{"id":6812,"date":"2026-01-26T12:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T17:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/?p=6812"},"modified":"2026-02-16T10:05:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T15:05:32","slug":"meet-board-member-emeritus-sally-kleberg-steward-of-land-legacy-and-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/meet-board-member-emeritus-sally-kleberg-steward-of-land-legacy-and-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Board Member Emeritus Sally Kleberg – Steward of Land, Legacy, and Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sally Kleberg WC\u201966, P\u201991, P\u201994, GP\u201924 <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the ranch was being expanded to foreign operations, Sally\u2019s father was charged with managing the main operations in Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDad was left to run the cattle and horses pretty much on his own,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was all about how you take a raw piece of nature, make it productive, leave it better than you found it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2011year drought in the 1950s, watching her father burn prickly pear cactus to feed the cattle to keep them from starving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The family\u2019s survival depended on creativity, grit, and respect for nature. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the land and everything that lives on it, and how hard it is to keep it together,\u201d Sally said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A World Expands: Education and Global Perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sally\u2019s experiences during the tumultuous decades of the 1950s and \u201860s shaped her life. She went to school at Saint Mary\u2019s 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\u2019s College.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe had our own administration, we had our own women’s organizations,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was very rare, especially in the South, to have a women\u2019s school in a major research university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. \u201cThe world turned upside down,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2011week trip across the globe. \u201cI said, \u2018If you\u2019re going to spend that kind of money on me, I want to learn about the world instead.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt solidified my interest in experiential learning as a component in formal university and graduate education,\u201d she said, \u201cSomething that is offered regularly in the Nicholas School at Duke.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She saw the early realities of the Vietnam conflict: tanks and helicopters poorly hidden under camouflage netting. \u201cWe\u2019re being told by the federal government that we only have advisors over there,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re seeing the lie.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stood in awe at King Tut\u2019s tomb, traveled down the Nile at sunrise, and met the Dalai Lama, who was then a teenager living in exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt opened my eyes,\u201d she said. \u201cTalk about an education!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she stepped into Notre Dame Cathedral after months of traveling the globe, she burst into tears. \u201cIt was like coming home,\u201d she remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaping the Duke Alumni Network<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe just started making a list of people we knew from Duke,\u201d Sally recalled. \u201cWe started having gatherings.\u201d That grassroots effort eventually became a crucial node in Duke\u2019s early capital campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This work also connected Sally to the emerging leadership of the university. The 1960s and \u201970s were a period of growth for Duke\u2019s alumni relations, and Sally\u2019s instinct for building community and relationships made her an invaluable early partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were part of capital campaigns from the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s how it all started.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sally played a formative role in the creation, expansion, and modernization of Duke\u2019s 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\u2019s regional presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2011building depended on volunteers like Sally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her efforts helped establish a network of Duke graduates in central and south Texas \u2014 one of the regions least represented in Duke\u2019s alumni footprint at the time. With the influx of Duke\u2011trained physicians at the newly developing UT Health Science Center, the community grew quickly. \u201cThat\u2019s where we got the vast majority of our Duke alums to start,\u201d she said. \u201cSan Antonio, Austin, and the ranching towns around them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service on the Duke Board of Trustees<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s leadership, and Sally joined a remarkable cohort of women who helped shape the university\u2019s strategic direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her board tenure coincided with Duke\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was such a creative idea,\u201d she said. \u201cIt shows you what a school like Duke \u2014 small, young, and nimble \u2014 could accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Founding the Nicholas School of the Environment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sally\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHearing that lit my fire,\u201d she said. \u201cWith my connection to the land and the environment, it just made sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon after, she met with botanist Norm Christensen, her son Ben\u2019s academic advisor, who would become the Nicholas School\u2019s founding dean. He asked her to serve on a strategic planning group for the new school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Count me in.\u2019 Whatever they asked me to do, I did,\u201d Sally said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat was the hardest part,\u201d she said. \u201cBut this is what makes Duke unusual. We were able to break down a lot of silos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sally helped Christensen as he integrated the advisory board of the Duke University Marine Laboratory, even despite its members\u2019 strong loyalties to other local universities at the time. She remembers \u201cwatching in wonder\u201d as Christensen transformed the board and various other Duke departments into a strong overarching governance structure for the new school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, the Nicholas School stands as a globe\u2011leading institution in environmental education and research \u2014 a legacy that Sally helped launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re all in it together,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s how I was raised.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3601,"featured_media":6813,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,1],"tags":[35,31],"class_list":{"0":"post-6812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-friends-enews","8":"category-stories-of-impact","9":"category-uncategorized","10":"tag-board-members","11":"tag-board-of-visitors","12":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6812"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7164,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6812\/revisions\/7164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nicholas.duke.edu\/odar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}