T H E I N D E P E N D E N T D A I LY AT D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y
The Chronicle
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2013
Italian in the LSRC?
ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTH YEAR, ISSUE 79
WWW.DUKECHRONICLE.COM
Alum founds innovative local school
Preventative measures
Classroom assignments don’t always make sense
by Carleigh Stiehm by Raisa Chowdhury
THE CHRONICLE
THE CHRONICLE
Beginning in August, middle school students of the Triangle Area will have the opportunity to pursue a new and more personalized learning experience. The Triangle Learning Community Middle School will offer students an opportunity to become “empathetic global citizens” rather than being taught to memorize material in order to pass exams, said TLC founder Steve Goldberg, Trinity ’90. Instead of a traditional learning environment, students will be given the opportunity to work at their own pace and assign themselves homework. “People have a passion for the world and learning—I mean look at toddlers, they want to learn to walk and talk—but traditional school squashes their passion out of them,” Goldberg said. This Fall, Goldberg hopes to have between 10 and 12 students enrolled at TLC, most of whom will be in sixth grade, though there could be several seventh graders. He said the school will attract home-schooled students, families looking for the right middle school and students currently unhappy with their middle schools.
Classes can end up in strange places, intellectually and geographically. Despite administrative efforts to assign classroom locations using a consistent system, many students become frustrated with inconvenient or seemingly counterintuitive placement of their classes. The process has placed math classes in Carr Building, far from the department’s home on Science Drive—while landing Italian classes in French Family Science Center. The registrar’s office assigns classrooms to classes with a computer program based on criteria such as proximity to departmental offices, faculty desires, room setup, AV equipment and where most enrolled students reside, Bruce Cunningham, assistant vice provost and university registrar, wrote in an email Tuesday. But these criteria are not always reflected in the classroom assignments. This is apparent in room assignments for Writing 101—previously Writing 20—classes, which are taken solely by freshmen residing on East Campus. For instance, when
EMMA LOEWE/THE CHRONICLE
Hundreds of students, faculty and staff line up in the Great Hall Tuesday evening to receive free flu vaccines.
SEE TLC ON PAGE 5
SEE CLASS ON PAGE 12
Initiative to connect Former trustee and religion and public life professor dies at 89 by Elizabeth Djinis THE CHRONICLE
A new initiative sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Divinity School will allow students to explore the effects of religion in the public sphere. The project originated from a comment Laurie Patton, Dean of Arts and Sciences, made to Ebrahim Moosa, professor of Islamic studies and religion, noting the lack of research on connections between religion and other aspects of society. The project developed after Moosa was awarded a public ethics grant from the Kenan Institute and Luke Bretherton, associate professor of theological ethics and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute—whose interests intersected with those of Moosa and Patton— joined them. The initiative will include a series of lectures focusing on the public effects of religion and a
Divinity School course—REL 999.08: “A Paradoxical Politics? Religions, Poverty & Re-Imagining Citizenship in a Globalizing World”—exploring religion in an interdisciplinary way. The course will be co-taught by Moosa and Bretherton. “The thrust of the course is on the question of poverty, citizenship and globalization,” Moosa said. “There is a kind of paradox in politics and religion: the more we globalize, the more alienated we’re becoming.” Moosa noted that the course will look at this question on both the national and international level, citing the Middle East and the Occupy Movement as examples of this paradoxical phenomenon. He also emphasized that although the class itself is geared towards graduate students, he hopes that SEE RELIGION ON PAGE 12
Eugene Patterson, formerly a Duke professor and member of the Board of Trustees, died Saturday. Patterson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, serving as editor of The Atlanta Constitution during the civil rights movement and later as editor of The St. Petersburg Times and managing editor of The Washington Post. He died of complications Eugene Patterson from cancer, which he had been battling since February 2012. Patterson taught at Duke in 1971 and then served on the Board from 1988 to 1994. An endowed chair in the Sanford School for Public Policy is named after Patterson. Phil Bennett, professor of the practice of journalism and public policy,
currently fills the spot. Bennett is a member of the board of directors for the Duke Student Publishing Company, which publishes The Chronicle. The winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, Patterson was well regarded among journalists for his integrity as a reporter during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Before his journalism career and his time at Duke, Patterson served as a tank platoon commander in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. After World War II, Patterson became a pilot in the Army before ending his military service in pursuit of his journalism career, which lasted 41 years. The University flew its flags at halfstaff Monday in honor of Patterson, who was 89. —from Staff Reports
ONTHERECORD
Q&A with Duke’s most popular Coursera professor, Page 2
“[Anonymity] has the power to turn any surface into a mirror. Especially the mind....” —Mia Lehrer in ‘Anonymeanie.’ See column page 11
Athletes spend winter break training in the tropics, Page 7