time. With the influx of Duke‑trained physicians at the newly developing UT Health Science Center, the community grew quickly. “That’s where we got the vast majority of our Duke alums to start,” she said. “San Antonio, Austin, and the ranching towns around them.”
Service on the Duke Board of Trustees
In the late 1980s, at a time when Duke sought to diversify and strengthen its Board of Trustees, Sally was invited to serve. Terry Sanford, president of Duke at the time, was opening doors for women’s leadership, and Sally joined a remarkable cohort of women who helped shape the university’s strategic direction.
Her board tenure coincided with Duke’s bold decision to elevate the arts. She supported the creation of the Institute of the Arts at Duke, an innovative interdisciplinary model that gathered existing arts resources across the university into a cohesive academic vision.
“It was such a creative idea,” she said. “It shows you what a school like Duke — small, young, and nimble — could accomplish.”
Founding the Nicholas School of the Environment
Sally’s environmental background and Duke experience converged in the late 1980s when she learned that the university was considering creating a School of the Environment. A staff member mentioned that Duke was thinking of bringing together marine science, forestry, geology, ecotoxicology, and other fields into a unified environmental school.
“Hearing that lit my fire,” she said. “With my connection to the land and the environment, it just made sense.”
Soon after, she met with botanist Norm Christensen, her son Ben’s academic advisor, who would become the Nicholas School’s founding dean. He asked her to serve on a strategic planning group for the new school.
“I said, ‘Count me in.’ Whatever they asked me to do, I did,” Sally said.
While working to build the school from the ground up, she found that there was no precedent at Duke for blending disciplines across multiple campuses and departments.
“That was the hardest part,” she said. “But this is what makes Duke unusual. We were able to break down a lot of silos.”
Sally helped Christensen as he integrated the advisory board of the Duke University Marine Laboratory, even despite its members’ strong loyalties to other local universities at the time. She remembers “watching in wonder” as Christensen transformed the board and various other Duke departments into a strong overarching governance structure for the new school.
Today, the Nicholas School stands as a globe‑leading institution in environmental education and research — a legacy that Sally helped launch.
Through all of it, Sally continues to work to build bridges and find connections to support the environment and the people who depend on it.
“We’re all in it together,” she said. “That’s how I was raised.”
