Duke University’s fund-raising team is quietly reaching out to New York area donors, seeking to keep cash flowing to the elite school as prosecutors step up their investigation into an alleged off-campus rape of a stripper who was performing for 41 members of the school’s lacrosse team.

Two Duke sophomores from the New York area were charged yesterday with kidnapping and rape in the March 13 incident. Collin Finnerty of Garden City on Long Island and Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., were both released on $400,000 bail. Prosecutors said they expect to file charges against a third member of the lacrosse team, but have yet to identify him.

Lawyers for Messrs. Finnerty and Seligmann maintained their clients were innocent and that there was no DNA evidence linking them to the alleged rape.

The stripper, a 27-year-old black, divorced mother of two who reportedly pleaded guilty in 2002 to misdemeanor counts of speeding, drunk driving, and assault on a government official, told police she was attacked by three white men in a bathroom during a March 13 party in Durham, N.C. The allegations have led to near daily protest rallies at Duke. The school canceled the highly ranked team’s season and accepted the coach’s resignation, as well as beginning internal investigations of the lacrosse team, the administration’s response to the allegations, and the campus culture.

The head of the of alumni club for the Duke Fuqua Business School in New York, Kirk Arrowood, 38, told The New York Sun that a major Duke fund-raiser reached out to him two weeks ago. Mr. Arrowood said the fund-raiser, whom he declined to name, expressed concern that New York-area alumni would stop donating to the university in light of the controversy.

“People are concerned,” he said. “What’s going on is a perfect cocktail of all the things you hope doesn’t happen: race, socioeconomic standing, North-South-type stuff because a lot of the kids come from the New York area. It’s a perfect cocktail of unfortunate events.”

Duke officials said about 10% of the undergraduate and graduate student body comes from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, and that 8% of its alumni settle in the tri-state region. More students come to Duke from New York than any other state except North Carolina. More alumni, especially from the business school, settle in the New York area than any other metropolitan area in the country. Duke officials didn’t have information about what percentage of the school’s donations come from the area, but a university spokesman, Peter Vaughn, said fund-raisers travel to the city several times a month.

The president of the New York City area alumni network, Erica Berg, said no one from the fund-raising office had met with her and declined to comment further about the arrests because she was too disturbed by the events. Her only contact with the university so far has been through the university-wide emails sent out.

“They’ve been sending out information. It’s just very upsetting information,” she said.

The fund-raiser, whom Mr. Arrowood described as “the gentleman that’s in charge of donations,” was concerned about how the news of allegations against members of the lacrosse team would affect potential donors’ attitudes towards the school. It was the first time they had met in his tenure as president of the alumni group, he said.

Mr. Arrowood, who deals with about 1,000 Fuqua graduates in the metropolitan area, said alumni have been “expressing disappointment” at the individuals involved, but not directly at the school.

“Duke University is an incredible institution and handled the situation quickly,” he said.

Mr. Vaughn said he didn’t know why a university fund-raiser visited the business school alumni network but not the wider alumni network. He had no specific information about the visits, but said the university was in constant contact with alumni groups – and not just about donations.

Judging from what happened at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2004, when several football players were charged with gang-raping a female student, a vice president at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, Rae Goldsmith, said individual donors would likely hold back until the controversy simmers down, but that major institutional donors would continue giving as they had in the past.

“The university is working hard to manage this risk,” she said. “What alumni want to see is the institution’s response, them doing everything they can to reach out and communicate, even in a situation when you don’t have all the answers.”

At the University of Colorado, she said, “They did take a hit, but now they’re bouncing right back.”

Duke has seen large donations in past years, including a $24 million donation in 2000 shared with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from New York investment manager Julian Robertson Jr. His son, Julian Robertson III, is a 1998 alumnus of Duke. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $20 million in 1998 for scholarships and interdisciplinary research. Mrs. Gates is an alumna of the university. A spokeswoman for the foundation declined to comment on whether the foundation would bear in mind the lacrosse player arrests when considering future donations.