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Whether debating rat clauses or Robin Hood, the Honor Council fights for campus integrity. p.26
Learning by adventure. Connecting cultures and communities. Building a better world. The Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places and programs that propel a Duke education from university to universal good. In Mexico City, David M. Rubenstein scholar Sujeiry Jimenez ’20 sits on the steps of El Ángel de la Independencia, a landmark representing victory and freedom. Jimenez is conducting field research on deportation and other issues affecting the Latinx community as part of her coursework in DukeImmerse.
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HOMECOMING
Engaged global citizens
SEPTEMBER 21-23, 2018 Autumn is a great time for alumni of all ages to engage, connect, and celebrate on campus. This year’s Homecoming weekend includes the Duke vs. NC Central football game, affinity gatherings, and more!
Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information.
INSIDE
Summer 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 2
COVER
A matter of integrity In these ethically challenging times, the Honor Council aims for change— over the long term. By Scott Huler
istock
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FEATURES:
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A path to more resistance
FORUM
7
When Matthias Gromeier modified the poliovirus, he helped ignite the idea that a better way to treat cancer may be through immunotherapy. By Barry Yeoman
THE QUAD
Talking statues, a prayerful departure, one of Peru’s best
46
FOREVER DUKE
Cara Robinson M.B.A. ’98 is working to keep prestige brand Clinique relevant in a millennial-driven market. Yunghi Kim
64
DEVILIST
Surviving the summer internship
COVER: Illustration, istock;Typography, Lacey Chylack
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Alex Boerner
What it takes to be a winner Eight recipients of postgraduate international fellowships reflect on experiences that helped propel them to standout status. Chris Hildreth
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Forum
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DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2015 | Vol. 101 | No. 1 EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler CLAY FELKER STAFF WRITER: Lucas Hubbard ’14 CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Penn and Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Jack Boyd ’85, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2017 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.
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DISH IT OUT: During Mural Durham: Satellite Park, local artists transformed former Duke Telecom satellites on the grounds of the Art Annex to create a public art park for Duke and Durham. Photo by Estlin Haiss ’16
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W
hen I’ve taught magazine journalism, my departure point has been Tom Wolfe’s essay on “The New Journalism.” It’s an argument for applying familiar literary devices—scene-setting, point of view, symbolically meaningful attributes—to the work of nonfiction. Wolfe, who died in May, was a protégé of the late Clay Felker ’51, the founding editor of New York magazine (and the longtime advisory-board chair of this magazine); New York, in many ways, provided Wolfe an early laboratory for his writerly experiments. Wolfe was relentlessly curious about the times he inhabited. But he was also timeless: His literary forebears were figures like Dickens and Balzac—figures who similarly appealed to Felker. And, decked out as he was in those thoroughly emblematic, somewhat outlandish, white suits, Wolfe was always out of context, the perpetual outsider looking in. The Economist, among many other publications, found it easy to classify Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, from 2004, as the work of an author with Duke insider knowledge. It was a novel that “poked fun at the macho culture of an elite university that was closely modelled on the would-be Princeton of the South, Duke.” For his part, though, Wolfe always insisted that his inspiration came from the excesses of higher education—excesses that he saw as an indictment of elite privilege—and not Duke specifically. Still, Wolfe was deeply tied to Duke, largely through his daughter, Alexandra ’02. (He gave the commencement address for her graduating class.) In the winter of 1998, Duke Magazine brought Wolfe, this clear-eyed and sharp-edged cultural observer, into the raw and rarified setting of Cameron, for a men’s basketball game. Several weeks later, I interviewed him for a conversation that would appear in the next issue. That was back in New York, in his Upper East Side apartment, a space that could have been a testament to Balzacian good taste and high society. Wolfe’s personal story intersected with athletics, he told me. He played baseball in high school and college, and then for a couple of years after college. He had fantasized that some pro scout would recognize his talent. “It turned out I was in no danger of being discovered. If I had been offered a professional sports contract, I’m sure I would have gladly done that. Who cares about writing? Nobody cheers you for writing.” This was a basketball encounter, though, including K-ville, a collection of student tenters who endured, if temporarily, sometimes extreme conditions and unwavering rules for game-going privileges. K-ville, as Wolfe saw it, was “a sort of Academic Outward Bound.” In an autobiographical aside, he described attending summer camp for three years and liking it a lot—“ex-
cept for the camp’s insistence on camping out.” For the game itself, the magazine positioned Wolfe courtside; this scholar of sub-communities had a clear avenue into a sub-community with its own exotic rituals. He characterized the student spectacle in Cameron as “high-class choreography,” adding: “There are also elements of ballet about it, and of ancient religious choreography in particular. Rhythmic dance started when people who believe in magic were facing a drought. They would all get together and start swaying to imitate the motion of wind against wheat. The ancient folk thought that when the wheat danced, the rain would come.” Wolfe’s most intriguing analogy was aligned with animal life. “You know the biological term colonial animal?” he wondered in our conversation. “It’s an animal made up of independent organisms all attached to one another…. And that’s what the crowd is like—it’s like one great colonial animal that has immediate responses to whatever is going on.” From there, Wolfe went on a trajectory from Cameron to the broader human comedy. He said he was perpetually pondering “why people like stories so much,” but also why people are drawn to the ongoing story of athletic competition: “How are people able to transfer their own yearnings, ambitions, hostilities, primal emotions of various sorts to a group of athletes who represent them in competition?” In representing the Duke masses, these athletes were garbed in uniforms that he found, well, a little funny, and the white-suited Wolfe was happy to show off his sartorial sensibility: “The thing that I don’t like about the basketball uniforms is the baggy pants. I don’t get it; they’re not elegant, they’re goofy…. Maybe one day they’ll wear Lycra, and the players will all look like Spiderman.”—Robert J. Bliwise, editor
“Nobody cheers you for writing.”
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Tom Wolfe by Yousuf Karsh, gelatin silver print, 1990. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Estrellita Karsh in memory of Yousuf Karsh. © Estate of Yousuf Karsh
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The chapel’s many roles p.24
What if there was a way for everyone in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?
The new DukeAlumni.com
All for One
Coming Fall 2014
First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28
A student works for justice p.36
An alumnus rejects his fear
p.34
| The meaning of eating
Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/
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SPECIAL ISSUE
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STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH
Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs
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p.38
C. Ray Walker
Weathering the rankings storm
F I N D ALU M N I AN D S TAR T YO U R N E X T ADVEN T U R E .
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Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great. Now can he get back to the lab? p.24
And it’s all
REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5? G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R
made
N E X T C A R EER M OV E .
possible
by you.
+
Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42
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TH E LANG UAG E I SS UE
and other labs
For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28
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At the Marine Lab,
Always Be Choosing
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SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.
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With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary? We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short video on drones at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth
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It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.
Oh, the places research can go! p. 40
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How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22
Photos courtesy of iStock
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Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42
Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18 Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31
COVERSTORY
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Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.
How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30
Where do you want to go in 2015?
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YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .
Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.
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Seriously, Carter over Jefferson?! First, I applaud any event that reinforces American history, a topic all too neglected today. However, I have to register
M AG A Z I N E
Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus
It never gets old Five views of a fifth title p.20
April 15-17, 2016.
DUKE
Truman over JFK?! I love the work that Mayer and Rudell’s students did with the Presidential March Madness program. Matching Trump vs. Nixon is truly inspired! However, I would love to know the justification behind Harry S. Truman taking down JFK in the Sweet 16, and Ike in the Elite 8. My recollection from U.S. history class was that Harry was ill prepared to be president, killed thousands of civilians in Japan under the premise of “preventing more American life loss,” plunged us into a Cold War, and accomplished little else. How were his victories possible? Paul Woolf ’85 Oak Ridge, North Carolina
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Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium
If your class year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.
Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2
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DON’T MISS IT!
Reunions 2016 Always a Devilishly Good Time.
Paris Immersion, Oct. 11-22
dissent that Jimmy Go out there and learn A student experience like no other Carter beats Thomas Jefferson. Clearly, the Made possible by you. students did not do enough research on this topic. While I bear Carter no grudge and I recognize that Jefferson owned slaves, Jefferson’s accomplishments could fill a book (primary writer of the Declaration Truth and balance of Independence, the Louisiana PurJust got my Spring issue. Great producchase stand out). In contrast, Carter was tion values, as always. a one-term president during a recession A question for a discussion around and a hostage crisis. Both were resolved journalistic balance: What would have after he left office. been the reaction if the examples in the Just my two cents. Loved the idea! article on the FactStream app had been Chris Hoyt ’90 100 percent examples of accuracy challenges faced by Nancy Pelosi or Bernie Strafford, Pennsylvania Sanders? Just askin’. Get your facts straight Steve Johnson ’69 I am aware that is a magazine, not a Spartanburg, South Carolina newspaper; however, I hoped that articles were factual. I hate bias in reporting. Let’s commit to Your article [“The facts just keep on ending inequality coming”] in the Spring 2018 magazine I applaud the publishing of “Deepening about a “truth-telling app” developed Differences” [Q&A with Charles Clotat Duke did show some bias. Ironic, felter ’69] in the Winter 2017 issue. The no? Funny that the fact-checking shown dramatic income inequalities on our was only for President Trump. I consider college campuses, and in our country, that to be bias showing how only President Trump has made mistakes in “facts.” are deeply disturbing. Places like Duke Very disappointing for such an upshould be at the forefront of educating per-tier university. a more economically diverse student Karen Dyas Delgado ’75 population. With an endowment of Granbury, Texas more than $6.4 billion, it’s time to NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO
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Carter over Jefferson?! With amused interest I read the Presidential March Madness bracket [Under the Gargoyles, Spring 2018]. Clever and thought-provoking. Then I noted Jimmy Carter’s triumph over Thomas Jefferson! Is that a joke? Louisiana Purchase? Lewis and Clark expedition? First Barbary War and establishment of the U.S. Navy? Not to mention, of course, Jefferson’s positively central role in the founding of the country, and his towering intellect. Carter, though arguably our most moral president, was largely ineffective. I look forward to reading the POLIS students’ defense of this absurdly indefensible choice. Jim Fordice B.S.E. ’87 Franklin, Tennessee
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WINTER 2017
Go out there and learn
A student experience like no other
A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.
10 Years of DukeEngage p.26
“We just love it there!”
Made possible by you.
across campus,
DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.
In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.
BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?
Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead
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Game on! Inside the making of the first women’s varsity softball team
Whose home is this?
Vince Price
For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation. Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38. Photos by Alex Harris
10 Years of DukeEngage p.26
In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s p.24 studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.
Epworth Forever
A New President Takes Center Stage
Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24
Jared Lazarus
an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke
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Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling.
Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change, and the chance to engage with your alumni community.
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Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke
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In the Spring 2018 issue, a caption accompanying the Retro story “History on the radio” misidentified Wright Tisdale J.D. ’71 as a trustee. His father, Wright Tisdale Sr., was chairman of the board at the time of the 1968 Spring Vigil. Wright Jr. was not in the image, although Wright Sr. does appear.
CORRECTION:
DUKE MAGAZINE Summer 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 2 | www.DUKEMAGAZINE.duke.edu EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler CLAY FELKER STAFF WRITER: Lucas Hubbard ’14 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Jack Boyd ’85, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2018 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.
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5
take action. More universities should follow Vassar’s lead, making a strong commitment to seek out, and financially support, students from outside the top of the income pyramid. I’m disappointed that Duke wouldn’t want to be leading the way in a similar effort. We’ve proven we can raise more money; can we prove that we are using it to the good of society? Or is it just for the good of Duke? I encourage anyone with an interest in hearing how those differences impact college campuses like Duke to listen to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” podcasts, Season 1, episodes 4, 5, and 6 (“Carlos Doesn’t Remember,” “Food Fight,” and “My Little Hundred Million”). Thank you for a great magazine! Robin Hill ’94 Charlotte
Girls love science, too I appreciate all you do to put together a magazine that reflects the various activities and personalities on campus. However, I must say that I reacted quite negatively to a picture you chose for your Spring 2018 edition. In the section entitled “The Quad,” you quite appropriately highlighted young women in STEM subjects. However, the picture accompanying the title, “Outreach: Introducing young women to STEM subjects,” reinforces all of the traditional/outmoded views of girls and “yucky” things like bugs or bacteria. Showing a girl clutching her throat and recoiling surely isn’t the norm these days. I’m certain you had other photos of young women/ girls working seriously and with
Editor’s note: We suggest you turn to page 40 of this issue for a showcase of Duke’s student recipients of postgraduate international fellowships.
SPORTS
The show goes on
|
By Lucas Hubbard
After injuries brought abrupt ends to their college careers, Duke football captains rely on each other to move forward.
S
Charles Rex Arbogast AP
ome days are better than others,” says Devon Edwards, Sirk was the charter member, victimized—just a week prior to sitting in the Yoh Football Center a week after knee Duke’s first game—by his third Achilles tendon injury as a Blue surgery, his crutches propped against the adjacent Devil. Compared to Edwards, he’s an elder statesman who’s all too chair. “Some days I wake up and it hurts, and I think, familiar with the difficulties of rehabilitation. ‘I just don’t want to do anything.’ And I’m mad for no reason, “You have to retrain your mind, retrain your body. Walking has and I wonder why I had to deal with this.” been the most difficult thing. It’s like being a kid, teaching yourself The five-foot-nine Edwards was almost an afterthought. “[Duke] is where I grew up, and for it to be taken He was a two-star recruit with no scholarship offers until late away before you’re ready, it kind of scars you.” in his high-school senior year. By the time head coach David to walk again,” Sirk says. “It defiCutcliffe could scout Edwards, nitely helps, having gone through it football season was over, but one before and knowing what to expect. trip to Covington, Georgia, to But it doesn’t make it any easier see Edwards in basketball practice convinced the coach. After when it comes time to do it.” a redshirt season, Edwards was This year Sirk had to grapple vexing opposing coverage teams with the added emotional burden and coaching staffs with his elu(and duty) of being a captain while siveness and speed; in his first sidelined. A key resource has been three years, he tallied six career former teammate Kelby Brown ’14, touchdown kick returns, one M.Div. ’15, who suffered four ACL shy of the NCAA record. But tears during his career as a middle during the fourth game of 2016, linebacker at Duke. As a captain the redshirt senior cornerback for his final two lost seasons, he and All-American return speis more than well-acquainted with cialist tore the anterior cruciate Sirk’s predicament. So in the leadligament (ACL), medial cruciate up to the season opener, he texted ligament (MCL), and meniscus the quarterback and invited him to in his left knee. He has no regrab lunch. maining NCAA eligibility. “I just knew that that first game “I wanted to help my teamwas gonna be a frickin’ bear for mates. I wanted to be able to him,” says Brown, who worked as a play with my friends for one last student assistant for Duke following year,” Edwards says. “[Duke] is his ACL tear last July. After the 2014 where I grew up, and for it to be injury, “I watched the first game up SCAR TISSUE: Cornerback DeVon Edwards is helped taken away before you’re ready, in Coach Cut’s office, basically by off the field after a season-ending leg injury. it kind of scars you.” myself up there. It was terrible.” The injury landed him on the With a smile, Edwards recalls list of Duke stars who had their the Oreo milkshakes and Heavenly 2016 seasons cut short: Quarterback Thomas Sirk suffered an Buffaloes wings his teammates and coaches took the time to bring Achilles tendon tear in training camp in August, as did run- him while he was cooped up post-surgery. These initial weeks, ning back Jela Duncan in late October. All three are redshirt however, can be just the beginning of the isolation for the injured; seniors, and all three are team captains; the on-field loss is their healthy teammates inevitably have to prepare for one game monumental, as is their frustration. Yet as the players recover after another. And as Sirk, Edwards, and Duncan become more ocfrom these setbacks, they’ve formed a de facto support group cupied by recovery exercises (Edwards estimates a third of his day to discuss their situations and their progress, progress they is spent rehabbing), they lost hours on the practice field with their hope will lead from the operating table back to the football peers. Brown admits that it was a struggle to stay involved emotionally, to not feel left behind. “The thing about college sports is it field and beyond. 22
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STANDING STRONG: Team captain A.J. Wolf, far left, locks arms with teammates Jela Duncan, Thomas Sirk, and Shaun Wilson. Along with other injured players, Duncan and Sirk have formed an ad hoc support group.
doesn’t wait around for you,” he says. “The show’s gotta go on.” Some of the best support, then, necessarily comes from those who can best understand. When Edwards and then Duncan went down, Brown added them to the lunch group; the quartet tried to convene once a week to check in and, mostly, just chat. They brainstormed how to remain leaders from the sidelines. They discussed how to tutor their replacements—especially important in Sirk’s case, as he had to teach freshman quarterback Daniel Jones how to deal with coverages, blitzes, and fronts. They shared tips for coping with rehab. They commiserated about the daily hazards of lower limb injuries that require crutches or other equipment, meaning everything from carrying a tray of food to using the bathroom invokes an additional calculus. The discussions also carried an undercurrent of the unknown, of that ever-present question: “What’s next?” “I’m in that stage of life now, so I can kinda share how it’s been a transition,” says Brown, who is currently applying for medical Chuck Liddy/2016 The News & Observer
school. “I want those guys to start to think about what they’re passionate about and what they’re really gifted in outside of football.” The three captains still aim to play football again, although those goals are tinged with uncertainty. None was previously projected as a sure-fire National Football League draft pick, so successful recovery and rehab will be especially important. (Sirk may have the best opportunity to return to the field: Because his injury occurred in the pre-season, in November he received a sixth year of NCAA eligibility.) At worst, these next few months will be crucial for reassessment; as Edwards says, in addition to writing his thesis and continuing to get healthy, he’s excited to take the time “to set my new goals and create my path.” But a sense of belief pervades—from the athletes to the highest reaches of Duke football. “Coach Cut said to me, ‘We’re gonna get through this,’ ” says Edwards. “We got through these past few years, and we’re not done yet.” n DUKE MAGAZINE
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UPDATE In the Winter 2016 issue, “The show goes on” shared the story of Duke football players whose injuries ended their college careers but allowed them to rely on each other to move forward in their lives. Quarterback Thomas Sirk ’15 suffered an Achilles tendon tear in an August training camp; Jela Duncan ’16, a running back, was felled by the same injury about two months later. Their former teammate Kelby Brown ’14 invited them to a lunch group to discuss everything from how to lead from the sidelines to that weighty question “What’s next?” This spring, the answer came. Duncan joined the Cleveland Browns and Sirk, who finished his college career at ECU, joined the New York Giants. In other sports-related news, Randy Jones ’92, who was featured in the Winter 2017 issue as Duke’s only winter Olympian to that point, will be inducted into Duke’s Athletics Hall of Fame in September. 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
interest. Maybe you can try a re-do next time. Joanna Shelton ’74 Missoula, Montana Where are the scholars? I received the latest with the women’s softball team featured on the cover and taking up more than several pages inside. Nothing against that story, but the magazine with this balance of content could have come from most anywhere else; where were the Rhodes Scholars and Phi Beta Kappas and other distinguished award winners? I somehow doubt that MIT featured sports as its lead article, but maybe it, too, has caved in. Michael Malone ’59, Ph.D. ’70 Hartsville, South Carolina
Get it right I loved reading in the spring issue that my alma mater was partnering with my former employer on a sustainability program (DR/TL*). However, you misspelled the airline. It is always Delta Air Lines, never Delta Airlines. I don't want any undergrads to make that mistake in their cover letters if they are seeking employment! Frank Wrenn ’92 Atlanta
SEND LETTERS TO: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. Published letters represent the range of responses received. For additional letters: www.dukemagazine.duke.edu.
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LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST
BOUNCY LDOC frivolity
Photos by Jared Lazarus unless otherwise noted
UP & OVER Professor taught his dog a neat trick
The Daily Tar Heel
LEMURS! Sifakas having fun
DISCUSSION Chapel dean Luke Powery, Senator Bernie Sanders, and the Reverend William Barber talk morality
STRING ALONG World-class yo-yoing for Latino recruitment weekend
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DR/TL*
Brief mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises
ANIMALS IT’S A WORLD OF TRADEOFFS, PART I: Toenail fungus seems to have given up sexual reproduction in order to more effectively reproduce on your feet. IT’S A WORLD OF TRADEOFFS, PART II: Snapping shrimp queens without rivals have smaller pincers and lay more eggs; those in colonies with multiple queens have larger pincers and lay fewer eggs. What probably caused the four-year period of killing and land grabs among the CHIMPANZEES studied by Jane Goodall was—wait for it—top males fighting for status. You may file this under STOP THE PRESSES. HOGFISH can “see” with their skin. With information their skin perceives, they decide what color to be. Wouldn’t you?
PEOPLE OBESITY does not seem to be declining in American children or adolescents; in fact, obesity in children ages 2-5 seems to have increased in recent years. Students who receive monthly SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (SNAP) benefits find their test scores vary with the timing of the benefits' arrival, implying that benefit levels are commonly not sufficient.
DUKE Duke has begun work on a new 150,000-SQUARE-FOOT, THREE-STORY, $115-MILLION ENGINEERING BUILDING to house research, entrepreneurship, and education initiatives at the Pratt School of Engineering. Duke Health is funding a $100 million expansion to DUKE REGIONAL HOSPITAL even though Duke does not own the hospital. The investment will increase the number of psychiatric beds and expand its emergency room facilities, among other things. Duke has indefinitely postponed plans to build a combined heat and power plant, which would have burned natural gas; Duke will instead focus on increasing the use of biogas and other ECOLOGICALLY FRIENDLY FUELS. To encourage diners to return the distressing amount of silverware liberated from dining places on campus, Duke instituted a FORK AMNESTY DAY.
6.4%
Duke accepted a record-low 6.4 percent of its regular-decision applicants for the CLASS OF 2022.
SCHOLARSHIP Carl Bolch Jr. and his wife, Susan Bass Bolch, will endow the new CARL AND SUSAN BOLCH JUDICIAL INSTITUTE at Duke Law School. It will be dedicated to bettering the human condition through studying and promoting the rule of law. The university and other donors will match the gift, bringing the total in support of the Bolch Judicial Institute to $20 million. SUHANI JALOTA ’16, from Mumbai, India, has been named to the inaugural cohort of Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University. The scholarship will fund her Ph.D. in health policy at the Stanford School of Medicine. Professors SALLIE PERMAR and GEORGIA TOMARAS from the Duke School of Medicine were among 96 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Microbiology. Samantha Bouchal and Shomik Verma, juniors, and Pranav Warman, a sophomore, were among 211 students from 455 institutions named 2018 BARRY M. GOLDWATER SCHOLARS for 2018-19. The federally endowed program encourages students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Twelve Duke students were awarded FULBRIGHT placements in 2017-18. ADRIAN BEJAN, J.A. Jones Professor of mechanical engineering and father of the constructal theory of thermodynamics, received the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal, one of the nation’s highest scientific prizes. With a grant of $15 million from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, the Pratt School will launch the A. JAMES CLARK SCHOLARS PROGRAM to encourage entrepreneurial thinking among engineers. It will give recipients dedicated servicelearning opportunities, leadership training, and mentorships.
MISCELLANY The world has only 12 to 16 years’ worth of GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS left, from the start of 2016, if it wants a better-thaneven chance of holding warming below 1.5 degrees. On the other hand, if we accelerate cuts to carbon emissions, we could save 153 MILLION LIVES over the next century in the 154 largest urban areas. Remember how ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS were going to save all kinds of money? Nuh-uh. Silver-coated copper NANOWIRES can be covered with silicone rubber and printed onto clothing, making stretchable, wearable, and inexpensive “felt” wires that may be usable for fitness and other monitoring and tracking. PLASTIC METAMATERIALS can redirect and reflect sound waves with almost perfect efficiency.
Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu for links to further details and original papers.
* Didn't Read?/Too Long? Well, we did, and now we're all smarter. 8
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ROOMMATES THEQuad
JARVIS
Match Made in H(RL)eaven: “We were random,” seniors Michelle Wei and Blaine Elias respond in perfect synchronization. The roommate pair—now in their fourth and final year of living together—met for the first time upon moving into Jarvis residence hall in August 2014. Both opted to receive a random match by completing a Housing and Residence Life (HRL) survey documenting lifestyle habits, such as sleep schedule. Beginning this fall with the Class of 2022, all first-year students will share this “random roommate” experience. “I never would have met Blaine otherwise because we’re in such different fields,” Michelle notes. “It’s a great opportunity to meet people who are different from you.”
Blaine Elias MAJOR: public policy/global health, certificate in Information Sciences and Studies HOMETOWN: Haymarket, Virginia FAVORITE CAMPUS SPOT: Gothic Reading Room FAVORITE CAMPUS EATERY: Law School Café FAVORITE DURHAM RESTAURANT: Goorsha FAVORITE ARTIST: Beyoncé POST-GRADUATION: working in finance for JP Morgan in New York (gap year[s] before applying to law school)
Brain Trust: Although each roommate pursues an opposite academic path, their Pratt/Trinity dynamic has made the roommate experience rewarding. “We always have things to share that are new to each other,” says Michelle. For Blaine, their varying interests offer a lens through which to see a different part of campus. “I have no idea what they do in Pratt. I’m always so amazed at what Michelle tells me.” SENIOR SENTIMENTS: With only a few weeks left on campus (and as roommates), the duo have recently found themselves reflecting on their Duke experience—past, present, and future. “I’m excited to see the influence of Duke outside of campus,” Blaine says. “I’ve seen it a bit in past summers, but I can’t wait to tap into it as an alum.” Michelle agrees, adding, “Most seniors—we’re always talking about how much we love Duke, and I think that’s really special. With commencement approaching, you’re like, ‘Wow, Duke really was the place for me.’ ” —Erin Brown ’16, Photo by Chris Hildreth
Michelle Wei MAJOR: biomedical engineering HOMETOWN: Salt Lake City MOST VISITED CAMPUS SPOT: Wilson Recreation Center FAVORITE CAMPUS EATERY: The Loop FAVORITE DURHAM RESTAURANT: Dame’s Chicken & Waffles FAVORITE ARTIST: Kendrick Lamar POST-GRADUATION: research at Massachusetts General Hospital (gap year before applying to M.D./Ph.D. programs)
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Not cast in stone
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The university community used statues to explore the ways we document history. early a year later, the niche in the chapel’s entrance remains vacant. But no one has forgotten about it. The Commission on Memory and History, formed after the activity of last August, has aimed to create an “open and deliberative process” around discussions on how to fill the space that previously held the figure of Robert E. Lee. In late March, the Office of the Provost held a two-day public symposium— “American Universities, Monuments, and the Legacies of Slavery”— that packed the Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room of Rubenstein Library, gathering scholars from across the country to consider how to best reckon with these issues of the past that can’t be outrun. And as a result of the chapel episode, investigations that were already under way are now imbued with a sense of timeliness. “Usually I work on ancient statues,” says Elizabeth Baltes Ph.D. ’16, the director of Statues Speak, “so it’s strange to me to be working on something that’s such a hot topic.” Her project arose in 2015, mimicking the “Talking Statues” exhibit of London, in which, walking throughout the city, tourists could scan QR codes on monuments and, instantaneously, receive a phone call from the statue itself. Baltes, amid her dissertation work through 2016 and transition to working as an assistant professor at Coastal Carolina
University, didn’t quite have the bandwidth or the budget to replicate London’s technology. But Statues Speak, an effort from Duke’s Wired! Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture, finally launched this past spring: During Blue Devil Days, visitors found the campus’ six full-body bronze statues gracefully tagged with square, Duke-blue signs. By scanning the QR code on each, they were directed to a link to hear the statues’ stories, told in the first-person. Statues are “certainly not neutral. They have agendas, and they have specific stories that they’re trying to tell,” says Baltes. “And even though the statues on Duke’s campus are fairly benign, I still want to highlight this idea that statues have a particular story.” In this case, “we have to choose what to put in the story, what to leave out,” she says. Baltes’ team, which included Duke and Coastal Carolina undergraduates, researched biographies and wrote the scripts (each recording is about a minute long), chose speakers (both President Vincent E. Price and his predecessor, Richard H. Brodhead, voice statues), and, in some cases, decided which statues were worth highlighting. Over on the medical campus, the 65th General Hospital Memorial statues feature, in a group of four, a nameless female nurse. It’s the only statue of a woman on campus, and now, through Statues Speak, Provost Sally Kornbluth lends her a voice. “It’s a really moving script, and I think it’s really
Ian Jaffe | The Chronicle
“We have to choose what to put in the story, what to leave out.”
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important to highlight female contributions to campus,” says Baltes. Highlighting untold stories is also the mission of Activating History for Justice at Duke. The Bass Connections BE STILL: Campus statues project, which began in the are telling stories and fall of 2016, recently released sparking conversations. a 100-page report examining the university’s institutional memory—and suggesting how to improve it. Monuments, says Robin Kirk, the project director and the faculty co-chair of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, are “not so much about history as they are about lifting up who we should be admiring and who we should be thinking about and who we should be thanking.” Kirk’s team of students digitally mapped Duke’s campus and documented 327 sites (such as plaques, statues, and buildings) highlighting Duke’s history. Women are represented in less than 15 percent of these sites; African Americans, less than 3 percent. “If we’re only celebrating white people, and among them, white men,” says Kirk (53 percent of sites highlight the latter), “it really does send a message to the other, very valued people in our community that they’re not honored and they’re not lifted up.” As part of the project, students also compiled a Story
Photos by Duke Photography, unless otherwise noted
Bank—accessible on the project’s website (activatinghistoryatduke.com)—that identifies important figures worth recognizing at Duke. They developed recommendations, such as renaming the Carr Building and East Residence Hall, and proposed sites that would highlight, among others, the first five African-American undergraduate students to enroll at Duke following desegregation and Oliver Harvey, a leader of Duke’s first labor union. “I think one really big statement that I learned from this is erasure is the most violent thing, or one of the most, violent things, that can happen,” says Helen Yu ’18, the project’s student manager. “And therefore, remembering is one of the most profound acts of resistance.” For Duke, these projects merely represent a departure point. Statues Speak is now part of a Bass Connections project, Building Duke, a three-year initiative that will examine the historical narrative of the campus’ physical environment. And while Activating History for Justice at Duke has completed its report, the discussion is just beginning. The administration wants to engage with these issues, Kirk says, and the project’s website is already receiving submissions to its Story Bank. “I hope people see this as more of an invitation to do what we’re supposed to be doing,” says Kirk. “To educate, to investigate, to learn.”—Lucas Hubbard
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When the smoke clears
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An old cigarette factory is now a space for biomedical engineering research. hen Adam Wax A.M. ’96, Ph.D. ’99, “We make a low-cost portable device the size of a shoebox president and chief scientist of Luthat you can carry with you,” Wax says. “It’s under $10,000.” medica, has a question about the basic In his Duke lab, on the fourth floor—Duke rents about 40 science behind the design of the afpercent of the Chesterfield—Wax shows off tables of equipfordable, cutting-edge biomedical imment: lenses, screens, 3D-printed components, and a protoaging machines Lumedica makes, sometimes he needs to go type of that shoebox-sized unit. One floor down on a quiet back to his lab at Duke, where he’s professor of biomedical bench of the BioLabs space he demonstrates OCT, examining the layers of a roll of tape. Research goes on upstairs, in engineering. the lab. “We generate revenue downstairs,” he says. Duke gets The journey covers exactly one stairway. a piece of the payoff, of course, but Wax is clear: “Money is The Lumedica lab lives on the third floor of the Chesterfield, on Main Street in downtown Durham, which had nice, but I didn’t pick to be a professor to make money. What its grand opening in December I want to see is the device have an 2017. Lumedica got its creative effect on patient care.” start in Wax’s research in his lab The Chesterfield, originally in the Fitzpatrick Center for built in 1948, sits on the site of Interdisciplinary Engineering, Washington Duke’s first in-town Medicine, and Applied Sciences mansion. That was replaced by (FCIEMAS) on West Campus. It what is now the executive office grew to the point where it needed building, and that in turn was its own lab space, which it now moved across the street when the rents from BioLabs North Cartime came for the new Chesterolina, a wet-lab coworking space field factory, a 300,000-squarethat occupies the second and foot behemoth that churned out third floors of the newly renovatsix packs of cigarettes per second. ed Chesterfield. Duke itself rents OPEN: Left, the atrium, and a lab in the Wexford Science and TechChesterfield nology, which redeveloped the space on the fourth floor, where Chesterfield, basically cored the Wax recently opened up a new lab building—removing the center of each floor to create a as part of his work as a Duke professor, though he still keeps skylit atrium that provides social space on the main floor the machines whirring and the postdocs thinking in his biomedical interferometry optics and spectroscopy lab back at and a light well the rest of the way up. Bright artwork covers the lobby walls, using the colors of the old Chesterfield FCIEMAS. cigarette logo. Various preservation tax credits provided an Seems like a lot of moving parts? Welcome to the future incentive for the designers of the renovation to leave strucof biomedical engineering and research. Welcome to the tural elements exposed and preserve original tile walls. Chesterfield. Apart from providing a model of that research-to-reveLumedica makes small, portable versions of the kind of nue pathway, the Chesterfield is an amenity in itself. “You equipment to which poorer communities commonly have can bike to work, you can Uber, you’ve got places to walk,” trouble getting access. Showing off his spaces in the Chesterfield, Wax explains a device that provides retinal imaging Wax says. “That’s an important part of getting talent” for his using optical coherence tomography— called OCT, it’s the labs. Scott Selig M.B.A. ’92, Duke associate vice president optical equivalent to ultrasound, producing high-resolution, of capital assets, agrees: “We want to use this to lure the next three-dimensional images without tissue destruction. He Nobel laureate.” says such devices usually cost in the $100,000 range, limitHe could be echoing the words of Dan Cramer ’75, presing their use to wealthy, urban hospitals. Imagine, he says, ident and COO of Wexford. “It’s not just a real-estate play,” being a poor diabetic patient in, say, Lumberton, worried he says of the Chesterfield. “It’s advancing the strategic mission of the university into these knowledge-based buildings.” about retinal problems and having to travel to Durham for “When I was still in school here, it was still open,” Cramer an eye exam checking for early retinal disease. It’s a big ask, says of the old cigarette factory. “You could smell it. Now it’s and the result is poor care for poorer people. Which is where being used to cure cancer.” —Scott Huler Lumedica steps in.
Photography by Alex Boerner
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FROM THE PRESIDENT: A CAMPUS VIEW
AS DUKE was celebrating its newest graduates, President Vincent E. Price was marking the end of his freshman year. Here he responds to questions from the magazine’s editor, with first-year reflections on campus hangouts, canine habits, presidential portraits, leaping lemurs, and more. What’s your best piece of advice to newly arrived Duke first-years? Embrace the creative confusion of your time at Duke, the freedom to explore new ideas and try out the full range of possibilities before you. And more important, get some sleep!
What’s your best piece of advice to freshly graduated seniors? Stop now and then—especially when you are at your busiest—to pause, reflect, and relax. These pauses will help clear the path ahead.
What’s your favorite place to hang out on campus?
as a traditional course, the Spring Breakthrough experience over spring break offers some enticing opportunities, from learning to build a bike to building a March Madness bracket for U.S. presidents.
What food choice most appeals to you among the Brodhead Center’s offerings? Falafel. It’s become a mainstay.
In burning off falafel calories, what’s your favorite piece of workout equipment at Wilson Rec?
Duke Gardens or the Al Buehler Trail with my dogs, Cricket and Scout.
You’ll find me in the morning on one of the two elliptical machines, just at the bottom of the stairs, that permit running at full-stride.
What’s your favorite space to stroll in the Duke Gardens?
What was your favorite Nasher exhibit this past year?
I enjoy the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants, which demonstrates North Carolina’s rich biodiversity, although the dogs aren’t allowed in that section.
Cricket and Scout have absolutely loved their first spring on campus, which they’ve spent chasing the squirrels. Scout has taken to closely observing—I might say obsessing over—the ducks at the Gardens. She’d like to get closer, but that’s why we have leashes.
I enjoyed Solidary and Solitary: the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, and I loved the exhibition of Bill Bamberger photographs of basketball backboards around our region, which was co-curated by undergraduates through a Curatorial Practicum taught at the Nasher Museum by assistant curator Molly Boarati. The Nasher has also loaned our office a wonderful collection of prints by Risaburo Kimura, the Japanese printmaker. We’re displaying his brightly rendered geometric depictions of world cities in the second floor of the Allen Building.
What course would you love to take at Duke?
What research project out of Duke this past year most intrigued you?
With the move south, what’s the favorite season for your dogs?
I’d love to take one of the first-year seminars: maybe “Game Theory and Democracy” or “From Quarks to Cosmos.” And while it may not count 14 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
Not a specific project so much as a program: Bass Connections. I visited the showcase recently and was so deeply impressed by what I saw—students and
faculty are teaming up to explore dozens of real-world issues, from population health in Durham to digital archaeology to professional ethics.
Which is your favorite presidential portrait in the subdued setting of the Allen Building board room?
William Preston Few, my fellow four-eyes.
How would you describe the noise level at a Cameron game? Delightfully deafening.
What was the most eye-opening city you visited on the alumni circuit?
As a native of Southern California, I enjoyed returning to Los Angeles for the first time as Duke president. L.A. has changed a lot since I was a kid, but it still has that Hollywood magic.
If you could have a conversation with one (no-longer-present) figure out of Duke’s past, who would you choose?
I wish I had an opportunity to get to know Samuel DuBois Cook, who casts a deservedly long shadow at Duke. Dr. Cook was here for such a tremendous period of transition for the university–he helped Duke begin to realize its potential as a welcoming, diverse academic community.
Though they aren’t good conversation partners, how would you and Annette feel about a lemur or two taking residence in Hart House? They sure are cute, but we’ve already got two pretty wild animals in the house– plus Scout and Cricket.
Photography by Bill Snead, Les Todd, and Jared Lazarus
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Stories from the front lines
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A website and repository shares the wisdom of civil rights activists.
Digital SNCC Gateway
t a lectern in the White Lecture Hall on East ment have felt toward historians who seemed to miss the point. Campus in March, civil rights activist, proWesley Hogan, director of the Center for Documentary fessor, and journalist Charlie Cobb admitted Studies, described receiving in the mail from one participant to his audience that activists mistrust how “an eighty-one-page single-spaced document called ‘Slander they’re represented by those not on the front Panderers,’” about previous attempts to tell the SNCC story. lines. “Many of us have long been dissatisfied with the hisAccording to Cobb, that was simply representative. “There toriography of the movement,” he said. He raised an eyewas a deep suspicion, trust me,” he said. brow and quoted activist and legislator Julian Bond: “Rosa Which was why the success of the Gateway is so satisfying sat down, Martin stood up, and then the white folks saw the to SNCC members. “The most lacking thing in the historiography was the thinking of the people who gave shape to light and saved the day.” He got a laugh—a laugh of recognition, not of surprise. Though perhaps also of satisfaction, the movement,” Cobb said. Speakers at the event described since he addressed a room full of people the collaboration of SNCC veterans, historians, scholars, librarians, and students to involved with a project that worked hard tell history “from the bottom up and inside to do a better job. He spoke at closing out,” according to a white paper the projevents surrounding the creation of the ect released. The SNCC Digital Gateway SNCC Digital Gateway (snccdigital.org), worked with SNCC members to tell their a vast multimedia website and repository that was a joint project of the SNCC own stories, worked with them to write the Legacy Project, Duke’s Center for Docuhistory, all parties working hard to make mentary Studies, and the Duke Universisure that people retained control over the ty Libraries. stories they lived. A page called Understanding a Community, for example, documents The Gateway gives a permanent home a 2016 conversation between two SNCC to the stories and documents of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitfield secretaries with recordings, photographs, tee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), founddocuments, and, always, links to other pages, ed in Raleigh in 1960, on the campus other media, other stories. “Think of it as of Shaw University. The only national, guerilla history,” Cobb said. Southern-based, student-led civil rights The project began when at its fiftieth anniversary, in Raleigh, SNCC created the SNCC group, SNCC focused on direct community action, sending “field secretaries” to Legacy Project. That led, through funding by EQUALITY: SNCC poster, 1963 communities and working with locals on the Mellon Foundation, to partnership with projects of their own choice. The Gateway the Duke University Libraries and the Center makes SNCC interviews, photographs, histories, videos, and for Documentary Studies, which itself had evolved from an other materials constantly available, without charge, to all who oral-history program about black activism. The SNCC activists commonly talk about the leaders who taught them, and wish to use and learn from them. “Learn From the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work” is the slogan the they see the Gateway as an opportunity to share what they Gateway uses, and now the SNCC stories will help people do learned with, and encourage, today’s student activists. For that as long as there’s an Internet. example, demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, which took Mainstream historiography of civil rights has tended to place at night became violent. SNCC learned long ago, one focus on the larger-than-life moments: the Greensboro Sitaudience member noted, that night demonstrations were In, the March on Washington, Bloody Sunday in Selma. But prone to violence. attendees at the event, many of them SNCC veterans, knew Chuck McDew was at the founding meeting of SNCC and the reality was far more complex—smaller grassroots events, served as its chair for three years. “SNCC was action-oriented,” he recalled. “If you joined SNCC, you did something.” individual efforts by SNCC field secretaries, community efforts made by countless people in hundreds of places. SNCC And he sees the Gateway as a resource reminding today’s activists that talk—and social media—is cheap. looked at the famous nonviolence of the Southern Christian “Every group of young people planning to change this Leadership Conference as one tool among many, not as its society,” he said, “should look at the work being done here.” only approach. Which makes the SNCC Digital Gateway all —Scott Huler the more important, given the mistrust members of the move-
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“”
Amelia Boynton
“I assigned myself to become the staff person for the Dallas County Voters League.” “I saw in front of us a solid wall of state troopers, standing shoulder to shoulder.”
Amzie Moore
brought SNCC into Mississippi; in fact, he put voter registration on SNCC’s table. For refusing to put a “colored only” sign up, local whites cut off his access to credit. He kept his brick home well-armed and at night, brightly lit with floodlights. “I found that SNCC was for business, live or die, sink or swim, survive or perish. They were moving, and nobody seemed to worry about whether he was gonna live or die.”
Tim Jenkins
“We made a calculated attempt to pull the best people out of the movement,and give them a solid academic approach to understanding the movement.”
Unita Blackwell
Victoria Gray (Adams) said in 1964
that she learned that there were two kinds of people in grassroots politics, “those who are in the Movement and those who have the Movement in them. The Movement is in me…and I know it always will be.”
Sam Block
“The Movement in Greenwood was not built with young people… but with older people who were angry, who was looking for some kind of direction, for somebody who could give form and expression to ideas and thoughts and things that they had had in mind for years—that they wanted to do and just couldn’t bring it together.”
Judy Richardson about Prathia Hall
“As she described the violence in Selma, the awful beauty of her words—and the intensity of her moral outrage—took me by such force that I remember typing on to that long, green mimeo stencil with tears just streaming down my face. It was as if some force of nature had swept me away to another place.”
Although Sias was a respected patriarch within the community, Unita Blackwell quickly emerged as the leader of the fledging Movement in Issaquena County, where no black person was registered to vote. “The more I heard about white people being so against it, the more I started thinking there must be something in this voting.” By 1964, Blackwell became a full-time SNCC field secretary, encouraging friends and neighbors to register to vote and leading groups to the courthouse.
Listen to a SNCC audio postcard: bit.ly\SNCCDuke DUKE MAGAZINE
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His moment has come The director of chapel music retires from that role, taking along memories like a prayer.
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odney Wynkoop settles into the spot near the front of the chancel in the chapel, the spot in the choir rows where he’s sat just about every Sunday for nearly thirty years. “When I’m sitting here during the sermon, I’m listening to the sermon, to be sure,” he says, perhaps slyly, “but often I just gaze around.” The ornate woodwork above the choir’s heads, organ pipes, stained-glass windows lining the aisles. “It’s just a beautifully designed place to be,” he says. “It can’t help but lift your thoughts to things beyond the ordinary.” For three decades Wynkoop has directed the thoughts of chorister and worshiper alike beyond the ordinary. He said during Reunions Weekend, in front of a couple of hundred current and returning members of the Duke Chapel Choir, that through their music they might hope “indeed, to catch, perhaps, a glimpse of God.” The alumni had gathered to sing with Wynkoop one last time because on July 1 Wynkoop will retire from the position of director of chapel music he took in 1989, no longer to stand in front of the hundred or so members of what he calls “a whole host of families.” Wynkoop won’t leave Duke: He will continue teaching in the music department (where he started at Duke in 1984), conducting the Duke Chorale, and conducting the Choral Society of Durham and the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham. Some retirement. “It is true that I will have somewhat less of a ridiculous overcrowded schedule,” he says; he hopes to visit his sons in college with his somewhat expanded free time. Wynkoop, sixty-six, approaches the change with no fear but perhaps a little anxiety. Being Chapel Choir director is enough of an identity that he treasures a pullover the choir made for him with the words “Chapel Choir Conductor” on the left breast; that and the Messiah score he’s annotated over the last twenty-nine years will provide all the souvenirs he needs, since he’s not leaving campus. But he is leaving the Chapel Choir, and there are things
he will miss. Performing the Messiah each year, for example. “Every year, the first performance is the first time that all of the new members hear all of the music from beginning to end,” he says. The piece includes, of course, the famous Hallelujah chorus. “But at the very end,” he says, “there is this thunderous chorus,” followed by “an ‘Amen’ that to me is one of the most beautifully constructed pieces in the repertoire. It builds, and builds, and comes in waves, and backs up and builds again. And it’s pretty cathartic by the end. “One of my favorite moments every year is hearing that buildup and knowing that this ‘Amen’ is strong enough to be a stamp, a goal at the end of that three hours of music, and that this says, ‘Yes—it shall be like this.’ I find myself incredibly moved by that moment,” he says. Not just him—every year some new member comes to him: “With tears in their eyes usually they will say, ‘It was unbelievable. I cannot believe what we have just lived through.’ That’s a very special moment to me because it’s about education, and it’s about hard work and teamwork and eye-opening experiences and all that.” Wynkoop says he has tried to integrate all those aspects of his service. “I see my work with the choir as partly edSWAN SONG: ucational, partly artistic, and partly as a Wynkoop, way of helping to shape how people apmid-magical proach their lives.” Does it work? “It’s a moment really trusting and caring and generous group. And I think it shows in the way they sound.” He’s conducted his final Messiah with the choir, and he shared that last afternoon with the alumni. Any parting thoughts? “I have told the choir that I hope in the days to come they will always look for opportunities to have these kinds of experiences, whether in choir or elsewhere. Places to create moments that are magical, that integrate them into some wondrous effort. To look for those, to enter into them fully, and then to treasure them forever.” Amen.—Scott Huler, LISTEN: bit.ly\wynkoopDukeMag
“I see my work with the choir as partly educational, partly artistic, and partly as a way of helping to shape how people approach their lives.”
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Chris Hildreth
BookClub WE ASKED
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Chatting with Laurent Dubois, professor of Romance studies and history
ver the past decade, Dubois has taught a course that explains world history, politics, and culture through the lens of the most beautiful game. This spring, just in time for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, his new book, The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer
(Basic Books), operates as both a primer for the uninitiated and an insightful cultural exploration for the scarf-shrouded fan. Here, Dubois explains how his love for the game has invaded his academic work and affected his viewing habits. How have you developed this entire series of scholarly inquiry around soccer?
My first work as an academic is about Caribbean history and French Empire. I wrote about the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in Haiti. But in the 1990s, the French World Cup team became this big symbol because the players were of such diverse backgrounds. It became a place where that historical experience of slavery, colonialism, immigration was talked about a lot. Some of the players became even quite prominent as voices talking about history and their history as people. So I connected with what they were doing around that, just because I was, during the same period, thinking about those issues. And then, in 2006, when the World Cup ended with Zidane’s head-butt in the final, I started writing an essay about that—I was in Paris at the time—about just what that meant. That evolved into this book called Soccer Empire that I published in 2010. That was really the nexus between my interest in the French Empire, history, memory, and soccer. You mentioned Albert Camus and Vladimir Nabokov as players in the book. Is there something about soccer that makes it more of a writers’ sport?
I do think so. For one thing, it’s just that it’s so widely shared has just meant that you can go to Latin American literature, African, European. There are so many places in the world where this sport is so central. But I do think that it has drawn intellectuals often, and even in the book’s chapter on the midfielder, on “Total Football”—Dutch soccer was commented on by abstract artists, and architects, and ballet dancers. That’s maybe something that we’re not
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as used to in American sports culture, that there’d be this real sweep of cultural life around the sport. So you have the stereotype of the jock that does not overlap with the academic. And in soccer, it’s all blended together a little bit?
There’s always that tension. When you teach sport at an American university, you often kind of get that question. Like, is this really academic? And I remember the first time I taught the [“World Cup and World Politics”] course, a Duke alumnus who had written about sport when he was here and has since written about sport, described being an undergraduate here—having sports dominate his life outside the classroom and never having it once come up in the classroom. I think it’s such a huge part of our culture that we also have to talk about it critically and in the classroom. In one of the final chapters, you describe how, when you’re watching soccer, you’re rooting for storylines more than anything—you’d be happy if either team won. What is that like?
It’s funny, because I wrote a piece for The New Republic about this Belgium-Algeria game that I watched. I’m Belgian originally, and I also have written a lot about Algerian soccer. I think the Algerian team’s very compelling. What I wrote about in that piece was that I figured out who I was rooting for, when someone scored a goal, by my reaction. But I do think there’s a lot of painfulness in a World Cup because, in a way, you will get attached to teams. Everyone loses except for one team. So there’s this way in which soccer is about joy, but it’s also a lot about tragedy, and loss, and that spectrum of emotions. And that’s the root of its power—the stories that it tells, and what those stories tell us about ourselves. That’s why it’s such an important form of culture. —Lucas Hubbard
R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S from Rae DelBianco ’14
BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY
Activism and the Fossil Fuel Industry (Routledge Press) Andrew Cheon ’09 and Johannes Urpelainen
In her debut novel Rough Animals (Arcade Publishing), DelBianco makes a powerful entrance to the con-
Darwin’s Ghosts (Seven Stories Press) Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Research Professor Emeritus of literature
temporary Western genre, weaving the poetic and laconic tale of a man on a meandering journey through the Utah wilderness. Here, she shares the works that have inspired her on her own writing journey.
Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote: A bittersweet coming-of-age that I’ll argue is the most beautiful work of Southern Gothic literature in existence. The earliest novel-length work of a literary legend, it holds none of Capote’s worldly pronouncements of his later works, its experiences freshly and purely sensory in the way that only our initial discovery of the world can be.
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson: A kaleidoscopically gorgeous set of linked stories for anyone who prefers books that plunge us into an atmosphere over those that take us on a linear track, filled with junkies and criminals and nobodies who find redemption in the bright cracks of their broken souls. The type of book that teaches us to see the light in the dark and the beauty in chaos.
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron ’47: There are dozens of reasons to read Sophie’s Choice, but for any Duke aspiring writers, here’s another— Styron’s semi-autobiographical protagonist is a recent Duke grad in his early twenties who’s struggling to write in New York. When he’s told by an old publishing colleague, “Son, write your guts out,” it’s Styron speaking straight into your ear.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: Discovering this blood-soaked masterpiece in Professor Victor Strandberg’s contemporary lit class as a sophomore was one of those Duke moments that change your life forever. The next year, we did an independent study on "The Aesthetics of Violence in Cormac McCarthy," breaking down how beauty in prose can force us to look at brutality, and in turn formed the basis of my education as a writer. The rest is history.
College Success Stories That Inspire (Miniver Press) Steven Roy Goodman ’85
Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World With Julian of Norwich (Duke University Press) Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics What Happens Now? Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You (SelectBooks) John Hillen ’88 and Mark Nevins The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter’s Tale of Family and Football (Morgan James Publishing) Lori Leachman, professor of the practice of economics The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke University Press) Bianca C. Williams ’02, A.M. ’05, Ph.D. ’09
DUKE MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2018
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SPORTS
For school and country
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Nicolás Álvarez is a national hero in Peru and a star on the men’s tennis team.
pril is crunch time for college tennis teams, and for the top player on Duke’s men’s team, redshirt junior Nicolás Álvarez, to step away for a week during the cruelest month, it had to be for something important. He had to win a match for his country. When healthy, Álvarez isn’t just one of the top players in college tennis; he’s one of the best tennis players from his native Peru, full stop. When his homeland competes in the international Davis Cup, he kind of has to play. “There’s not a vast array of players they can choose,” Álvarez says matter-of-factly, after his April victory in Metepec, Mexico, pushed his career Davis Cup record to an unblemished 5-0. For coach Ramsey Smith, Álvarez is the first player he’s coached at Duke who has competed in the Davis Cup while in college. “It’s tricky because he’s a part of this team, and he’s on scholarship, and he’s our best player,” says Smith. “But then he also has this unique opportunity to represent his country, which is bigger than Duke.” The Davis Cup is unlike anything in tennis. It’s wildly partisan, played either in front of raucous supporters or hostile opposing fans. And unlike NCAA team tennis, only one match happens at a time. Which means, for players, all eyes are on you. “The entire country’s watching,” Álvarez says. “Well, maybe not the entire country…but a bunch of people are.” In the fall of 2016, Álvarez faced off against his Venezuelan opponent in the deciding match. Playing in front of his friends and family in his hometown of Lima—ten miles from his house, at “a club I’m familiar with, I’d drive through there on the weekends,” he says—could have overwhelmed the youngest player on Peru’s team. Not to mention being forced to return on a second day after darkness suspended the match with Álvarez just three games from victory. But he came through, notching the win to secure Peru’s promotion to a higher level of the competition. Which means his coach’s assessment doesn’t seem like hyperbole. “He’s a national hero there,” Smith says. Álvarez’s origin story starts at age four, with him picking up a racket at the club where his parents were members. Belonging to a club, he explains, is the only way to learn the sport in Peru; no public courts dot the country like they do in the U.S. Álvarez eschewed soccer and karate to focus just on tennis
around age ten; his education at an American school in Peru supplied him the English skills to thrive academically here. His mother had played at Clemson, and she knew the opportunity college tennis presented. As the average age on the pro tour has steadily crept up, Smith explains, more international players have used college tennis as an incubator to prepare for the increased physicality of the professional ranks. Beyond that, in the U.S. the sport has unrivaled resources. “I always talk about how there’s so many college facilities that are absolutely amazing, like the one we have here [at Duke],” Álvarez says. Peru’s only similar club, he says, is the home for its tennis federation. Applying to schools as an athlete from afar isn’t the easiest, especially for a Peruvian tennis player: Coaches “wouldn’t imagine that you’d be looking to come from Peru and play,” he says. He was reaching out to colleges—not vice versa—and sending them tapes of himself, including to the sole school whose academic ranking and tennis ranking were, at the time, both in the top-ten nationally. “You get a good feeling or a bad feeling pretty soon,” Smith says, of recruiting visits. And when Álvarez visited Duke’s campus, Smith had a “great” one: He offered a scholarship to Álvarez without ever seeing him play a match in-person. It was a good decision on Smith’s part. After Álvarez committed, his results soon improved, and his junior ranking jumped from outside the top-100 to the top twenty. “Then I started receiving e-mails from coaches,” he says, laughing. From carving a path to Duke as an unknown recruit, to adapting a style built on the clay courts of Peru for the hard courts of college tennis, to bouncing back from a wrist injury that cost him all of last spring, Álvarez has continued to develop. He’s won matches for college and country; he’ll wrap up his Duke career in 2019 and then take aim at the pro ranks. That jump, from college to pros, isn’t an easy one to make. But if recent history is a predictor, odds are Álvarez has a better shot than it seems. “I get a lot of videos, and sometimes it’s hard to tell [a player’s quality],” says Smith, of when he first watched tape of Álvarez. “But you could just tell his technique was rock solid. He was very good from the ground, no real holes.” “Having said all that, he ended up being way, way better than I could’ve ever imagined.”
“The entire country’s watching. Well, maybe not the entire country… but a bunch of people are.”
—Lucas Hubbard, Photography by Reagan Lunn
DUKE MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2018
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THEQuad
A lot happened in spring semester 2018. Here, our recap and the level of response each provoked. ??
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Mild
Mild
Heated
Mild
Heated
Quenchers replaced
No choosing roommates
Duke vs. Kansas
Quenchers, the longtime healthfood and smoothie vendor of Wilson Recreation Center that was one of the best arguments for actually going to the gym, will be replaced next year by Red Mango.
To reverse the trend of students preselecting roommates before stepping on campus, Duke is now playing matchmaker—and hoping it won’t also have to play mediator—by assigning random roommate pairings for freshmen starting this fall.
Playing against Kansas in the NCAA tournament, Duke men’s basketball star freshman Wendell Carter Jr. fouled out on a questionable (Bad? Atrocious? We, like everyone else, don’t actually know the rule) blocking call in overtime. The Blue Devils went on to lose by 4.
Mild
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Heated
Heated
Mild
Heated
Mild
Heated
Racial incidents on campus
The Joe Van Gogh incident
Barbershop closes
Screenshots of a racist Snapchat post showed up on a popular student Facebook group. A racial slur above a student’s Central Campus apartment door. Anti-Semitic flyers near East Campus. Students delivered a petition to administrators demanding a “standardized set of consequences for acts of hate and bias on campus.”
A week later, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta wanted a vegan muffin and a hot tea from the campus Joe Van Gogh. But after Moneta’s objection to the lyrics in the rap music playing in the shop and a series of phone calls, the two baristas working at the time were fired. Protestors responded by blasting the offending song outside Moneta’s office, and the coffee shop severed its ties with the university.
David Fowler, the longtime manager of the Duke Barber Shop, announced his shop would leave Duke—after fifty-five years—at the end of May. (For those who have never stepped into the bowels of the Bryan Center in the past five years: Yes, there was a barbershop on campus.)
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HOW ENCHANTING
David Morgan, professor and chair of religious studies, is the author of Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (Oxford University Press).
Enchantment, as you see it, is more than wish-fulfillment or escapism. It changes our relationship to the world, and it involves the little things we do to make the world go our way—tokens, devices, objects, words, images. But in an age of scientific rationality, aren’t we beyond enchantment? I write that modernity is not the era of the scientific eradication of religion, magic, or any other form of enhancement. Telegraphy became a primary metaphor for spiritualism; photography captured the soul and documented spiritual effluvia; the phonograph recorded the sounds of the dead. Electricity was miraculous, and magnetism was a soul-curative. Enchantment is a fundamental part of our humanity. We’re wired not just for rational thinking. We feel our way through life with our emotions, our sensations, as much as we do with our reason and our logic.
Even at NASA, right?
At NASA, the most scientific minds animate objects by applying human names to them. They invest in a satellite, which travels to the far end of the solar system, as it if were kind of a child. They name it. They name its components. They talk about it so tenderly. They humanize this piece of technology because in some ways it is an extension of us; we think of it as our offspring going out to space.
Do we see enchantment in everyday life?
Enchantment is at work when we look at an advertisement, or the clothing worn by a passerby, or the car someone is driving, and imagine ourselves similarly arrayed. We may be so persuaded by the image’s appeal, so moved by the promise
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of its power to transform us from one thing into another, that we actually purchase the item. Consumerism seems premised on enchantment, so that a commodity magically will confer on its owner a new status or place in the world.
You write that enchantment often involves imagery of one kind or another. But we usually think of images as just things to look at and not as being “at work.” Images are not just messages; they are agents. They do things. And they do things to us: They scare us, they inspire us, they threaten us, they comfort us.
How can images scare us?
What makes things terrifying is what exposes our impotence and threatens our sense of ease and control over the universe. The eighteenth-century concept of the sublime often meant showing people facing a vast ocean or a towering mountain. The human presence is dwarfed. That’s what J.M.W. Turner does in his paintings. He blurs the horizon. He takes away the principle of stability. It’s disorienting. Some other force is stronger than you; it overwhelms you.
Maybe more typically, images can be comforting, can help orient or anchor us. I remember interviewing a guy at a church in Chicago where, it was said, a picture of Mary began weeping. I was the typical
Q&A
secular scholar saying, “Oh, this is pretty incredible. What do you think about this?” And he goes, “It’s not incredible at all. Our Lady does this. This is how she manifests her will to us. She shows us she is with us. Pictures of Mary have been weeping for centuries.” So he helped me understand that it only looked supernatural and weird to an outsider. In his world, that’s what the image of Mary does.
What role does chance play in the forming of images and the work of enchantment? When a random occurrence matches a need, the result
may appear mysterious but not particularly random. We see in the world around us what matters most to us. Enchantment curbs randomness by making it the agent of divine or superhuman action; it helps make the universe a friendlier, more sympathetic place for us. Religion, magic, and art all manage chance. By doing so, they help make the world go our way.
In the book you refer to The Wizard of Oz. What does that illustrate about enchantment?
It’s a story about estrangement and return. Dorothy had been alienated from her world by the menace of losing her dog. And she found her world once again only by following the yellow brick road. That’s what enchantments are successful at doing. Losing yourself, and then re-emerging to find your place in the world is what’s so powerful. —Robert J. Bliwise, Photo by Les Todd
HONO A M AT T E R O F I N T E G R I T Y
In these ethically challenging times, the Honor Council aims for change—over the long term.
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BY SCOTT HULER
he Duke Honor Council had Kashal Kadakia at hello. “On opening night of orientation week,” recalls Kadakia, a rising senior biology and public policy major. That first night of O-week, all freshmen gathered in the lacrosse-stadium bleachers. Among presentations by luminaries like Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek ’76, M.H.A. ’78, LL.M. ’93, the Honor Council chair gave a speech about the Duke community standard and unfurled a banner bearing its three principals. A community standard of behavior! To a driven highschool student, someone who had just made his way into Duke, it felt like the stuff. A standard; a high bar. So when the first opportunity arose he applied—and he made it onto the Honor Council. But no chills. In the first place, after the first night, that banner got folded and put away. In the second place, meetings. That’s what the Honor Council seemed to be about: having meetings. Among his classmates, “most people didn’t even
know the text of the community standard,” Kadakia recalls. “I felt like what we were doing, no one cared about.” That’s either disappointing or dispiritingly predictable. We inhabit a world of #MeToo moments, of a parade of CEOs and public servants being caught in flagrant lies or merely in flagrante, of everyone from Volkswagen to Wells Fargo adopting cheating as a corporate strategy and succeeding, at least as long as they don’t get caught. We look to students for hope for the coming generation—and sometimes find instead evidence that the failures of their parents’ generation have not left them unmarked. “Exaggerating on your résumé?” one Duke student remarked on a 2011 survey of student ethics. “My mom TOLD me to do that.” So students like Kadakia and his cohort on the Honor Council have work to do. On the other hand, maybe in a time like this, the work of the Honor Council can make a difference. Quick cut to spring 2018, to McDougle Middle School in Chapel Hill, where the Honor Council prepares to make its first-ever off-campus presentation. Shai Cullop, a social-studies teacher at McDougle, was part of a team that reached out to the Duke Honor Council for help because the teachers
OR found that their students were ethically at sea. “I think we’re relying more on the parents to provide those messages,” she says. “And sometimes that gets lost in translation.” Though McDougle students tended to know that, say, plagiarism was against the rules, “they don’t understand the bigger integrity piece. So that’s going to be important for them to hear from the Duke students.” Three Duke Honor Council members stand in front of Cullop’s class of eighth-graders, flinging out challenging questions. “We’ll be introducing you to aspects of integrity, and what honor means,” freshman Noah Lanier says, slowly pacing in front of them. “To get things started, we’re going to pose what we call ethical inquiries to you.” He describes a situation in which Robin Hood robs a bank, with the intent of distributing the stolen money to the poor, and the eighth-graders are asked to consider themselves witnesses. One of the other Honor Council students hangs up signs on opposite walls of the classroom: One reads, “leave the crime scene” and the other reads, “report.” “Is Robin Hood wrong?” Lanier asks. “You’ve got to answer.” They do; in a hubbub of screeching chairs and giggles, the eighth-graders walk to one side of the classroom or the other, with a few choosing the uncertainty of standing in the middle. The tone of the discussion emerges from
the first moment, when Lanier sees where most of the kids end up in the shuffle. “Oh my goodness—‘Leave the crime scene,’ ” he says. “Oh, I’m going to have fun with you guys.” For the next hour they do have fun. They debate the ethical course of action toward Robin Hood, the poor, and the people whose money was in that bank. Then they advance to other inquiries—an overly complex one involving two Jean Valjeans that leaves the kids a little perplexed, and more relatable discussions of plagiarism and cheating that have them fiercely engaged, debating, considering, even changing one another’s opinions. The Honor Council members keep the students talking by rewarding them with T-shirts and stickers lauding integrity. “Integrity over image” says one sticker, and Lanier explains to one student that cheating, for example, offers the image of accomplishment. “But the benefits that we seem to get from cheating don’t matter nearly as much as having integrity, I mean that personal character. It’s a set of values we’re trying to instill.” Instilling a set of values is where the Honor Council lives. The presentation to middle-schoolers was hardly the only undertaking the council took as it tried to rebrand itself this past academic year. Duke’s first honor code was adopted in 1993, and the council, now led by Kadakia, used the occasion of the code’s twenty-fifth anniver-
“Is Robin Hood wrong?”
sary to try to bring honor into a far more visible role on campus. The council produced monthly panel discussions on topics like academic and research ethics, athletic integrity, and sexual misconduct. They ordered plaques of the community standard and hung them in classrooms all over East and West Campus. They created posters of different members of the council explaining what honor means to them and hung them on the Bryan Center plaza. They even put a box in the Brodhead Center where students could anonymously submit ethical dilemmas: “Someone cheated in my math class… I told no one… I still don’t know what the right thing to do is.” “Is it cheating if you cheat on a class that teaches you how to cheat?” And by the way, that banner doesn’t get folded and stored now. It hung in the East Campus Marketplace lobby during first term. “You’re a freshman, taking your first midterm,” Kadakia says. “And the community standard is up there on the wall.” That’s got to have an effect, he says. The year culminated in a series of events during Integrity Week in March—from a Censored Women’s Film Festival at the Rubenstein Arts Center to public presentations with Duke scholars and administrators; from a community-focused discussion with Durham mayor Steve Schewel ’73, Ph.D. ’82 to the final event, a discussion at the Brodhead Center with three generations of Honor Council chairs hosted by Rubenstein Fellow and former Federal Reserve Board governor Sarah Raskin. Clearly, this is not the Honor Council that had meetings and vanished.
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N FACT, SOMETHING HAS CHANGED regard-
ing Duke and an honor code, and despite the rapid change this year, it’s changed over the long haul. For most of Duke’s history, people didn’t pay attention to the honor code because one didn’t exist. Duke was slow off the mark regarding honor. “Duke doesn’t have an honor-code history,” says associate provost Noah Pickus, who for more than a decade directed the Kenan Institute for Ethics and has advised the council for that long. “It’s not UVA. It’s not part of the culture.” He speaks of institutions like the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, West Point, and Davidson—schools whose applicants sing of their honor codes the way Duke applicants praise DukeEngage and Cameron Indoor Stadium.
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Yet honor is important at Duke, Pickus says, and he lauds the approach Kadakia and his council have taken to raise its profile. “The early students, working with Elizabeth [Hanford Dole ’58], made the argument that though we tend to think at universities everything is about reason, an equally strong tradition is that how we behave is shaped by ritual and habits and the community that supports that. And that you need both. You need rituals like an honor-code signing that’s public.” Yes—Elizabeth Hanford Dole, in 1957, was part of the group of students who created Duke’s first attempt at a formal honor code. “To my mind, we have one major purpose in passing this code,” she said at the time. “The transfer of responsibility in this college community to the students themselves.” The women seemed to agree with her, voting overwhelmingly in favor of some sort of honor code and in favor of the suggested code, in particular. The men, not so much—more than three-quarters of men voted against the proposed code, though 50.5 percent of men were willing to agree that some sort of honor standard might be nice. In 1965, Duke again considered an undergraduate honor code, raising such emotions that the Chronicle described it as a “war-torn issue.” Elizabeth Hanford’s desire for students to fully accept responsibility for their own behavior returned as a theme. Joe Schwab ’67, at the time a sophomore on the student senate, supported the code: “It instills a sense in the students that they and not a super-imposed authority, are responsible for their conduct.” He expressed frustration that students complained about what he called “the administration’s ‘big-brother’ attitude,” yet resisted policing themselves through an honor code. Resist indeed: The 1965 code lost narrowly among the women on East Campus and on West suffered the same three-to-one trouncing as its predecessor. It’s not like Duke was a chaos of lawless dishonor; there were a judicial board and consequences for misdeeds as there are on every campus. “This didn’t mean there was no honor on the Duke campus,” Kadakia says now. “But there was no body for integrity.” Which was something of an issue. Refusing to adopt an honor code is, in some ways, just like Hanford Dole explained: a way of leaving responsibility for student conduct in the hands of what Schwab called “a super-imposed authority.” If you’re only behaving honorably to avoid getting caught, is that honorable? “I thought that was so in-
I will not lie,
cheat, or steal in my academic endeavors; I will conduct myself honorably in all my endeavors; and I will act if the Standard is compromised. teresting,” Kadakia goes on. “At the city-state we call Duke University, the rules we have were all sanction-based.” Somebody needed to lead the way toward more responsibility and better behavior for intrinsic reasons. When you’re talking about Duke, that usually means “here comes Terry Sanford,” and here comes Terry Sanford. In 1978, Sanford asked entering freshmen of the Class of 1982 to think through a new honor code, something that “would propose honor for the sake of honor, not merely caution and care in order to evade the penalties of law.” Inquiry at the university should be uninhibited, Sanford said in a note he wrote to entering freshmen of the Class of 1984, but that didn’t mean students should follow no rules: “Even if there is value-free inquiry, there cannot be value-free life,” Sanford wrote. Eventually Sanford formed the President’s Honor Council, which has become today’s Honor Council. In 1993, Duke instituted its first true undergraduate honor code, requiring students to act honorably and to report it if they witness others failing to do so. The code got pushback from the start: “I know when I’m taking a test I’m not personally scoping out the room for cheaters,” said then-sophomore Julie Brashears ’96. Legendary English professor Reynolds Price ’55 said he’d refuse anonymous reports of wrongdoing.
This slow progress of the honor code bears consideration, especially in regard to the natural inclination to connect this year’s focus with current events. Rising sophomore Nick Santangelo will be president of the Honor Council in 2018-19, and he says that though current events drive discussion and remind the council of the importance of honor, the council thrives through the efforts of people who don’t need chaotic public events to remind them of honor and integrity. “The chaos of the real world isn’t the driving force for getting involved in Honor Council,” he says. “But it’s a force for remaining involved.” Pickus notes that the Honor Council is not the student Judicial Board, which plays a more quotidian, enforcement-based role. He returns again to the two approaches to integrity—the rational, consequences-based approach (it’s Kantian, he says) of the Judicial Board, and the more Aristotelian approach of the Honor Council, focusing on the habits and practices of the community. “This is the community they know,” he says. “They take Duke very seriously, and they want honor to matter. It’s much more proximate to them as a habit, as a virtue, than as a set of reasons.” Weekly council meetings include time set aside for just such ethical discussions, and current events commonly arise: the responsibility to vote, for example. But the council, Santangelo says, actively seeks not people motivated by current events but “the internally motivated individuals.” Good thing. By 1997, the Chronicle wrote articles citing statistics proving that cheating was increasing rather than decreasing, and, in 1998, it called the code “riddled with philosophical and practical inconsistencies.” In 1999, by participating in a project run by the Center for Academic Integrity (then based at Duke), in which students were surveyed on their actions, Duke learned that the Chronicle had a point: 38 percent of surveyed students had copied material verbatim and had not even footnoted it in a paper; 37 percent said they’d falsified lab data. And fully 45 percent admitted to unauthorized collaboration.
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RESIDENT NAN KEOHANE, faced with
bad news, responded honorably, Kadakia says. “She did what anyone would call an act of moral courage: She went public with the results.” In a piece she wrote for the Chronicle, she quoted an answer on the survey: “As long as students feel the responsibility for academic honesty rests elsewhere (faculty, administrators) there can be no meaningful honor code here.” Noting schools like the UniversiDUKE MAGAZINE
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ty of Virginia and West Point, famed for their honor codes, Keohane echoed the student’s sentiment: “If Duke is ever going to become ‘an honor code school,’ I think any approach to the cheating problem based on mutual distrust is doomed.” In 2003, the council created the community standard, not dissimilar to the current one. That final step toward full responsibility—responsibility for not just your own actions but for those of the whole community—came in 2007, when Duke added the final line to its standard: “I will act if the Standard is compromised.” That’s a complex pledge to make. Even in his first letter to the students, Sanford discussed “reluctance to ‘rat’ on fellow students.” That’s the sticking point of an honor code for this past year’s freshmen, as well. “It would depend on the anonymity of it,” says Spencer Ganus, an English major from Los Angeles, asked over dinner in the Marketplace about how she’d respond to honor-code violations. Approaching someone she suspected of cheating or informing a professor seemed extreme. “It depends on the level of severity.” On the other hand, “I mean, I signed the standard.” Her tablemate Sayle Evarts, a public policy major from Massachusetts by way of Abu Dhabi, agrees. “It depends on the situation,” she says. She would not be likely to disrupt an exam if she saw cheating, but she might inform a professor. As for the standard itself, though she and Ganus both remembered signing the banner and it hanging in the Marketplace, neither could say much about it. “I’m assuming it talks about plagiarism,” Evarts says. “I’m assuming it talks about academic integrity. That’s it?” At another table, Daniel Kingsbury, an electrical and computer engineering major from Greensboro, rattled off the standard’s first two points, about not lying, cheating, or stealing in academic endeavors and being honorable “in all contexts.” As for the third, though, that rat clause? “It’s pretty unlikely, seeing as how I didn’t recall that,” he says. He felt he’d very likely try to steer a friend toward better behavior—“you’re here for a reason,” he says. “You clearly can do your work,” so he’d see cheating as harming his friend. As for approaching a stranger or informing on someone in a complex situation? That’s “placing this unrealistic expectation” on students,” 30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
he says. “It’s not a good idea to force someone to sign off on something like that. It’s this almost pretentious idea of Duke. It’s highly unrealistic.” Everyone knows cheating is wrong; everyone knows they’ll get in trouble if they’re caught, he says, so signing the code—on the banner, on every exam, on lab notes, on papers—doesn’t change anything. On the other hand, he was far from critical of the notion of the code itself: “That last clause should be, ‘I will do my best to act in an appropriate fashion,’” which he thought wouldn’t leave students with two equally unhappy options: either confronting a situation they can’t manage or feeling that they had failed the honor code. But Jarrett Smith, an economics major from Georgia, embraced the code: “Personally, I feel like I should take some sort of measure” if he sees a misdeed. “As a student body as a whole, I think we do a pretty good job. I was pretty surprised.” His friend Julian Lewis, a public policy major from Charlotte, was not surprised: “It’s on every assignment I do,” he says of the community standard. “I sign it like five times a week.”
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AYBE THAT HELPS. Duke had a re-
cent cheating scandal, in 2014, when students in a computer science class seemed to have cheated; the line between cheating and collaboration seems highly blurred, especially when students work together on code. Eerily similar “unpermitted collaboration” scandals have recently emerged at Stanford and Harvard, in the Stanford case in a class that urged students to share “ideas, hints, and debugging help, or problem-solving strategies and program structure.” Clearly the availability of information online, the ease of sharing it, and the focus at Duke (and elsewhere) on collaboration further complicates an already complex issue. Owen Astrachan, associate director of undergraduate studies and professor of the practice of computer science, says students can sometimes find answers to previous years’ unchanged questions online. In a coding class, the standard “Can I compare my homework answers with yours?” might yield an e-mail with lines of code from a solution found online, and those can easily be copied into another student’s answer. Automated tools easily find the copied code, and what to students seemed like improving an answer with help from a friend becomes a scandal. Some instructors now provide homework answers to encourage students
to spend their time thinking and comparing, not simply getting a right answer for a grade. Meanwhile, cheating scandals have occurred even at the Air Force Academy and the University of Virginia. An honor code doesn’t by itself create honor. Nor for that matter does being Honor Council chair, a position once held by currently beleaguered Missouri governor Eric Greitens ’96; Kadakia calls his predicament “a reminder that character can’t be something that you preach, but more importantly must be something that you do.” That notion—that the honor code is less about preventing cheating than about a way for students to engage with
“It’s the words that people remember.” He’d like to see the word “I” in that famous rat clause—“I will act”— changed to “we,” putting the “community” into the community standard, but he’s happy to let the next generation of Honor Council members work on that. “It’s quite an experience to see the generations,” he said of the panel discussion that ended Integrity Week. “Knowing that one day when I come back it will have evolved.” As it has already—from failed attempts at an honor code, to an honor code, to a community standard, to a community standard containing an obligation for action. The Honor Council itself has moved from the quiet group
“Does it have a rat clause in it?” their world—came up in the capstone panel discussion of Integrity Week, moderated by Sarah Raskin. About forty attendees filled a Brodhead Center conference room, enjoying a free Indian dinner and listening to the panel, which included Kadakia, Alex Parrish ’87, and Bronwyn Lewis Friscia ’08, all one-time Honor Council chairs. Raskin asked whether at twenty-five years the standard had stood the test of time. Parrish, who had been selected as part of the first president’s Honor Council and had been the first Honor Council chair to speak at convocation, laughed. “The one I worked on didn’t,” he said, “because it’s gone.” And he instantly brought up the first question he gets when honor codes come up: “Does it have a rat clause in it?” Parrish went on to echo Kingsbury. In the face of injustice, one can choose to disobey a law and take the consequences—or to blow up a building. When encountering dishonorable action, people face important choices, and the standard should recognize that. “It would make me happier if there were an acknowledgement that you had an obligation to meet your own internal standards,” not just the words of the Duke standard. “The real problem is getting people to buy into these things,” he said. “The words matter, but it’s the work that matters more.” Friscia agreed. “I have no doubt that this version will be rewritten,” she said. “It’s more the process of a community appraising and recommitting. That is healthy and good.” Kadakia, too, agreed that Duke’s community standard is, and should be, a work in progress. “For me the point is not the words in the standard,” he said.
Kadakia joined to an active group sending programs into the community. Members of the Honor Council put themselves forward as leaders: “We were engaged in ethical leadership,” Friscia says of her time on the council, and that dedication remains. “We are so fortunate,” she says, “to be models of moral courage in an era when we need it.” Parrish, who as Honor Council chair began the tradition of addressing incoming students and parents at convocation, remembered the response of then dean of the chapel Will Willimon. Parrish had exhorted the new students to challenge themselves, to think not just about rules and consequences but about what he notes even the nation’s founder called their “sacred honor.” After he finished, Willimon “leaned over,” Parrish recalls. “He put his hand on me and said, ‘So you’re an optimist.’ ” “That was a perfect expression of what I had expressed,” Parrish says. “We can be better. We have an obligation to be better.” Generations of Honor Councils have tried to lead the way, each cycle raising the bar a bit; the current generation has consciously upped its game. Santangelo, the incoming president, turned down a full scholarship at Washington and Lee, an honor-code perennial. “If I would have gone there it would have been an ideal honor situation,” he says. “Here it’s a project to pursue. Overall, Duke was an environment that I preferred to be in, so why not just make change?” As for whether they’ll have an effect, take Kadakia’s advice—come back in a generation and see. n DUKE MAGAZINE
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A P AT H TO
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When Matthias Gromeier modified the poliovirus, he helped bolster the idea that a better way to treat cancer may be through immunotherapy. By Barry Yeoman, Photography by Alex Boerner
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T
he honor of pressing the button fell to Matthias Gromeier. The button activated a pump that was connected to a syringe containing a genetically modified form of poliovirus, infused in a liquid. Once Gromeier initiated the process, the infusion would travel through a long plastic tube and into a small hole drilled into twenty-one-year-old Stephanie Lipscomb’s skull. It would take six-and-a-half hours for the entire virus to reach its target: a large brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, that had outmuscled chemotherapy and radiation and was threatening to kill the South Carolina woman. No one watching the process at Duke’s Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit knew whether the treatment would help destroy Lipscomb’s tumor. It had never been tried on a human patient before. Gromeier, a professor of neurosurgery, felt confident that, at minimum, the virus would cause no harm: He had engineered it himself, as a postdoc in the 1990s, altering the structure so it couldn’t cause the paralyzing disease poliomyelitis. He had spent years convincing the federal government that human trials would be safe. “We just didn’t know what to expect in terms of ‘Could it help her?’ ” he says. Later, as the infusion ended, Gromeier stood at the foot of Lipscomb’s bed. He was joined by Annick Desjardins, an associate professor of neurosurgery, who at the time was running the clinical trial. “I was scared,” Desjardins says of Lipscomb’s decision to become Patient No. 1. “I was excited to be able to offer her a new trial. But at the same time, it would have been so much easier to offer her something that we had already used. We were both going into the unknown.” There was so much unknown in May 2012. No one knew the correct dose to give or what to expect after the treatment. They didn’t even know how the modified poliovirus might attack a tumor. It would take another five years for Gromeier and his colleagues to publish a journal article explaining the biological mechanism, and an additional year for the clinical trials to expand beyond Duke. A quarter-century after Gromeier first re-engineered the poliovirus—after enduring skeptical colleagues, fearful regulators, and research breakthroughs followed by 34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
setbacks—cancer experts are now paying close attention to his work. “It’s a very bold approach,” says Stephen J. Russell, a professor of molecular medicine at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic College of Medicine & Science, who describes Gromeier as “a strong, innovative scientist with great depth.” Russell says it’s too soon to know whether the research will lead to an effective next-generation cancer treatment. Still, he says, “I’m watching with interest.” Some of those directly involved in the research, while acknowledging how much work remains, are nonetheless speaking with a heady optimism. “Even for somebody who is very seasoned like myself, I have never been as excited as I am about this strategy and this therapy,” says Mitchel Berger, director of the Brain Tumor Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, one of the new clinical-trial sites. (Berger is also a scientific adviser to Istari Oncology, a private research start-up cofounded by Gromeier.) “The data that’s come out so far—it’s just extraordinarily impressive. I can’t imagine it not making a huge impact in this field.”
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romeier is a soft-spoken fifty-two-year-old with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard and enormous blue eyes. Originally from Germany, he earned his medical degree from the University of Hamburg, but already knew he didn’t want to treat patients. Earlier, during his compulsory military service, Gromeier had worked at a large breast-cancer center. “Breast cancer, back then especially, was a losing battle,” he says. “It wouldn’t fulfill my life to prescribe chemotherapy so patients suffered and it didn’t work.” If he wanted to make a difference, he decided, he needed to go into research.
“This was made for very nerdy basic research— curiosity, let’s see what happens, G that kind of thing.”
and how to fight it. Sometimes for reHe originally wanted to study HIV. searchers, if you’re very, very well read, It was the late 1980s, before protease very exposed to current opinion, it can inhibitors were saving lives, and the mean that you’re biased and have a disease was still considered a death closed mind.” sentence. But Gromeier couldn’t find a Gromeier’s early thinking focused on physician with an HIV lab who would what he now calls a “simple paradigm”: welcome him as a student. “The only the ability of his modified poliovirus lab that would take me was a tired, not to infect and kill tumor cells. “That’s very successful polio lab,” he says. relatively rare,” he says. “Viruses have After medical school, Gromeier came evolved over millennia to do certain to the United States for a postdoctoral things, and killing tumors is not generfellowship at New York’s Stony Brook ally part of their natural program.” University. There he studied with Eckard Wimmer, one of the world’s leadWhile the virus does kill tumor cells, ing virologists and a polio specialist. this turned out to be an oversimplified Gromeier spent much of the 1990s version of how it attacks cancer. “I was studying polio pathogenesis—that is, very naïve,” he says. how the virus causes the infectious disease associated with iron lungs and romeier came to Duke in 1999, Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Polio was nearly eradicated by a vaccine developed in drawn in large part by the strength the 1950s, but still exists in a handful of its brain-tumor research. He had of developing countries.) always seen brain cancer as a prospective Around 1993, while at Stony Brook, target for his work. “Poliovirus is the Gromeier engineered the virus he’d latvirus that’s most capable of causing the er use in the Duke cancer trials, swapmost damage in the brain,” he says. It ping out a critical part of the structure invades the central nervous system and with the equivalent part of the human can paralyze the muscles we need to rhinovirus, which causes the common walk, swallow, and even breathe. “It may cold. “This was made for very nerdy sound counterintuitive,” he says, “but I basic research—curiosity, let’s see what saw this as a sign that it might be a good happens, that kind of thing,” he says. It agent to be used in the brain.” wasn’t until he began testing it on ani“Counterintuitive” was an undermals—first mice, and later monkeys— statement. To some experts, it was outrageous. “Early on, when we first heard that he understood the importance of about it, it was ‘What the hell?’ ” says his recombined virus. It had lost the Mayo Clinic’s Russell. Even local colability to cause poliomyelitis, which leagues were skeptical. “I thought this had implications for understanding was nuts,” says Henry Friedman, deputy how it and other viruses work, and director of Duke’s Preston Robert Tisch how the brain responds to them. Brain Tumor Center. “A virus, however Gromeier also studied receptors, modified, that produces motor-neuron proteins on the surface of cells that viruses evolve to recognize. (Think of a attack and paralysis—it was one of the lock-and-key system: If a virus matches real plagues of mankind, and I just didn’t the receptor, it can enter the cell.) It understand how one could exploit it.” RESEARCHER: Gromeier in the lab; left, turns out that the poliovirus binds to a Given the horror of poliomyelitis, the the People article about the treatment. receptor called CD155, which is found U.S. Food and Drug Administration on many solid tumor cells. Through a would need some serious convincing succession of experiments, starting in the mid-’90s, Groto allow the virus to be tested in humans. “They were so meier concluded that the modified poliovirus could poafraid that there was going to be toxicity,” says Darell Bigtentially target cancer. It helped, he believes, that he was ner, director emeritus of the Tisch Brain Tumor Center. not a cancer expert. “They were afraid, at the simplest level, that it was going to “This was an ignorance-is-bliss type situation,” he says. lose its genetic stability and revert to a wild-type poliovirus “I didn’t have preconceived notions of what cancer was and cause poliomyelitis. And they were also afraid that the DUKE MAGAZINE
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“If you come to the FDA with something outrageous, they give you an impossible list of tasks to do. And they did that to me.”
mutations might cause some very new, horrible type of virus, causing diseases we’ve never seen before.” Before the FDA would approve human clinical trials, it required researchers to inject the virus into the brains of thirty-nine macaques. (This was done at an outside contractor’s lab.) What’s more, the federal agency required Gromeier to explain the mechanism that assured the virus’ safety in human subjects. “If you come to the FDA with something outrageous, they give you an impossible list of tasks to do,” Gromeier says. “And they did that to me.” All told, it took almost a decade of work before the FDA approved human trials. This is not unusual in the history of medicine, Gromeier notes. “People are reluctant to embrace something that’s not yet standard practice,” he says. “And what we did was daring; there’s no way around it. It’s important in science to not just do those things that everyone feels are safe. You have to push the envelope.” Gromeier invokes one of his heroes, Albert Sabin, whose oral polio vaccine helped bring about a global near-eradication. “He faced terrible opposition to his idea because he wanted to give live poliovirus to children,” Gromeier says. “He had to do his clinical work in the Soviet Union 36 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
because he couldn’t do it in the United States. And see how that all ended up?” FDA green-lighted the first clinical safety trial in 2011. The authorization cleared a tremendous obstacle. But that didn’t guarantee Gromeier and his colleagues a straightline path.
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ven before she became Patient No. 1, Stephanie Lipscomb knew she wanted to be a pediatric oncology nurse. A student at University of South Carolina Upstate, from a religious family, she had chosen her career after babysitting a sick child, according to a profile in People magazine. It seemed unlikely she’d achieve her goal: In April 2012, ten months after undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, Lipscomb had a seizure that signaled the
return of her tumor. Most patients with recurrent glioblastoma live for less than a year after it returns. Offered the chance for the experimental treatment, she showed little hesitation, recalls Desjardins, the neuro-oncologist who had treated Lipscomb’s cancer and would later run the clinical trial. “She said, ‘Yes, absolutely. This is my job. I always wanted to bring new therapies and help other people that live with cancer, and I’m doing it.’ ” Not everyone was so enthusiastic. “Wait a minute,” Desjardins recalls Lipscomb’s mother saying. She was old enough to grasp the fearsome potential of poliomyelitis and worried that her daughter didn’t understand the experimental treatment. Lipscomb did understand, and wanted to proceed. Gromeier expected to be anxious when the infusion started. “But I wasn’t,” he says. “It was a calm moment.” He credits the patient, who displayed no visible anxiety. “She had such poise,” he says. “She was funny even.” When Lipscomb returned for a checkup two months later, the seizures had disappeared and she felt better. On her MRI, though, the tumor looked larger. “In cancer, anything larger is bad,” says Desjardins. “Dr. Gromeier came and looked at the MRI with me, and he said, ‘This is exactly what we see in animals. We just need to sit on it and wait.’” At six months, Gromeier says, “I thought her MRI looked horrible.” (He is quick to add, “I am not an expert on reading MRIs.”) He deferred to Desjardins’ wisdom, and this time it was her turn to reassure. “She described to me some features on the MRI that she said she was encouraged by,” he says “And Dr. Desjardins was right.”
TEAM: Opposite page, graduate student Ross Walton confers with Gromeier; left, associate professor of neurosurgery Annick Desjardins, in white coat, ran the poliovirus clinical trial and Smita Nair, right, a professor of surgery, teamed up with Gromeier to explore the science in mice; above, Gromeier at work in his office and later, right, back in the lab.
After that the tumor shrank, and today Lipscomb remains in remission. She was married in March and works as a registered nurse, according to her wedding announcement. The Duke team had a number of impressive outcomes like Lipscomb’s. By that point, Gromeier was coming to understand that poliovirus does more than kill cancer cells directly. It also stimulates an immune response, directing the body’s own immune system to destroy the tumor. “It looked like it might be a home run in the field of oncology,” says Mayo Clinic’s Russell, who heard Gromeier speak at a 2013 cancer conference in Quebec City. “It felt like a dream come true.” Then came the setbacks. Some patients, says Desjardins, had tumors that were growing too fast for an activated immune system to make a difference. In others, the virus triggered too much immune response for the patient to tolerate. A sixty-year-old social worker named Donna Clegg was treated with a dose three times stronger than Lipscomb’s. She then experienced inflammation that put pressure on her brain. (“The brain is limited in ability to expand by this enclosed bone box that is the skull,” Desjardins explains.) Clegg became partially paralyzed, decided to withdraw care, and died in 2015. Raising the dose had backfired. That’s not how cancer treatments usually work. “In cancer, there is a very old, ingrained culture: You want to push the dose as high as you can,” Gromeier says. “Just look at how we use chemo: We basically say, ‘How much can we give the patient before DUKE MAGAZINE
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killing him or her?’ and we stay a little bit under that.” But with the immune system, more is not necessarily better. “Often, you get a worse response,” Gromeier says. Recognizing this, the Duke researchers scaled back the dose. Different patients offered different lessons. Brendan Steele, an IT manager in his thirties, suffered and survived a brain hemorrhage when his catheter was being removed, leading researchers to suspect that he didn’t receive much of the virus. Seven months later, his tumor returned. “We gave him one dose of chemotherapy and—bing!—the tumor broke down and almost completely disappeared,” says Desjardins. “That’s really, really rare.” Gromeier speculates that a single dose of chemo (as opposed to a full course) might have triggered an “immunological reset.” Chemotherapies used for brain cancer deplete the body of the white blood cells called lymphocytes, some of which help fight cancer and some of which suppress the body’s immune response. “You could imagine that by wiping out everything, you allow the more desirable anti-tumor lymphocytes space to grow,” he says. In 2016, Desjardins gave an update, in the form of a poster presentation, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago. She reported that 23.3 percent of the modified-poliovirus recipients were alive after two years, compared to 13.7 percent of a similar group of brain-cancer patients treated conventionally at Duke. There’s considerable more testing to come before the FDA grants its approval for clinical use. But that same year, the agency promised to expedite development, based on the initial results, when it designated the poliovirus treatment a “breakthrough therapy.”
“When we started out,
“E
arly on, my comfort zone was the fact that the virus was great at killing tumor cells,” Gromeier says. “But that’s not the whole story.” As it became evident that his re-engineered virus activated the immune system, he set out to understand how. Immunotherapy—helping the body’s
38 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
own immune system fight disease— has become one of the hottest topics in cancer research, and Gromeier believed his new therapy might be relevant to the conversation. He teamed up with Smita Nair, a professor of surgery at Duke, and an expert in how immune cells help our bodies survive infection or cancer. The two had met in 2013 through mutual colleagues. Together, they worked both with human cells and with mice that had been genetically engineered with the human CD155 receptor. We humans have two categories of immune cells. “Innate immune cells” are the first responders; they rush to the scene of an injury or infection, within hours, to assess the damage and take quick action. Based on the signals they receive, they then signal the next line of defense: “adaptive immune cells.” (One well-known type of adaptive cell is the T-cell.) Once adaptive cells respond to an abnormality, they create a memory, so they can return if it recurs. What Nair and Gromeier figured out is that, when the poliovirus uses the CD155 receptor to enter and kill a tumor, the cancer cells release proteins called antigens. The killing of the tumor signals the innate cells to travel to the tumor site, where the innate cells recognize that there’s something both abnormal and dangerous going on. They
CONVICTION: Gromeier believes immunotherapy is the only hope to make meaningful progress against cancer.
then present the antigens to the T-cells. “The T-cells realize, ‘These antigens are not part of the body. This is something wrong,’ ” Nair says. The T-cells go on the attack, seeking out and annihilating the cancer cells. But there’s more: CD155 receptors are also found on two types of innate immune cells, dendritic cells and macrophages. Gromeier knew this already, because a friend of his had discovered it two decades early. Until then, he says, “I thought it was a sideshow.” But it turned out to be key to poliovirus’ potential value as an anti-cancer therapy. The CD155 receptor, he and Nair learned, allows the virus to enter and activate the innate cells. Dendritic cells activated in this manner become fully capable of presenting antigens to T-cells. “We were not anticipating that,” Nair says. “Research always takes you down a path, and you follow your path.” When they saw that poliovirus directly infected immune cells, “that’s when everything started coming together and we had a proper story,” Nair says. The team published the findings in September 2017 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
and Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida. After this trial, it will take a larger multi-institutional study for the treatment to win FDA approval. Bigner expects that trial to take place in both the United States and Europe. William Curry, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General and the principal investigator at that site, notes that the polio research is part of a larger effort to attack cancer with viruses. For example, a modified herpes virus is now being used to treat advanced melanoma. The early poliovirus data, he says, offer him “genuine enthusiasm” about the approach. “There’s nothing out there that, by itself, is going to be a cure for all patients with glioblastoma,” Curry says. “There are some [Duke] patients that responded, and many that don’t have a really durable response. But any advance that we can make, therapeutically, in a patient with a recurrent glioblastoma—I haven’t really seen that ever happen in this disease in my career.” For Gromeier, this moment represents a convergence of his own career and one of the most promising cancer-research trends. “When we started out, we were in Neverland,” he says. “And as we moved forward, we coalesced with what the cancer immunotherapy field wants. That’s very important in science, because you can’t just pigheadedly stick with what you invented. In our case, we were adopted by this much bigger field.” During his first decade at Duke, Gromeier incrementally began thinking of himself less as a virologist and more as a cancer researcher. “Now I’m in the midst of a second transition,” he says, “from cancer to immunotherapy and immunology.” He’s not anticipating a third transition. “Pigeonholing is extreme in science,” he says. “You’re supposed to do what you know best and stick to your guns.” Given the funding environment, which rewards specialization, Gromeier plans to continue on his current course until he retires. “It is my personal conviction that the only hope to obtain meaningful, dramatic progress against cancer will be through immunotherapy,” he says. “There’s no alternative.” If his work eventually leads to a game-changing FDA-approved cancer treatment, that will still be many years in the future. Gromeier doesn’t mind the wait. “This is how things work: incredibly slowly, and you need to have this long horizon if you want to make a dent,” he says. “If you’re interested in cancer, you better make that a lifelong commitment.” n
we were in Neverland.”
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ith the safety phase completed, and breakthrough status from the FDA, the pace of clinical trials has now notched up. In 2016, to attract outside investors and facilitate commercial development, Gromeier and Bigner cofounded the private firm Istari Oncology. Duke’s Desjardins (now a co-investigator) and Friedman, along with Berger from the University of California, San Francisco, all have stakes in the company. “We stand to gain financially from the success of this intervention,” notes Friedman, the chief medical officer. The profit-making end makes Gromeier uncomfortable. “I’m being shielded from a lot of this,” he says. “I’m involved with Istari but do not go to meetings typically. They very much like to have scientists do science and business-minded folks do business-type things.” Meanwhile, Duke has launched a safety trial for children with recurrent brain tumors. Scientists are also looking at other types of cancers for which the treatment might be effective, including breast cancer and melanoma. And work has begun on a multi-institutional brain-cancer trial that will measure survival after two years. Half the sixty-two patients will receive the modified poliovirus alone, and the other half will receive the virus plus a single dose of chemotherapy. The other sites are Massachusetts General Hospital; the University of California, San Francisco;
Yeoman is a freelance journalist living in Durham. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, Popular Science, and National Wildlife, among other publications. DUKE MAGAZINE
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What It Takes to be a
Winner Eight was a big number for Duke this past academic
year. It’s the unusually hefty count of student recipients of postgraduate international fellowships. Here those students reflect on undergraduate experiences, from working to contain a tropical disease to researching the history of the book, that were particularly meaningful for them—and that helped propel them to standout status. Edited by Robert J. Bliwise Photography by Chris Hildreth
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n my sophomore spring, I spontaneously signed up for an “Archives Alive” course titled “History of the Book.” I worked with an eighteenth-century manuscript in the Rubenstein Library and pieced together the stories of those who had owned it through the years. The comprehensive nature of this kind of “detective work” got me hooked on archival research, and I began my own independent research of similar manuscripts. When it came time for me to propose a senior thesis, the Rubenstein allowed me to combine my passion for classics with my newfound love of the archives: My thesis traces the development of papyrology in the U.S., and the Rubenstein houses the records of the American Society of Papyrologists, along with the papers of esteemed historian Michael Rostovtzeff, who worked extensively with papyri. I credit my experiences with archival research for not only training me as a researcher but also for giving me a visceral reminder of the human element of history. -Gabi Stewart, Rhodes Scholar
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ollecting oral histories through my senior thesis has been the perfect culmination of my four years at Duke. As an ROTC cadet and council member of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy, I’ve studied the military’s role in foreign affairs. But after learning that the single greatest indicator of a state’s peacefulness is how its women are treated, I wanted to know why women’s empowerment wasn’t the most important consideration in our conflict-resolution efforts. I was also curious about the positive impact women are having in regions of conflict. I identified three countries in three different states of conflict: Afghanistan was my in-conflict case; Israel, my conflict-ridden civil society case; and Rwanda, my post-conflict case. My goal was to capture women’s stories in their most honest form and to celebrate some of their accomplishments that have gone largely unrecognized. I heard stories of women in Afghanistan, for example, defending their schools against terrorist groups. Those oral histories opened my eyes to my own capacity to influence positive change as a leader. -Amy Kramer,
Schwarzman Scholar
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he Baldwin Scholars Program taught me to abandon the idea of being a “good girl” and comfortably own the idea of being a confident, bold woman. Everything I had done before Duke had been to fulfill my role as perfect daughter to immigrant parents who, hoping to offer me the world, had sacrificed their own goals. I couldn’t afford to take risks if it meant not following the course charted out for me. But Baldwin mentors and peers taught me about indifference to healthy sexual relationships and left me determined to create a Sexual Health Resource Center on campus. Following Baldwin conversations around independence, I worked with a team in Ethiopia, through DukeEngage, to understand what secondary schools needed from their sexual-health curriculum materials. My goal was to provide a new, culturally appropriate curriculum, even as I struggled with wanting to include themes that—in a country where homosexuality is illegal—weren’t culturally accepted. -Riyanka Ganguly, Schwarzman Scholar
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he director of the Program in American Grand Strategy, Peter Feaver, stresses that college is important for the relationships we forge and the initiative we take. As a sophomore, I found myself organizing the AGS staff ride to Grenada—a deep dive into the 1983 U.S. intervention on the island. I played the role of Captain (today General) John Abizaid, who was among the first paratroopers deployed in the assault. I not only had to outline the key details relevant to my character’s experience; I also had to defend his decisions on the ground, whether right or wrong. Abizaid’s push to lead his company on an immediate offensive northward seemed foolhardy at the time. But that decision ended up saving many American lives by destroying the Cuban anti-aircraft guns. In the classroom, it’s easy to condemn mistakes or celebrate heroism. During the staff ride, I learned a different form of analysis—examining the root causes of decision-making and inhabiting the perspective of a leader who has to make difficult judgment calls with imprecise information. -Aron Rimanyi, Schwarzman Scholar DUKE MAGAZINE
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hat most inspired me at Duke wasn’t the Gothic stone but rather the workers who, every graveyard shift, cooked and cleaned. In my four years there, I made so many lasting friendships: McDonald’s staff who invited me to family quinceañeras; bus drivers who taught me “You don’t know where you’re going, until you know where you’ve been”; housekeepers who talked with me, over 5 a.m. coffee, about organizing strategies for unions. While I am indebted beyond measure to the countless faculty who have mentored me, I emphasize the staff, because they, overwhelmingly Latinx and African American, reminded me where I came from. This community taught me to fine-tune my advocacy, to be a better leader. In them, I saw my father, returning from work with his waiter’s vest every night, with a commitment to provide for his family. Every time I ordered a McCafe, I saw my parents’ generation, laying the foundation for their children behind kitchen fumes and industrial-strength sprays. It was with their struggle in mind that being president of La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity Inc., was so rewarding. Our small cadre organized LARP (Latino/a Access to Higher Education Recruitment Program), a four-day, annual school trip for sixth-toeighth-graders to visit and experience our university. We do this work because we hold steadfast to the belief that when they see us here, they can see themselves here, too. -Antonio Lopez ’16, Marshall
Scholar
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n the spring of my sophomore year, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Douglas Campbell, who encouraged me to pursue a graduate certificate in Duke Divinity School’s Prison Studies Program. I then took a course in which, alongside inmates at Butner Federal Prison, we examined the modern applications of Gandhi’s teachings. My final paper explored the manifestation of Gandhi’s notion of ahimsa—the principle of dynamic, indomitable nonviolence toward all living things—as it plays out in restorative justice. The most interesting exchange I had all semester occurred after our first class. I struck up a conversation with an older inmate who had committed a slew of armed robberies as a young man; his past forty-one years had been spent in prison. Long ago, he said, he had outgrown his penchant for crime, and he had much to offer society. It was a revelation to see the shortcomings of our criminal-justice system through the eyes of men captured in its grip. -Jackson Skeen, Mitchell Scholar
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ne day, I happened to watch a video on schistosomiasis, the deadliest of what the World Health Organization classifies as “neglected tropical diseases” (NTDs). I wanted to learn more. I scraped together money from a few grants to fund a summer working on a public-health control program for schistosomiasis in Tanzania. I recall speaking with one old man in particular. He had grown up in the area and once hoped to send his two little girls to college. He could not afford to pay their primary-school fees; his disability from chronic schistosomiasis infection had robbed him of his wage-earning capacity. In him, I saw glimmers of my own grandparents, who had once lived in a rural farming village in China. I came to realize that while NTDs don’t kill people, they kill hopes and dreams. I’ve also done mathematical modeling around NTDs. That’s revealed to me that simply treating individuals with NTDs is insufficient: People become re-infected. Preventive vaccines need to be developed, and my hope is to make that my life’s work. -John Lu, Marshall Scholar
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hrough Program II, Duke’s design-your-own curriculum, I’ve been able to tackle a core question: What does brain function or dysfunction tell us about ourselves? I sliced through both human and animal brain tissue to find the anatomical structures that allow us to move, think, and feel. Program II also led me to Oxford, where I lived above a bagel and ice-cream café in the heart of the city. I spent the days conducting empirical neuroethics research and meeting academic stars, while spending the evenings running in Oxford’s cow- and duck-friendly meadows. Just this past year, I ran my own qualitative study in Kathmandu, interviewing more than fifty doctors and medical students to investigate their thoughts on mental health. As I write my thesis, I draw from epidemiology, anthropology, neuroscience, ethics, global health, and more to flesh out an understanding of phenomena like stigma and social suffering. I find myself returning to the conflicts between free will and determinism, global and local cultures, theory and practice. I’ve gained so much knowledge while working in diverse academic and physical spaces; yet I’m left with these aching, fundamental ponderings on self, subjectivity, and humanity. -Meghana Vagwala, Marshall Scholar
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ForeverDuke
FDCONNECTIONS
Beauty contest Alumna Cara Robinson is working to keep prestige brand Clinique relevant in a millennial-driven market.
BY STACY PERMAN • PHOTOGRAPHY BY YUNGHI KIM
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Other Duke alumni in the beauty business include
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rriving at Clinique’s sleek offices, headquartered in the General Motors building towering above Fifth Avenue in New York City, visitors could be forgiven for thinking they’d stepped inside some high-tech, space-age lab. The sleek offices are high-gloss modern, bathed in surgery theater lighting. It’s here that Cara Robinson M.B.A. ’98, vice president of global marketing, makeup, and fragrance for Clinique, directs strategy for the quintessential beauty brand. Her office is loaded with products notable for their familiar, simple, clean packaging and those opaque bottles filled with pastel-toned miracle workers. The walls, however, are adorned with several mementos and images. In one, the words “If Ruth Bader Ginsburg can show up every day, you can too!” are emblazoned alongside the eighty-four-year-old Supreme Court justice. That photo shares space with baseball legend Jackie Robinson in the iconic “Think Different” Apple Computer campaign. She calls them “great subliminal daily reminders that keep me inspired.” As Clinique’s marketing sage, Robinson oversees one of the cosmetic sector’s biggest prestige players at a time when the industry is in the midst of fundamental change. Consumers, who once made their beauty findings at their local department-store counters, are now discovering indie brands on social media and through beauty influencers—and increasingly buying them online or at cutting-edge multi-brand retailers like Sephora and Ulta. Now after fifty years of counter dominance, Clinique, one of the stars in beauty conglomerate EsPOSEY: tée Lauder’s galaxy of marques, finds itself in Robinson, the position of having to introduce itself to a with images new generation while re-acquainting itself to of the iconic its longtime beauty consumers. And for Robbrand inson, who started at Clinique four years ago,
Tarang Amin ’87, M.B.A. ’91, chair and CEO of e.l.f. Cosmetics DUKE MAGAZINE
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ForeverDuke that means “humanizing an iconic brand.” It all began in 1967 when Estée Lauder happened to read an article in Vogue that asked: “Can Great Skin Be Created?” Featuring Norman Orentreich, then dermatologist to the stars, the piece turned conventional wisdom about skincare on its head: One didn’t have to hit the genetic lottery to have a lovely complexion. Lauder, who launched her eponymous brand in 1946, joined with Orentreich and Carol Phillips, Vogue’s beauty editor, to create Clinique. A year later, the brand debuted with its now famous 3-Step Skin Care System. Clinique differentiated itself from the outset. For one, its dermatologist-guided program was the first that was both allergy-tested and fragrance-free. Clinique not only revolutionized skincare and cosmetics (it was the first beauty brand to make sunscreen a daily part of skincare regime)—but how they were sold, too. It was Clinique that popularized the Gift with Purchase (GwP), providing generous vials of its Dramatically Different Moisturizer, blushes, and lipsticks in snazzy reusable travel bags. The product of a brilliant marketing strategy, GwPs introduced new users to the brand and longtime customers to
sen, beauty analyst at NPD Group, “you have a lot more history tied to what you’ve always done. Consumers are not as concerned with brand or their legacies as they are excited about discovery and trying new.” So, where does that leave a heritage brand like Clinique? “We were founded on the promise that great skin can be created,” says Robinson. “We still exist to ultimately create great skin. What will change is how we communicate with our consumer and our tone of voice with her—more relevant, engaging, and modern.” One of Clinique’s greatest assets, in Robinson’s view, is the authority and trustworthiness it has built with its consumers over decades. “I think a lot of brands are chasing the millennial consumer, and we do want to service that consumer as well,” she says. “But I think we also want to be true to who we are and who our core target really is.” Robinson is hardly daunted about the prospect of finding that sweet spot of being attractive to a broad
“Millennials and younger consumers are not necessarily getting their information from their mother. If anything, they are informing their moms about what is new and what’s different.”
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new products. It wasn’t long before Clinique expanded its offerings to include cosmetics, fragrance, and a men’s line. Legions of teens, their mothers by their sides, have been introduced to the concept of skincare at a Clinique counter. Numerous women remember Clinique Happy as their first fragrance and Black Honey, their first serious lipstick shade. And there’s the rub. Over time, Clinique in consumers’ minds has come to be viewed as either a starter brand or your mother’s brand. And that for Robinson, is both a blessing and a curse. “We don’t suffer from brand-awareness issues,” she says. “I think where we have some challenges is being part of the current consideration and really being perceived as relevant.” As she notes, “Millennials and younger consumers are not necessarily getting their information from their mother. If anything, they are informing their moms about what is new and what’s different.” Take Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics. Largely fueled by Instagram and a massive hit with young customers, according to WWD, the brand hit $420 million in sales in just eighteen months—a revenue metric most cosmetic companies took years to achieve. “Broadly speaking, with a heritage brand,” says Larissa Jen-
customer base and a focused one. After all, she forged a rather unconventional path to the world of marketing in general—and Clinique in particular. A native of Washington, D.C., Robinson earned her bachelor of arts degree, majoring in Spanish language and culture, from the University of Virginia. She then spent a year teaching English as a second language in Puerto Rico. Along the way, she came to the realization that she wanted to shift gears and become a business leader. That meant getting an M.B.A. During her first year at Fuqua, Robinson met Ann Fudge, then president and general manager at Kraft Foods, a moment that helped set her own trajectory. Fudge came to Fuqua as part of the Distinguished Speakers series and, says Robinson, “it was the first time I’d seen and interacted with an African-American woman in business who was at such a senior level. Her speech was dynamic and authentic and, in that moment, I’d decided I wanted to intern at her company and that I also wanted to become an executive fellow.” Robinson achieved both goals. After graduating from Fuqua, Robinson returned to Kraft,
Bridgette Howard ’08, founder and managing partner at Parlor West Ventures, an incubator for early-stage beauty brand
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research, advertising and communicating how to establish a brand with zero awareness into consumers’ minds.” Indeed, in some ways, the situation with Clinique is similar to the one she found at Maxwell House, as upstart Starbucks was on the rise. “That was taking a venerable brand and figuring out how to make it relevant.” Beyond that, “there is really a challenge from consumers about traditional Western ideals of beauty.” Unlike most beauty brands, Clinique has never been driven by celebrity. To that end, Robinson has been focusing on reinforcing Clinique’s message with its consumers about authenticity and trustworthiness. “What we’re doing is really going back to our roots in terms of the voice and how we speak to consumers.” Today’s consumers are exceptionally savvy but also wary when it comes to inauthentic products or histories, she says. “I think our challenge, something that we’re trying to figure out, is how do you capture the magic of our visual identity and that voice and that authenticity in a way that is compelling and relevant today. It’s an ongoing challenge.” Clinique has shifted away from traditional deTABLE TALK: Robinson and her staff discuss partment-store counters to ways to reinforce Clinique’s message. multi-stores like Sephora build the brand. Robinson worked on its and Ulta in the U.S., collab“What’s in your wallet?” campaign. After orated with Google and Facebook, and launched a series of Youthree years, she concluded that the financial-services industry Tube tutorials. Still, Robinson says it’s important for Clinique wasn’t all that interesting. She jumped at the opportunity to to be true to its venerable history. “We want to do things the return to New York and move over to the beauty sector. Clinique way, versus the way everyone else does it.” n While coffee and banking wouldn’t seem the prerequisites to steer a beauty brand into the twenty-first century, Robinson Perman is a journalist and author of three books, most recently, says one of the main things she took from her time at Fuqua A Grand Complication: The Race to Build the World’s Most was the ability to be a collaborative and conscientious leader. And, at Kraft, she honed her abilities to “focus on market Legendary Watch.
Erin Schaffner M.B.A. ’05, vice president of finance, Luxury Division at L'Oréal USA Inc.
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working on the Maxwell House coffee rebrand. In 2000, she headed back to D.C., landing at Capital One. The bank, then just seven years old and with little national name recognition, was mostly known for its balance transfers and was looking to
Jennifer Goldfarb ’97, cofounder and president at ipsy, a beauty subscription service DUKE MAGAZINE
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ForeverDuke Newsmakers
Tom Catena M.D. ’92, who was recently awarded the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, is the subject of a new documentary, The Heart of Nuba, which chronicles his story as the only doctor in war-torn Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. Duke Sports Information
Gretchen Shappert ’77 was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the U.S. Virgin Islands.
asbarez.com
Former Duke basketball player and WNBA veteran Lindsey Harding ’07 was selected to be a part of Michelle Obama’s fifth annual College Signing Day event, which celebrates a commitment to higher education.
Martin Kratt ’89 has brought his popular PBS Kids’ nature TV series, Wild Kratts, to the stage with Wild Kratts Live, playing across the country.
Raphael Obonyo M.P.P. ’13 was named the 2017 Leader of the Year by African Youth Awards, the most coveted honor for African youth.
Grant Hill ’94 and Charles “Lefty” Driesell ’54 became the first individual Duke players to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Tim Carroll Ph.D. ’02 was named the new dean of the University of the Pacific Eberhardt School of Business.
movie web
Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Claude Tellis ’95 and Kareem Cook ’94, M.B.A. ’00, the co-owners of health-products provider Naturade, are combating the diabetes epidemic in black communities.
wikipedia
Former Duke swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar ’86 has established a reputation as the leading lawyer and champion for young athletes filing sexual-abuse lawsuits in the age of #MeToo. 50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
naturade.com
Actress Annabeth Gish ’93 joined the cast of an upcoming drama about the Charles Manson murder trial, Charlie Says.
Nick Jiang M.B.A. ’14 founded Birdnest, a new company that pairs startups with workspaces in unused offices and restaurants at an affordable price.
Christine Schindler B.S.E. ’15 and Dutch Waanders B.S.E. ’15 have created a new sanitation technology called PathSpot that quickly scans hands to detect pathogens that cause foodborne illness.
Amanda Blumenherst ’09, former Duke golfer and three-time National Player of the Year, is the co-host of Shotmakers, a new show on the Golf Channel.
7Have news to share
about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.
Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, traveled to Asia and remembers .....
This beautiful fan is my reminder of the whirlwind trip to Asia I
recently took with President Price. In ten days we visited Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore! At that pace, it was tough to take in much of the region’s culture, but I did get to embrace a new facet of Duke’s culture. Duke’s culture now includes 4,800 alumni across Asia. It shows up on the campus of Duke Kunshan University, which just admitted 251 students to its first undergraduate class. It’s alive at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. And it thrives with the new Duke India office. In those ten days, we celebrated our global community and connected with alumni as passionate as those in North America. When we find those connections even 7,000 miles from Durham, we make “Forever Duke” feel broader and deeper. n
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ForeverDuke A scary proposition
With Crypt TV, Jack Davis wants to help create the next class of monsters.
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ure, Jack Davis ’14 has seen and enjoyed Scream and Final Destination, those signature modern-day horror-film classics. Yet it wasn’t so much a love for the genre that led him to cofound Crypt TV. “My interest is in how tech and media intersect,” he says. Davis points out that his sister, six years younger, doesn’t go to movie theaters at all, choosing instead the screen on her personal devices. Indeed, overall, he notes, the theater audience is dwindling. People even deal with the Internet differently than they did a half-decade ago. When Davis was at Duke, those changes were just beginning to percolate. He noticed. “No one was doing scary content, no one was filling that space,” he says. The Los Angeles native had met director writer/producer Eli Roth—he’s responsible for The Hostel films—so they came together to launch the horror-media company in 2015 to reach the social and mobile generation. The company has received additional investment and support from high-powered figures Jason Blum, who runs horror studio Blumhouse (Get Out and The Purge), and Kenneth Lerer, who has invested in BuzzFeed and Mic.com. Things look promising. According to Deadline, Crypt TV has drawn an average of more than 100 million views per month across its Facebook show pages, which have more than 7.5 million total fans. Its YouTube channel has more than 575,000 subscribers. The shift in the way the films are consumed has changed the process of making them, says Davis. Storytelling still matters, he says, but crafting those stories comes with the technological benefit of data. Crypt TV creators can tell how old their viewers are, whether the story has been successfully engaging, and specifically, in what parts of the story viewership peaked. Data tell Davis that 92 percent of his audience is watching Crypt TV on smartphones. “So a powerful visual is so important. It’s not just that people could be watching something else. They could be texting, they could be on Instagram.” That’s why the company has become particularly adept at creating monsters; Davis’ oft-stated goal is that Crypt TV become the “Marvel of monsters.” To that end, he’s already had a hit with Giggles, a scary female clown character with the
worst teeth you’ll ever see and more than 370,000 Facebook followers. Besides appearing in Facebook live videos, she’s had live fan gatherings and merchandise selling in some of Spencer’s stores. Giggles’ burgeoning ubiquity is a step toward Davis’ hope that he can bring his monsters beyond the short videos and features Crypt is now producing to different formats, including virtual reality, podcasts, and long-story forms. “We want to make the next class of iconic monsters,” he says.
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—Adrienne Johnson Martin
Courtesy Jack Davis
“No one was doing scary content, no one was filling that space.”
BOO: At Crypt TV, Davis, top, aims to introduce memorable monsters like The Look-See.
MICROSCOPIC: Kinorhynchs (aka mud dragons) range in size from about 0.13 to 1 millimeter. Like other meiofauna species, they are integral parts of marine food chains in sediments throughout the world.
Maria Herranz
unlocked a whole new realm. “I think I got people interested in them, because I had broken the barrier of how to work on them,” he says. Higgins got his start with microscopic science at University of Colorado Boulder, where he took “whatever job I could get to supplement my G.I. Bill,” landing on a thirty-five-cents-an-hour gig in the moss-and-lichen herbarium. He worked with Professor Robert Pennak to study tardigrades (read: microscopic “water bears”) and soon made plans to head to Duke for similar doctoral work, selecting it from the five schools that had accepted him. “Duke seemed to be the best at the time,” Higgins says, “and it certainly turned out to the best.” The turning point came the summer before he traveled east. He was on a fellowship at the University of Washington, trying to collect kinorhynch samples for Pennak. Minimal literature existed on this process; Higgins decided to painstakingly skim the surface of a bucket of muddy water and attempt to collect these unknown creatures one by one. Higgins had never seen a kinorhynch before; it took him an hour to catch just four. But when he fumbled a piece of paper into the water and rinsed it off, Higgins realized he had snagged hundreds of them at once. In doing so, he invented a precursor to the still-used “bubble and blot” method for finding mud dragons, and he soon had an unfiltered view of that world Blake was talking about. So when Higgins arrived at Duke, his area of study had changed. “I said, ‘Well, I’m still very interested in tardigrades, but I’ve actually gotten more interested in kinorhynchs,’ ” Higgins says, of his initial conversation with C.G. Bookhout, a legendary Duke Marine Lab professor. “And basically he said, ‘I’ve never seen one of them; I don’t know anything about them, either. So...what do you need?’ ” “I designed a dredge, and he had it built,” Higgins says, “and from then on I did my thing.”
No small change
Robert Higgins discovered a new way to study microscopic creatures.
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Courtesy of Fernando Pardos
ven for Robert Higgins Ph.D. ’61, it’s a little tricky to describe kinorhynchs—and their appeal—to a broad audience. For decades he studied these meiofauna, marine, microscopic “mud dragons” that live not among but between grains of sediment, that are smaller than a period on this page yet are nevertheless essential to marine food chains. Higgins helped discover a new species of them and a new phylum (one of four new phyla described in all biology in the twentieth century). He developed and supported an international network of researchers interested in this topic; he even received an honorary doctorate at the University of Copenhagen from Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. But growing up, Higgins didn’t have DISCOVERY: In the late 1980s, Higgins, right, and Fer“a great deal of innando Pardos search for life in samples collected earlier terest in biology, in the day on the coast of Santander, Spain. Higgins travcertainly not mieled the world collecting meiofauna from their sand and croscopic things,” mud habitats. (Courtesy of Fernando Pardos) he says. So how did he end up here? Maybe the best explanation invokes the William Blake poem “Auguries of Innocence.” The poem starts, Higgins explains, with this line: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” And once Higgins figured out how to catch these creatures in bulk, he
—Lucas Hubbard
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ForeverDuke
#TheDoersProfile
As we hurtle toward a bold new world of travel—from cars that pick you up to houses that are hotels—these Blue Devil alumni are helping pave the way.
Yifang Xiong M.M.S. ’13, cofounder and CMO of EHang, a start-up that makes taxi drones that can carry humans
Jonathan Lee M.B.A. ’11, vice president, global sales and product marketing of Nor1; founder of Stay Delightful (now eDirect), which allows hoteliers to directly interact with guests
Arthur Nie M.B.A. ’15, director of platform growth and strategy at DiDi Bike, the ridesharing conglomerate
Crystal Brown ’02, director of policy initiatives at Airbnb
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Josh Cohen M.B.A. ’07, national director of policy at TransLoc (now a Ford Smart Mobility Company), which makes software for transit agencies, cities, and universities
Zachary Dunn ’05, vice president of launch at SpaceX, an aerospace company that designs, builds, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft
Stephanie Engle ’16, product designer, self-driving cars at Cruise Automation
David Imai ’01, senior manager of exterior and interior design at Tesla
Lisel Welden M.B.A. ’04, vice president of brand marketing at Lyft
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ForeverDuke
THENNOW
Retro
“I’m glad to be a librarian at this time, in an era where knowledge is everywhere and is so usable but needs to be examined and investigated in order to serve us all best.” —Mea Warren ’13, on the pleasures of her work
“I like to think that the work we do, I know it does—it makes a difference.” —Judy Woodruff ’68, in an interview with her friend and fellow journalist Andrea Mitchell
“…I do believe that Facebook is best equipped to build the tools and the controls necessary for Facebook to be a safe environment [for] people to use.” —Soleio Cuervo ’03, on FaceBook’s ability to defend its platform
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A place to lay their heads
Living arrangements for freshmen have evolved with the times. | By Valerie Gillispie
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his summer, anxious freshmen prepare to see their new living quarters and meet the person they will be living with for the next nine months. Duke students arriving as freshmen today live on East Campus, which has been specifically designated as a first-year campus since the fall of 1995. But the freshman experience has varied widely since Duke became a university in 1924. Back then, men and women lived on East Campus (then the only campus). The opening of West Campus in 1930 allowed the university to create a coordinate college system; men were housed on West and graduated from Trinity College, and women were housed on East and graduated from the Woman’s College. Starting in 1930 and well into the 1960s, it was the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Asso-
ciation) or the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) who would meet the arriving freshmen and help them find their dormitories. The freshman handbook in 1930 advised students to write ahead to reserve a room, but if you hadn’t you were advised to “go to Mr. Whitford’s office in the basement of the administrative building and you will be able to get a room key and assignment there.” All students were asked to bring sheets, towels, and blankets. Rugs, curtains, and lamps were optional, but “will make the room more attractive.” Freshmen were also asked to bring a typewriter—if they had one. WELCOME: All male freshmen Gathering around were required to wear “dinks” (beanie hats) the information table during September and women to wear 1946 move-in bows, each with their
Duke University Archives
class years. Although freshmen tional (multiple class years) were not housed together as a population and provide an intellectual and social framework cohort, they were nevertheless for students. Different houses, instantly distinguishable. both selective and independent, Dormitory life for freshmen were brought together under the continued in much the same program. This new model was way up into the 1960s, by which implemented in 1971 in several time dinks and bows were a relic dormitories. However, new stuof the past. As Duke desegregated and diversified in the 1960s, dents could still elect to live in the realities of interracial life on a variety of other housing models. The federation model was a formerly segregated campus FIRST YEAR: An undated image from phased out in the 1980s. set in. The housing application a Woman’s College welcome event Other scenarios were also informs, for a brief time, included vestigated, including “clusters” questions about willingness to of dormitories and residential room with a person of another With the changing colleges. Multiple studies and race or nationality. student body, new reports were produced. With the changing student residential models, Finally, in 1994, a new report, body, new residential models, “Plan for the Enhancement of including all-freshman dorincluding all-freshman mitories, were being tested. Residential and Co-curricudormitories, lar Life,” recommended a new In 1969, the Committee for model for freshman life, with the Study of Student Residenwere being tested. tial Life, co-chaired by profesall freshmen rooming on East sors Thomas A. Langford and Campus. Noting that what Howard A. Strobel, issued a was missing from the Duke report addressing various aspects of Duke residential life, residential experience was an overall sense of community, with considerable attention given to freshman-only men’s the report’s authors stated, “The plan to house all first-year dorms. The report noted that the dorms had an “enjoystudents on East Campus emanates from the assumption able esprit de corps” as students navigated their first year that entering students, when housed together in a relatively at college. Among the downsides, though, was social strife: tranquil environment, in close proximity to faculty and an “The freshmen are isolated from the rest of the university. array of academic support services, and with opportunities They usually have great difficulty in meeting and getting to participate in small seminars, writing courses, and other dates with girls. Their initial contacts are ordinarily made in academic and co-curricular venture experiences, will flourish and grow.” somewhat artificial meetings in the girls’ dorms. There the Indeed, since 1995, freshmen have found a community freshmen have to compete with upperclassmen, a competition that they usually lose.” on East Campus. No longer are they greeted by the YMCA In conclusion, they wrote, “[i]t is true that all the freshor YWCA, but rather by professional staff, a move-in crew men are going through the same trials and share their expeof older students, and a robust orientation program. Memriences; it is conversely true that the all-freshmen house is bers of the new first-year class will not, for the first time in one of their more serious trials.” recent memory, be allowed to pre-select their roommate, Although the report did not spell the death knell for a change made to better introduce students from different all-freshman dormitories, experimentation continued with backgrounds to one another. And so the story of freshman other residential models. The merging of the Woman’s Collife will continue, but the anticipation and excitement of lege into Trinity College offered new opportunities for cobeginning the Duke journey will never change. n educational living arrangements. Based on the 1969 report, Gillispie is the university’s archivist. “federations” were developed; they would have a cross-sec-
DUKE MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2018
57
ForeverDuke In Memoriam
1930s
Sara Berenson Stone ’35 of New Orleans, on Feb. 3, 2018. Henry A. Ferris ’39 of Rohrersville, Md., on Feb. 7, 2018. Ewart G. Watts Div. ’39 of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 3, 2017.
More Duke memories online Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at
alumni.duke.edu
1940s
Adele Lavington Riley ’40 of Corte Madera, Calif., on Jan. 20, 2018. Dorothy D. Wolcott Kennedy Raver ’41 of Riverton, N.J., on March 19, 2018. Nina Johnston Todd A.M. ’41 of Hendersonville, N.C., on Feb. 22, 2018. Corman S. Drumm ’42 of Raleigh, on Feb. 7, 2018. Cornelius W. Hunter ’43 of Kalamazoo, Mich., on March 16, 2018. Vida Selden McDonough ’43 of Lower Makefield Township, Pa., on Feb. 11, 2018. Gladys V. Rooker Phillips ’43 of Southampton, Mass., on March 3, 2018. Terrill M. Brenner ’44 of New Brunswick, N.J., on March 7, 2018. Mary F. O’Briant Flynn ’44, R.N. ’44 of Bluefield, W.V., on Jan. 28, 2018. Frances L. Lummis Lloyd ’45 of Washington, on March 23, 2018. Vilma Raskin Potter A.M. ’45 of Los Angeles, on Jan. 29, 2018. Robert H. Thompson ’45, M.D. ’47 of Brunswick, Ga., on Aug. 31, 2017. Helen I. Tierney Zavertnik B.S.N. ’45, R.N. ’45 of Miami, on Feb. 17, 2018. Judith B. Smith Mott ’46 of Stuart, Fla., on Feb. 10, 2018. Willard L. Pattridge ’46 of Tyler, Texas, on May 26, 2015. Dorothy Lewis Simpson ’46 of Seattle, on Feb. 12, 2018. Dorothy Jean Fetherston Smurthwaite ’46 of Columbia, S.C., on Feb. 25, 2018. Frank J. D’Amico ’47, A.M. ’49 of Magnolia, N.J., on Sept. 24, 2016. Bennie Harris Edwards ’47 of Blacksburg, Va., on Feb. 12, 2018. Leah V. Spicer Glickfield ’47 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Aug. 13, 2016. George R. Jarvis E ’47 of Grayslake, Ill., on Nov. 1, 2017. George C. Kiefer Jr. ’47, M.F. ’48 of Salisbury, Conn., on Feb. 10, 2018. Charles F. Peksa ’47 of Spartanburg, S.C., on Oct. 7, 2017. John L. Knoble Jr. B.S.M.E. ’48 of Bridgewater, N.J., on Feb. 19, 2018. Charles T. Ellis ’49 of Inverness, Fla., on Nov. 15, 2017. Robert L. Honeycutt Jr. ’49 of Clemson, S.C., on March 12, 2018. Tom J. Kearns Jr. ’49 of Colfax, N.C., on Feb. 19, 2018. William C. Naylor ’49 of Savannah, Ga., on Feb. 26, 2018. Enta H. Cove Olim ’49 of Memphis, Tenn., on Feb. 14, 2018. Thomas L. Proctor ’49 of Chicago, on Dec. 23, 2017.
1950s
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Betty G. Smith Clark ’50 of Chapel Hill, on Jan. 31, 2018. Clinton R. Harris ’50, Div. ’51 of Canyon Lake, Texas, on Jan. 11, 2018. Beverly Beacham Lucas B.S.N. ’50, R.N. ’50 of Atlanta, on Feb. 12, 2018. James M. Brown ’51 of Key West, Fla., on May 29, 2015. Jack H. Chambers ’51, LL.B. ’53 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 22, 2016. Ollin K. Dozier Jr. ’51 of Richmond, Va., on June 6, 2017. Charles A. Jones ’51 of Greensboro, N.C., on March 20, 2018. Harry A. Orr Jr. ’51 of Sisters, Ore., on Jan. 19, 2018. Joseph E. Orzano ’51, L ’53 of Reno, Nev., on Jan. 12, 2018. William B. Richardson III ’51 of Dallas, on Feb. 1, 2018. Samuel H. Brown ’52 of Charlotte, on March 9, 2018. Jack R. Conaway ’52 of Bradenton, Fla., on Feb. 13, 2018. Robert L. Finberg ’52 of Wall, N.J., on April 23, 2017. William R. Hanson ’52 of Walnut Creek, Calif., on March 4, 2018. Dexter W. Hess ’52, A.M. ’53 of Clinton, S.C., on March 16, 2018. Ben W. McCall ’52, M.D. ’55 of Statesville, N.C., on Feb. 21, 2018. Ralph O. Nesslinger ’52 of Columbus, N.C., on Jan. 22, 2018. James D. Parish ’52 of Seattle, on Jan. 22, 2018. James D. Peacock ’52 of Topsham, Maine, on April 2, 2016. Nancy T. Watkins Sommer ’52 of Winston-Salem, on Jan. 13, 2018.
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John Akomfrah: Precarity On view March 29 – August 26, 2018
2001 Campus Drive, Durham
nasher.duke.edu/precarity
ABOVE: John Akomfrah, Precarity (still), 2017. Three-channel HD video (color, sound), 46:03 minutes. Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of the artist and Smoking Dogs Films. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University with funds provided by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Acquisitions, the VIA Art Fund, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation; 2018.3.1. Still courtesy of Smoking Dog Films, London, United Kingdom. Š John Akomfrah. This exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art. Precarity was originally co-commissioned for the 2017 New Orleans Triennial, Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Schoonmaker. Its presentation was made possible by Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger and the Via Art Fund, with additional support from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and Smoking Dogs Films. At the Nasher Museum, Precarity is supported by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions, and Parker & Otis.
Josephine D. Weedon Stipe ’52 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Feb. 24, 2018. Gerald J. Barton ’53 of Mission Viejo, Calif., on Feb. 16, 2016. Margaret E. Cartwright Crawford ’53 of Royal Oak, Mich., on March 5, 2018. David C. Groves B.Div. ’53 of Bartow, Fla., on Dec. 2, 2017. Ida M.C. Watlington Johnson R.N. ’53 of Woodbridge, Va., on Jan. 24, 2018. Mariann Mobley Mitchell ’53 of Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 20, 2018. Mary R. Edwards Snyder R.N. ’53 of Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 25, 2017. John C. Turner ’53, M.D. ’56 of Key West, Fla., on Feb. 8, 2018. Henry C. Boshamer ’54 of Morehead City, N.C., on Sept. 16, 2017. Bobby M. Collins ’54, M.A.T. ’73, Ed.D. ’80 of Durham, on Dec. 4, 2017. Harold C. Earnhardt ’54 of Rockwell, N.C., on Dec. 3, 2017. Fleming James ’54, A.M. ’59 of Wilbraham, Mass., on March 13, 2018. James R. Lloyd ’54 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2018. Katherine P. Hinds Smythe A.M. ’54 of Memphis, Tenn., on Dec. 8, 2017. S. Sidney Ulmer A.M. ’54, Ph.D. ’56 of Lexington, Ky., on Jan. 19, 2018. Charles E. Wern Jr. ’54 of Warren, Ohio, on Feb. 13, 2018. Norman H. Bell M.D. ’55 of Charleston, S.C., on Dec. 6, 2017. Forrest E. Campbell J.D. ’55 of Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 15, 2018. Jean F. Norton Dickman ’55 of San Antonio, on Jan. 18, 2018. Bill A. Haire B.Div. ’55 of Nashville, Tenn., on Jan. 19, 2018. A.L. Honeycutt Jr. ’55, A.M. ’64 of Raleigh, on Feb. 1, 2018. Mary Stewart Huston ’55 of Miami, on Feb. 8, 2018. George P. Robinson ’55, B.Div. ’58 of Winston-Salem, on March 12, 2018. Thomas H. Albertson ’56, B.S.M. ’59, M.D. ’59, H ’64, H ’65 of Lynchburg, Va., on Feb. 11, 2018. Halbert E. Ashworth ’56 of Hilton Head Island, S.C., on Jan. 25, 2018. John R. Aubry ’56 of Wilmington, N.C., on Feb. 21, 2018. Richard B. Crabb ’56 of Milford, Del., on Feb. 12, 2018.
Konrad K. Fish ’56, LL.B. ’59 of Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 21, 2018. Louis C. Hennick ’56 of Shreveport, La., on Feb. 26, 2018. Donald D. Smith ’56, M.D. ’60, H ’66 of Greensboro, N.C., on Jan. 26, 2018. Judith A. Inman Callahan ’57 of Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 1, 2018. Phillip A. Cockrell ’57 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Feb. 8, 2018. Phillip A. Lomax ’57 of Athens, Ga., on Feb. 14, 2018. Joan D. Beacher Micun B.S.N.Ed. ’57 of Philadelphia, on Dec. 12, 2016. Michael B. Nitsberg ’57 of Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 28, 2017. Audrey D. Jessee White ’57 of Lynchburg, Va., on Feb. 20, 2018. Jack Y. Harrison ’58 of Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 1, 2018. John F. Knapp ’58 of Waynesboro, Va., on March 9, 2018. Gordon R. Lang ’58 of Chicago, on Feb. 20, 2018. Tom D. Leeaphon ’58 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on Nov. 27, 2017. Lawrence E. Lugar B.Div. ’58 of Fayetteville, N.C., on Nov. 10, 2017. Edward Thornhill III ’58, J.D. ’60 of Asheville, N.C., on March 31, 2018. Jack C. Bunn ’59 of Seattle, on Feb. 13, 2018. Spruill G. Bunn B.S.C.E. ’59 of Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 7, 2017. Robert D. Featherston ’59 of Salisbury, N.C., on Feb. 9, 2018. Peter E. Kautz ’59 of Oceanside, Calif., on Jan. 30, 2018. Joan L. Barcy Locke B.S.N. ’59 of Aiken, S.C., on Feb. 2, 2018. Charles R. Scott M.Div. ’59 of Henrico, Va., on Nov. 22, 2015. Alice Mashoian Walrath A.M. ’59 of Burlington, Vt., on Nov. 18, 2017.
1960s
W. Arthur Blackwood Jr. ’60 of Winston-Salem, on April 25, 2017. Linda D. Rubendall Fletcher ’60 of Mobile, Ala., on Feb. 24, 2018. Charles B. Hartwig ’60 of Upper St. Clair, Pa., on Feb. 11, 2018.
SUMMER HALF-PAGE
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DUKE MAGAZINE
SUMMER 2018
61
is year, when you make your gift to Duke, make it
hen you designate part or all of your annual und gift to support
the ue nivesity ibaries, ou give back to where you once belonged. That’s what it means to roc. Are you one for the books?
library.duke.edu/annualfund
ForeverDuke George C. Hopkins H ’60 of St. Augustine, Fla., on Feb. 12, 2018. Walter A. Hough M.F. ’60, D.F. ’63 of Hendersonville, N.C., on Feb. 4, 2018. Robert L. Andersen ’61 of Charlotte, on Jan. 22, 2018. Frank C. Ballance ’61 of Arlington, Va., on March 29, 2016. John L. Frye ’61, M.A.T. ’63 of Washington, on Feb. 18, 2018. Elizabeth I. Simmons Lieberman ’61 of Annandale, Va., on March 2, 2018. Charles L. Munson ’61 of Wilmington, Del., on March 13, 2018. Ellis Quinn Youngkin B.S.N. ’61 of The Villages, Fla., on Jan. 31, 2018. Robert L. Bromhal ’62 of Raleigh, on Feb. 6, 2018. Charles J. Dyer A.M. ’62 of Durham, on March 1, 2018. Raymond M. Farmer M.D. ’62 of Gainesville, Ga., on Feb. 11, 2018. Albert W. Kennon ’62 of Durham, on April 7, 2018. Robert S. Waldman H ’62 of Phoenix, on April 16, 2016. James L. Borland Jr. H ’63 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 30, 2018. J. Larry Golden ’63 of Gainesville, Fla., on March 20, 2018. Stephen G. Mace ’63 of Garden Grove, Calif., on March 4, 2017. Marshall H. Margolis ’63 of Chapel Hill, on Jan. 20, 2018. Linda M. Emery Miller M.A.T. ’63 of Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 19, 2018. Robert L. Stewart ’63 of Cary, N.C., on Jan. 23, 2017. Mary B. Wooten Cooper ’64 of Kinston, N.C., on Feb. 17, 2018. Albert S. George Jr. ’64 of River Forest, Ill., on Nov. 29, 2017. Ben M. Willwerth ’64, M.D. ’67 of Hilton Head Island, S.C., on April 3, 2018. Linda Clement Coleman ’65 of Danville, Pa., on Dec. 3, 2017. R. Nowell Creadick ’65, A.M. ’70 of Durham, on Nov. 5, 2015. R. Rodney Foil D.F. ’65 of Starkville, Miss., on Feb. 4, 2018. Amos L. Laine A.M. ’65, Ph.D. ’72 of Staunton, Va., on Feb. 26, 2018. W. Robert Caviness H ’66 of Fayetteville, N.C., on Jan. 29, 2018. Richard V. Mestler ’66 of Buffalo, N.Y., on Oct. 5, 2017. Douglas E. Simmons ’66 of Lincolnton, N.C., on March 8, 2018. Robert W. Widell ’66 of Auburn, Ala., on March 10, 2018. Mitchell W. Collier ’68 of Fort Myers, Fla., on Jan. 24, 2018. Martha Lillian Henderson ’68, M.S.N. ’78 of Chapel Hill, on Jan. 5, 2018. Robert C. Phares B.S.E.E. ’68 of Farragut, Tenn., on Jan. 18, 2018. Jean S. Foster Bolton ’69 of Foley, Ala., on Dec. 6, 2017. David U. Elliott Jr. ’69 of Norfolk, Va., on Sept. 7, 2015. John H. Judd Jr. B.S.E. ’69 of Abilene, Texas, on Feb. 3, 2018. William R. Strickland Jr. A.M. ’69 of Pinehurst, N.C., on Jan. 20, 2018.
1970s
David F. Shaffer ’70 of Delmar, N.Y., on Jan. 24, 2018. Mary Rachel Queen McKay ’71 of Waynesville, N.C., on March 9, 2018. C. June Bryant M.A.T. ’72 of Macon, Ga., on Feb. 15, 2018. Peter S. Curtis ’72 of West Palm Beach, Fla., on March 1, 2018. Sara E. Cushing ’72 of Greenwood, S.C., on March 14, 2018. John T. Helgeson ’72 of Bloomington, Ill., on July 25, 2017. Rufus D. Owens Ph.D. ’72 of Raleigh, on Feb. 2, 2018. Linda G. Davis Cox ’75 of Richmond, Va., on Dec. 28, 2017. Brenda L. Malloy ’75 of Durham, on Dec. 31, 2017. Vincent J. Colombo Ed.D. ’76 of Greenville, N.C., on March 2, 2018. David N. Katzin ’76 of Boca Raton, Fla., on Oct. 13, 2017. Jeffrey F. Stone ’76 of Los Angeles, on Sept. 1, 2017. Karen Van Winkle-Swift Ph.D. ’76 of Flagstaff, Ariz., on Jan. 1, 2018. John E. Wiley ’78 of Sumter, S.C., on March 4, 2018. David S. Finch M.B.A. ’79 of Thomasville, N.C., on Feb. 25, 2018.
1980s
Christopher S. Bertics ’80 of La Jolla, Calif., on Nov. 10, 2017. Karen P. Husted Snyder M.Div. ’80 of Ashville, N.Y., on Dec. 4, 2017.
Peter G. Wyman ’80 of Durham, on March 3, 2018. Kent J. Hornbostel ’81 of Dallas, on Feb. 9, 2018. Joan E. Lovett Tripp ’81 of Hendersonville, N.C., on Feb. 5, 2018. Craig G. Veith ’82 of Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 5, 2018. Susan E. Ford Ph.D. ’84 of Williamsburg, Va., on Dec. 5, 2017. Jiin-Fang Lin LL.M. ’84, S.J.D. ’89 of Taipei, Taiwan, on Feb. 15, 2018. Katherine E. Ramsay ’84 of Birmingham, Ala., on Feb. 5, 2018. A. James Beyer III ’89 of New Bern, N.C., on Jan. 22, 2018. Judith N. Wimberly Dorminey A.M. ’89 of Charlotte, on March 11, 2018.
1990s
Tait O. Norton A.M. ’91, J.D. ’91 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Dec. 4, 2017. David D. Voelz M.B.A. ’92 of Orangeburg, S.C., on May 24, 2017. Anthony J. Adinolfi Jr. M.S.N. ’93, Cert. G.N.C. ’95 of Wake Forest, N.C., on Dec. 6, 2017. Lisa Diahann Howe ’93 of Austin, Texas, on May 10, 2017. Charles G. Crowder ’97 of Burnsville, N.C., on March 18, 2018. Steven M. Koes ’97 of New York, on March 25, 2018. Scott P. Mendenhall ’97 of Bend, Ore., on March 10, 2018.
2000s
Daniel C. Potucek ’06 of Washington, on March 31, 2018. Byron F. Deen H ’08 of Atlanta, on Feb. 28, 2018.
2010s
Alexander O. Firempong H ’15 of San Francisco, on Feb. 14, 2018. Daniel I. Watkins ’18 of Seattle, on May 31, 2017.
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DEVILIST
While an internship can springboard a career, finding the right one is often as easy as finding a reporter whom Coach K will talk to at halftime. Perhaps the best strategy is to show up, keep your head down, and steer clear of these nightmare scenarios:
The Internship at the Socially-Aware Company That’s Really Making a Difference YOUR HOPE: This too-good-to-betrue start-up’s not a scam.
The Internship With Little Oversight
The Internship on Capitol Hill
YOUR HOPE: A challenging summer position that provides you independence.
YOUR HOPE: To make a difference and sway policy with your well-informed beliefs!
REALITY: Your boss is still introducing himself during your exit interview.
REALITY: It’s the lynchpin of eight different moneylaundering schemes.
LESSON: Take creative writing; make any experience sound good on a résumé.
LESSON: Just do DukeEngage instead.
REALITY: A chance to batter the op-ed pages with the senator’s views on the sole issue where you completely disagree. LESSON: The West Wing is fiction.
The Internship Where You’re the Hardest Worker
The Internship at the Past-Its-Prime Company
YOUR HOPE: Your experience studying until 3 a.m. in Perkins will set you up to “make big contributions” this summer.
YOUR HOPE: Given how immediately clammy you feel after hitting “Submit,” you pray your application e-mail bounces back.
REALITY: You slog through all-nighters; your bosses go to happy hours and make you redo everything the next morning.
REALITY: Simply by contacting the business, you now hold an equity stake in it.
LESSON: Corporate America is wasteful.
What’s your worst internship horror story? Send it to dukemag.duke.edu. If it’s bad enough, we may mention it in an upcoming issue.
64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
LESSON: Don’t apply to RadioShack.
Learning by adventure. Connecting cultures and communities. Building a better world. The Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places and programs that propel a Duke education from university to universal good. In Mexico City, David M. Rubenstein scholar Sujeiry Jimenez ’20 sits on the steps of El Ángel de la Independencia, a landmark representing victory and freedom. Jimenez is conducting field research on deportation and other issues affecting the Latinx community as part of her coursework in DukeImmerse.
Made possible by you. Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #MadePossibleBy
HOMECOMING
Engaged global citizens
SEPTEMBER 21-23, 2018 Autumn is a great time for alumni of all ages to engage, connect, and celebrate on campus. This year’s Homecoming weekend includes the Duke vs. NC Central football game, affinity gatherings, and more!
Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information.
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SUMMER 2018
To those wise, loyal, and beautiful readers who sent generous donations in support of Duke Magazine, we say,
“thank you, oh, ones most blue! We live only to serve thee!” _ To those just-as-wise-loyal-and-nice-looking readers who have been meaning to, we say, go to gifts.duke.edu, and type Duke Magazine in the search box or send your checks payable to Duke Magazine to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, NC 27701.
Whether debating rat clauses or Robin Hood, the Honor Council fights for campus integrity. p.26