April Issue - Towerview by Duke Chronicle

TOWERVIEW

t +Student U’s vision for Durham

APRIL 2013

30 years of WXDU

Cocoa Cinnamon’s story

TOUR GUIDE

MARCH 2013 • VOL. 14 • issue 6

Blah dee blah bee bhad yo

what that talk yo walk like THE PLAZA

BUS STOP

Brunch with Prof. Vadde: The youngest member of the English Depar tment redefines the meaning of contemporary literature ALSO +Driving Distance: A farm (and ice cream shop) with a view (p.8)

ON THE COVER If online education is the future, what does that mean for ‘brick-and-mortar’ institutions? GRAPHIC BY MELISSA YEO

that yo The Tassel: Tying In midst of ‘hookup culture,’ some couples elect early engagment

ALSO +An ‘in Durham, for Durham, by Durham’ nonprofit with Duke roots (p.14)

FEATURES 20 THE PAST A look behind the DJ booth at WXDU and one of its founders (who has moved up to the Allen Building) BY JACK MERCOLA

24 THE FUTURE A Digital Duke: Is it ‘knowledge in service to society,’ a branding initiative, a way to hedge the competition—or all of the above?

THE LINK Meet the founders of a new shop that’s adding sugar, spice and heritage to downtown Durham

BY MATTHEW CHASE

TOWERVIEW | 3

A NOTE From the Editors

Dear Readers,

the chronicle’s news & Culture magazine

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Matthew Chase and Sonia Havele PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Addison Corriher Melissa Yeo Chris Cusack Ciaran O’Connor Nicole Kyle Yeshwanth Kandimalla

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Laurel Burk, Jack Mercola, Jamie Moon and Katie Zaborsky CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Eliza Bray, Tracy Huang, Jessie Lu and Caroline Rodriguez PRODUCTION ASSISTANT: Tracy Huang GENERAL MANAGER ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR OPERATIONS MANAGER DIGITAL SALES MANAGER

Chrissy Beck Rebecca Dickenson Barbara Starbuck Mary Weaver Megan McGinity

@TowerviewMag

dukechronicle.com/ towerview

Towerview Magazine

towerviewletters@ gmail.com

Towerview is a subsidiary of The Chronicle and is published by the Duke Student Publishing Company, Inc., a non-profit corporation independent of Duke University. The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Duke University, its students, faculty, staff, administration or trustees. Columns, letters and cartoons represent the views of the authors. To reach The Chronicle’s editorial office at 301 Flowers Building, call (919) 684-2663 or fax (919) 684-4696. To reach The Chronicle’s business office at 103 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811. To reach The Chronicle’s advertising office at 101 West Union Building, call (919) 684-3811 or fax (919) 684-8295. Contact the advertising office for information on subscriptions. Visit The Chronicle and Towerview online at dukechronicle.com 2010 The Chronicle, Box 90858, Durham, N.C. 27708. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written permission of the business office. Each individual is entitled to one free copy.

4 | TOWERVIEW

On Oct. 29, 1969 a message traveled over a network connecting a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles to another at the Stanford Research Institute. This network, called ARPANET, which included two additional nodes at other West Coast universities, was the original precursor for what would eventually become the greatest invention of the 20th century: the Internet. More than 40 years later, the Internet has revolutionized far more than modes of communication— it has provided the platform for the virtual worlds and cyberspaces through which we form friendships, travel the world and even receive higher education. The controversy surrounding this last impact—the rise of online education platforms—has probed a global debate about the implications of substituting virtual instruction in place of the traditional lecture setting. This debate certainly resonates here at Duke, an “elite” university community with one of the largest price tags in America. At the very least, it compels us to reflect, if only for a brief moment, on the material value of our educational journey through Duke. It forces us to question our privilege—is it deserved, and if so, is it fair to share the knowledge contained within our classrooms with communities around the world? More personally, it forces us to consider our individual experiences at this institution—the professors who have transformed the way we think and peers who have challenged the assumptions that guide our daily lives—and if that could ever be replicated online. In this issue, we feature three stories that add perspective to this larger debate. An in-depth exploration of the opportunities and challenges that the Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) poses for the global community provides a backdrop for the dramatic question posed on our cover: Is College Dead? Katie Zaborsky’s profile of Assistant Professor of English Aarthi Vadde—who believes the best professors share more than objective knowledge and “give you the guidance you need to think the way you want to think”—illuminates one advantage of maintaining face-to-face professor interaction. And what happens if we remove the discussion from the realm of college? The director of an area nonprofit that seeks to encourage high schoolers to “own their education” by developing academic skills and personal well-being sheds yet another light on the important role that “a longhaired, bearded undergraduate” enrolled in a Social Entrepreneurship course can play in combating educational inequality. The online education revolution is likely here to stay, but the value of a face-to-face relationship between a professor and a pupil appears stronger than ever—at least to us.

TOWERVIEW 4

Bus Stop

aarthi vadde:

ecess Arts Editor and Towerview writer Katie Zaborsky sat down for a bustling Sunday morning brunch at Mad Hatter’s Bakeshop and Cafe with Assistant Professor of English Aarthi Vadde. Halfway through her second year of teaching at Duke, Vadde has already garnered a reputation as a breath of fresh air for her progressive attitude toward the canon and her eloquent, encouraging demeanor. Vadde (pronounced “va-Day”) is currently teaching two courses in the English department, an undergraduate class, “The Contemporary Anglophone Novel,” and a graduate-level seminar, “Transnational Modernism and the Novel.” Discussing everything from modernist superstars to the merits of being an only child (“only children are smart, good people”), Vadde’s lighthearted humor and academic insights are evident both in and out of the classroom. “Is it OK if I call you Aarthi now?” Upgrading from “Professor Vadde” to “Aarthi” over freshsqueezed orange juice and Earl Grey tea was not the monumental leap I had expected it to be. Having taken two classes with her, I had been referring to Professor Vadde by her first name in out-of-class conversation for over a year now—but never faceto-face. “You should take a class with Aarthi before you graduate.” “I saw Aarthi at Motorco during the Junot Diaz reading!”

“Yeah, I want to raid Aarthi’s closet—and her bookshelves.” I didn’t reflect too much on this habit, nor did other people, it seemed. Calling college professors by their first names is no longer an indication of disrespect; rather, it can signify affinity, appreciation, approachability. After two hours of chatting, it became clear why I had been dropping her professorial title. Vadde embodies not only academic intelligence but also what academia can be: energetic, inclusive, personal.

t 32 , Aarthi Vadde is the youngest faculty member in the English department. Walking the halls of the Allen Building, she is often mistaken for a student, something that Vadde has grown to accept and even embrace. “My very first year, it kind of bothered me, just because you’re still in this vein where you think, ‘I’m making this transition, and if other people don’t recognize it, how can I make it?’” she says. “But this year it’s more of a compliment, I suppose. It’s not going to last forever. Then I’m going to have to transition to actually looking my age.” Even though her youthfulness might be her most salient quality, Vadde adds that “the fact that I’m closer in age and maybe physically look more approachable does not mean that I am taken advantage of.” What doesn’t seem to be in transition is Vadde’s approach to

PHOTOS BY JESSIE LU

a modern woman

TOWERVIEW | 5

BUS STOP

teaching—a testament that decades of experience isn’t always the sole precursor of an enlightening “this-is-what-literaturecan-be” college course. Self-proclaimed as “anti-soapbox,” she avoids lecturing as a way to posture. She explains that there is a certain kind of teaching style that she tends to avoid—one that may look like “grandstanding” or to younger students, like authority. “Your ability to speak for a certain amount of time with a certain amount of conviction is a performance that is not actually imparting knowledge but that is imparting a kind of self-aggrandizement that people misrecognize as knowledge.” While Vadde acknowledges that lecturing works under certain constraints, it’s free-form dialogue that has been the vehicle for unpacking novels like Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In Vadde’s “Joyce in the World” course, we spent roughly half the semester tackling “Ulysses,” a novel with a reputation as exhausting as the text itself. “The great thing about ‘Ulysses’ is that you can take almost any interpretation you want, and you could be correct,” I remember her saying. What Vadde managed to do was portray Joyce as fallible, conquerable. For many, the literary baggage surrounding Joyce is enough to run the other direction, but Vadde ensured us that the journey would only be slightly nauseating. Criticism and adulation were equally encouraged if you could defend your argument in a cogent way, which seemed to

6 | TOWERVIEW

be Vadde’s modus operandi. “I think the higher you get in the major—or if you go to graduate school—you don’t need a professor to tell you what to do,” she says. “You just need a professor to give you the guidance you need to think the way you want to think.” Vadde seems to have a soft spot for the dissenters. She sees the English major itself as providing tools to question departmental assumptions and professors alike, an approach she also uses in the literature she teaches. Speaking about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—two paragons of modernist literature—Vadde describes a hierarchy that she tries to disrupt when teaching both authors. She describes how gendered assumptions, even with an established name like Woolf, can cloud notions of what great writing is supposed to look like. “The reason that Joyce attracts so much attention is partly because Joyce— who is obviously brilliant and a genius— cultivates an idea of genius that appeals to a lot of people who want to believe in heroic genius—who want to believe that there is one person who’s better than everybody else and maybe they can be that person. And I don’t think that Virginia Woolf buys into any of that, and so I sort of don’t buy into any of that.” While both Joyce and Woolf have now secured a place in the modernist canon, Vadde mentions that a critic once labeled Woolf a “provincial lady writer” and not a modernist—an idea that has persisted with stubborn vestiges in current popular thought. Vadde is not afraid of irreverence to-

ward classic texts, because, for her, English is supposed to give students the tools to assert themselves so that “when they cross you, they cross you better.”

orn in Staten Island, Vadde is a second-generation American. Her parents, who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, are from Andhra Pradesh in southern India. As in many immigrant narratives, identity for Vadde is complex and not easily pinned down. “I have a very complicated relationship to how I identify. This is probably the psychoanalytic reason why I like modernism,” she laughs. “I never liked the idea of leading with my race. And so, I am fully aware that people will see me and make certain assumptions. But it’s never something that I took any comfort in.” With an older sister 12 years her senior, Vadde felt very much like an only child growing up, and she is quick to point out that only children incur an unnecessary reputation. “I wasn’t horribly lonely, I wasn’t horribly selfish,” she says. “I think it’s ridiculous the way only children are talked about in our culture.” Although her parents and older sister are all physicians, Vadde knew that when she “considered medical school for about five minutes,” it was only a brief interim from a more deep-seated interest in the humanities. She credits her parents, who encouraged her in gymnastics and painting lessons alike, for laying out many trajectories at a young age. Her artistic interests emerged in high school—she commuted into Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School via the Staten Island Ferry every day—where she began to direct plays and attend summer film programs. “I was probably indicating art from around 14 onward,” she jokes. Vadde then went on to attend Columbia University with the intent of being a film major, but switched to English and Comparative Literature soon after. For someone who seems so centered, it’s difficult to believe that Vadde once experienced the awkward hurdles of the American college experience. “I think finding who you want to spend time with and who shares your interests beyond just the proximity of sharing a floor with some people—that [takes]

a little bit of time,” she says, reflecting on her first year at Columbia. “But once that happened, I felt very happy there.” She adds that she felt most at home with the “artsy” kids, a reference to the blanket description for creative outcasts that I had used earlier in the interview. In what also seems to be a universal way to muse on the past, Vadde characterizes the students from her undergraduate days as falling into one of two categories: those who ventured below 110th street and those who didn’t (Columbia is on 116th). She refers to the former as wanting a smaller-town college experience—a desire that baffled her, given the Manhattan zip code. “They were at the same three bars every weekend, and those were the people where I thought, ‘Why did you come to New York for college?’” she says, implying that she fell into the latter category. “Most of my friends and I would try to go to the Village and try to go to places where we weren’t old enough to go—and generally, that was fine. When we were being more intellectual, we’d go to museums, go to plays, but that was not as often as I’d like to pretend.”

fter Columbia, Vadde went on to receive her doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before accepting a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard in 2010. The following year, Vadde joined Duke’s English faculty as a contemporary literature professor, a position that was appealing not just because of the job itself but also in the way it was advertised. According to Vadde, job listings for doctoral candidates in English literature are commonly organized by period, such as “Victorian literature” or “Romanticism”—categories that can breed near-identical syllabi across the country. “Duke was the only one who said they wanted a contemporary scholar, post80s,” notes Vadde. “That was the only job in the country that looked like that.” Contemporary literature has been historically defined as works produced after World War II, but as Vadde points out, “How long can you say post-’45 is contemporary before you sound ridiculous?” A slippery category to begin with, Vadde is also fighting against the notion that ev-

erything worth writing has already been written. “There’s not a lot of intelligent work about what makes contemporary fiction good,” she asserts. “There’s a lot of intelligent work on what makes it bad. And it comes out of a kind of nostalgic attitude and a real cynical attitude about presses, about publishers in general and this sense that we’re always largely in decline.” This sentiment drives Vadde’s personal philosophy about the value of contemporary literature— and more importantly, translating that sense of value to her students. “You have to actually come in and point out not what is devolving but what is new about new fiction because there is a tendency to think that new fiction is just a warmed-over version of whatever great novelist you’ve made a career of teaching,” she adds. Those great novelists—the Joyces, the Woolfs—are situated in Vadde’s syllabi alongside works that have only been released in the past five years, such as Gail Jones’ “Five Bells” or Zadie Smith’s “NW,” both of which happen to invoke Joyce in explicit references or stylistic appropriation. In addition to tackling the contemporary, Vadde also specializes in modernism, another vague, sticky term with multiple meanings. Of the few definitions that Vadde offers, it’s the one that she labels as “political” that perhaps best embodies the literary movement.

“When you see any kind of art that confronts you, that might anger you, that might challenge you because it’s not beautiful or immediately recognizable as art—that’s the modernist spirit,” she says. “So it’s not just a set of texts that are in the canon. It’s a kind of relationship to the social world that’s a little bit perverse.” Initially drawn to modernism while studying at Columbia, Vadde describes the movement as “world-changing or at least world-interested.” For a university that’s invested in making waves around the world, the smaller currents begin with professors like Vadde who are equally devoted to shaking up ideas from the inside out.

s we put on our coats to leave Mad Hatter’s, I notice that Aarthi and I are dressed almost exactly alike: black peacoat, black skinny jeans, black boots. Yet for someone who looks like my style doppelganger, the student-professor boundary still hummed in the background, however softly. I am reminded of one of Aarthi’s own habits that I noticed one day in our Joyce class: after you speak up, Aarthi will nod, process your comment for a second or two, and repeat your thoughts with more careful, meaningful language to where you wish you had phrased it that way to begin with. But you didn’t. Next time you want to. And you’re reminded why you’re taking a class with Professor Vadde in the first place. n TOWERVIEW | 7

8 | TOWERVIEW

A View From The Farm Text by Sonia Havele • Photos by Tracy Huang

ust a 30-minute drive west of Duke’s campus, Maple View Farm is an iconic vision against the backdrop of Hillsborough’s rolling countryside. White picket enclosures, long winding roads and grassy hills form the contours of this agrarian daydream, colored by bold green pastures, spotted cattle and amber skies at sunset. Best known for its homemade, seasonal ice cream sold at the farm’s rustic “Country Store”—a timeless, honey-colored country house wrapped by a wooden porch and rows of sturdy wooden rocking chairs—the locale offers visitors a simple yet breathtaking “taste” of North Carolina living. The farm’s nostalgic combination of spacious outdoors and vintage interior compelled us to capture, preserve and share moments of the Maple View experience.

This photo essay takes readers to the scenic Maple View grounds and into the cozy ice cream parlor that has attracted customers from all over the state and across the country. Across from freezer walls lined with pints of homemade lemon custard, butter pecan and red velvet cake ice cream sits a glass display of antique scoops and vintage dairy cartons that give historical meaning to the popular space. Next to the entrance lie red and blue plastic crates stocked half full with glass jars of fresh farm milk (a reminder that Maple View is foremost a familyowned farm, and not just an ice cream shop). And, behind the register, a friendly, older woman—presumably one of the farm’s five full-time employees—crafts vibrant sugar cones and multicolored sundaes for smiling families out for an after-school treat.

TOWERVIEW | 9

THE PLAZA

juniors Alex Haas and Amanda Griffis

seniors Meghan Whelan and Andrew Jones

DukeEngaged story by Jamie Moon photos by Eliza Bray

10 | TOWERVIEW

onventional wisdom says that a guaranteed method to ruin a second date is to start talking about marriage. There’s nothing more intimidating than for either party to jump from talking about his or her insatiable love for Greek food to what type of decent spouse he or she is ready to become. Contrary to popular belief, however, juniors Alex Haas and Amanda Griffis found the transition absolutely natural on their second date. On an autumn day, the couple was driving in a friend’s car—a friend who will serve as Griffis’ bridesmaid next year—when they experienced a bit of a scare. A spider appeared on the dashboard and panic ensued until Griffis took charge and killed it. During an evening stroll later that day, the event came up in their conversation and Griffis proposed a solution for the next time it happened. “When we have kids, we’ll make them kill the bugs!” she exclaimed, proud of her realization. Instead of running away at the mention of not just children but his future children with Griffis, Haas agreed that it was a great idea. Shortly after, the two sat down on a bench to discuss their children’s names. Engaged to be married in May 2014, Haas and Griffis may seem like an anomaly among college students—not to mention many young singles in the dating scene. Yet the number of students who become engaged during their undergraduate years is not insignificant. According to a study released by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2008, 18 percent of college students in the United States are not just engaged but already married. Haas and Griffis agreed that their decision to get married after a year of dating could be because they come from similar backgrounds and have shared the same goals in life. Both are from small towns, Haas from New Jersey and Griffis from central Florida. More importantly, both are certain that they want to become parents and have a family. “Being at Duke and being around so many people invested more in the hookup culture, it was so rare to meet someone who had the same kind of family goals,” Griffis said. “I think that made me much more interested in Alex.” Unlike Haas and Griffis, seniors Andrew Jones and Meghan Whelan dated for four years before deciding to get married. Still, as a freshman, Whelan would have never imagined that she’d become engaged as an undergraduate. “I was looking to get to know someone that I could potentially marry, but that didn’t have a time stamp on it or anything,” Whelan said. “If I hadn’t met the right guy until I was 35, then I wouldn’t have gotten married until I was 35.” But Whelan did meet the “right guy” freshman year at a Reformed University Fellowship retreat in September 2009. The couple started dating that October and has been together since. After Jones proposed this past August, the couple has been busy planning and preparing a July wedTOWERVIEW | 11

THE PLAZA

ding in Trinity, North Carolina. “Faith has definitely played a role in the way our relationship has developed,” Jones said. “Praying about every big decision in our relationship was important for the both of us.” In addition to the fear of making significant decisions like marriage so young in life, many students, especially women, worry about its impediment upon their career goals. The joke about women going to college to earn a “Mrs. Degree” can often make marriage appear like a cop-

12 | TOWERVIEW

out from working in the professional world. “People are fairly career-driven [at Duke],” Whelan said. “That mind-set for me didn’t really change until late last year when I actually had to sit myself down and ask what’s most important to me in life.” Even though Whelan will be marrying Jones this summer, she still plans to enroll in physician assistant school in two years. During those two years, Jones intends to intern for an engineering software company somewhere in the Triangle and eventually get his master’s degree at North Carolina State University while Whelan gains necessary clinical experience. The couple plans to move wherever Whelan eventually enrolls. “It’s important to realize that there is never a perfect person out there for you, and you’re going to have to sacrifice for each other,” Jones said. “That’s not a bad thing or an indicator that the relationship is wrong. You get a lot of joy from learning what it means to sacrifice and share with another person.” Still, for many students, leaping into the discussion of marriage and commitment remains a struggle. Popular blog Thought Catalog put it a little more harshly. Contributor Rose McCapp posed a critical question regarding marrying young: “You have your whole life ahead of you, what is the rush? More importantly, however, you have no job, no skills and no savings. How can you possibly think about getting married at a time like this?” Moreover, at an institution like Duke—where most students are not local,

hailing from different states and countries—post-graduate plans continue to inevitably impact the direction of certain relationships, and may create a cloud of uncertainty. “I probably wouldn’t get married right after graduation just because a lot of things change after college,” sophomore Kevin Wu commented. “Where you’re going to be is often uncertain. But, who knows, it might still probably work out.” Similarly, junior Flora Muglia is not entirely against the idea of getting married straight out of college as long as she can still devote time to her other priorities. She also cited economic and professional stability as prerequisites to marriage. “I have no qualms about being married young—it would just have to be a joint decision between my boyfriend and me,” she said. These concerns about marrying right out of college are not uncommon, but senior Simon Ho, who is engaged to Faith Villanueva, Trinity ’12, still believes that the connection he has with his girlfriend was the most important determining factor of his decision to marry—waiting was not worth the risk of losing the right person, he said. “I wasn’t afraid of missing more opportunities in the future more than I was afraid of missing my opportunity at the moment,” Ho said. “Also, I’ve had other relationships before my current girlfriend, but the fact is that I’m not romantically compatible with a lot of people as I am with my girlfriend now.”

A bit of irony exists in this widespread perception of uncertainty. If anything, shouldn’t finding and marrying the elusive “other half” alleviate concerns of doubt and insecurity? Ho believes that marriage makes Duke students uneasy because they’ve never had to deal with uncertainty in other areas of their lives. Not knowing how a commitment like marriage will end can be particularly troubling. Perhaps these couples understand a greater truth and promise that other students unsure about marriage just have not yet encountered. Or maybe they experience the very same doubts and fears of committing to a partnership in life that may require sacrifice but are willing to take that leap because they simply—and quite luckily—found the right person. “I realized this is the person I want to marry, and we’re in a place that we can,” Jones said about his fiancé, Whelan. “It doesn’t make sense to wait.” n

TOWERVIEW | 13

THE PLAZA

A VISION for

DURHAM Story by Laurel Burk

an Kimberg draws me a picture. It’s a threeringed bull’s eye. He scrawls “what” inside the outer ring; the next one he labels “how”; occupying the coveted center is “why.” We are sitting in the commons of the Sanford School of Public Policy, but the conversation tends more toward philosophy and ethics. Before sitting down with me, Dan, Trinity ’07, was whipping off a flurry of emails on his laptop—the nonstop life of a nonprofit director. Leaning forward on the edge of a padded bench, my boss and friend gestures at his sketch with a pen. “A lot of times in life we focus on the ‘what,’” he says. “What does Student U do? We provide a six-week summer program and ongoing support throughout the school year. We provide students with skills.” I’m not surprised that he’s mocked up a visual aid—in 14 | TOWERVIEW

his role as co-founder and executive director of the educational organization Student U—which provides academic opportunities to low-income area students, largely through summer programming—Kimberg is all about vision. He has given presentations to six groups of summer staff since his program’s inception, yet always seems to have a new guiding metaphor for the role of a Student U teacher or the function of a learning community. A wizard with Prezi, he’s a master of distilling expansive concepts into their component parts, then zooming back out again to show how they are integral to the whole—a quality of a good teacher. In presentations to donors, faculty and even students, he harnesses big ideas to demonstrate the scope and gravity of the task of battling educational inequality. His speaking style can best be described as “feverish,” exuding

an explanation of his organization’s core mission. The simplest “why” for Student U is that Durham asked for it. Seven years ago, enrolled as a long-haired, bearded undergraduate in a Duke Social Entrepreneurship course, Kimberg and the two other co-founders of Student U—Amanda Dorsey (now Amanda Kimberg), Trinity ’08, and Mary Williams, a Chapel Hill Robertson Scholar who also graduated in 2008—asked Durham what it needed from them. The answer, gleaned from local community members, was an academic bridge from elementary to high school for some of the area’s most underserved students. There was an abundance of enrichment programs for the youngest and oldest students in the DPS system, as well as a prevailing sense that middle school is a crucial turning point in young lives. Thus, Student U was born to serve Durham middle school students at risk of disconnecting with the school system. The uncommon efforts of its students, faculty and administrators have not gone unnoticed—the Durham Chamber of Commerce named the organization its Nonprofit of the Year in 2010. There’s another “why” at work here, though—why Kimberg? The son of social workers and grandson

of Holocaust survivors, Kimberg attributes his orientation toward service and his belief in education to the influence of his family. He recalls when his maternal grandmother— who met her husband fleeing Nazi occupation—was once disappointed in him for scoring in the 98th percentile on a New York state Regents examination in Language Arts. Even as an immigrant with limited English proficiency, she had managed to earn the best score in her school on her own Regents exam. She put in the hard work, he says, “because she knew education was the pathway to success in America.” For him, the story illustrates the power of a commitment to learning—a value that he’s carried with him on his own journey. He admits to losing sight of this commitment at one point along the way. After arriving at Duke in 2003 as a Robertson scholar, Kimberg seemed to shrink rather than thrive in a competitive higher education environment, despite his upbringing. “My first year at Duke,” he explains, “I tried my best to be average in every way.” Feeling like his light was being snuffed out by Duke’s academic and social culture—and expected by his scholarship program to do something

PHOTOS COURTESY OF STUDENT U

passion and urgency, while making it clear what the audience can do to further the cause. “Compliment and challenge” is his self-professed motivational strategy. It’s the best formula for convincing prospective teachers, families and contributors that the “U” in Student U stands for you. Kimberg moves on to the second ring of his bull’s eye to address the “how” of his brainchild: through a two-way “pipeline” that runs from the university students in the Triangle to Durham Public Schools students, and back. Under the guidance of DPS and Teach for America mentors, college students assume titles like Mr. Matt and Ms. Lauren, and are entrusted with their own summer classrooms; the students come from middle schools all across Durham. In keeping with this “how,” the nonprofit’s tagline is “where students are teachers, and teachers are students.” We’ve arrived at the bull’s eye’s inner circle. He laments that the underlying “why” of businesses and organizations is often neglected: “If we’re great at what we do, we should start with the why.” Dan has finished with the drawing and reestablishes his characteristic intense eye contact. He takes a meaningful pause before delving into

TOWERVIEW | 15

THE PLAZA

useful with his summer—Kimberg applied to teach with Breakthrough Collaborative, a national organization that offers academic enrichment programs for highpotential, underserved middle schoolers, after his freshman year. Motivated, he says, by little more than a desire to spend the summer in New Orleans, Kimberg accepted an offer to teach English for underserved fifth-grade students. What started as an obligation and opportunity for summer travel became a transformative experience, reigniting Kimberg’s passion for service and re-solidifying for him the importance of education—and education equality. He was struck by the “brilliance” (a hallmark of Kimberg’s vocabulary) of each of his students, and had the opportunity to share his “best, fullest self,” the one he’d been hiding from the Duke community. Arriving back on campus emboldened by a renewed sense of purpose, Kimberg drew on this set of experiences to respond to Durham’s specific needs. Through a “two-year listening tour of Durham,” which Kimberg spent in schools and meetings with community members, his social entrepreneurship project began to take real-world shape. With the other co-founders, he worked to develop Student U’s six-week academic enrichment program, which welcomed its first class of students in the summer of 2007. Core academic courses in English, science, math and “global connect” combated the notorious phenomenon of “summer loss,” in which low-income students lose up to 25 percent of what they have learned during the school year. Much of the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap in formal education can be explained in terms of this pattern, and it can spell disaster for students already behind grade-level. Student U has since grown to serve 285 students and has added a burgeoning high school Summer Academy. The organization’s first cohort won’t graduate from high school 16 | TOWERVIEW

until 2014, but so far the results are promising—on average, Student U students outperform matched pairs in the DPS system on measures of classroom grades and End-of-Grade exam passage rates. Raising test scores is all well and good, but none of this gets to the core of Kimberg’s organizational “why.” Why does Durham need Student U in the first place? Why are national debates raging about education reform? The blond, bright-eyed founder—now more well-groomed than his former undergraduate self—approaches the question from a perspective of social justice, framing it in terms of pure unfairness. “We are living in a community

where the trajectory for an individual, of an individual’s life, is so much based on that person’s race and where that person’s being born in Durham,” he says. “We have schools that are 98 percent black and Latino. We have schools where 95 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced[priced] lunch.” This separate and unequal state of affairs—which Kimberg calls “absurd”—is an obvious consequence of a nationwide neighborhood school system heavily funded by local property taxes. Affluent areas levy higher taxes, leading to richer districts that can use their differential resources to attract and retain better teachers, while maintaining more appealing

Only 77 percent of students in DPS are graduating from high school. The figure for low-income students drops to 72 percent. Nationwide, the picture gets bleaker: only 52 percent of U.S. students from lowincome backgrounds go to college, and of those, a meager 11 percent manage to graduate within six years. He repeats the last figure for emphasis—11 percent—calling it “unbelievable.”

school facilities. Those affluent areas, Kimberg notes, also tend to be white areas. “Racism is around us every single day,” he says. “We are in a racist society still, for sure.” Is it the racism of the 1950s? No, but it is racism nonetheless. Kimberg calls up segregation imagery to discuss the demographics of schools in Durham and the U.S. in general. White kids and black kids, rich kids and poor kids going to different schools is not fundamentally different than having a black and a white water fountain, he says, especially when “teachers are different, access to supplies is different, the life path is different depending on which schools you go to.” Kimberg knows his statistics cold and uses them to paint a grim picture. Only 77 percent of the (mostly black) students in DPS are graduating from high school. The figure for low-income students drops to 72 percent. Nationwide, the picture gets bleaker: Only 52 percent of U.S. students from lowincome backgrounds go to college, and of those, a meager 11 percent manage to graduate within six years. He repeats the last figure for emphasis—11 percent— calling it “unbelievable.” But this isn’t just some numbers game. It’s Kimberg’s life’s work, and his students’ futures hang in the balance. He links educational achievement with not only economic solvency and intellectual growth, but even with basic survival. “Life expectancy—the number one indicator of life expectancy [in the U. S.]—is high school graduation,” he explains. “If our kids want to live, if they want to live a fulfilled, long life they need to graduate from high school.” He may place a premium on education, but Kimberg isn’t so naïve as to have a one-step solution to all of Durham’s, and America’s, social ills. He cautions against regarding education as a “silver bullet” or a “magic wand that’s going to change the world.” Like many leaders in urban education—notably Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone—Kimberg stresses the importance of wrap-around services. He identifies three tenets for social reform: education, housing and healthcare. The ideal Student U of the future would include expanded health and social work

services, and the program is in the process of launching a comprehensive health and wellness program. Could Student U ever be a school? Kimberg says sure, but it’s not a goal of his. Such a transformation would shrink the influence of Student U, he contends. Currently, students from throughout the district come to Student U for their summer studies and then return to their respective academic-year schools to impact their various classmates and teachers. Kimberg fears enclosing the community within four walls would confine its impact to the thousand or so students it could realistically serve, and stifle the ripple effect this kind of intervention is capable of having. On the other hand, Kimberg also fears spreading the program too thin and fracturing a unified community. Despite having his first, fondly remembered teaching experience at Breakthrough Collaborative, he adamantly refuses to emulate that organization’s model of expanding to sites in different cities and states. There have been offers and interest, but he says he will not even consider an additional location until all of Durham’s high-need students have the opportunity to chip away at the achievement gap each summer. Student U partners with Triangle universities and mines some of the area’s brightest college talent; students in the program eat hot, healthy meals from Durham Catering Company; Durham’s Local Yogurt brightens one staff meeting each summer with free frozen yogurt for the much-appreciated college-student teachers. In Kimberg’s words, Student U is a program “in Durham, for Durham, by Durham.” For the foreseeable future, Student U will be a work in progress. The nonprofit will get its most substantial feedback— whether encouraging or sobering—as it tracks its first graduates through college in the coming years. Each morning of the six-week summer institute, 150 middle schoolers recite the Student U Affirmation, declaring they are “destined to change the world.” With Kimberg in their corner, they’ve got a fighting chance to do just that. Like its students and its founder, Student U is young, with an eye to the future and a willingness to change not only the world, but also itself. n TOWERVIEW | 17

DUKE’S BLUEPRINT

THE PLAZA

PHOTOS BY ADDISON CORRIHER

onstruction is all around us. With the Events Pavilion and the Gross Hall renovations expected to be completed later this year and with longer-term renovations to West Union and David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the horizon, the campus we walk across today may look quite different from that of tomorrow. In this photo essay, we take you on an inside look at the construction of the Events Pavilion—which will host eateries during West Union renovations and later become an events space and a connection to Towerview Road—and the $24 million renovations underway at Gross Hall.

18 | TOWERVIEW

TOWERVIEW | 19

Tuning over the decades Story by Jack Mercola Photos by Addison Corriher

20 | TOWERVIEW

This year marks the 30th anniversary of WXDU, Duke’s student-run, 24-hour alternative radio station. To honor the station that he has served for the last four semesters, Towerview writer and WXDU DJ Jack Mercola sheds light on the function WXDU has served for both listeners and DJs over the past 30 years—and a surprising campus personality who helped shape the station’s upbringing during his Duke days.

rom an old studio on the fringes of East Campus, Duke University sometimes resonates a hum, sometimes wails an infernal weirdness. Its varied buzz can be heard throughout much of the Triangle by tuning a radio dial to 88.7 FM. A space in the Bivins Building—walls quite literally lined with music, shelves cluttered with radio equipment from many eras—sends a signal to a transmitter hidden in a Hillsborough forest that oscillates at a frequency of 88,700,000 cycles per second. A 30-year history of the studio is told by what fills it. CDs, vinyl records and digital music all occupy the same space. A stack of CD players is sandwiched between record players on one side and flat screen monitors on the other. The artifacts and technologies, along with their human operators, work together to put music, public service announcements, news, sports coverage and other media on the air for 24 hours every day. And at the top of every hour, per Federal Communications Com- mission policy, tuned-in listeners can hear the disc jockey rattle off the station identification. “It’s 10:59 p.m., and you’re listening to 88.7 WXDU, Durham,” I say in my deep, apathetic radio host voice when I run a show on WXDU. I then announce the next track, get the record spinning, flip up the volume on the record player and allow the music to do the rest of the talking. Perhaps an undergraduate like me is out of place on FM radio. It is an antiquated medium to many—or even most—college students in the era of Spotify and Soundcloud, but it has not always been that way.

hirty years ago, a group of ambitious and dedicated Duke undergraduates labored to bring an FM frequency to campus. One of those students was Michael Schoenfeld, who graduated from Trinity in 1984 after helping found WXDU in 1983, and then went on to pursue a career in broadcast media Fast-forward three decades. Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations, now works from a haute Allen Building office. His online “Leadership Profile” says he “oversees communications and advocacy for the University... and serves as Duke’s chief spokesperson”—a

professional-sounding title, to say the least. When students see him, he is in a suit and tie, his salt and pepper hair conservatively cut. But he still is fiery and strange, like one might expect of a college radio pioneer. When I sent him an email asking to talk about his experiences founding the station, he quickly replied “I’d love to.” Thirty years of WXDU history separated the two of us, the reporter-DJ and University spokesman-DJ, and the prospect of imparting his FM radio wisdom to both The Chronicle and WXDU’s infant generation seemed to animate Schoenfeld. He made amazing claims and remembered the advent of WXDU in great detail. In October 1983, the first song to ever air on WXDU was David Bowie’s “Station to Station,” Schoenfeld recounted. He was pleased that the song’s title signified that Duke students had successfully facilitated a move from a stubborn AM carrier current—a type of signal that required a wired connection to a wall—to an FM frequency.

“If there is one word I could use to describe WXDU... it would be eclectic— eclectic in every way,” -Dean Sue There were more than 200 student volunteers interested in working at WXDU when it first started, he said. College FM radio was something novel and exciting in 1983. It was a channel to broadcast students’ voices into the greater Durham area and a place to play relatively undercover music. Schoenfeld beamed during this blast to the past, recalling all the music he used to play—including The Clash, The Replacements and Talking Heads. He and his fellow DJs played all of the essentials of college rock in 1983, as well as a wide selection of jazz and other genre-specific shows. WXDU’s founders were not all necessarily friends, Schoenfeld noted. But they shared a passion for broadcast and a dedication to Duke’s radio presence—a passion and dedication that remains in bits at the station. The WXDU logo produced in 1983 by Schoenfeld’s roommate, Matt Laffey, Trinity ’84, is TOWERVIEW | 21

still intact. “If there is one word I could use to describe WXDU... it would be eclectic—eclectic in every way,” said Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek, who sat on the Duke Union board in 1983 when the union approved the $76,000 in funding that WXDU would need to erect its tower and hit the airwaves. WXDU further developed its eclecticism over the past 30 years, but Duke’s radio did not always cater outside the mainstream. Mike Woodard, Trinity ’81, helped to oversee Duke’s station-to-station transfer. In his four years as an undergraduate, Woodard, who served as a Durham City Council member from 2005 to 2013 and now serves a Democratic state senator, worked for WDUK, the aforementioned AM carrier station on campus. Woodard said that after he was WDUK’s general manager, he stuck with the station until 1991 as a DJ and was the station adviser from 1981 to 1987. As he oversaw the switch from WDUK to WXDU in 1983, Woodard said he witnessed a great change in the station’s personality. “In 1977, we were a top-40 station,” he said. “We even had little jingles to promote the station.... But as the years went on we solidified a progressive format.” “Progressive” is one way to put it, but many people from more recent WXDU generations, myself included, have employed choicier words; “weird” and “fringe” are among the most common. The current WXDU staff is comprised of about 50 Duke students and 50 Durham community members, said junior Jake Cunnane, the station’s general manager. The majority of this staff falls into at least one of several alternative-scene archetypes, though they may resist being classified according to those traditions, as is probably expected. In 1997, WXDU recorded an oral history online in a project called “Seizing the Sound.” In this project, Janette Park, Trinity ’99 discussed the opportunity afforded by WXDU to Duke students who do not identify with mainstream Duke culture. Upon arriving to Duke, she said she saw most people as “crazy frat boys,” causing her to conclude that “everyone here sucks!” Duke frat boys, a stereotype that station members seem to regard as generally prevalent on campus, are sparse at 22 | TOWERVIEW

WXDU. Alternative cultures reign supreme. Staff members bond over the underground shows, weekly bowling outings and a dedication to good musical programming. And maybe understandably so, “typical” Duke students don’t listen to their own campus’s radio station. When I unscientifically asked a large swath of Duke undergraduates, “do you listen to WXDU?” I was most commonly met with the response “What’s that?” closely followed by “No.” And inaccessibility is not the issue; although very few students use FM radio as their main source of music consumption, there is a 24-hour live stream of WXDU online. In a recent interview, Park admitted that she gave the 1997 interview after having a few beers and that her language may have been overstated, but that the sentiments remain true.

“Some DJs play old school urban music. Many of the old-guard Durhamite DJs spin grungy garage rock. Others play...the more sonically appealing version of a knife accidentally dropped into the garbage disposal.” “My first week at Duke was kind of horrifying,” noted Park, who ended up working at the station as a programming director and general manager. There were a lot of people there, and they all seemed the same to me—just the same in a way that was not like me. I thought, ‘Oh my god. Holy shit. I’m not going to fit in here.’ But the station was great for me, especially in a social way. It helped me meet other like-minded students I would not have met otherwise.” Perhaps the station’s “otherness” is inherent to WXDU’s strength and personality, as the music and broadcasting is like an extension of the staff. “There is no exact sound of WXDU,” Cunnane said, noting that each DJ brings his or her own unique style to the air. Some DJs play old school urban music. Many of the old-guard Durhamite DJs spin grungy garage rock. Others

play what I would consider to be the more sonically appealing version of a knife accidentally dropped into the garbage disposal. And that description is not meant to insult that DJ’s taste—college radio is exactly the locale for experiments in wacky genre. As WXDU is classified as an FCC Educational Non-Commercial station, both its listeners and its DJs are working to educate and be educated on music and broadcasting. “WXDU, as a member of the Duke University Union, exists to inform, educate and entertain both the students of Duke University and the surrounding community of Durham through quality progressive alternative radio programming,” reads part of WXDU’s mission statement. Through music and on-air education, the radio-guru Durhamites train and teach Duke undergraduates how to disc jockey, develop their on-air presences and mix music and interact with artists, among many other skills—a testament to the importance of WXDU’s community members DJs.

XDU is a unique DUU committee in that half of its staff members are not Duke students. The community member DJs and staff have varying degrees of affiliation with the University. And throughout WXDU’s history there has been a fluctuating ratio of student DJs to community DJs—a point

of a good deal of controversy. As few as six years ago, Cunnane said, there were only two undergraduate DJs, a stark contrast to the 200 eager undergraduates Schoenfeld mentioned. Many past and current WXDU affiliates I interviewed emphasized the importance of striking a balance between undergraduate and community staffers. Stephen Conrad, a DJ who has been with the station for 11 years, works at the Duke University Bookstore. He has trained undergraduate DJs in his career at WXDU, and his job allows him to interact with undergraduates on a daily basis. He said the station relies on its undergraduates for its liveliness, and leadership on campus and its community members for a backbone and sense of continuity—both groups have shaped the station’s collective personality over the years. A current pair of DJs—pseudonyms “L A U R E N” and “ChEYEnne”—describe their coveted Monday 4 to 6 p.m. rush hour show as “dusty star junk floatin’ around in the airwaves.” Three decades ago, a younger, more raucous Schoenfeld held a talk show during which his girlfriend, his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend—all of whom employed different pseudonyms each week—were his three regular call-ins. It seems as if a collective devotion to broadcast and strangeness keep WXDU whirring through the speakers of Triangle area listeners as it barrels into its 30th anniversary. n

TOWERVIEW | 23

the Digital Classroom story by MATTHEW CHASE graphics by MELISSA YEO

teenage girl in El Salvador, a self-proclaimed “nonacademic” freight train driver in England and a juvenile corrections instructor in Idaho have at least one thing in common: they all enrolled in Duke Professor Mohamed Noor’s “Genetics and Evolution” class last Fall. How? The answer lies in a web-enabled trend that is bridging cultural, economic and educational divides while also prompting questions about the trajectory of higher education. Though Noor teaches his gateway biology course here on campus, he also broadcasts a version of the class to the online world, allowing him to simultaneously reach thousands of students, workers, sons and daughters, grandmothers and grandfathers—the list goes on. The platform is Coursera, an educational technology company that has partnered with many top universities to give professors the opportunity to teach to a (large) global audience—for free. The courses, which consistently attract thousands of participants of all ages and educational backgrounds, range from highly technical (such as Vanderbilt’s “Pattern-Oriented Software Architectures for Concurrent and Networked Software” course) to the ultra-liberal (such as the University of Virginia’s class titled “Know Thyself”). Though the courses aren’t completed for college credit, some do provide participants with a certificate of completion. Just as Coursera is only one of many start-ups currently attempting to transform the future of education, Duke is only one of the many universities pursuing multiple strategies to advance its online education platforms—and to hedge the competition. Duke is pursuing a variety of online efforts, having also partnered with Semester Online (presented by 2U) which will offer for-credit courses for Duke students. Though both prongs of Duke’s online future are interesting, perhaps most intriguing are the Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs)—the classes like 24 | TOWERVIEW

Noor’s—which are replete in both ironies and possibilities. A “come one, come all,” free program provided by some of the most exclusive and priciest institutions, MOOCs present the opportunity to both transform and undermine higher education as we know it.

Knowledge in Service to Society

Noor’s students are a testament to what the MOOC platform may mean for the future of global education. For Aria, the juvenile corrections instructor, it gave her students a glimpse of the world outside confinement. For the teenager in El Salvador, it provided a glimpse into evolution—a field rarely taught in her Catholic high school. For Richard, the train driver in England, it provided something to watch on his free shifts and a way for him to pursue his interest in science. “I am in the process of convincing my principal and everyone else that this is a great program; we’ve got to get it on board,” Aria testified in a Google Hangout that Noor led with select participants in November to discuss the merits of his recent course. “To get something like this without payment is fantastic,” Richard added. But the praise that this movement has received doesn’t stop at anecdotes from across the planet. Columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman robustly stated that “nothing has more potential to lift more people

“NOTHING HAS MORE POTENTIAL TO LIFT MORE PEOPLE OUT OF POVERTY.” - THOMAS FRIEDMAN

out of poverty…. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems.” The initiatives have won both the praise—and capital—of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen has called the trend a “disruptive innovation—an innovation that transforms a sector from one that was previously complicated and expensive into one that is far simpler and more affordable” that “carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs.” Yet it doesn’t take an education expert to question where this trend is going. If online education is the future, how will brick-and-mortar colleges continue to justify their rising price tags? Is this trend the beginning of the end of higher education? How will universities make up for the costs—and they may be more than you think— that these courses are consuming? One of Noor’s students, a Filipino currently studying medicine in Italy, may have brought up one of the most essential questions regarding the academic nature of these courses when he posed a questions in the Google Hangout: “What would a certificate certify?”

The Silver Bullet?

Perhaps the event that crystallized the important implications these courses may have took place this summer, when UVA President Teresa Sullivan was forced to step down, citing “philosophical differences” with the institution’s Board of Visitors. A series of email chains make it

appear as though Sullivan’s alleged hesitation to jump on the MOOC bandwagon partially led to her ousting. One of those emails, sent from UVA rector Helen Dragas to vice rector Mark Kington, included a link to a Wall Street Journal article about the trend, which had the not-so-subtle subtitle: “the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education.” In the subject line Dragas wrote, “Why we can’t afford to wait”— a thought that has likely been on the minds of many university officials. Slightly more than one week after Dragas hit send, the board demanded Sullivan’s resignation. Facing increasingly tighter budgets, public institutions are looking for innovative ways to teach more students at a lower cost per head—making the online platform look ever more attractive. But Duke Provost Peter Lange was clear to tell somewhat of a different story—that this trend will not be the quick-fix that many institutions are hoping

DUKE PROVOST PETER LANGE WAS CLEAR: THIS TREND WILL NOT BE THE QUICK-FIX THAT MANY INSTITUTIONS ARE HOPING THAT IT WILL BE. TOWERVIEW | 25

that it will be. “What they’ve been treating these as is, ‘OK, we can teach a lot more students at a relatively modest cost, and in growing margins per new student,’” Lange posited. “That’s what they hope. Now, are they going to be able to do that and lower the cost of education, or just keep it stable?” Some institutions may be able to repurpose the content freely available online and maintain their faculty to create a better educational experience, Lange noted. But he added that this will only be feasible at low-tier institutions, including community colleges. “We would never do that at Duke, but they would do that and they might enormously benefit from it—and their students may enormously benefit,” Lange said, adding that even mid-tier research institutions likely wouldn’t be able to get away with repurposing MOOC content to reduce internal costs. “It’s not a silver bullet,” Lange asserted. Amanda Ripley, an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation, suggests the same sentiment in her recent Time Magazine article, titled “College is Dead. Long Live College!” Ripley posits that institutions on both ends of the “brick-and-mortar” institution spectrum have something to offer their students; face-to-face professor inter-

“it seems likely that very selective – and very unselective – colleges will continue to thrive. the colleges in the middle, though...will need to work harder to justify their costs.” 26 | TOWERVIEW

action is key for both fostering discussion among the best and brightest and ensuring that those less academically inclined can keep up with challenging topics. “What is going to happen tomorrow?” Ripley asks in her article. “It seems likely that very selective—and very unselective—colleges will continue to thrive. The colleges in the middle, though—especially the forprofit ones that are expensive but not particularly prestigious—will need to work harder to justify their costs.” Though universities like Duke aren’t necessarily concerned that the MOOC trend will mean the end of brick-and-mortar colleges, Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education, acknowledged that the trend will force universities to re-examine exactly what they are providing for their students. “The real divider is not going to be whether online education directly challenges some schools, but it’s going to have to do with the cost-benefit analysis of education, because liberal education is by its very nature costly because it is so high-touch. If the outcome of that is the kind of education that deeply enriches people’s skills beyond just knowing a bunch of stuff and…that it translates into really becoming leaders—getting good jobs—then it will all work out.”

Rethinking Higher Education

“Why should Duke want to have its professors put their courses online?” Nowicki asked, rhetorically. “One, it’s good for the world; two, it’s great publicity to get the Duke name out there; and since this is something that’s coming, we need to jump into this and explore it.” Yes, this trend may have important long-term financial consequences, but what appears to be more important for many Duke professors is the first of Nowicki’s points. Not only do the courses consistently reach thousands of individuals located across the world, the information gleaned from those experiments may mean improvement for those classes still taught here in Durham. “MOOCs are a different model for learning, because if you actually have a large group of people who can collaborate and create subgroups—as the web allows—really interesting things can happen,” said French professor David Bell, who also chairs the University’s Arts and Sciences Council online course subcommittee. “For me, it’s the experimental learning environment that really, really interests me.” Experimenting also means using the web to explore what works—and what doesn’t. “We have never had that kind of data about learning trends before, and I think that’s really, really the crux of

it,” Bell said. “We’re going to do a better job at presenting things in the learning environment than we did before.” More participants can mean more problems, however. Some academics emphasize that cheating is virtually impossible to measure—posing issues for the courses that are given for-credit. Additionally, though thousands of students often sign up for popular courses, only a select few will go on to complete all tasks necessary for credit. In Noor’s first Coursera course, taught this past Fall, he said that only about 2,000 participants completed the requirements of the course, which initially had about 33,000 enrollees. But this low retention rate doesn’t faze Noor. “I’m sure that’s true if you watch how regularly people watch TV shows,” he noted, emphasizing that many of the participants are also merely auditing the course. “What happens right now is there is a bit of an over-enthusiasm for a lot of these things so a lot of the students are reporting—and I’ve seen this in discussion forums—that they’re enrolling for a ton of these classes. And then basically as they’re going through…they’re like, ‘OK, I don’t have time to actually be enrolled in 10 different classes.’” After all, there is a distinction between interest and education, and although most participants may not be officially completing the course, that doesn’t meant that they’re not watching the lectures and engaging with the content. Noor also points out that the model isn’t just helping those enrolled online. Instead, the video clips are be-

ing integrated into the course Noor teaches on campus in somewhat of a hybrid format known as the “flipped classroom.” Professors are quick to mention the benefits of this emerging model when discussing the online education movement, perhaps because the two are intricately linked. In this model, instruction is entirely delivered online— mostly through video lectures that students watch, sometimes in place of completing reading—thereby reserving classroom time for collaborative work and application exercises. But is this just an educational gimmick? After all, the “flipped classroom” model carries with it hefty ethical questions. Why should students shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to watch videos already freely posted online? Are professors spending more time focusing on tailoring their courses to their outside audiences instead of focusing on the audience sitting in front of them?

“IF YOU HAVE A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO CAN COLLABORATE AND CREATE SUBGROUPS, REALLY INTERESTING THINGS CAN HAPPEN.”

TOWERVIEW | 27

Noor, who currently integrates the Coursera videos he created into his course on campus, is defensive of the “flipped classroom” model. Students in the brick-andmortar section of his course receive lab, teacher feedback and the requirement to participate in collaborative inclass exercises, making the experience entirely different from that of his online pupils. And data from his class’ first midterms back him up. The grades were not only “dramatically higher” than they have been in previous semesters, but they were actually the highest midterm grades he has seen in his career. “The level of questions I get from students has, on average, gone higher—people are asking much deeper questions as opposed to ‘What did you just say?’ or things like that,” he added. “They are much more in-depth, understanding, ‘Where did this come from?’ questions and that’s very rewarding for me.” These rewards did not come at a small cost to Noor, however. Noor estimated that he invested about 2025 hours per week for a month and half leading up to the course, and spent about 10-15 hours per week throughout the duration of the course. In fact, the hefty time associated with instructing these courses may prove to be an obstacle as this movement expands. But the “flipped classroom” model may have the longterm impact of reshaping veverything we know about how professors lead courses. Why not break up traditional lectures into shorter segments and force students to complete periodic activities, which some studies say do a better job engaging students? Why are lectures even traditionally 50 or 75 minutes long in the first place?

Moreover, the online education trend is forcing institutions to rethink what value they provide to the outside world. In Nowicki’s opinion, Duke will be safe in this reshaping of universities—Duke graduates are consistently successful, and the institution’s financial aid initiatives mean that the rising cost of tuition—it just climbed four more percentage points in 2013—won’t mean that students will be substituting their Duke degree with a slew of Coursera certificates. But Nowicki acknowledged that the future of higher education may be shifting, especially since it’s “really damn expensive”— and doesn’t appear to be getting cheaper anytime soon. “In a sense, we are being driven by outside forces to prove our worth,” Nowicki commented. “Is it really worth that much money to go to Duke? Prove it. Traditionally, the proof of learning was how well students did on tests—well, how good is that? So we, the industry, are actually rethinking assessment.”

Though still young— and maybe because of its youth—the MOOC trend is setting many education experts ablaze regarding what this trend may mean for education in coming years. Will it “help strip away all the distractions of higher education—the brand, the price and the facilities—and remind us all that education is about learning” as Ripley asked? Or will it do the reverse, making branding more important—on a global level—and increasing the importance of those qualities of university campuses that exist outside of the classroom? (Nowicki even listed watching the DukeCarolina game in Cameron as one of the hallmarks of at-

“IN A SENSE, WE ARE BEING DRIVEN BY OUTSIDE FORCES TO PROVE OUR WORTH. IS IT REALLY THAT MUCH MONEY TO GO TO DUKE? PROVE IT.”

28 | TOWERVIEW

Grappling with the Future

tending a brick-and-mortar institution.) Professors seem to agree that expectations that the MOOCs will entirely replace established institutions are far-fetched, but depicting the exact effect of this recent trend seems to be challenging across-the-board. One of the more prominent question marks is what the trend means for the bottom line of participating universities. As a for-profit institution, Coursera offers a “Signature Track” that allows students to pay a fee—ranging from $30 to $100—to earn a “verified certificate” for course completion, which may be more attractive to employers and educational institutions. Though these certificates will still not count toward a degree, Coursera also recently received approval from the American Council on five of its courses, including Noor’s “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution,” to count for credit, signaling that the profitability question is quickly evolving. And given that these education start-ups’ costs are notable, that profitability question may be increasingly important in coming years. At Duke, the start-up costs—video recording equipment and staff, teaching assistants and support staff and the opportunity-cost of the professors themselves (who Lange noted “are paid a small amount” from the University for leading the courses)—likely pale to the costs of other University initiatives, but they are still important to weigh in times of rising tuition and spending cuts. Though Lange noted that the University can legally

withdraw itself from contracts with online platforms should they be sold to “an organization that you did not want to be associated with,” the risks that these establishments may bear are worth noting, especially given how quickly the organizations are evolving. Just last month, Coursera essentially doubled its number of partner universities, which inherently means that what started out as an initiative led by the ultra-elite—including Stanford and Princeton—is expanding to less-elite, though still prominent, institutions. Soon after, Coursera announced that a Georgia Tech course ironically titled “Fundamentals of Online Learning” would be suspended after complaints about technical glitches—signaling that institutional quality control over the courses will be increasingly necessary as the organization grows. Though the trajectory of these open online platforms seems positive—at least given how much hype they have generated among university administrators—Noor was quick to note that the growth of these initiatives may not be constant in years to come. “Part of it is going to become a market—there’s going to be demand,” Noor said about the potential expansion of courses. “It’s a little funny to think about it in the context of, ‘So, how many genetics classes do we need to have?’ I’m not sure we’re going to need to have a lot more. I mean, we need more than there are now, but at a certain level it’s almost going to be this steady-state as long as people are maintaining and updating them regularly.” n

TOWERVIEW | 29

THE LINK

Sugar & Spice This year has been a dream come true (literally) for Areli Barrera de Grodski and Leon Grodski de Barrera. In late January, the couple opened Cocoa Cinnamon—the brick-and-

mortar version of their popular mobile coffee shop bikeCOFFEE—which has anchored their shared passions for aroma and taste to the corner of Geer and Foster Streets in downtown Durham. The shop itself is cozy—vintage, upholstered couches and colorful chairs seat 20-somethings in search of new surrroundings for conversation and writing. And the hand-ground coffee—infused with flavors like cardamom and cayenne—is noticabley delightful, even to a nonconnoisseur. Here, Towerview’s Sonia Havele asks Areli (with a contribution from Leon) about the transformation of Cocoa Cinnamon from dream to reality.

Can you talk about the experience of coming up with the concept for Cocoa Cinnamon and what it has felt like to see that idea turn into a reality? The name Cocoa Cinnamon and concept came to Leon in a dream. In a sense, it comes out of a desire to experience where and when the stories and tastes of what we sell comes from. Coffee, chocolate, tea and the spices we put in them all have long and complex stories that are deep and can amaze. In a way, we use this kind of digging into the origins of our items as the undercurrent of what we do. It’s analogous to the pleasure of following the etymology of a word; it comes alive, sharper, more complex and ultimately meaningful. We have worked really hard since December 2010 to make Cocoa Cinnamon become a reality.... We could not have asked for a better way for Cocoa Cinnamon to have unfolded than the way it has. A lot of helping hands that believed in us and the business are a part of it and therefore make Cocoa Cinnamon a much richer concept, business and location. 30 | TOWERVIEW

What have been the most difficult and rewarding parts of opening and running your own coffee shop? The most difficult parts have been starting with a very minimal budget. The rewarding parts have been figuring out how to make it happen regardless of money, learning new skills along the way, meeting amazing people that have chipped in and ending up with a unique and more thoughtout result. It’s also really nice to think about the fact that Cocoa Cinnamon is providing jobs to the community where we live and that there is much more that the business can do for our community as we continue the work of doing business. The community element of the work takes time and commitment. Right now, we are

still establishing our foundations and working to move past our beta launch mode. On your website, you write “Cocoa Cinnamon means a lot to us.” Can you expand on the ways in which the shop and its menu reflect your unique heritages? The name stems from the history of the search for spices, the colonization that occurred in turn, the destruction of nations and cultures, the creation of new cultures, exploration and scientific discoveries. It also stems from the history of the cultures behind cacao, coffee, tea and spices from around the world. Being from Mexico, it is fascinating to read about the importance of cacao within the indigenous communities of the Americas and how it continues to be a daily and accessible ingredient in Latin American cooking and beverages. Leon: I like to think I am more connected to coffee because of my Italian roots. I am addicted to the “new”— language, experience, travel, culture, story—and the pleasure of attempting a better more sustainable and creative life. The space and business are there to support that. Espresso, specifically, and the desire to congregate like family probably stem from the Sicilian part of my background.

Something we find welcoming about Cocoa Cinnamon is that it’s family owned—had the two of you planned on going into business together? When we got married we both decided that we did not want to live a life in which we were not doing what we loved, so we decided to create Cocoa Cinnamon to give us the freedom to create at all times. Cocoa Cinnamon is only months old at this point. Where do you see the business going in the near and distant future? Do you have plans to expand? We would like to see the business be more embedded in the community that we are in, expanding, providing more jobs. Right now, it is a bit early to talk about expansion; we are focused on running a tight and inviting space, where coffee, espresso, drinking chocolate, tea, wine, beer and desserts serves as a pretext for a place to live and be together. The business aims to create a space/field of democracy. As a business, we don’t support a specific politics, beyond being dedicated to real and healthy discourse in a place where habit sharpens and brings to life. We want people to come in and have a simple and delicious moment in their day. And if they want more, they can find it or be it at Cocoa Cinnamon. n

PHOTOS BY CAROLINE RODRIGUEZ

Why did you choose to open your shop in Durham? Leon had been working intermittently in Durham since 2001, producing the artwork of his friend and artist David Solow (who designed Cocoa Cinnamon, the shop) and I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We lived in the North Carolina mountains near the Smoky Mountain National Park. After we got married, we wanted to create a new beginning. We were dreaming and after a very poetic email from David and a couple of visits, Durham was at the top of our list. Since we’ve gotten married, we have worked hard at creating our life and business. And there has been a sense of inevitability, like we are floating down a river and following where it goes. In that way, we are here because it felt right and fell into place. It’s still happening.

TOWERVIEW | 31