Spring 2019

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DUKE MAGAZINE • SPRING 2019

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ALL THINGS BEING UNEQUAL How Sandy Darity’s research is being written into the national conversation

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How do you teach 15 super-smart DukeEngage students that conservation matters in the real world? You have them hand release sea turtles off the coast of Thailand so they never forget the feeling. Student experience made possible by you.

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Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information.

INSIDE

Spring 2019 | Vol. 105 | No. 1

COVER

Sandy Darity has some thoughts about inequality As politicians adopt ideas he’s researched for decades, the economist patiently stays the course.

By Lucas Hubbard

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Roger Haile

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FORUM

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THE QUAD

A reborn quartet, language maintenance, and a tempest in a tent city

FEATURES:

Just canʼt win for losing Success gave this men’s basketball fan great expectations. He learned that sometimes those feelings go unfulfilled.

By Shane Ryan

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48

FOREVER DUKE

Timely+Timeless

CEO David S. Taylor ’80 is leading Procter & Gamble during an especially turbulent time.

At Duke, classical studies is showing the self-confidence that comes from the power to subject the fraught present to insights gleaned from the ancient past.

Will Jones

By Robert J. Bliwise

72

WORKINPROGRESS

Junior Kora Kwok pays tribute to the ocean.

COVER: Photography by Roger Haile

ale+ale

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FULLFRAME NEW/OLD: A shimmering view of the Brodhead Center reveals the traditional Duke stone amid the glass modernity. Photo by Alex Boerner

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

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Nasher Museum of Art/The Brummer Collection

RITING IN THIS MAGAZINE five years the locations of two older churches, a baptistery, and various other properties, both ecclesiastical and private. “Conago, Caroline Bruzelius, now a professor emerita of art and art history, sider the logistics of clearing the land, setting out the foundations, and assembling a large work force that consisted of called herself “essentially a detective quarries, masons, carpenters, and manual laborers, not to for the places and spaces of the past, mention sculptors and glaziers.” for the way the world as we know it was shaped.” When, Symbolically, the building would assert the earlier this spring, a fire engulfed Notre-Dame, Bruzelius found a new role— importance of Paris by being wider, longer, an expert source for media, ranging from and taller than any cathedral before it. It also NPR to Foreign Policy. came to incorporate many new features for Bruzelius fell in love with medieval the first time on this scale, notably the flying architecture as a Wellesley undergradbuttress. uate, went on to Yale for a Ph.D., and “One thing that many people don’t for many years worked on French Gothknow—but generations of my Duke stuic architecture in and around Paris. That dents do!—is that over the long course of led her to the abbey of St.-Denis, where constructing a cathedral, often as long as one Gothic architecture had been introduced hundred years or more, buildings rapidly became out of date as structural and stylistic in the 1140s and where the kings of innovations were introduced in newer buildFrance are buried. ings,” she notes. Notre-Dame was updated as While she was writing a book on it went up, a process she describes as a strucSt.-Denis, work was under way to clean ture “in dialogue” with itself—preserving a the interior of Notre-Dame. She recognized—and grabbed—the once-in-asense of internal and external unity, while inRECOVERED: A face for corporating newer aesthetic ideas and struccentury opportunity to go up the scafNotre-Dame, ca. 1245; at folding as it moved slowly, over five to six tural innovations. the Nasher today years, from east to west.

Post-construction, events have brought When the scaffolding was repositioned, other changes. Most of the sculpture was violently torn off during the French Revolution; Duke’s Nashevery few months, Bruzelius would teach at Duke Friday er Museum has at least one, and quite possibly three, of morning, take the evening Raleigh-Durham Airport flight the sculpted heads. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral to Paris, work in the cathedral all day Saturday, see some was restored, a project largely stimulated by Victor Hugo’s local friends that evening, and fly home on Sunday for her The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Notre-Dame is, in Monday classes. She could “read the walls,” as she puts it, effect, the central character. by measuring the stones and recording the details: “In the And how to characterize Notre-Dame’s fate, post-fire? absence of written texts about the history of the construction Bruzelius is “somewhat alarmed” by President Macron’s vow of the building, the walls themselves were the documents.” to rebuild within five years. “It would be nice if there were a The last time she went up, when the scaffolding had arrived way to create a community around the restoration, and use near the west towers, she had some accompaniment—her the opportunity of this disaster for a thoughtful and careful baby. “In order to do the work, I popped him in the Snugli process, as well as general reflection on the role of historic and up we went the full height of the building, 108 feet.” architecture in the twenty-first century and the challenges At its inception, around the year 1163, Notre-Dame of maintaining this patrimony.” —Robert J. Bliwise, editor would be inserted into the densely packed city of Paris over

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019 | Vol. 105 | No. 1 | 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: Laura Meyer Wellman ’73, 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 • © 2019 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

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DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2018

Letters& Comments

M AG A Z I N E

WINTER 2018

Round-trip wisdom

keep students from visiting downtown!

Thank you, Boldens.

Sojourning in the customs of others. Harvesting knowledge from unexpected experiences.

Returning with global health insights from afar. The Annual Fund helps Duke students realize their dreams to make a difference no matter their ability to pay.

Rev. Lindsey A. Groves M.Div. ’11 Nashville, Tennessee

What’s in a name?

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

A balanced approach Made possible Thank you for the thoughtful hanby you. dling of the cover story, “In the Name of ” [Winter 2018]. Both the editorial introduction and the article itself deftly balance a delicate and emotionally charged, multi-layer issue.

Despite reading this article carefully, I’m left unsure of where I stand on this issue. I feel more enlightened and aware of the thinking of those who would oppose the names, statues, and other monuments left to us by prior generations. I appreciate the depiction of the tug-of-war between honoring and memorializing historical figures vis-à-vis alignment with an institution’s current views and values. Many of these tributes were in response to acts of extreme generosity to Duke and other universities. But as parts of the past heretofore hidden become revealed, questioning permanence is an appropriate next step.

I spent my freshman year as a resident of Aycock, yet had no knowledge of the building’s namesake. How young and foolish I was to live somewhere (and proudly wear that name on multiple T-shirts, no less) without ever taking the time to ask who or what Aycock was. To me, Aycock will always be a collection of great friends and shared memories from one of the best years of my life, not a building or a historical figure. That said, I thank you for filling in this gap in my education decades later.

The names discussed in this article were, in every sense of the word, written in stone. How exceedingly difficult, especially in this day and age, to write such a balanced and articulate piece about a subject matter that can so quickly evoke strong emotion. To do so while presenting multiple angles and leaving this reader pondering the

History, memorials, and inclusion on campus

Photo taken while Arabic studies major Marivi Howell-Arza ’19 traveled to Jordan to learn more about mental health as a sustainable development goal in the region.

After graduation, Marivi aims to pursue a career as a clinical social worker to better serve refugees who are in the process of resettlement.

Made Possible By You_BACK_Marivi_F-rev.indd 1

A true do-gooder Thank you for the article “Within the space of ” [Fall 2018] about Ryo Ragland and his innovative development work in Belgrade, Serbia. I found his personal story leading up to his time at Duke to be fascinating, along with the innovative way he thinks about economic and community development in a region of Europe that has been forgotten. Ryo stands in the same line of other entrepreneurial Duke graduates like Neal Keny ’76, C.E.O. of Mercy Corps, and Paul Farmer ’82, founder of Partners In Health, who have integrated their Duke experience with a creative concern for the lost and hurting of the world. Ryo’s commitment to facilitate positive change in a broken world should be a challenge and inspiration to all of us.

Darrell “Drick” Boyd ’75 Broomall, Pennsylvania Welcome back I was so pleased to see that Dorian Bolden is back on campus, alongside his great coffee and keen sense of community. I so enjoyed working for him as a barista, as did many other budding clergy (a.k.a. divinity students), as he began Beyu downtown. My prayer is that we all remember what he said in your article: There’s a level of nobility in making a person’s day brighter, and I hope having Beyu on campus won’t

1/22/19 2:43 PM

subject many hours later is precisely what good journalism is all about. Well done: This piece made me feel both foolish and more educated.

Brian Swab ’93 North Royalton, Ohio On being accountable Many thanks for your excellent Winter 2018 issue, and especially for the thoughtful article by Scott Huler “In the Name of.” It definitely reminded me of how much I appreciate Duke for its veneration of the principles of justice, truth, and freedom. The article’s thoughtful, measured contribution further enhances Duke’s already established reputation as a great national university.

Sincere appreciation should also be extended to Christine Kinyua, for her sound initiative. Should more be called for, I remain confident Duke and its students will meet the challenge. Having said this, I am modestly conflicted by her sincere characterization of Duke’s “culture” as “a place seemingly frozen in ‘a time stuck with the prevalence of wealth and white supremacy.’ ” A former resident of New York State, I graduated from Duke some sixty-five years ago. Since then, I can safely posit that it has never impressed me as a provincial, Southern university, one frozen by its cultural surroundings. Rather, it has continued to accept and then institute needed cultural change, as circumstances require.

During my years at Duke, black DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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Letters& Comments

UPDATE

Durham scene

Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau

“B

students like Christine. The process of eradication, however, should not attempt to erase or distort history.

For example, our nation, like Duke, has definitely benefited from many important contributions in its past.

Unfortunately, some of the earlier contributors were either participants in or espoused unconscionable injustices against people of color. From the

the portal of the Duke Chapel disturbing, especially as I had to pass it weekly for choir practice.

The article certainly highlights an ongoing national urgency to employ justice and righteousness in the removal of all remnants of racism in our nation. Understandably, the latter could dishearten many who have come here for the first time, especially as

Heather Jacks and Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau

students could not attend; today, such a limitation is unthinkable. Similarly, as I was about to graduate in May 1954, the United States Supreme Count rightfully declared segregation in our nation’s schools unconstitutional. I distinctly recall that the governor of the state decried the court’s decision; such a stance would itself be decried. Further, as a student, I considered Lee’s presence at

continued

Chris Hildreth

American Tobacco Campus

Chris Hildreth

ull Rising,” the magazine’s cover story in the MARCH-APRIL 2012 ISSUE, reported on the burgeoning of Durham, a phenomenon that has accelerated since then—and that has been sparked, in part, by Duke’s investment in redevelopment efforts.

The Duke-Durham relationship was complicated this spring with the outcome of a decades-long conversation: The Durham County Commissioners voted unanimously to discontinue work on the A decade of redevelopment has breathed life into downtown Durham. But the city’s remarkable Durham-Orange Light Rail line. Earlier, the transit turnaround is about more than bricks and mortar. agency spearheading the $2.47-billion project had recommended pulling the plug on the project.

As reported in The Indy, the local alternative touch with the needs of the community; another described weekly, multiple factors derailed the project. GoTriangle, Duke as a “wealthy, private landowner” aiming to shape the the local transit agency, had failed to secure agreements region’s economic trajectory. from two key players: the North Carolina Railroad CompaFor its part, the university had expressed concern about ny, which owns the existing tracks the light rail would have radiation and vibration from the project, as well as issues traveled alongside, and Norfolk Southern, which operates around access to Duke the track. Originally, Hospital along Erwin the state was expected “It is a project twenty years ahead of its time, but its Road. In a letter to The to kick in 25 percent time was 1980. Electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles, Chronicle, longtime Duke of the overall cost; and so on are coming. Fixed rail traffic is going.” faculty member E. Roy eventually, the figure Weintraub, emeritus was closer to 7 percent. professor of economics, wrote: “It is a project twenty years Responding to concerns from downtown businesses that the ahead of its time, but its time was 1980. Electric vehicles, project might cut off a section of downtown, GoTriangle had self-driving vehicles, and so on are coming. Fixed rail traffic proposed tunneling and elevating a portion of the line—pois going.” tentially adding some $8 million to the cost.

Speaking to the Academic Council, the university’s faculty Also, the Federal Transit Administration, the presumed senate, President Vincent E. Price called the controversy federal funding source, had identified an additional $237 milunfortunate “because it’s being represented somehow as a lion in project costs, along with the need for an environmenwithdrawal of Duke’s support for Durham, which I believe is tal assessment that would have stretched out the timeline. a mischaracterization of what is happening.” He added, “It Still, The Indy and other media pointed to “a lack of coopcertainly does not reflect any diminution of my view that we eration from Duke University” as the most public hurdle. Sevneed to double-down and strengthen our partnerships over eral public officials expressed their own criticism, including time.” n city council members. One complained that Duke is out of Golden Belt

Brightleaf Square

Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce papers, oversize, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

BullRising

By Eric Ferreri

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6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

The way we were: Panoramic 1925 photo of downtown shows W.T. Blackwell and Company factory and American Tobacco Company manufacturing plant, left; the twin steeples of Duke Memorial Church and the Liggett & Myers plant in the center distance; and a cluster of buildings near the intersection of Main and Corcoran streets, including the Durham Loan & Trust Building, Washington Duke Hotel, and U.S. post office.

Moments after Brad Brinegar told the staff of McKinney advertising agency that it would be moving from Raleigh to Durham, six employees came to him with some version of the same question: “Why are you giving me a death sentence?”

Brinegar, McKinney’s CEO, understood the concern. This was 2003, and Durham hardly had a stellar reputation.

The city’s center was a ramshackle version of its once-vibrant self. The redbrick tobacco warehouses that had pumped life into the city’s economy had fallen silent years earlier, when cigarette production moved out of town. Huge

swaths of downtown were vacant and in disrepair. It seemed the only thing that earned downtown Durham headlines in those days was its high crime rate.

The site Brinegar had chosen for his company was the granddaddy of those broken-down buildings, a decaying former American Tobacco cigarette factory that had been empty for more than a decade.

Sandwiched between a car dealership and the then-eight-year-old Durham Bulls Athletic Park and just off the heavily traveled Durham Freeway, the warehouse was an unmistakable eyesore whose blight had become a symbol for downtown Durham’s struggles. It sat close enough to the ball-

park that a particularly well-struck foul ball might shatter a warehouse window— not that many were left by the early 2000s.

Its insides had been unattended for so long that when construction workers began gutting it, they found trees growing within the walls. In some places, the floors were covered ankle-deep with pigeon droppings.

If you’ve been away from Durham for a while, you very well might not believe what you see today at the American Tobacco complex. Eight years after its reopening, the former cigarette factory has become a poster child for mixed-use urban redevelopment, a sprawling, eye-catching collection of restaurants, bars, offices, and

shops that, along with several other new projects in the area that followed its lead, has brought about a stunning rebirth of Durham’s core. In many of those renovated spaces, innovative new businesses are taking root, fueling Durham’s surprising new standing as a vibrant, hip center of entrepreneurial activity. A burgeoning restaurant scene—once dominated by fried chicken and burgers—has caught the attention of critics at The New York Times, who last year placed Durham on a list of “41 Places to Go in 2011.” (Locals point out with glee that Durham was mentioned right between Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo.)

DUKE MAGAZINE

March-April 2012

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standpoint of history, however, we would err if we were to dispassionately dismiss the importance of their historical contributions.

Indeed, the truth of their injustices must be made clear and their contributions judged accordingly. To best appreciate the present, we must be prepared to admit to our past. Only then will a future culture at Duke, or elsewhere in America, be enabled to hold itself accountable for its past.

Roger Turner ’54 Falls Church, Virginia He has a suggestion Thank you for your excellent article “In the Name of.”

While I do not wholeheartedly agree with the removal of historic artifacts, statues of Robert E. Lee and the like, I am beginning to understand the need for change in order for the university to stay current with Duke and Durham’s needs and desires, and maintain its high standard with the worldwide academic community.

The change in name of the Carr Building is a good example. While Mr. Carr should be recognized for his altruism, I see that it is time for a change in light of the poor example he set during his lifetime.

Might we consider changing the name of the building that houses the history department and name it the Dr. John Hope Franklin building in honor and memory of the late eminent historian and longtime faculty member?

Lee Davis ’90 Barre Town, Vermont Not a black or white issue Wonderful work on the [Winter 2018] cover story; it was a very enlightening read. The one thing that I quibble with is that it is not only black students who have trouble walking into a building funded by an ardent segregationist. I feel that there are a lot of white and non-black folks who don’t love walking past these buildings. I was always

averse to the discussion about Julian Carr’s harsh comments and actions toward black men and women. They are probably accurate.

Dan Scheinman J.D. ’87 I objected to Ms. Christine Kinyua, San Mateo, California a guest in our country, evidently from Kenya, and a student at the university Julian Carr was a critical asset in Try a little tolerance building. She speaks out as though she The article about changing names at had a right to condemn. In the world Duke reminds me of how much has of slavery, there are many culprits. changed there and about everywhere Ms. Kinyua’s ancestors went into the else since I was a student in the early heavy forested jungles of Africa and 1950s. That Duke was a racist, sexist, enslaved and no doubt killed hundreds and homophobic institution. Change of thousands of their fellow Africans to its present state of enlightenment has and took them to the ocean to sell them not come easily. to the European and Middle-Eastern I remember what Taylor Cole wrote slavers. In Kenya, they had been doing about how hard it was to persuade the that for hundreds of years board of trustees to admit before the European and black students. He was American slavers started advised to approach them The buying slaves from Ms. on pragmatic, not ethical process of Kinyua’s ancestors in the grounds. The alumni deeradication, partment advised us Duke sixteenth century. however, was considering recruiting What is even more should not a black player, hopefully as disturbing is that in Kenya, attempt good as Charlie Scott. He Ms. Kinyua’s kinsmen are to erase turned out to be all right, currently engaged in human or distort but not as good as Scott. trafficking and modern-day history.

Then, women students wore slavery. According to raincoats over their shorts the June 2009 U.S. State when going to and from the Department Trafficking in gym. The social standards Persons Report, Kenya is a committee would have been horrified to source, transit, and destination country learn a woman student was sexually acfor men, women, and children trafficked tive. Homosexual conduct got a student for the purposes of forced labor and kicked out of school. sexual exploitation. Kenyan children are Now, the names of people who were trafficked within the country for domestic servitude, forced labor in agriculture thanked and memorialized for the good (including on flower plantations), cattle they did are being ostracized because we herding, in bars, and for commercial have found out they held views reprehensible to modern students. I undersexual exploitation, including involvestand why they feel the way they do. I ment in the coastal sex tourism industry. wish they were bit more tolerant of past So, I recommend Scott Huler ask Ms. sins, but it would greatly surprise me if Kinyua to address her ancestors’ past they were. and current aggression toward black people before she besmirches the name James B. Richmond ’53 of a man she never knew. A man who Durham was a major developer of our country and the Durham-Chapel Hill region, What about Kenya? engaging in successful textile, banking (Durham’s First National Bank), As I read my Winter issue, I became railroad, public utility (Electric Lighting a bit incensed at the “In the Name Company), and newspaper endeavors. of ” article by Scott Huler. I was not

embarrassed to be in buildings where I knew they once had segregated bathrooms.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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Letters& Comments Julian Carr was probably a tough person, and no doubt not friendly and sometimes inhumane to black people, but he didn’t enslave and sell them for profit or kill them. He was part of an unheard-of effort to use a black architect, Julian F. Abele, to help design major parts of Duke University. The world was different back in 18451924. A Duke University student should be able to understand the totality of history and not just through a prism that only sees the current environment. There’s a lot of ugliness back there.

For Christine and others who share her beliefs, “He or she that is without sin among you, let him or her first cast a stone.”

Dave Miller M.B.A. ’94 Southport, North Carolina

continued

largest black-owned insurance company in the United States. He gave the real estate on which much of East Campus now sits, which permitted the relocation of Trinity College to Durham. Does the university intend to repay Mr. Carr’s heirs for the present value of the land that was given? Isn’t the university tainted by continuing to benefit from someone who it now considers so unworthy?

Unless the university is willing to put its money where its mouth is, excising the Carr name is little more than a cheap exercise in political correctness.

I knew some members of the Carr family, and they were just as generous as their ancestor was.

Dale E. Hollar ’76, J.D. ’79 Raleigh

Che was no hero The Winter edition of Duke Magazine sported a full-page ad for the Nasher Museum of Art to highlight the current “Pop America 1965-1975” exhibit. Elena Serrano’s lithograph of the “iconic” photograph of Che Guevara was chosen by the Nasher to spotlight the ad; Serrano’s work is sadly entitled “Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.”

The curators should be reminded that Che Guevara was a key figure in delivering the Cuban people to a vicious police state, replete with slave labor camps and mass executions. Guevara had a predatory urge to confiscate property and violate human rights, and was a psychopathic murderer. Unfortunately, there are many who view his legacy as one of a champion of the oppressed, and “chic Che gear” is sported by many who are entirely ignorant of his malevolence.

Duke has made a mistake by giving the impression it has bought into this tragic narrative.

What about Che? Carr wasn’t all bad All I know about the Carr debate I The university’s decision to rename the learned in your article. My sense is that I Carr Building dismisses and distorts a come down nearest to the expressions of lot of history. Like all of us, Julian Carr sophomore Michael Johnson Jr. —and was a product of his time, good for him for saying so.

Robert Varney A.M. ’79 place, and associations. He I consider Duke Magazine Encinitas, California held views on race that any the media extension of Duke Unless the thinking person considand wish to register my university is ers offensive today. But Get your statues straight disgust at the Nasher ad (p. willing to put they were not uncommon I just got the Winter issue and am 58). In this issue, especially, its money during the times in which disappointed to see the mistake in to promote an exhibition where its he lived. Undoubtedly, his captioning of the snow-covered statue of “Pop America” with the mouth is, views would be different if on page 7. With the chapel in the lithograph Dia Del guerrillero excising the he had lived in a different background, that statue could only be heroico is an affront to Duke.

Carr name is time and place. Mr. Carr Buck Duke, not Washington Duke.

Che may still be a folk hero little more also was a generous man Everyone knows Washington Duke to the radically chic left, but than a cheap and worked in many ways sits on East Campus, waiting to rise he was a murderous racist exercise to advance his commuwhen approached by any virtuous whose legacy falls far short of in political nity. He donated his woman. the criteria discussed in the correctness. wealth to many charities, Carr debate. “It’s just art” ( ?) including colleges foundJohn Elliker ’72 is just as wrong as “It’s just a ed to teach newly freed Norfolk, Virginia name on a building.” slaves. He paid for the Trinity College education of a young man from China Editor’s note: We regret the error.

Russ Phillips ’67 who became an important leader in his Lambertville, New Jersey home country. He was also among the earliest mill owners in the South to hire SEND LETTERS TO: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.

African Americans. edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and Julian Carr was a central figure in class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. the history of Durham and Duke. He Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. Published provided financing for the founding of letters represent the range of responses received. For additional letters: www.

North Carolina Mutual Insurance Comdukemagazine.duke.edu. pany in Durham, which became the 8 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Quad

THE Megan Mendenhall

LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

Jared Lazarus

Megan Mendenhall

CATCH: Frisbee on the Davison Quad

BRUSH UP: Learning scenic painting techniques

Bill Snead

SOAR: A Lunar New Year dance

PERFECT LIGHT: The iconic scene on Abele Quad

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

9

THEQuad

DR/TL* Brief mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises

ANIMALS AND MICROBES The strontium isotope ratios in fish ear bones match the ratios in the sediment at the bottom of the lakes they swim in, making the bones trustworthy records of environmental strontium. Since strontium shows up in coal ash, that means scientists have a new way to measure coal-ash contamination.

And now you have a fun thing to say at parties about strontium and FISH EAR BONES. Did you love that cute lemur video? Did you share it?

Don’t. Videos of adorable lemurs acting pet-like appear to spike demand for PET LEMURS. Lemurs make terrible pets, and being pets is terrible for lemurs.

PEOPLE Adolescents who SELF-HARM (by, for example, cutting or burning) are three times more likely to commit violent crime than those who don’t; those who do both are also likely to have suffered maltreatment and have poorer self-control than young people who only self-harm.

A single season of HIGH-SCHOOL FOOTBALL, without suffering from a concussion, is still enough to cause changes in the brains of athletes.

The higher a person’s BLOOD LEAD LEVELS at age eleven, the more likely he or she is to show signs of mental illness and difficult personality traits by age thirty-eight.

Into the same sad file folder place this: Childhood lead exposure damages more than intelligence. It is also linked to poor ADULT MENTAL HEALTH. Children who live in homes with all vinyl flooring or with flameretardant chemicals in the sofa tend to have much higher concentrations of SVOCs (semivolatile organic compounds) in their blood or urine. Those compounds have been LINKED TO CANCER, obesity, neurodevelopmental delays, and other diseases.

“RED-SHIRTING” CHILDREN—holding them back a year before sending them to kindergarten— appears to benefit them significantly.

Boys are held back more than girls, and white boys most of all.

Israel targeting infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has had enormous HUMANITARIAN COSTS.

MISCELLANY The turnover of warm and cold OCEAN CURRENTS that helps drive the global climate turns out to occur not off Canada but between Greenland and Scotland, hundreds of miles east of where scientists thought it occurred. It may be changing less with climate change than was previously thought, too.

A lot more than erosion and vegetation determine how much salt marsh wetlands an estuary can support; size, shape, depth, and latitude of both an estuary and its surrounding coastline help predict ECOLOGICAL TIPPING POINTS. Temperature differentials between forest canopy and surrounding air turns out to PREDICT DROUGHT accurately and quickly, allowing scientists to spread the news (via a free online map), enabling water managers to take action faster than before.

DUKE MARY PAT MCMAHON, dean of student affairs at Tufts, will replace Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs, and become vice provost/vice president for campus life.

Duke will pay $112.5 MILLION to the U.S. government to settle a lawsuit over faked research data.

Duke electrical engineers will work with a Durham start-up, Smiths Detection, and the University of Arizona to help design the next generation of machines that zap your luggage at airport security for the DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. So if you go through faster, you can thank Duke. If something slows down, it was probably the University of Arizona.

Matt Cartmill, professor emeritus of evolutionary anthropology, has been awarded the 2019 CHARLES R. DARWIN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the highest honor given by the society.

Andrew Leon Hanna ’14 and Ruby (Lillie) Reed ’14 are part of the second cohort to be awarded the KNIGHT-HENNESSY SCHOLARSHIP, which funds graduate study at Stanford. Hanna will enroll as an M.B.A. student, while Reed will attend medical school.

After years of negotiation, Duke will now begin PAYING PH.D. STUDENTS year-round, freeing graduate students from worrying about funding over their summers.

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.

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istock

FACULTY FUTURES.

Abbas Benmamoun is professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies and linguistics and vice provost for faculty advancement. Among his research interests is language maintenance and loss within second-generation speakers.

How did you respond personally to the instantly notorious case, from earlier this semester, of a Duke faculty member seeming to challenge Chinese students around their speaking Chinese in a social space?

I’m a linguist, so I have some general understanding of the issues involved with language and how deeply language is woven into one’s identity. When you are in an unfamiliar environment, you are trying to navigate and negotiate a space where you need to become fluent in a different culture and language. So here, at a university in the U.S., how should we think about somebody speaking to fellow nationals in their own language?

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They’re not necessarily trying to exclude other people.

Rather, they may just be using the linguistic medium that comes naturally to them in that specific context.

Also, mastering academic language does not automatically translate into complete fluency with language in all contexts. Non-native speakers may have no problems delivering an academic talk, but may find it difficult to find the appropriate language to use in a different environment or context.

You grew up in Morocco, did graduate work in the U.K., and then earned your Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. How did those experiences make you think about the pressures on international students?

When I teach, I always share with students how, over time, I’ve changed my mind about certain ideas in my field of research, and that we always need to adopt healthy skepticism toward established ideas and authorities. But some students, both domestic and interna-

Q&A

tional, might find it difficult, at the beginning, to do that.

So one of the behaviors we have to model as faculty members is that critically engaging accepted ideas is how we develop new knowledge.

Your office is relatively new at Duke. How would you define its work?

One of our mandates is to build diverse intellectual capacity. That’s a notion of diversity writ large. We want to recruit faculty from different backgrounds and different perspectives. But faculty diversity lags student diversity—not just at Duke, but also in higher education generally.

We also want to make sure faculty have the resources and the support they need to be effective researchers, teachers, and mentors. A related aspect of this work is to create a healthy climate at Duke; that, of course, is a team effort. How can we create a community where, for example, women feel valued as equal partners? Or students, whether they are from abroad or from the U.S., whether they speak English fluently or not, feel they belong here and have access to the full range of opportunities available at Duke?

People talk a lot about how we should be a “welcoming” institution. What I prefer to say is that we are successful when every student and faculty member feels they have ownership of Duke—they own a piece of the institution.

That sounds very lofty. How do you instill those values?

We focus on the new-faculty orientation as one place to share our values and our best practices. And we organize community-building workshops for faculty leaders. But this is really a long game; culture is not something you can just change overnight. It takes time to have a critical mass, so that, for example, a faculty member will feel it’s expected to step in and say to a colleague, “You know what?

Using language or acting in a way that is demeaning to other people is not who we are or want to be as an institution.”

Don’t people, particularly in an academic community, get uneasy around the thought of policing language?

We can still have robust discussions that are respectful, where one acknowledges that the other person has something to contribute.

The concern is with actions that demean people, that diminish people. A lot of the things we talk about around climate and culture have to do with disrespectful behavior, behavior that is really inappropriate. There is no interest in challenging academic freedom or compromising free speech.

I would invite people to consider another side of the argument: By fostering a culture of respect and inclusion, we open up space for other voices and talent to enrich our academic environment.

—Robert J. Bliwise Photography by Les Todd

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Rebirth is cool Everything is new after the Ciompi Quartet adds a new cellist.

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tart with scales.

You’re playing the cello, and you want to get used to new players, so you go back to the beginning. And you play scales.

“Scales are something you do your entire life,” says Ciompi Quartet violist Jonathan Bagg. “So it’s kind of like calisthenics. But we weren’t in the habit of doing that as a quartet before Carrie came.”

That would be Caroline Stinson, who in 2018 suceeded the retired Frederic Raimi and became the first new member of the Ciompi since 1995. And being the new member of an established group—the Ciompi is both Duke’s in-residence performing group and a teaching resource—doesn’t mean sitting quietly and learning to fit in.

In fact, quite the opposite: It means everybody has to rethink everything.

“It’s a little like a rebirth when you have a new member,” Bagg says. “You’re kind of reinventing yourself.”

And Stinson offered a way in with scales.

“We started last semester, playing scales together,” she says. And while they play, “we think of the blend, the color, the intonation” of the music.

The Ciompi has been around since 1965, but now it’s becoming a new Ciompi. “We took it down to the basics again,” she says. “To build this Ciompi Quartet, we’re taking the sound, the tuning, the pacing of the quartet down to the studs.”

Stinson isn’t new to quartet membership. After finishing her graduate degree in Germany, the Canadian-born Stinson found her first job in 2000 with the Cassatt Quartet in New York City. With residencies at various universities and participation in Buffalo in the famous Slee Beethoven Cycle, a recital of all sixteen Beethoven string quartets,

“To build this Ciompi Quartet, we’re taking the sound, the tuning, the pacing of the quartet down to the studs.”

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“it was a very busy year,” she recalls. “It was cool to be connected to that tradition in the first year of playing in a quartet.”

In 2009, she joined the New York-based Lark Quartet, where she continued learning “the nitty-gritty of showing up for rehearsals every day, practicing six hours a day, doing finances with a group, traveling with a group.” Above all, working with a group. She says the best part of her few months so far with the Ciompi has been the group’s

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When the group was looking for Raimi’s successor at cello, it sought someone with an interest in modern music (check) and a commitment to teaching (also check). Stinson has quickly fit in, and that shows in the quartet’s performances.

Since her arrival, “my colleagues in the Ciompi Quartet had been looking for a way to publicly show this transition,” Stinson says, and they’ve decided on something delightful. During Stinson’s term with the Lark, the group wished to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. The Lark invited the group’s four founding members back, and they commissioned a string octet by Stinson’s husband, composer Andy Waggoner, which the current and founding members of the quartet all played, three decades of history coming together.

Next fall the Ciompi will invite the Lark Quartet to Duke and perform Waggoner’s octet once again.

Because Stinson is still finishing her time with Lark, the two groups Alex Boerner collectively would be down one cellist. So they’ll invite Lark’s founding FANTASTIC FOUR: Eric Pritchard, left, on violin; Hsiao-mei Ku, on violin; cellist, Laura Sewell, to rejoin Lark Caroline Stinson, on cello; and Jonathan Bagg, on viola, now make up the as Stinson sits in her new chair with Ciompi Quartet. the Ciompi. Music created by her husband, played by colleagues old and new: years of history and concommitment to hearing and understanding each other’s nection—as though Stinson’s life connections and career goals for not just a particular piece of music but also for trajectory will unite to show off in Durham. the quartet as a whole. She loves that flexibility, that focus “My colleagues are extremely generous,” she says. “I realize I say this word out loud a lot.” on process.

They say the same. “We now have to become the new “The music-making is best if the goal is always our own Ciompi Quartet, and that challenges us to be our best greater flexibility,” she says. “You’ve got to invest in process. That’s how you spend your time. That’s what builds person, best collaborator, best musician,” Bagg says, “to the trust in the ensemble. question things we’ve taken for granted for a long time.

“That’s what we’re trying to teach the students, too.”

“The end result is very wonderful.”—Scott Huler

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FROM THE PRESIDENT: A CAMPUS VIEW

Supporting Schools—and Communities

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hen I visited Durham’s Lakewood EleThe goal is simple, he said: “We want them to think mentary last month, the smart students in of our school as a community hub.”

Ms. Ledwith’s first-grade class were having Likewise, Duke recognizes that all of our work in a spelling contest. Divided into teams of the community starts with our schools. If we can get five, they raced each other to spell green, week, feet, this engagement right, we’ll benefit for generations. So and—perhaps for the benefit of their visitor—Duke. we’ve invested in initiatives like Stepping Stones, which “D-U-K-E!” one student called out. “That’s my team!” is strengthening Durham Public Schools’ reach to children with little to no preschool experience and preparAs I said—smart kids.

I was at Lakewood with Vice President for Durham ing them for school, and the K-12 Technology Mentor and Community Affairs Stelfanie Williams to visit with Program, which helps students and teachers access the Principal James Hopkins and hear about the ways that latest technological innovations.

Supporting our public schools is only one piece of Duke is supporting the school in its efforts to be a school Duke’s engagement with Durham, a comprehensive of excellence.

When Principal Hopkins came to Lakewood in 2017, effort that Stelfanie oversees at the Office of Durham Affairs. From economit was a failing school, ic development to afslated for takeover by the fordable housing, early state board of education. childhood to workforce With his vision—and education, the office in part through partnerships with Duke’s Office collaborates with a host for Durham Affairs and of Duke and community-based partners to our program in education—he has transsupport our neighbors formed it into a model in leading healthier and for the city. more prosperous lives.

Hopkins met us at the As we were walking entrance to the school, a in the halls, Hopkins introduced us to another bright space decorated DURHAM DYNAMICS: Above, visiting a Habitat for face of Duke’s engagewith student artwork Humanity home under construction with Vice President ment—Duke first-year and supportive notes for Durham and Community Affairs Stelfanie Williams; student Brynne O’Shea, from parents. He greetopposite page, a corridor check-in with Principal James ed by name the passing a volunteer from the Hopkins at Lakewood School students—most of them Partners for Success program, which pairs tutors from the diverse neighborhoods that lie between the school and Duke’s campus. in our undergraduate education program with mentees “Lakewood is Durham,” he told me and Stelfanie. at Durham Public Schools. I couldn’t help but notice that “Our school sits in a neighborhood that reflects the she was proudly wearing a Duke sweatshirt. demographics of our city.” He recognizes that positive We chatted for a moment—she had just been tutorstudent outcomes often start outside school, and he has ing her mentee—but she had to rush off. “I have to get created a community literacy night to support reading back to campus,” she said. “I’ve got class!”

—Vincent E. Price, photography by Jared Lazarus among his students and literacy among their parents.

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A little help from civilians Class invites students and alumni to work on problems faced by the military.

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utfitted in someone else’s camouflage protective vests and helmets, preparing to walk the perimeter fence of a concrete motor-pool containment of the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, a half-dozen Duke students give considerable thought to what might happen on their circuit. They’re on a simulation exercise helping the Special Forces figure out how to best get medical care and information to units as they fight, far from support. Before heading out on their patrol, they discuss things like whether to break into two units that would go in opposite directions and pass each other in the middle, and they give a lot of thought to what they’ll do if they encounter enemy fire. Ultimately, they head out as a single group.

After they go, Sergeant-Major Dave Hubler, the battalion commander, explains why a bunch of Duke students—and alumni—are flinging themselves into complicated problems at the very edge of the farthest reach of military fighting forces. They’re part of “Hacking for Defense (H4D),” a demanding, interdisciplinary course that connects students from all over the university with military groups trying to solve problems. The students are expected to use entrepreneurial and start-up techniques to try to get to solutions

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quickly, delving into interviews with end-users before even the first class meeting.

If untrained Duke students wouldn’t be your first resource for solving persistent problems the military faces on the other side of the world, let Hubler explain. He’s been commanding units on the front lines for years, and though he knows what problems they face when members are hurt, he doesn’t think he’s going to find creative solutions. “My doing this for so long in some ways constrains my freedom of thought,” he says. “It’s fun having creative leaders” from places far outside the military who can look at problems in an utterly new way.

Then it’s time to hustle across the parking lot, because on their simulated patrol, the Duke students have encountered a problem. Not enemy fire, though—a “wounded” soldier in a vehicle, as planned by the trainers. The students heard him groaning, then spent some time in confusion. Finally, some of the first-aid training they’d received all morning kicked in, and they got to work. The group removed him from the vehicle, got him on a litter, and hustled him to the makeshift clinic where their instructors waited, though communications breakdowns caused further difficulties.

Afterward, the students and their trainers went through an AAR—an After-Action Report. The students noted that they had spent too much time worrying about enemy fire and had lost track of the first-aid they had been trained in all morning. Communication was a much bigger hurdle than they had expected, as was, actually, everything. “I was randomly chosen to be the leader” in the simulation, says Akanksha Ray, a junior major in public policy and economics. “And the moment I had the vest on, I was just at a loss. I had no idea what to do.”

That’s part of the plan, according to Tommy Sowers ’98, one of the teachers of the course. Though a significant part of H4D involves straightforward teaching about how to work with the military, many students are drawn to it because of its entrepreneurial, interdisciplinary, and hands-on approach. “We were thinking about our problem in very

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“I was randomly chosen to be the leader. And the moment I had the vest on, I was just at a loss.

I had no idea what to do.”

been taught at schools like Brown and abstract terms,” Ray says, even after count- PROBLEM SOLVERS: Akoukshoo less interviews and planning sessions—an Ray leads her group carrying a the University of California-Berkeley, “wounded” soldier. At left, the essential lesson, according to Sowers. but Sowers brought it to Duke for the “There are so many start-ups out there brief training the group received. first time this year. Sowers was a member that don’t interface with their customers,” of Army ROTC at Duke and taught at he says. Getting the students out of their comfort zone and West Point, and he came across the course in his work at into a situation where the problems the military deals with MD5, a program office of the Secretary of Defense. Once he truly emerge wakes the students up. Research and interbegan developing it for Duke, he turned to people he knew views are nice, but “there are no facts at Duke”—that is, from his time in service and at West Point. “My former students were some of the first people I talked to: Have you got you can learn a lot at Duke, but to apply that learning you any problems?” need to be in the field.

And eventually thirty-some students from all over Duke The other course instructor is executive-in-residence Steve were broken into teams, trying to solve specific military McClelland, who wanted to include teamwork in his teaching on entrepreneurship but found a paucity of materials. problems. Duke has even added a new wrinkle to H4D: As “That’s how I found [Sowers],” he says. “I had him come to both participants and advisers, alumni are included. “This my class.” Sports and the military were the hot sources of is an experiment to have alumni on the team,” Sowers says. teamwork-teaching leads, and Sowers told him about H4D. “We’re trying to figure out, how could we teach a thousand H4D was developed at Stanford by professors with milialumni?” tary backgrounds as a way of encouraging fast-acting startFor help solving that problem, wonder where he could ups to help military enterprises solve their problems. It has go?—Text and photography by Scott Huler

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From America to América

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Nasher exhibition examines the varied uses and meanings of pop art around the world.

Explosion, locates the accent in a place that makes the viewer t’s a little scary to talk to an academic about the first restart the phrase; in turn, it triggers an accent on the word time they have an idea,” says Esther Gabara, “because “pop,” and imprints the notion of the pop in pop art “as a we kind of muddle things. You look at something in verb, or an activity,” Gabara says. For some artists, pop means an archive; you have a spark here. You start working to commercialize, while for others it means to disrupt. on other projects. It’s not this sort of straightforward Each of the six galleries centers on a gerundial phrase process.” (“Welcome to,” “Mediating,” “Fashioning,” “Consuming,” The answers that the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of “Facing,” and “Liberating”). Across these, the works explore Romance studies provides on a Wednesday afternoon in an the outcomes of global consumer culture and how free maroff-campus coffee shop reflect this flowing, almost meandering fashion of scholarship: A quick reply would simply beget kets have culminated in prosperity for some and poverty for another question, so her responses are neither self-contained many. In “Consuming,” the triptych Agresión del imperialismo from Diego Arango and Nirma Zárate shows the inverse nor definitive but manage, unfailingly, to answer about three relationship between the intactness of the U.S. dollar in a questions in one. foreign land and the status of that country’s citizenry. In the The start of this, her debut curation, dates back to around “Fashioning” gallery, Lance Wyman’s elongated type for the 2001, when Gabara came across posters from 1960s post-revolution Cuba. She immediately recognized, in the official 1968 Mexico City Olympics, which necessitated “the design communist government’s “choice of an entire world,” says Gabara, of visual language,” the pop art that finds its way into graphics that she, like so many others, traditionhighlight the government’s masally associated with an American, sacring of students that same year. post-World War II consumer culMuch as the exhibition reflects ture. “That’s where the question the collaboration and conversations among artists around the began. And if you can ask a good hemisphere in this decade, Gabquestion,” Gabara says, “the research ara’s project reflects the work of a will follow.” number of collaborators and coorWhat’s followed, nearly two decades later, is Pop América, 1965dinators. The proposal, originally 1975, the first fully bilingual exhibit inspired by the Global Brazil Lab at at the Nasher Museum of Art. (All Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute, had to “lend itself to vertically related text, from the artworks’ wall POP CULTURE: Above, Eduardo Costa, integrated research”—essentially, a descriptions to the catalogue, comes Fashion Fiction I, 1966-1970; 24-karat gold project conducive to researchers at in both English and Spanish.) It exwearable sculpture and photograph (first plores the varied meanings and uses all levels of the academy and across published in Vogue, February 1, 1968); left, of “pop art”; in the catalogue, Uniinstitutions. Gabara has taught Emilio Hernández Saavedra, Bang Bang, 1967 versity of Pittsburgh art historian two undergraduate seminars that Jennifer Josten calls it “equal-opporassisted with the relevant research; tunity language,” capable of operating in both affirmation this spring, she taught a class that took advantage of the exhibition to engage students in a focused object analysis. and subversion.

From the start, the project has focused on engaging the “I wasn’t so interested in pulling apart or repressing that public. “Immigration and the identity of America has been American-ness up top,” Gabara says, noting that pop art is an important and relevant topic,” Gabara says. “I was talking more of an American artform than a global one. But, she says, to someone this morning and saying, ‘Since 1848, it’s been this exhibition stretches the understanding of the definition relevant.’ ” of America beyond a country, or even a continent. It explores A few minutes later, she heads back to the exhibition, where how the tentacles of pop art latched on throughout the hemisphere, and the end product emphasizes that pop art doesn’t she’ll give yet another tour of this global phenomenon, and belong to America so much as it belongs to América. particularly of a museum project that examines “very closely In just the first gallery, this emphasis on subtle differences what it means to look at America as one singular continent.” in language surfaces. The Hugo Rivera-Scott print Pop AmériShe’ll be doing it, she says, smiling, in Portuguese. ca, an allusion to its neighbor on display, Roy Lichtenstein’s —Lucas Hubbard

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Bringing them into the tent

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A senior’s quest to foster unity hits a policy snag. yan Bergamini discusses “community” to a degree that the combination of his face and the word has become a meme. On East Campus, he’s the senior making signs that encourage the first-years in the dorm where he’s a resident assistant to become TROUTs (Trinity Residents Organizing a Unified Trinity, with the slogan stating that “TROUTs swim together”). On West, he’s hosting weekly open dinners in the Brodhead Center, complete with a subversive and self-aggrandizing acronym—DSG, for the Duke Student Group—to make the act of meeting new people worthy of a line on a résumé.

Pretty much everything Bergamini does is focused on generating this unity on campus, making others aware of its absence, and proving it’s possible for such a community to grow from the ground up. “I think it’s important to change things institutionally,” he says, “but we also have to realize we have agency to change.”

Existing as an “independent” student unaffiliated with a Greek organization or an SLG (selective living group), Bergamini operates from a vision that entails not “trying to tear down SLG/Greek life,” but instead building up alternatives to the “effortless community” that the social-circle-as-housemates model provides. He quickly realized, as many Duke students do, that community at this school often starts with a “K.” “I think that K-Ville’s one of the few truly open spaces on campus,” says senior Steve Hassey, head line monitor, “where regardless of what social group, whatever your other things going on…K-Ville is the one space where you can

though, his snarkier instincts kicked in.

Given its predilection for sleep- deprivation tactics, K-Ville can feel like a torture prison. There are inmates (tenters) and guards (line monitors), and while the tenters have to sacrifice multiple nights of good shuteye per week for the chance to see Duke-UNC in-person, the guards earn easy access just for their policing.

Bergamini recognizes that line monitors have a necessary job: “It’s kind of like the RA role,” he says, in that “you need to enforce policy.” But he didn’t like the divisiveness they fostered, or the added prestige that line monitors garner, best symbolized in the Dukeblue warmup jackets that they wear. To minimize that distinction, Bergamini ordered replica jackets in bulk, selling 170 of them at-cost to fellow tenters, which, he says, “completely nullified this power trip that they had.”

Surprisingly, the head line monitors were onboard. “It comes from a very positive place,” says Hassey, of the jacket scheme. “I think that’s a real problem that he identified.”

There was some initial confusion, in that tenters in need of help didn’t

“That gap between line monitors and tenters—it’s not something that will ever fully close, but I think that this year was the least animosity between the two groups.” come together and participate in this much larger community and have this sense of belonging.”

Bergamini, as a member of tent #12, made small efforts in his immediate surroundings—staking out a spot at the K-Ville entrance in front of Wilson Gym, where he organized street-hockey games for his fellow tenters. Quickly,

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know which authority figures to approach. (To re-distinguish the jacketed campers from the actual line monitors, Bergamini ordered the latter safety vests.) But the lasting effect was a more communal K-Ville. Even before the jacket scheme, Hassey and his co-head line monitor, Peter Potash, had aimed to reduce this gap between the groups, to en-

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Getty Images

sure the monitors weren’t just enforcers K-VILLE: This year, tenters away from the dorm in a semester. Found but also the sort of people who’d hang out and line monitors fostered a to have been “intentionally deceiving” and play pickup soccer if the sun was shin- more communal atmosphere. around his plans to tent, he was fired from ing. “That gap between line monitors and his RA role, along with two tenting peers. tenters—it’s not something that will ever fully close,” says It turned out to be only a temporary firing: Bergamini and Hassey, “but I think that this year had the least animosity his colleague were reinstated after an appeals process (many between the two groups.” fellow students petitioned in his favor), and now he’s agitating to change the policy.

After the tenting season was complete, Bergamini’s activism about K-Ville would continue—albeit on slightly It’s unfortunate, Bergamini starts to explain, that tenting different terms. The day after the Duke-UNC home game, caused such a situation, and then he stops talking abruptly: his resident coordinator asked whether he had “black”-tentThree people in his jackets had walked by. ed—the most intense, and time-intensive, iteration. Ber“I think taking RAs out of K-Ville would be a real gamini confessed he had, which definitionally put him shame,” Bergamini says, before ending on a familiar, if bittersweet, note. “I think we made real strides in terms of in violation of the Housing and Residential Life’s nightsbuilding community.”—Lucas Hubbard away policy that states RAs can only spend eight nights

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WE ASKED

Courtesy De Hart

BookClub

Jane Sherron De Hart ’58, A.M. ’61, Ph.D. ’67, professor emerita of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara and author of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Knopf), about what she learned about Justice Ginsburg from decades of research and countless interviews with her. De Hart received the graduate school’s 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award.

On the gulf between the justice’s personality and outsized persona: She was a very intense, private workaholic who was not given to small talk.

Her husband was brilliant and was very gregarious and very witty, so she really relied on him to an enormous extent in social occasions.

What really got this whole “Notorious RBG” thing going was her dissent in the voting-rights case [Shelby County v.

Holder]. A first-year law student at NYU was so impressed with the dissent, and how outspoken Ruth was in the dissent, that she started the Notorious RBG Tumblr. Ruth was totally unaware of this, until her clerks showed it to her.

And she found out her granddaughters had Notorious RBG shirts. She went to give a lecture at Berkeley, and half the students were decked out in those T-shirts.

So she really has taken it in stride.

And when she was asked what she and the dead rapper Biggie Smalls had in common, she said, “Well, you know, we were both born in Brooklyn.”

I knew that that was something I had to explain, how this celebrity developed, because it was certainly unusual. It seems so at odds with her JUSTICE: Ginsburg personality. I knew I had to take it into account and explain it.

On the justice’s change in recent years: If you read her decisions and dissents, they’re for the most part rather dull. She hated personalized dissents, which Scalia did, and wrote articles objecting to them. When she disagreed with the court, the language was very neutral.

That changed on the Roberts Court. And it had to do with Roberts and Alito as replacements and particularly their views on civil rights. A series of cases there deeply

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antagonized the liberal wing of the court, and she just decided that she’d had enough. This had begun to happen on the Rehnquist Court—not that her dissents were hostile, but they were very pointed and provided excellent factual reasons for her disagreement with the position the majority was taking. I think her Gratz dissent [in Gratz v. Bollinger] is a really eloquent exposition of why she felt, for example, that affirmative action was necessary and why this business that emerges in the Reagan administration of how race has to be color-blind just does not work in the real world.

But her dissents really change on the Roberts Court: They become really direct, and she dissents increasingly from the bench. You do that when you’re so frustrated and so convinced that the majority has gone in the wrong direction, that you dissent verbally, and it’s an abbreviation of your written dissent.

On De Hart keeping her first biography project alive after losing all her drafts and research in a fire a decade ago: I had thirteen chapters written, and they aren’t the same thirteen in the first part of the book. One of my research assistants, a graduate at rest student, had a much earlier draft of those chapters on her computer, and I was able to work from those.

At the time, I really, seriously debated whether to go on.

But if you read about Ruth, if you know very much about Ginsburg, you know that she just doesn’t accept odds against her. She had had plenty of reversals of one kind or another in her teen years and afterward. And the idea of really giving up on it was totally inconsistent with the person I was writing about. n This interview has been edited and condensed.

RECOMMENDATIONS from Evan Ratliff ’97

In The Mastermind (Random House), Evan Ratliff divulges the unbelievable but true tale of the DEA’s years-long investigation to bring down twenty-first-century drug lord Paul Le Roux.

Below, the author and cofounder of Atavist, an online publication devoted to long-form storytelling, reflects on the four books that most directly influenced his weaving of this story.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis: For my own book, I knew I would need to describe complex technical maneuvers by the main subject, a programmer-turned-crime boss named Paul Le Roux. Here, Lewis is absolutely masterful in the way he spools out the intricacies of the housing bubble—entirely through the eyes of his subjects and their journeys through those same revelations. As a reader, you are learning without knowing you are being taught.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot: I love this book for many reasons—the reporting and writing are unbelievable— but I kept it by my desk while writing my own book because of the way Skloot deploys an unconventional story structure. I knew that I was going to stray away from a straight chronology of events, always a risky endeavor in nonfiction. But this book shows how a writer can move readers around in time seamlessly enough that the narrative never loses momentum.

The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean: I return to this book constantly; for me, it is the ultimate nonfiction portrayal of obsession.

Orlean shows that you don’t need a grandiose topic to write an irresistible book. What you need are the kind of intimate details that fill out a portrait of real human beings, particularly one with the quirky single-mindedness of John Laroche, the eponymous thief. I can flip through to any of her descriptions—of Laroche, of orchids, of the swamp—for evocative inspiration.

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler: I don’t read many mystery novels, but someone turned me on to Ambler and his 1930s spy novels right as I was beginning my book. It turned out to be the perfect inspiration: a gripping but complex murder mystery laced with international geopolitical intrigue. The first-person narrator who attempts to navigate a world of spies, drugs, and lies became a surprising model for the role I played in my own book, doing the same and trying to bring the reader along with me.

Amazon.com

BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY

Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishing) John J. Curley IV ’97 Four Guardians: A Principled Agent View of American Civil-Military Relations (Johns Hopkins University Press) Jeffrey W. Donnithorne B.S.E. ’97 Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books) Richard Gergel ’75, J.D. ’79

Destroy All Monsters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Jeff Jackson ’93

The Hubley Case (Moonshine Cove Publishing) Justin Lee ’06

The Spirit Almanac: A Modern Guide to Ancient Self-Care (TarcherPerigree) Emma Loewe ’15 and Lindsay Kellner

This Is the Way the World Ends (Thomas Dunne Books) Jeff Nesbit ’79

Our Way: The Life Story of Spike Yoh (The Day & Zimmermann Group, Inc.) Bill Yoh ’93

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WHERE'S HOME? TRINITY HOUSE

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he pairing in room 374 of Trinity House is a study in contrasts: Aneesh Gupta is in Pratt while Will Hayward is in Trinity; Will’s the extrovert to Aneesh’s introvert; Duke was the last school Aneesh decided to apply to (Will applied Early Decision); and, notably, they grew up more than 7,000 miles apart. Yet in month nine of living together, they’re thriving—“I don’t think we’ve come to a single disagreement,” says Aneesh—having navigated the infuriating behavior of their dorm appliances and, well, each other. “I have the most annoying habits with my alarm, like I’ll literally hit the ten-minute

Will Hayward

timer five, eight times before I get out of bed,” says Will. “So absolutely, God bless him for putting up with that.”

As first-years, the duo were randomly assigned, learning last summer that they’d be rooming together in the newest dorm on East Campus. They both apologize for the space’s state of cleanliness when showing it off, swearing that it wasn’t always this messy.

Hometown: Summit, New Jersey (although now Boston is his home) Favorite On-Campus Eatery: Il Forno Attitude Toward Coffee: Needs the caffeine, hates the taste Genre of Music: Rap

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THEQuad

ROOMMATES Jim Sink Photography

To fill the ample wall space, both Will (who stays busy with Greek life and the Duke Investment Club) and Aneesh (dance team Raas, Investment Club, and the Humans and Anatomy Lab) have successfully hung up family photos from home—and less successfully integrated a dartboard into the decor. “I don’t think we’re able to mount anything,” says Will; it sits on the microwave, sadly bracketed by cardboard. (They also note that they no longer possess working darts.)

When considering the year overall, the two highlight their intellectual connection. Their conversations are “less about music and movies and more about society,” says Aneesh, noting that they discuss topics like India’s caste system and the differences in higher education there and in America. And even if they go their separate ways after this semester, they’ll leave with tangible memories: Aneesh with the T-shirt of all of Boston’s sports teams that Will gifted him; and Will with a post-winter-break present from Aneesh’s family, which Aneesh describes as “Indian ‘handcrafted’ stuff.”

“I love the air quotes,” says Will, laughing.

—Lucas Hubbard '14 Photography by Chris Hildreth

Aneesh Gupta

Hometown: New Delhi, India Favorite On-Campus Eateries: The Loop, Ginger + Soy Attitude Toward Coffee: Likes the taste, doesn’t need the caffeine Genre of Music: Classic rock

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Sandy Darity

has some thoughts about

I N E Q U A L I T Y As politicians adopt ideas he’s researched for decades, the economist patiently stays the course.

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By Lucas Hubbard | Photography by Roger Haile

he clip lasts just five minutes, but little about it seems right.

Sure, Sandy Darity is talking about one of his ideas to combat the racial wealth gap, but absent are his laidback nature, his ubiquitous laugh. It’s July 2018, and Darity’s the guest on Bloomberg’s What’d You Miss? His posture and movement—hunched; fidgety—reflect a man aware of the stage and of the fact that he has brought his ideas, at least briefly, to the center of it.

Darity is the rare award-winning economist who boasts both a twenty-fivepage curriculum vitae and a rather active online presence. He tweets (and retweets) with the zeal of a brand ambassador; he writes long-form pieces for The Atlantic and commentary for HuffPost; and his research earns citations in Paul Krugman’s New York Times column (albeit with his last name misspelled). Most of all, Darity pops up time and again on the circuit of YouTube channels and the embedded videos of blogs, affably discussing the sorts of topics that, more often than not, leave one relieved to find a closed comments section.

But on Bloomberg, at the peak of what he fears is his moment in the sun, Darity is tense. He and the show’s host, Joe Weisenthal, are talking on different levels, making the chat almost cringeworthy. Before asking a second question, Weisenthal paints Darity’s proposal for a federal jobs guarantee as “radical,” and Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of public policy, must re-route to amend the record: His suggestion has a long lineage, dating all the way to Great Depression-era New Deal policies.

It’s occupied his thoughts and research for at least a decade. And so, when pushed to justify its merits, Darity speaks with the terse, deliberate nature of a man on the phone with tech support, who knows how badly his computer is broken and is tired of hearing that he try unplugging it. Much like his other ideas to help remedy the staggering racial wealth gap in this country, the federal jobs guarantee isn’t so much a brave new concept as one that has long been passed up for more “reasonable” solutions.

“If you took ninety-nine out of a hundred economists and brought them into the Council of Economic Advisers,” says Patrick Bayer, the Gilhuly Family Professor in economics at Duke, “the kinds of things they would propose are those more marginal changes.” What Darity has advanced and made more amenable to politicians and the public, Bayer says, actually comes close to the sort of reform that’s needed. The important next question, then, is will folks listen—and for how long?

Near the end of the segment, Weisenthal asks Darity about seeing the audience for these suggestions grow, particularly in Congress. “I’m absolutely surprised to see this catching on,” Darity says, smiling his deep-creased, default smile that’s been dormant for much of the interview, “because for many, many years, people told me this is an idea that wouldn’t have any wings.”

By the new year, though, even as more and more Democratic presidential candidates come out in support of his proposals, Darity is fretting about the

longevity of this wave. “My fifteen minutes may have all taken place in 2018,” he says, “so we’ll see.”

Watch the Bloomberg clip online today, and before Darity can even finish his statement about how his plan is finally gaining steam, the next video is already playing: an interview with a newly minted executive, or a market analyst combing through earning reports, or an expert breaking down a company’s upcoming IPO. The dreamer stops by, shares his life’s work, and then the regular programming continues like nothing happened.

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illiam Alexander Darity Jr. tells his origin story cautiously, hesitant to ascribe outsized importance to a particular slight or wrong. He isn’t so much surprised that he has spent his life studying inequality as he’s bemused that others haven’t; as far as he can remember, the topic has always weighed on him. It was, Darity concedes, “probably a little weird” for someone to be asking these massive questions at the age of seven. But such realities were unmissable for him growing up, and so, with the cognitive dissonance of youth, and the curiosity that would later spark him to dive into Twitter in his late fifties, he tried to make sense of it.

His father, the first known African American to receive a Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill, studied health education, and by virtue of his international work with the World Health Organization, the family grew up in a range of environs. In Egypt, Darity first noticed the high number of panhandlers in the streets. Then, he realized that the beach in Alexandria provided different experiences, based on whether he was on the private side of the corniche or on the other, free side, with his “domestique” friends.

Every other summer, he’d visit his grandmother in Wilson, North Carolina, where he’d walk to get “fantastic” chili dogs at the Stoplight Grill, whose sanitation rating “was always grade B, and it always stayed open,” Darity recalls. A block farther were the train tracks, and he saw the stark role they played, as they do in so many American cities, in segregating the town into white and black, those with and those without.

Darity’s family, too, benefited from factors other than grit and determination. His mother and father had made the jump from very-low-income to middle-class, in part due to their own extraordinary efforts, but also due to infusions of financial aid at crucial times from the community. “My parents never took the position that the folks who had less deserved to have less,” he says. “I always was inclined to think—and encouraged to think—that this was the result of the luck of the draw.”

When his dad joined the faculty of UMass-Amherst, where he would become the founding dean of the school of health sciences, Sandy spent his high-school years in a college town. He wore many hats there—including blues harmonica player and nationally ranked debater—but the questions that bothered him seemed most likely to be solved via academia. Childhood friend Phil Greenfield describes the atmosphere as idyllic: “Knowledge for its own sake, research as being among the noblest of pursuits—that was in the water, that was in the air.”

As an undergraduate at Brown, though, in his initial economics classes, he witnessed “the way in which economists would explain, say, inequality across individuals or across social groups as attributable to something they call ‘human capital differences,’ ” Darity says, outlining the theory that states, roughly, that poor people are poorer because of deficits in intelligence, skill, education, or something similar. “And that did not resonate with my sense of how the world works.”

But he didn’t search for a more amenable department. He instead leaned into the headwind, choosing a field in which, even by 2015, only forty-seven black economists were on the faculties of the 127 Ph.D.-granting economics departments in the U.S. Darity eventually landed at M.I.T., amidst the university’s

“I tend to think that everybody has the possibility of doing very well, with the proper support and encouragement.”

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attempts in the ’70s to desegregate its top-rated economics Ph.D. department. He found pockets of support in Cambridge, notably from his dissertation supervisor Lance Taylor and economic historian Charles Kindleberger, but such backing was rare.

“As black graduate students, we received strong signals that research on race and discrimination was not valued by most of the economics faculty.... Nevertheless, most of us did do work that involved an exploration of racial inequality while at M.I.T. or thereafter,” Darity wrote in 2014. “We were stubborn.”

Darity earned his doctorate in three years; had he stayed longer and proved his readiness to department superiors, he likely would’ve jumpstarted his career in the Ivies. Yet his arrival at the University of Texas was fortuitous. There, he’d meet a cohort of thinkers (including his wife, the

peers Bobbie Horn and Michael Pyne—the latter a Jamaican scholar about whom, even today, Darity is “not really sure what his original attachment was to the university.” At Pyne’s urging, he began reading “the literature in its original form”; in these works, he made quite the discovery: “What people had told me was there,” he says, “really wasn’t.”

“I think it was one of the most intellectually useful investments I could make,” Darity says. It fit the scholar’s nascent mold: reflecting a skepticism about the prevailing wisdom, a willingness to consider anyone’s intellectual contributions, as well as a desire to unearth a more nuanced truth. Some thirty-five years ago, he found that the historical works “were quite salient, and there were some ways in which the economics profession, in trying to move forward, had papered over the cracks,” Darity says.

“So, I went back and explored the cracks, and that’s been an obsession of mine ever since.”

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folklorist Kirsten Mullen) who’d dramatically shape his future.

By then, Darity was already an outlier. A voracious reader, he had long looked to far-flung sources for ideas and answers. As an undergraduate, following the recommendations of fellow students he consumed books like Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. “Economics is a discipline that ignores its own history, as a field,” he says, bemoaning the field’s lack of reading and its emphasis on contemporary questions. Through his time at Brown and M.I.T., he never engaged with any articles older than a few decades—no Adam Smith, no David Ricardo. Even a seminal work like John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) wasn’t on the syllabus. (Today, Darity points out that Duke is unique “insofar as there still is a presence of the history of economic thought here.”)

While working toward tenure in Austin, Darity began hearing a different perspective, from

t twenty-one, Darity summarized the problem in the first sentence of his first published paper: “Black people have always been troublesome for social scientists studying the United States.” In no field is this more apparent than in economics, a world of assumptions and approximate models. Whether intentionally, or because of the blind spots that economists possess, much of the standard thinking doesn’t account for discrimination.

Take the labor market: The unemployment rate for black Americans has long hovered around twice the rate for all Americans. Economists have often favored a personal (or human capital) explanation for this divergence: The unemployed must have some shortcoming—a lack of schooling, or insufficient “soft skills”—that make them less productive for and thus less appealing to these companies. Or, they must present an additional cost (like a heightened risk of a wrongful-termination lawsuit) that employers have to consider.

Economists, then, don’t ignore discrimination because it’s bad and unpleasant.

They do so because, according to conventional thinking, it’s irrational, shrinking labor pools and raising wages. In modern society, no such bigotry could exist in the long run. Plus, says Bayer, the Duke colleague, “the burden of proof in economics to establish something as racial discrimination is extremely high.”

Different people see the world differently, and exploring the effects of race has long been a playground for white scholars. When someone like Darity tries to measure it, the result is not celebrated as research so much as it’s denigrated as “me-search.” Within academia, “objectivity is not something that can be achieved,” Darity says, adding that all scholars choose to focus on a question of relevance to them, invariably bringing their unique frameworks and personal experiences to these inquiries. “What can be achieved is honesty about methods and procedures,” he says, as well as how one arrives at certain findings. “I’d say that we all do ‘me-search’ to some degree.”

It’s a tricky dance, going against the grain. One needs to understand the conventional thinking thoroughly, both to develop an explanation for what traditional economists miss and to coherently express the flaws in their reasoning.

In a way, heterodox research almost requires an additional peer review, says Art Goldsmith, Jackson T. Stephens Professor of economics at Washington and Lee University, who has frequently collaborated with Darity. The findings must make sense within the new framework, as well as resist attacks from inevitable critics. “I just feel like you have an extra set of hurdles to overcome,” Goldsmith says. “But DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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“It’s all about preserving privilege— you can discriminate against somebody without hating them.”

as a scholar, I think that’s good—because then you believe that your work is more sound.”

While at the University of Texas, Darity wrote a book with Bobbie Horn, a specialist on the economist Thorstein Veblen. (Today, the economist is known as the namesake for the term “Veblen goods,” luxury items for which demand increases as the price does.)

At Horn’s urging, Darity made himself familiar with Veblen’s research; his papers stressed “invidious comparisons” that humans make to judge their lot in life. “Most of conventional economics is about people’s absolute position, but Veblen points us to thinking about relative position,” explains Darity.

He then latched onto the writings of sociologist Herbert Blumer, who argued that “prejudice is instrumental”; instead of being an outgrowth of ignorance, this bias is functional, helping to maintain a certain group’s position of dominance.

“Sandy just read whatever other disciplines had to offer about the questions of interest, and he didn’t favor economic conventional reasoning over anything else,” says Goldsmith. “He just let them compete away. This led him to such deeper and broader insights about things.”

Eventually, this blending of disparate findings from Veblen and Blumer—the byproduct of a lifetime of reading and curiosity—became what Darity coined as “stratification economics.” The subfield articulates a world in which individuals focus not just on their status but also their group’s relative position in a social hierarchy. Dominant groups strive to maintain their power, and so stratification economics doesn’t consider discrimination to be irrational. Rather, it posits the exact opposite. As Goldsmith explains, “It’s all about preserving privilege—you can discriminate against somebody without hating them. What you want is to maintain the advantages that you have garnered through institutions that have historically been discriminatory.”

The presence of discrimination helps explain, for example, the doubled unemployment rate that blacks have historically held in this coun30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

try, but it illuminates much more. Like the findings of the late Harvard sociologist Devah Pager’s urban field experiments that black men with no criminal records face lower odds of a callback for a job than do white men possessing criminal records. Or the findings of Karen Gibson, Darity, and Samuel Myers Jr., Roy Wilkins Professor of human relations and social justice at the University of Minnesota, that black workers, who purportedly lack “soft skills,” are crowded into low-paying service-industry jobs. Or Darity and Goldsmith’s findings that the darker the worker’s skin, the lower their wages—evidence of colorism that can’t be attributed to something like educational attainment. (“It’s pretty hard to argue that when black kids go to school, that the lighter-skinned blacks get to go to better high schools or middle schools or kindergartens than the darker-skinned ones,” says Goldsmith.)

Nor are these damaging effects confined to the workplace. Racial disparities start in the womb and persist, showing up in infant (and maternal) mortality rates, in who gets identified as “gifted and talented,” in disparate levels of incarceration and early death. According to stratification economics, such differences aren’t caused by individual factors but rather by structural ones. Under closer scrutiny, the former fall apart.

With the help of frequent collaborators Darrick Hamilton and Alan Aja, among others, last April Darity published a report called “What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.” While black people constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population, they hold less than three percent of the nation’s wealth. The report explores ten common explanations for this disparity—from a lack of sufficient educational attainment, to a lack of saving behavior on the part of black people, to the suggestion that they should “emulate successful minorities”—and finds them all inadequate. That is, at every level of educational attainment, black people have significantly less wealth; once household income is considered, they exhibit the same, if not greater, savings behavior as whites; and minority groups who find success in America often do so on the ballast of start-up capital that black people lack.

The “What We Get Wrong” report is the culmination of a career-long effort; it also merely marks the start for Darity and his peers. “There’s a particular image that many of us would like to have about this country, as the land of opportunity, as a society that promotes freedom and promotes equity,” he says, “and these kinds of findings from my research are inconsistent with that image.”

Wealth is increasingly considered a better assessment of economic well-being than income. Wealth, which represents one’s net worth, has less volatility than income, the stream of wages one earns through work. Besides providing extra financial security during emergencies and economic downturns, wealth can benefit subsequent generations by providing payments for college tuition or assisting with a mortgage down payment. A racial income gap exists, but the racial wealth gap is that much more striking: While the median African-American household has consistently held 50 to 60 percent of the income of the median white household over the past half-century, it possesses just 5 to 10 percent of the wealth.

Darity has a simple answer for why African Americans are behind: Differences in wealth linger and lock in systemic advantages or disadvantages. And that population, more so than any other, has never inherited wealth—or had a legitimate opportunity to accrue and maintain it—for as long as this country has existed.

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f there’s one person to make these connections and reach these conclusions, it’s Darity. Ask anyone, and they gush about his effortless brilliance, efficiency, and versatility: Rhonda Sharpe, the editor of Black Political Economy, remembers teaching herself to speed-read to keep up with Darity’s book consumption. Tressie McMillan Cottom recalls that, following an initial lunch together when she was an undergraduate, Darity arrived at their next meeting toting a ten-year plan to launch her academic career.

The easiest criticism might be that, as he self-effacingly puts it, he’s “a dilettante and spread too thin.” In truth, he’s connecting with a wider audience. “Anyone who’s done any type of in-depth research on race and class,” says Keisha Bentley-Edwards, assistant professor of medicine at Duke, “if you haven’t come across Sandy’s work, then you really were not doing any research on race and class.”

“I’ve heard him go from humanities to critical race theory to literature studies all the way back to macroeconomics—I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say there’s a thing that he doesn’t do,” says McMillan Cottom, now an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Darity isn’t a “traditional” economist, but he’s not someone who has skipped crucial checkpoints along the way. He’s simply bringing in outside perspectives and applying frameworks in novel ways: As McMillan Cottom says, he’s a traditionally trained economist “who tackles questions that a traditional economist has been unwilling to tackle.”

In November, Darity delivers a lecture to roughly a dozen undergraduate and graduate students in his “Global Inequality” research seminar. Here—in this cookie-cutter room off Science Drive, where the tables have coalesced into a horseshoe to aid discussion—he is the closest he’ll be to his ethos: that is, a jolly pessimist. Few uncork as many depressing one-liners and belly laughs. When studying the racial wealth gap for a living, the Venn diagram of what’s depressing and what’s worth a laugh blurs into a single circle. Avoiding levity leads to depression, which in turn means gloom and hopelessness. “Your capacity to keep going is contingent on your sense of humor,” explains Darity.

With his close-cropped gray hair, and eyes perpetually twinkling behind his glasses, he has the aura of a grandfather with stories to share. He traces back to economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo the lineage of ideas suggesting certain climates, populations, or geographies are inherently less productive than

others. Two centuries later, these ideas have persisted, thanks to folks like Ellsworth Huntington, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Jeffrey Sachs. They claim that temperate zones (meaning Europe and America) are more conducive to economic output, that the Arctic is too challenging for growth, and that the tropics make growth too easy. Or that creativity peaks at a certain level of diversity (coincidentally, that of Europe and America).

Which means, Darity says, since Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, flawed reasonings for uneven development—and thus, inequality—have proven remarkably resilient. “These ideas do not die!” he exclaims, and the deep, M-shaped furrow in his brow fades, replaced by his resting state of knowing amusement. “It is fascinating.”

Teaching and mentorship are oft-ignored aspects of academia. But Darity boasts “a almost limitless amount of time to invest in people,” says McMillan Cottom, who initially met Darity through a UNC program designed to springboard underrepresented students into doctoral research. One of his main coauthors is his former graduate student at UNC, Darrick Hamilton, and a decade ago Darity and Sharpe cofounded the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) project, which pairs junior minority faculty members with mentors in hopes of assisting the former group’s path to tenure. His peers praise him for doing everything possible to aid in their career advancement, even allowing others to be named as first authors on collaborations where Darity would typically take top billing.

“A lot of faculty members are interested in folks who are already shining,” says Sharpe, who's also now the president of WISER, the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race. Any investment of time, she explains, can be seen as risk— especially when “talking to junior folks who are unknowns.” By contrast, says McMillan Cottom, “what Sandy offers is one of the rarest forms of mentorship. He doesn’t just give general advice, which can be useful, but it’s also the lowest form of mentorship investment there is.... The deepest form and most meaningful form of mentorship is the person who gets invested in learning you.”

“I tend to think that everybody has the possibility of doing very well, with the proper support and tangible resources and encouragement,” Darity says. His commitment to aiding nascent scholars is matter-of-fact, but it highlights the reality that the fight over these ideas will outlast him. He must do what he can to foster connections—Darity even went to an American EcoDUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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nomic Association meeting on his honeymoon— and open doors for the next wave of thinkers. “I think that his [research] might be his second life’s work,” says McMillan Cottom. “I think his first life’s work will be the things he’s built for people.”

Back in the seminar, as students share drafts of their capstone projects, Darity interrupts a master’s candidate’s proposal to analyze the media coverage of race and genetics in Australia. He gently chides her for perpetuating the empirical flaws of the previous literature. “The things that we examine are a function of the questions we ask,” Darity says, “and the questions we ask are a function of our priors.”

If the previous investigator’s framing is wrong, then it doesn’t behoove future researchers to answer an identical question more accurately. Instead, the latter investigator must inquire better—and persuade others to follow suit.

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“I don’t really worry so much about whether something is likely to be embraced immediately, but if I think it’s a good idea to change the world, I’ll work on crafting it.”

he longer one talks to Darity, the more the sad irony of the situation becomes clear.

The statistics he has helped uncover—for example, that white households in Boston have a median net worth of $247,500; for African Americans, that number is a mere eight dollars—are striking snapshots that at first seem like typos. “It’s disturbing,” Darity says, “but before examining this work or this data, I would not have expected the gaps to be this large.”

These gaps aren’t accidents but rather the culmination of discrimination past and present: from chattel slavery, to the lynchings and plunderings during Jim Crow, to the police killings and mass incarceration of today; from housing practices like redlining and predatory lending to the ongoing threats—eviction, air polution, tainted water—that people of color must disproportionately weather; from the government’s New Deal policies that restricted Social Security and the G.I. Bill to mostly whites, to the ravaging of the welfare state since these benefits were expanded. The arc of the moral universe has been stunted: By most any measure—unemployment, wealth, family income— 32 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

the relative economic position of black Americans hasn’t changed since the Civil Rights Act. Anyone familiar with this history must also know two things: the substantial work required to unseat these inequities, and the low odds of its success. Darity is fighting a battle where victories, if secured, will likely come decades later; he compares the requisite mindset to that of abolitionists in the U.S. in the early 1800s or activists rallying against South African apartheid in the 1950s. “I don’t really worry so much about whether something is likely to be embraced immediately,” he says, “but if I think it’s a good idea to change the world, I’ll work on crafting it.”

So, he’s crafted massive solutions. A “baby bonds” proposal, which would provide a child, upon her turning eighteen, a trust fund with anywhere from $500 to $50,000 based on her family’s position on the economic ladder. A federal jobs guarantee that would eliminate involuntary unemployment and provide workers health insurance and non-poverty wages.

These will not be cheap fixes: Darity and Hamilton estimate baby bonds, for example, would require an $80 billion annual expenditure; the annual bill for a federal jobs guarantee would land north of $500 billion. The jobs the government offers must thread a needle to identify important needs and projects that won’t require substantive training, meaning that anyone eighteen or older could find work. Plus, to many, the concept of government just giving away funds and jobs seems crazy.

But as Darity notes, his ideas stem from a long list of predecessors. “Baby Bonds” was termed not by him but by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Manning Marable, and a similar program currently exists in the United Kingdom. Likewise, in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of an “economic bill of rights,” guaranteeing a right to work, in addition to housing and health care. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech preceded a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: The third goal for organizers was a public-works project for the unemployed. And in 1978, the country almost achieved this goal with the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act: If individuals were willing to work but unable to find work, the act empowered the president to establish “reservoirs of public employment and private nonprofit employment projects” to fix those gaps. The legislation steadily weakened before passage, though, and today the act effectively guarantees nothing.

Since 2015, Darity has operated as the founding director of the Samuel Dubois Cook Center for Social Equity at Duke, and he produces research that’s easily conveyable to laymen and politicians alike. The center grew out of Darity’s vision to pull together social scientists and historians and health-science scholars to find remedies for these troubling disparities: As Bentley-Edwards, the center's associate director for research and director of the health equity working group, points out, the center is interdisciplinary in a way that many places aspire to be but few actually are. “One thing that it makes it easier to do is present data, present research, in ways that could be understood by a lot of different people,” she says. “You can’t get away with speaking in a bunch of jargon around here.”

In the fall, U.S. Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, announced legislation that drew heavily on Darity and Hamilton’s baby bonds idea. Booker and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, have both put forth plans that would provide a job for anyone who wants it. And Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, is among those pushing for a public banking option, another page in Darity’s playbook, in which U.S. post offices will provide basic financial services to citizens who currently have no access to them.

There is so much momentum, and yet, to borrow one of Darity’s self-made aphorisms, “things can always get worse.” Darity is wary of implementing piecemeal policies that merely offer lip service to desired outcomes and alleviate

pressure for a proper fix. “The partial measures can often become obstacles to getting to the full measures,” he says, pointing out that this is what happened with the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. As Bentley-Edwards notes, the common thread with the researchers at the Cook Center is that “we all have a low tolerance for complacency.” Not just any solution will do: Only the right, complete answer will suffice. Most important, Darity has a sense of what full equality would look like. “If we’re going to get to that condition,” he says, “then there’s some very, very difficult work that has to be done.”

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arity’s Cook Center office, in the brick Erwin Mill complex just off Ninth Street, sums him up neatly: both unpretentious and swelling with scholarship. Right in the center of his tome-laden desk is Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

In the book’s conclusion, Kendi authoritatively states that anti-racist ideas in America will never be adopted until it’s in the best interest of the ruling class to adopt them.

The growing discussion around baby bonds and a federal jobs guarantee seems like they might reflect such a change: Indeed, a larger share of benefits would go to the least-wealthy people and those most in need of employment, who are disproportionately black. But Darity believes the push behind these ideas isn’t driven by a newfound tolerance but instead by the extreme outcome of the 2016 election—and the Democratic party’s belief in the efficacy of bolder policies. “If you want to talk about a truly anti-racist project,” Darity says, “you’d have to be talking about America adopting a national reparations program.”

In September, Darity convenes a panel to discuss that very idea. Bathed in the golden light of East Campus’ Nelson Music Room are a half-dozen speakers, spanning two schools and six discrete departments. Darity appears as the elder spokesman; in the concluding Q&A, time and again the panelists defer to Darity to provide a definitive response. And as others speak, Darity sits with a perpetually cocked eyebrow, jotting down notes with either hand, his chuckles of acDUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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knowledgment contributing the backing track for his peers’ addresses.

Reparations have happened elsewhere for similar injustices, and they’ve occurred in America many times before. In the last fifty years, the U.S. government has delivered payouts to Native Americans, to Alaska Natives, and to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. It’s only logical to Darity that since forced labor built this country, those wrongs, too, require atonement.

Resistance to reparations for black Americans, Darity claims, once he receives the microphone, hinges on the narratives of the heroic nature of the Confederacy and of black dysfunction. He goes on to dismantle one of the ten myths that his “What We Get Wrong” report dismissed: the idea that buying black and banking black can close the racial wealth gap. His speech is an onslaught of numbers—passionate, but argued from a place of empiricism.

But even when the evidence is as good as it gets, nothing guarantees people will change their views.

It’s a testament to the unfairness of the world Darity inhabits: A mythbuster has to rely on facts despite their ineffectiveness. Like his laugh in the face of misery, or his decisions to persist with 34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

economics, read classic texts while fighting for tenure, and devote an exorbitant amount of time to junior scholars when he has so much on his own plate, the life of a mythbuster is paradoxical until it isn’t. For it to make sense, one needs a longer-term horizon and a belief in the power of trying to, as Darity says, “imagine worlds that would be better and think about how we might get to those worlds.”

When one of the forty or so audience members gathered asks about what the effects of providing reparations might be, no one’s surprised that Darity chimes in. What’s surprising is that he says something speculative, almost optimistic, a counterweight to the fact-laden speech he just delivered. “I’m not sure that we’d solve all the racial issues in the U.S.,” he says, of providing reparations, “but I sure would like to run the experiment.”

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hen, in the spring, the experiment inches closer to reality. Following 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s call for reparations, aspiring nominees are put on the spot, asked about their beliefs. The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and C-SPAN all discuss reparations: Darity’s quotes appear in each.

His fifteen minutes aren’t over.

Few have outlined what reparations might actually look like, but Darity has considered this question for twenty-some years. That is his essence: the person running ahead of ideas, talking about them well before politicians or writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates—let alone David Brooks—are willing to, and discussing things in definitive terms while others are operating in the abstract.

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“I’m not sure that we’d solve all the racial issues in the U.S., but I sure would like to run the experiment.”

Back in 1997, Darity noted how after the Civil War, the freed slaves were promised “forty acres and a mule” along the coast in Georgia and South Carolina before Andrew Johnson revoked this agreement. In 2003, he cowrote a paper with Dania Frank, “The Economics of Reparations,” which explored how much African Americans are owed for slavery and decades of Jim Crow, as well as five potential forms that payment should take. In a forthcoming book, Darity and his wife, Mullen, will further the specifics of both eligibility for reparations and the size of restitution, likely estimated based on the present-day value of the post-Civil War promise: As Darity and Frank said in their paper, “the damages to the collective well-being of black people have been enormous and, correspondingly, so is the appropriate bill.”

In mid-March, Darity guests on WBUR, the Boston NPR station. He’s paired off against John McWhorter, the Columbia English and comparative literature professor often called to supply the wet blanket for these discussions. McWhorter outlines how these conversations have happened before, around 2000, following the publication of Randall Robinson’s The Debt. “There was a big, big debate...and reparations, frankly, was soundly defeated as a viable notion,” he says.

McWhorter is pithy and energetic, speaking with the fervor of someone who can’t believe his time is being wasted with this chatter.

Darity, by contrast, sounds weary but persistent, his responses providing muted sound bites but laced with historical context. Conditions have changed, he says.

In the early 1990s, 4 percent of white Americans said they supported the idea of reparations; a 2016 Marist poll suggests those numbers are around 20 percent, with even higher numbers among millennials. Presidential candidates are willing to discuss these topics and express their support for it, and other elected officials are developing interest. From 1989 until 2017, each year U.S. Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, advanced a bill (HR-40) to start a com-

mission to study the case for reparations for black Americans and develop proposals for delivering them. U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Texas Democrat, now oversees the bill, and since she proposed it in January, it has accrued additional cosponsors in a manner the bill hasn’t in previous sessions.

Darity notes that before the 1990 delivery of payouts to Japanese Americans, Congress convened a committee—the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.

“And so, I think as a prelude to the development of a comprehensive reparations program for black Americans, it’s appropriate to have a similar kind of commission,” Darity says.

A promising sign would be if his book, From Here to Equality: Black Reparations in the Twenty-First Century, gets published. Fittingly for a project with such an ambitious title, it’s been a long time in the making. He’s teased it since 2014, and now the book is set to come out next February, amidst the presidential primary season.

Darity’s a patient man when it comes to advancing policy, but he wants his and his wife’s work in public before the window of relevance has shut. “I hope it’s no later than that,” he says. And then, of course, he starts to laugh. n DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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2019 NCAA | ELITE EIGHT | W - MICHIGAN STATE

Associated Press

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Just can’t

for losing

Success gave this men’s basketball fan great expectations.

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He learned that sometimes those feelings go unfulfilled.

B Y S H A N E R YA N

t’s the last day of March in 2001, and the Duke Blue Devils, led by faultless demigods Shane Battier ’01 and Jason Williams ’03, are hours from facing the hated Maryland Terrapins in the Final Four.

I’m a senior in high school, bound for Duke in less than six months. Victory, I believe, is assured. This team exists beyond the possibility of loss, and I am upstate New York’s foremost ambassador—no, missionary—no, zealot—of the Blue Devil way. I walk among the heathens, aglow with pure belief. I know the promised land awaits.

So, for the first and only time in my life, I decide to paint my chest.

The “paint” is actually a blue magic marker I find in a Ziploc bag, and it’s harder than you might imagine to draw a giant blue “D” on your own chest. I manage, barely, and cover up with a T-shirt.

I’m watching with family at home, and the plan is to unveil my masterpiece—to great dramatic effect—when victory is certain.

But I’ve forgotten a few things. First, Maryland is also very good. Second, the male members of the Ryan clan, from my grandfather to my father to my younger

brothers—Syracuse fans, curse them—have a shark-like instinct for human frailty.

Duke struggles, and the mockery hits me from all sides, reaching a crescendo as the deficit grows to twenty-two. I am beside myself with rage and despair—the jackals don’t understand my fanaticism and seem to be under the false impression that we’re witnessing a mere basketball game. Or—a darker explanation—they do understand and find my suffering delightful.

They laugh. I storm out.

By the time I arrive at my mother’s house forty-five minutes later—thank goodness for divorced parents, ha-ha—things have changed. The insurmountable lead has been surmounted, Duke is insatiable, and heartbreaking loss gives way to glory. I’m so stunned, so happy, that I forget all about the blue “D” on my chest until I see it in the bathroom mirror later that night. It’s now melted on my torso, like something by Dali if he had dabbled in body art.

Two nights later, Duke wins the national title. Watching the confetti fall, I consider the four years I’ll spend in Durham. We will win at least two titles, I think. Probably three. Four is unlikely—let’s be reasonable—but then again, I can’t rule it out.

w

in

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ou know the upshot: Reality cut me to pieces. By the time I graduated in 2005, with zero titles for Duke instead of four, unfulfilled expectation had rendered me insufferable.

I’m not alone. To be a Duke basketball fan is to be an ingrate—to live in a time of bounty, but to scoff at anything short of the absolute, impossible zenith. To be a Duke basketball fan is to suffer from the disease of expectation and to sulk when reality won’t bend to your deep-rooted delusions.

For me, that 2001 title obliterated all sense of proportion, clouded the sheer difficulty of ever winning a title in the capricious playoff system that is March Madness, and sabotaged my enjoyment of one of the greatest careers in Duke basketball history.

I realize today that there is only one path to true atonement. There is only one way to cleanse myself of the ravenous greed that seized me in its jaws around the turn of the millennium and hasn’t released me since: I need to throw myself at the mercy of the only high priest who can grant me absolution. I need to confess my crime: I didn’t appreciate you like I should have. I need an audience with J.J. Redick himself.

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ut first, an important question: Was it always this way? I knew just whom to ask.

John Feinstein ’77 is a prolific author who has written the two best-selling sports books ever published, but in February of 1973, he was a high-school senior being recruited by the Yale swim team. His father desperately wanted him to choose the Ivy League path, but while visiting Duke that winter, he saw Gary Melchionni ’73, J.D. ’81 score thirty-nine points as Duke shocked No. 3 Maryland. The students taunted the Terps by singing their victory

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“I used to joke that when we talked about the

Final Four , we were

talking about making the semifinals of the ACC tournament.”

song, and when Feinstein left Cameron Indoor Stadium that night, he prepared to disappoint his father. “Dad,” he said, “I’m really sorry. But if I get in here, I’m going.”

He got in, and by his sophomore year he was covering the basketball team for The Chronicle. He clearly picked a good time to launch his journalism career, but it was not a high point for the program—in Feinstein’s four years, the Blue Devils finished last or tied for last in the ACC each season and went a pitiful 1-10 against Carolina. A student in those days could walk in twenty minutes before any game and get a seat near midcourt. To further illustrate the difference between eras, Feinstein told me about a game he attended his senior year at Madison Square Garden between Duke and Connecticut, and how those two teams played in the forgotten 7 p.m. undercard. The headliners that night? Fordham and Rutgers.

When I asked him whether he had any expectations about winning national titles while he attended Duke, he just laughed.

“God, no. I used to joke that when we talked about the Final Four, we were talking about making the semifinals of the ACC tournament.”

There was a hint of lingering regret in his voice, I think, when he delivered the punchline: “Which, in my four years, they did not.”

But despite the ignominy of the early ’70s, things were changing. New head coach Bill Foster knew his business, and he began to build a team that could compete with the giants of the ACC. By the ’77-78 season, Duke boasted players like Jim Spanarkel ’79 and Mike Gminski ’80, and one morning his senior year, Feinstein got a call from Bob Wetzel, an assistant coach, breaking the news that they had successfully recruited Gene Banks ’81. He’ll never forget Wetzel’s words: “The worm has turned.”

2018 NCAA | ELITE EIGHT | W - KANSAS

And the worm turned quickly. The next season, Foster’s young Blue Devils would go all the way to the NCAA championship game, and raise the school’s profile in a way that helped make it possible for Mike Kryzyzewski, who took over in 1980, to recruit the team that took him to his first Final Four in 1986.

That ’79 Duke season also brought another curious development. Their success landed them on NBC’s “Game of the Week,” and Feinstein—now working at The Washington Post—saw something new in Cameron: A few of the students, anticipating the cameras, had painted their faces blue and white.

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ou don’t need a history lesson.

You don’t need me to tell you how Coach K transformed the team from ACC also-rans to loveable upstarts to hated juggernauts. How the years passed, how success begat success, how titles rolled in. How expectations grew. How they led to my shameful ingratitude.

But did it persist with those who came after? Those who had reached the mountaintop?

I realized I had to find a younger alum who had experienced what I had not—a precious, precious title. I turned to Connor Southard ’12, a New York-based writer who described his childhood fandom in Wyoming as “a sort of heliocentrism in which Duke was the sun.”

When Southard arrived in Durham in the fall of 2008, his expectations were actually muted—Duke hadn’t made a Final Four since 2004, and it was Carolina that seemed to be on the ascent. He even felt that Coach K had lost his edge. It certainly didn’t help that after spending five “miserable, disillusioning weeks” in a tent for his

“The worm has turned.”

first Carolina game, he watched Duke fall 101-87 to a Tar Heel team that would go on to win the national championship.

“The horrific thing about washing off Prussian blue and white face paint,” he wrote in an e-mail, “is that, as they combine in the sink, they make Carolina blue.”

The next season, while standing in line for the UNC-Greensboro game in November, he heard the news that Harrison Barnes, the nation’s top-ranked high school player, had chosen UNC over Duke. That day, even the diehards had to concede the point—the Blue Devils had fallen behind. Then, somehow, they won the national title.

Southard’s main memories from the night of triumph include watching a large bearded man scream to the heavens from atop a burning bench while avoiding death and third-degree burns, and a strange meeting with a freshman friend on the quad.

“Enjoy this,” he told her. “Oh,” she replied, “it’ll happen again next year.”

And that’s the reality of expectation at Duke—it gets you no matter who you are or when you attend. Success breeds confidence, and confidence breeds the privilege of wanting everything, all the time. Southard

CHAMPS: In March 2015, the team went all the way, something this year’s seniors didn’t get to witness.

Associated Press

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came in with very few preconceived notions, but his innocence was lost with the title. Just one year later, he was at the Izod Center in New Jersey when Kyrie Irving ’14 hurt his toe and one of the greatest college teams ever assembled fell to ruin. Did the title soften the blow? Just the opposite.

“College basketball was robbed of something transcendent,” he wrote. “So no, it wasn’t gravy. There was still heartache, frustration, losses.”

Shaker Samman ’17, who writes for The Ringer in Los Angeles, concurred. He spent most of his childhood as a Michigan Wolverines fan, firmly believing in Duke’s inherent evil, but things changed when his cousin sneaked him into a game at Cameron during a high-school trip. Andre Dawkins ’13 buried a slew of deep threes to lead Duke to a win over Virginia, and with Cameron rocking, Samman had one thought: “I have to do whatever it takes to get back here.”

He succeeded—“someone in admissions was drunk and let me in”—and his sophomore year, he scrounged up enough money for a forty-dollar student lottery ticket to the Final Four and plane fare to Indianapolis. He wore his blue body suit, and in the waning moments of the championship game, as Tyus Jones ’18 sealed the victory, he nearly managed to destroy a CBS boom camera with an exuberant punch.

To him, the title came as a relief—he wanted one, he expected one. But he found that it permanently altered how he viewed Duke basketball.

“Any other school, a trip to the Elite 8 and a loss to a blueblood like Kansas, and you’re saying ‘great season, great job,’ ” he told me, describing Duke’s 2018 run.

“It took me a month to get to that point.

At the time, I was like, ‘Are you kidding

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“Any other school,

a trip to the Elite 8 and a loss to a blueblood like Kansas, and you’re saying ‘great season, great job.’ ”

me? Grayson Allen couldn’t hit that shot?’ It changes your expectations in a kind of sick way. You’re never satisfied unless a season ends in a banner.”

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he story is the same in 2019.

This year’s seniors are the rare class that will graduate without ever having seen a Final Four, much less a title. The presence of Zion Williamson filled them with hope that the curse would end at the eleventh hour, but for all the moments of transcendence, this team, too, fell short of the promised land.

Steve Hassey, one of those seniors, was the head line monitor of K-Ville. He came to Duke terrified of this exact fate—his boss at a high-school job graduated with the doomed Class of 2014, sandwiched by titles but with none of their own. “It inspired the fear of God in me,” he said in early March, before Duke had been eliminated. He was staring down the same barrel of the same gun, and two weeks later he watched his team fall to Michigan State just one game shy of the Final Four.

As head line monitor, he has seen the dark side of the school’s collective basketball obsession and how expectation leads to entitlement. He once received a long, angry, and very personal e-mail about the allocation of “spirit points” during tenting season. (When I asked my friend Ariana Eily, a graduate student who serves as an usher inside Cameron, for her most bracing memory of ugly fandom, she described one student who delivered a wild threat to an usher upon being asked to move: “I know who you are, and I’m going to write you a bad Yelp review.”)

But Hassey took pains to note that this is the exception and not the rule. His opti-

2017 NCAA | SECOND ROUND | W - S. CAROLINA

mism shone through, and even though he won’t graduate until May, he already views his time in K-Ville with something like nostalgia. “Duke basketball is embodied in K-Ville,” he said. “It’s very hard to get more than 1,000 Duke students together for anything, and I think it’s something that is unbelievably unique in college athletics.”

Samman agreed about the Duke fan experience. “A lot of the social culture at Duke is very exclusive,” he said, “with one exception: Cameron and K-Ville. It’s Duke’s last monoculture.” Ultimately, for Hassey and Samman, it’s this collective experience that resonates more than any disappointment.

I

had discovered, I think, that expectation was inevitable and a little bit corrosive, but ultimately worth enduring. Only one task remained: To beg forgiveness at the feet of J.J. Redick ’06.

I reached him by phone after a Philadelphia 76ers practice, and rather than beat around the bush, I confessed my crimes and asked a simple question: “How annoying were students like me?” To my surprise, he laughed.

“I don’t find it annoying,” he said. “The interesting thing, at least with my class, is that we thought we’d win multiple championships. We’d all talk about it on our official visits, and at the McDonald’s games. Coming into Duke, I probably had the same unrealistic vision of how the four years would turn out.”

And it eats at him, to this day, that he never won. It eats at Coach K, too—he’s told Redick multiple times how much he regrets that they couldn’t bring home a title together. “It’s one of the great

“Coming to Duke, I probably had the same unrealistic vision of how the four years would turn out.”~ J.J. Redick

disappointments of my life,” Redick said.

“It bothered me. It bothered me a lot. I know this sounds weird, but I wish that I could have been part of the national championship team to give back to the Duke community.”

Nevertheless, he has nothing but fond memories of his fellow students. If they had crushing expectations, they never crushed him. Maybe it was because his career came just before social media hit its stride—the worst it ever got was his dad phoning him in a panic because he read on a Duke message board that his son had been arrested for underage drinking (not true)—but he was no stranger to pressure.

When I asked him what advice he’d offer to a theoretical J.J. Redick entering Duke today, he had a quick answer ready: “Don’t waste your freshman and sophomore years partying.” A pause. “No, I’m kidding.” A second pause. “Sort of.”

A third pause. “I would say, Coach is going to demand a lot, he’s going to expect a lot, the fan base is going to expect a lot, and Coach is recruiting guys for the most part that expect a lot of themselves, so there’s just this cycle of expectation that I think is sort of unavoidable.”

But amid the fatalism, Redick echoed what I’d heard over and over again—the love of the experience, and the sense that even if you can’t beat the expectations, you can exist alongside them without being engulfed in their shadow. “I can say now that even knowing I had huge expectations, and knowing that some of them were unfulfilled and I have to live with that, I still look back and say, ‘wow, what a great period in my life.’ ” And though we suffer beneath the weight of our impossible dreams, most of us ingrates would say the same. n

Ryan ’05 is the politics editor for Paste Magazine and writes regularly for Golf Digest. He’s the author of New York Times best seller Slaying the Tiger: A Year Inside the Ropes on the New PGA Tour. He lives in Durham with his wife and daughter.

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Timely +

Timeless At Duke, classical studies is showing the self-confidence that comes from the power to subject the fraught present to insights gleaned from the ancient past.

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BY ROBERT J. BLIWISE I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y A L E + A L E

he sweet release of spring break beckons, but the day is dreary. How dreary? Perfectly dreary. The very definition of dreariness. The ideal, ultimate expression, the Platonic Form, of dreariness.

Some undergraduates—pulled together as a discussion section of a ninety-student course—escape all that as they duck into Gross Hall, a one-time fortress of chemistry instruction. Now repurposed, Gross is the setting for a kind of classical revival, with “Democracy: Ancient and Modern,” taught through the department of classical studies. Perhaps fueled by the doughnut holes sent around by Jed Atkins, their jeans-clad instructor, the students show the super-attentiveness that accompanies impending midterms.

In that Gross lecture hall, the ancient and modern worlds are colliding.

There’s a periodic table of elements, a giant-size tribute to modern atomic theory. But the idea that all matter is made of atoms originated with the ancient Greek philosophers, and the word “atom” comes from the Greek word atomos, or “indivisible.” Then there’s the question for class discussion.

It’s a question firmly rooted in the realm of political theory. It also smashes across the spectrum of time: Is American democracy more immune from despotism and tyranny than Athenian democracy?

Atkins, an associate professor of classical studies, divides the discussion section into even smaller groups; when they report back, the students show classic ambiguity around the comparative look at democracies.

Well, suggests one group, the U.S. populace is better-educated than their ancient counterparts. Sure, responds Atkins, but the ancient Athenians considered the responsibilities of citizenship—including familiarity with the policies of the city-state—a serious matter. A thought from a second group: There’s the checks-and-balances feature of American democracy.

Atkins points out that for ancient thinkers, the goodness of the political system hinged on the goodness of the leader. From a third group: If there’s a factor fueling America’s political conversation, maybe it’s anger. From Atkins: The Athenians had their own reasons for anger, but they also had a more direct form of democracy. They had their Athenian assembly, through which all (male) citizens could vent their concerns and join in passing legislation, appointing officials, and declaring war.

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STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields seem to Half-jokingly, Atkins declares himself a fan of ostracism as a dominate the academy. democratic tool. (“Bring it back!”) That refers to the practice of Even in his days as a Duke graduate student, Adler says, banishing a citizen, an opportunity that presented itself in Athens every year. The threat of ostracism, then, could be seen both the department stretched its curriculum in unexpected directions. His mentor, Mary T. Boatwright, professor of classical as an outlet for citizen anger and as a way to tame an individual studies, maintains strong interests in both ancient and modern leader’s excessive rhetoric. historiography. Others he studied with similarly modeled inIt could also lead to the anti-democratic muzzling of someone tellectual breadth: They were devoted to Latin love elegy and for his views. Building on that concern, Atkins ends the class contemporary literary theory alike, or to classical and modern with a nod to James Madison, who, in The Federalist Papers— Caribbean works, or to poetry along with philosophy. In craftsome of which are included in the course readings—wrote ing courses that speak to the concerns of the present, they and about the pernicious influence of political factions. The cure for their colleagues, as he puts it, “answer the most important quesfactionalism, Madison acknowledged, could be to destroy liberty, to enforce the same opinions and passions on every citizen. tion about the study of classical antiquity today: Why should The cure for a factions-ridden democracy someone learn about the classical world?” could be worse than the disease.

In his own book, Roman Political Thought, For generations classical studies, as reppublished last year, Atkins takes on a series “One of the reasons resented in the academy, reveled in its of themes that bounce between the ancient status—call it hubris—as the unshakable and the current-day. One of those themes we study antiquity foundation for the study of Western civiis political rhetoric; Roman texts acknowlis to see some lization. Then, in recent decades, with the edged that rhetoric can lead to flattery, manipulation, and deep political division, but opening up of the canon, the fraught associcontinuities—as well ations sometimes accompanying “Western also that rhetoric can contribute to the common ethos necessary for shared, and hence civilization,” and the rethinking of curricuas differences—in the lar requirements, it recognized itself as unpolitically sensitive, judgments. human condition.” der threat. These days, classical studies faces Atkins writes that he is “strongly convinced of the relevance of Roman political declining enrollments and, at some colleges, thought for contemporary liberal-demoeven oblivion, with departmental downsizing in the humanities. A survey conducted cratic readers.” Relevance, he points out, two years ago found that the majority of doesn’t mean that comparisons are always classical scholars believe the discipline to be neat and clean. “I think that we must work in crisis. hard to highlight the familiar concepts in Last spring, in The Chronicle of Higher EdRoman political thought, especially given ucation, Stanley Fish, the academic gadfly the historical myopia of our own age. However, relevance may be found in what from our perspective is and one-time chair of Duke’s English department, wrote an essay strange, jarring, or distasteful, as well as in those aspects that under the fatalistic title “Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities.” It’s strike a more familiar or comfortable chord.” hard to make a defense “when the rest of the world is preaching In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, he writes, instrumentalism, assessment, outcomes, employment statistics, “Americans across the political spectrum were concerned with and metrics,” he wrote. His argument was that there’s essentially the deep divisions within their polity revealed by an ugly and no argument for studying the humanities—except that it may be contentious campaign.” How should we respond when the sense satisfying for its own sake, not for any larger purpose. of civic wholeness seems to have dissipated? It’s helpful to look But at Duke, at least, classical studies is showing a burst of back to the Roman concept of corruption, “which directs us to intellectual energy, healthy enrollments, and the self-confidence ask questions about the overall health of the body politic”— that comes from the power to subject the fraught present to insights gleaned from the ancient past. It’s fair to say that for faculquestions, that is, about civic virtue. The more familiar liberal ty devoted to the humanities, “relevance” is hardly a measure of idea of corruption, “which focuses more narrowly on politicians’ worthiness. But the ancient world seems to matter—a lot. use of their authority for personal material gain,” hardly gets us That’s one of the premises of Classics, the Culture Wars, and to the heart of the matter.

Beyond, whose author is Eric Adler Ph.D. ’05, an associate proIn the very same week of the Atkins class, Duke offered three fessor of classics at the University of Maryland. His book is the outside speakers who proclaimed, in various forms, a retreat source of the anxiety-revealing survey of classical scholars. In his from the democratic tradition that has its origin in ancient Athens. Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, chartview, teachers of classics should more avidly promote classical ed, among other trends, the slide of the U.S. on a democracy knowledge as foundational for an educated person; after all, the spectrum. Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, former president of Cosliberal-arts tradition itself has origins in Rome. And, as he writes, ta Rica, told his audience: “We should not take democracies for they “should advertise the prominent role of classical antiquity in shaping the modern world”—particularly at a time when granted. It’s becoming more and more common to see how they 44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

can fail.” Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, recalled her (immigrant) father’s observation that Americans don’t understand that democracy is a fragile concept.

The chair of classical studies at Duke, William Johnson, notes that the ancient world has always had something to say to, or about, the modern world. His own background shows a veering between the ancient and the modern: He was an undergraduate double-major in English and Latin, earned a master’s in ancient Greek, worked as a senior-level computer programmer, and then returned to graduate school for his Ph.D. in classics.

His department’s website highlights the fact that several nations, much of Western Europe and the U.S. among them, explicitly leaned on the model of Athens. But Athens was a democracy only if a democratic state is one in which a narrow slice of the population—certified as citizens—is eligible either to debate or vote on civic matters. Athens ruled by the One Percenters?

How alien is that to our idea of democracy? As for Rome, the biggest slave state in history: Romans thought slaves so untrustworthy that courts only admitted their testimony if obtained

under torture. Yet, Rome granted freed slaves full citizenship status, a step Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, failed to take.

From the moment she stepped on campus as dean of arts and sciences, about four years ago, Valerie Ashby “has been pushing the departments to consider the experiences of first- and second-year students,” Johnson says. Classical studies “kind of led the charge on that.” As he talks about the department’s curriculum, the word that comes up a lot is “intentionality.” So the department “makes sure we have enough richness of subject material in our curriculum so that anybody can look at classics and find something interesting.” That means “having some courses that are really accessible for neophytes who may not even think they’re particularly interested in antiquity,” he says.

Among those spring-semester courses is Johnson’s own “Birth of the West.” Johnson has the students looking at the ancient Greek origins of Western civilization—theater production and writing systems, philosophy and historiography. In one class, students are discussing the meaning of freedom, then and now. The freedom, for example, to speak your mind, to practice your religion, to expect personal privacy, to plan out your own life. Or the freedom to disobey social norms, which Socrates pressed beyond the limits.

Back in his office, where the jammed bookshelves include his own The Essential Herodotus, Johnson says, “We don’t actually sit around as faculty and ask ourselves, ‘How can we design our courses so that we cleverly drag in current events?’ One of the reasons we study antiquity is to see some continuities—as well as differences—in the human condition. It’s pretty hard not to have some attachment to what’s happening now; it’s low-hanging fruit.” Recalling his lecture on Periclean Athens, an era that had its own encounters with executive overreach, he adds, “I don’t want to be teaching a political agenda. On the other hand, for everything that we’re talking about in class, there’s such a rich set of examples that relate to recent U.S. presidencies.”

The links across time extend beyond leadership attributes.

When Johnson teaches The Iliad, Homer’s Trojan War epic, his students zero in on traits and travails that somehow feel contemporary. One example: the questioning of gender roles. Hector, stripped of his armor and so vulnerable to his fierce foe Achilles, is portrayed, dismissively, as acting—and even talking—like a woman. Is the hero always going to be hyper-masculine? “That gets us into all sorts of interesting explorations of this thing we park under the term ‘masculinity,’ ” Johnson says.

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That relevance factor is a draw for students like Rise Miller, a rising junior majoring in public policy and history. He says a Greek history course taught by Joshua Sosin Ph.D. ’00, associate professor of classical studies, influenced his world view. The class spent a lot of time covering Thucydides and the issues the ancient historian raises about war, law, and politics. Those issues came to a head with the Melian Dialogue, a template for cold and calculated reasoning: In rationalizing their cruel conquest of the island of Melos, the Athenians declared that, in essence, the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides also provides an enduring, if not entirely fair portrait of Pericles’ successor in Athens, Cleon; he portrays Cleon as a demagogue, a bully, and a figure driven to take down his political enemies.

Miller resists drawing direct parallels. But, he adds, “we are still trying to find the balance between democratic principles and the need for expediency in wartime, we are still trying to find the line between democracy and demagoguery, and we are still trying to figure out if there is an alternative to the realpolitik of the Melian Dialogue.”

The appeal of war may be an aspect of the human condition, ancient and modern alike.

So is the appeal of spectacle (a not-unrelated phenomenon). “Roman Spectacle” is among the spring-semester offerings in classical studies; the seminar is taught by Alicia Jiménez,

“I don’t want to be teaching a political agenda.

On the other hand, for everything that we’re talking about in class, there’s such a rich set of examples that relate to recent U.S. presidencies.” assistant professor of classical studies. The syllabus refers to “the most popular forms of public entertainment in the Roman world,” including gladiatorial games, wild-beast hunts, chariot-racing, and elaborately staged executions of condemned criminals.

As class begins in the Allen Building, Jiménez enlists the students to adjust the arrangement of the room’s tables-on-wheels, a move meant to allow for a friendlier seminar layout. In the process, one wheel comes off, prompting a few wry comparisons to Roman chariot races. One of the dozen or so students is wearing a “Disney’s Hercules” T-shirt, complete with the mythological hero attacking a purplish, serpent-like, big-fanged monster. The student explains he wore it specifically for the class.

46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Among the readings for the day is an article called “The Lure of the Arena.” Toggling between the Roman era and our own, the article looks at violence in the Roman arena as “in no small measure packaged for its audience,“ and, in its own way, “as stylized and staged to meet their expectations as modern movie violence or professional wrestling is to meet ours.”

There’s not much of a gulf, it seems, between the Roman arena spectator and the consumer of modern violent entertainment.

Much of the class discussion rides with that theme. Students offer thoughts on spectacles then and now. The power of images to excite the public imagination. The symbolic significance of staged battles: Did the stadium spectacle of man versus beast represent Roman valor quashing a barbarian threat? The links be-

tween military victory and national glory. The puzzling juxtaposition of a society committed to notions of justice and that, at the same time, delights in crass entertainment—the fighting gladiators of the Colosseum, the fighting protagonists of reality TV. The gladiators have a place in another course, “Roman History: Power Plays,” taught by Boatwright, the classical studies professor and Society for Classical Studies president. Boatwright doesn’t hesitate to link the past and the present, in rather public fashion: A few years ago, she wrote an opinion column for a local newspaper, “What Ancient Romans Can Teach Us About Confederate Monuments.” The Romans understood that negative lessons out of history were as significant as positive ones, she observed. “The Romans also developed a way to designate monuments as negative exemplars, so as to remember, through pseudo-obliteration, individuals deemed notorious. Often dubbed damnatio memoriae, this official practice could erase a name from an inscription or chisel away a portrait on a bas-relief while carefully leaving traces of the letters or a void in the depiction to demonstrate that something had been removed.”

For one class meeting of “Roman History,” a jackhammering crew roams just outside, and for the left-handed student searching for a chair with the appropriate writing surface—well, good luck with that heroic quest. Still the class shows a good bit of interaction. The readings reveal themes that straddle the ages.

For example, social inequality (How did the economically disadvantaged fare as power became concentrated?), the relationship between justice and power (What were the implications once public officials were granted immunity from prosecution?), and the standing of a particular leader (How are we to process the picture of a leader who is strong and charismatic but also untruthful and cruel?). Boatwright wants her students to become familiar with Roman leaders and leadership, as she notes on the syllabus, while being able “to draw connections between Roman leaders and those in later eras, including our own.”

Boatwright finds lots of avenues into those connections. She has the students read about the flexible Roman concepts of physical borders, Roman forms of political propaganda, and— via an essay by Robert Harris, a popular writer of historical fiction—Roman responses to a terrorist attack on its very heart, after Rome’s port of Ostia was set on fire and the slow erosion of civil liberties ensued. There’s also reading from Caesar’s own memoirs; Boatwright notes wryly that in his own telling, everybody loved Caesar, everybody looked to him as the champion of the people, and everybody was okay with his breaking the rules of the day. That would include a step symbolizing the point of no return: his defying the Roman Senate and, with his army, crossing the rather puny Rubicon River, then the northeastern boundary of Italy.

When Boatwright started at Duke, in 1980, the classical-studies curriculum, outside the study of Greek and Latin, was largely built on courses that followed a familiar chronology: the Aegean Bronze Age, Greek history, the Age of Pericles, Alexander the Great, Roman history. By the early 2000s, the curriculum had started to open up, and Boatwright was teaching “Women in the Ancient World.”

As a researcher, Boatwright has scoured ancient historians, coins, inscriptions, papyri, and museum holdings for evidence of the contributions of women. Over time, she’s been bringing that scholarship into her teaching. (She chose not to work on women in antiquity until she earned tenure. At the time, she says, such an interest might have been considered marginal in the context of ancient civilization.)

In her teaching, she’s also moved beyond the traditional emphasis on the text—another nod to what seems relevant today.

“Roman History,” like many of the department’s courses, includes encounters with material culture, along with its digital representation: The first goal of the course, according to the syllabus, is “to access, understand, and interpret ancient material, including Roman historical texts and objects in Duke’s Nasher Museum.”

She sends her students online as well; they analyze Roman coins, a key cultural marker, through various specialized websites.

Just after spring break, Boatwright lectures in “Roman History” about women’s ambiguous place in Roman society. Women were supposed to be out of the public eye, meaning they were officially removed from the realms of the military and politics.

They were, instead, expected to produce lots of children, since one in two children would die before reaching the age of ten.

Women did, though, participate in the political power plays of the elite—think Cleopatra, who was part of the extended Roman world. And among the non-elite, women did vital work, even if some of the work was low in social status (actresses, for example, were seen as akin to prostitutes.) Some 80 percent of the population of the Roman world lived outside the city. For women and men alike, that meant endless agricultural work.

The ancient world also produced endless athletic contests— bread and circuses and all that. One class day in early April, students in “Ancient Athletes” fill a lecture hall. (An “Aging Athletes” course would have its own wellspring of material.) The students clearly buy into the broad athletics theme: Their T-shirts, baseball caps, and book bags are branded with the New York Yankees, the Chicago Bears, Devine’s Restaurant and Sports Bar, and, naturally, the Blue Devils.

Kyle Jazwa, an instructor of classical studies who leads the course, asks the students to compare their recent sports-spectating experiences with what they’ve learned about Greek and Roman games. They talk about how glory and honor are reinforced, the relationships between competition and ritual, and the architecture of stadiums.

It’s registration season for the next semester, and Jazwa advertises future classical-studies offerings. One of his own courses set for the fall is “Ancient Science and Technology.” A cool feature of the course is the chance to build a replica of ancient technology.

He flashes on the screen the image of a replicated catapult, a machine meant to hurl rocks or arrows.

Jazwa doesn’t mention a notorious case from two years ago: Border Patrol agents in Arizona discovered and dismantled a catapult that would sling bundles of marijuana from Mexico into the U.S. That episode from recent history provides another reminder that at least one border—between the ancient and modern worlds—is permeable. n DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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Company man David S. Taylor ’80 has spent his career at Procter & Gamble.

Now, as CEO, he’s leading it through an especially turbulent time.

By Anne Saker | Photography by Will Jones

ForeverDuke

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lmost every advertisement for razors ever created captures the same moment. Towel around his neck, a man with morning stubble confronts his bathroom mirror. He is about to execute the manly act of shaving. But first, he locks eyes with his image.

Such a stock visual opens the ad for Gillette razors released in mid-January. But this new pitch goes further and explores a potent concept. For many men, the daily meeting with the mirror serves as existential reckoning. What am I doing? Where am I going? Who am I? Procter & Gamble Co., the global consumer-goods giant, owns Gillette and developed the ad to splash chin-deep into today’s public turbulence about sexual harassment and bullying. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the ad said, men can no longer excuse bad behavior with the rationalization that boys will be boys.

The ad aired, then…BOOM. For a few weeks, the media world set itself on fire over the ad. Offended opinion shapers barked that P&G was labeling masculinity as toxic. Reddit and Twitter commenters vowed boycotts of Gillette and other P&G goods.

P&G had expected blowback, and with its sophisticated communications force, the company could have dispatched a battalion of officials to the defense. The man who got into position, though, was P&G’s president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of directors, David S. Taylor ’80. In a television interview while convening with business titans and political leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Taylor explained that the ad is not saying men are bad, but rather that men can be better, that men want to be better.

Arriving at a critical juncture in the company’s 182 years, the furor over the ad spoke to the foundational status of P&G as a major American commercial institution with business in 100 countries, about 95,000 employees, and $66.8 billion in 2018 sales. But the ad also said plenty about the company’s leader, Taylor, now steering P&G through fundamental structural change.

No one growing up in the 1970s, especially in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, could miss the tumult over court-ordered busing for public-school desegregation.

Many families in Charlotte’s largely white Myers Park neighborhood responded by pulling their children from public education for private schools.

Howard and Bea Taylor, parents of AT THE TABLE: five boys, offered that option to their Taylor started at third son, David, who was about to P&G when he was a start high school. He chose the bus, rising senior. which meant a half-hour ride to West

Charlotte High School, with a majority African-American student population.

In his eleventh-floor office at Procter & Gamble Center in downtown Cincinnati, a space lined with P&G products, Taylor says those years “opened my eyes and broadened my field of vision to what the world had to offer.”

“You had, frankly, some fear and concern. Race relations weren’t good. There were literally riots. There were all types of tough things going on,” he says. “Then it settled out, and you ended up figuring out that they were kids just like you.”

Taylor credits his West Charlotte teachers with quickening his love of mathematics and preparing him for college.

During high school, he got a summer job at the Carowinds amusement park in Charlotte, first helping to run the cable cars, then leading the teenagers operating the Thunder Road rollercoaster. He spurred his team to break ridership records.

He followed an older brother, Howard B.S.E. ’76, to Duke, joined Kappa Sigma fraternity, played intramural sports, and held down the math-and-science course load in electrical engineering. In addition to work“He had a very ing summers at Carowhe drove three hours diverse group inds, home every spring and fall on his team, weekend to work at the amusement park. and all these One day, a new team people wanted member reported to Thunder Road, a smart, shy to do well for Winthrop College student David Taylor.” named Marsha Hellard. She noticed the thatch of red hair on the tall, skinny leader, but more important, his frequent laughter and friendliness.

“He had a very diverse group on his team, and all these people wanted to do well for David Taylor,” she says. “They worked hard because they wanted to do it for him.” Taylor asked her for a date, then another, and she soon knew he was the one.

Taylor quit Carowinds the summer before senior year for an internship at Procter & Gamble’s plant in Greenville, North Carolina. He went back to Duke in the fall with the offer of a full-time job upon graduation in his pocket. Taylor collected his degree and married Marsha the next month. They set up housekeeping in Greenville.

The next year, P&G brought in another young engineer to the plant. Stan Harper and Taylor are friends to this day.

“He really was fantastic at motivating people and coaching people,” Harper says, “and not only coaching the people he DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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ForeverDuke worked with directly, but people like myself who were his peers.”

Harper recalls that when the plant plugged in its first desktop computer, Taylor wrangled an office key from the head of finance. When the young managers finished their shifts on the line, they would poke at the computer keyboard for hours to teach themselves how to do spreadsheets.

From Greenville, the Taylors moved to P&G’s plant in Cheboygan, Michigan, where their Piedmont drawls fascinated the locals. A year later, the company sent the Taylors to the Albany, Georgia, factory. Then came the step that marked Taylor as a star.

Normally, a production manager had to clock in at least fifteen years with P&G before getting the chance to run a whole plant. But with just nine years in, Taylor was picked to lead P&G’s largest manufacturing facility then, in Mehoopany, Pennsylvania, about thirty-five miles northwest of Scranton.

Janeen Lyle landed at Mehoopany as a manager just out of college, a little worried about fitting into the plant culture. In one meeting, the guys talked about their long hours, and she cringed “because I’m a young mom, and I’m going to be saying that I start at 7:30 and leave around 5:30. I began to apologize and talk about childcare. But then David jumped in and said what matters is that people get their work done, and people get it done in different ways. He probably didn’t even give it a second thought. But it was huge support from him.”

Taylor soon was known for “Davidisms” that became so familiar to his team that one manager could

and Marsha had three young boys, Jason, Christopher, and Brian. David changed diapers, Marsha says, because “he was interested in how the product worked.”

Jason Taylor says his father’s grueling work habits stayed at the office. “He and my mom maintained a pretty normal house. He was our dad. He’s always been fantastic at being present. He’s there with you. He’s engaged. He makes a big effort. The only way I knew if something was wrong was maybe from my mom.”

Marsha Taylor figured they were in Cincinnati for good. But as P&G’s global operations expanded, the corporate management path demanded overseas tours.

In 1998, Taylor came home with a promotion: general manager of hair care in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. He knew nothing about hair products or, for that matter, Asia. He took the job.

The family moved to a neighborhood in Hong Kong that felt like a little corner of America, full of expatriates to celebrate the Fourth of July and Halloween. Taylor commuted eighty miles to P&G’s office in Guangzhou, China, on Tuesdays and came home Thursdays.

Taylor’s portfolio expanded to anti-counterfeiting, a huge issue in China, and he became a vice president.

In 2001, another move loomed, but first the family had a meeting. The move to Hong Kong had been hardest on Jason, then ten. In an act of rebellion, he once swiped a lighter from a convenience store. When his parents uncovered the theft, they marched him to the store to apologize to the owner and return the lighter. “They didn’t yell,” Jason says. “There was just this profound disappointment that said more than anything else.”

Dad explained they could go home, or to Geneva, Switzerland. Now seaworld citizens, the Taylor sons "In some very rocky water, he is positively but soned voted for the European assignment. realistically focused on where we need to go.”

In 2003, the Taylors did return to Cincinnati, and over the next dozen years, Taylor rose to group president start the sentence, and another could finish it: Anyfor global beauty, grooming, and health care, runthing is possible, but not all things that are possible are ning about one-third of P&G. Working with him smart to do. No one of us is smarter than all of us. Are you was Mindy Sherwood, who runs P&G’s business with listening, or are you waiting to speak?

Walmart.

P&G’s career tracks are clad in steel, and changing “He has straight talk. He will ask: Where is the business? If the business is off track, I’ve never heard David emphasis could be risky. One day, a boss visiting from Taylor dance around the fact that the business is not headquarters assured Taylor of his rise on the production side. But two years in Mehoopany made Taylor where it needs to be,” she says. Sherwood calls Taylor curious about marketing. The boss said shifting gears a lighthouse leader, who “will show you the beacon of meant going into an entry-level job usually filled with where you have to go, in smooth water and in rocky college graduates. Six months later, Taylor did just that. water. In some very rocky water, he is positively but Moving to Cincinnati, P&G’s birthplace and corporealistically focused on where we need to go.” rate home, Taylor joined the Pampers brand account, Outside the company, Taylor shouldered two interests. The Asia years awakened him to hunger around a happy coincidence with his home life. By then, he 50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

the world and in the United States. Between 2006 and 2014, he served on the board of the relief organization Feeding America. Today, he is on the board of a Cincinnati nonprofit, the Freestore Foodbank.

His second keen interest was Duke. The three Taylor sons earned Duke undergraduate degrees. Brian also earned a Duke master’s degree in environmental management, and Jason just finished a master’s in business administration. When his father speaks at the university, Jason says, “He makes the joke: ‘I would support them going anywhere, but I pay for them to go to Duke.’ ” David and Marsha Taylor visit Durham for one or two football and basketball games a year. When P&G’s recruiter visits Duke to pan for prospects, the CEO sometimes tags along. For five years, Taylor has served on Fuqua’s board of visitors.

In July 2015, P&G’s board of directors selected Taylor, then fifty-six, as the next president and CEO, the latest leadership product in the company’s 182-year line of top executives hired and promoted from within.

Jason Taylor remembered that in family talks about the job, his father was reluctant. He didn’t want to be that public. But he also felt an obligation to the people of P&G. Janeen Lyle, his Mehoopany teammate, says Taylor’s selection was “electrifying,” the elevation

of someone on the inside who seemed BEACON: Colleagues describe to know everyone and who embodied Taylor as a "lighthouse leader." what was right about P&G. But some people on the outside saw Taylor’s arrival in the corner office as evidence of things going wrong at P&G. Barely two years in the CEO’s job, Taylor faced a multimillion-dollar struggle for control of the company to which he’d given his life.

Nelson Peltz wasn’t the first hedge-fund investor in the past decade to complain about P&G’s performance in the marketplace. But the CEO of Trian Fund Management aimed to make a change. P&G had hit a trough. Taylor’s two immediate predecessors had dialed back on research. The company that had created toothpaste that cut tooth decay and dish soap gentle enough to clean birds pulled from oil slicks looked to be out of new ideas.

The world’s largest advertiser even sliced ad spending, an odd move for an operation dependent on keeping its goods in front of consumers’ eyeballs. P&G cut thousands of jobs and sold product lines to get leaner.

Yet in 2015, sales dropped, and inside nine months, the stock price plunged from ninety-three dollars to sixty-eight dollars a share.

Perhaps the greatest long-term threat lay in the shifting sales environment, and P&G didn’t appear ready DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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or able to adapt. For decades, P&G relied on product domination of grocery-story shelf space. But in the twenty-first century, ordering consumer staples online for front-door delivery had gone from novelty to fact of life, and P&G wasn’t responding. The markets of China and India exploded, with no bold action from P&G. Fashions changed: Many young men did not believe good grooming required shaving.

In early 2017, Peltz announced that Trian held $3.5 billion in P&G stock, or about 1.5 percent. At midsummer, Trian offered a devastating analysis that P&G’s “suffocating bureaucracy” suppressed innovation and shareholder return. Peltz would ask shareholders, most of them large institutions, to elect him to the board of directors.

In defense, Taylor said Peltz’s plan for P&G was radical and dangerous. Taylor acknowledges that P&G had been slow of foot, but he says the company was addressing its prob-

inclusion in the company, a legacy of riding the bus to high school.

“We have figured out and embraced the idea of creating an environment where everybody can show up every day, authentically, and contribute and value difference, as opposed to fear difference,” he says. “I have to believe, to some degree, even back to my days at West Charlotte, you either reject or you embrace difference.”

Advertising got a boost, too, but the spending of $7 billion a year reflected a fresh message about P&G’s products, and about P&G. In 2015, while Taylor was in top leadership but not yet CEO, P&G rolled out an ad that looked more like a mini-documentary. While advertising feminine hygiene products, the “Like a Girl” pitch addressed how teenage girls need reinforcement and support. In 2017, an ad called “The Talk” was a frank comment on racism. Both ads won commercial Emmy awards.

In January, the company released the Gillette ad. The two-minute “I have to believe, to some degree, pitch, titled “We Believe,” unspools a string of uncomfortable images of even back to my days at West boys bullying each other and men Charlotte, you either reject or you harassing or belittling women on the street and in the workplace. embrace difference.”

Many male viewers, and some women, scoffed that a razor-blade lems and focusing more than ever on innomaker had no business telling men how to behave. vation. The shareholders spoke in October “We got lit up,” Taylor said in April, yet the Gillette 2017, with nearly 2 billion votes cast. In ad delivered as intended, particularly with the under-thirty market. “They can say, ‘This is a brand that three separate counts, the lead changed hands with shares my values,’ that isn’t afraid to stand up and exever-narrowing margins. In December, the company’s press those values.” directors invited Peltz to join the board.

“If you’re values-based, at times you’ll take some In an appearance at the Fuqua School a year later, heat,” he says. “But we won’t walk away from someTaylor said it was better to have Peltz on the board rather than “on the outside saying you’re not listening.” In thing that’s good for the long-term health of the brand.” late 2018, P&G unveiled a reorganization that drew on Every morning, David S. Taylor shaves with a Gillette razor. But one day, the next CEO of Procter & Peltz’s 2017 analysis. In January 2019, Trian sold some Gamble Co. will stare into a bathroom mirror at the of its P&G position. start of the day, and the reflected image might be an The stock broke $100 a share again, and Taylor announced a sixty-third straight year of dividends. In African American’s. Or a woman’s. It could be the face April, Taylor said, “After a contentious proxy fight, we of someone who did not spend a lifetime working in both turned the page, and we found common ground P&G. In that respect, Taylor may be the last man of to build a better relationship for P&G.” his kind.

Stan Harper, Taylor’s old friend, says, “You don’t “I want to hand over a company that is producing see Mr. Peltz in the news saying bad things about the strong results with a strategy that a board is confident company or David.” in, and a leadership team that is taking it to higher The company also began publishing an annual citilevels,” Taylor says. “When that happens, I’ll be happy zenship report on such initiatives as hunger relief, the to retire.” n provision of clean water, and global efforts to cut back Saker is a staff writer at The Cincinnati Enquirer. on plastic waste. Taylor also emphasizes diversity and 52 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ForeverDuke DUKEISEVERYWHERE

SPAIN Number of alumni:

106

INSTAGRAM: @sorenchargois

Inspired by her study-abroad experiences when she was a Duke student, Soren Chargois ’18 decided to spend a year hopping across Europe (while working remotely as the Duke Alumni Association’s social media manager). She’s found many smaller adventures to embrace on this new path. For example? “I got to spend the month of January in the lovely Andalusian village of Mijas in southern Spain. My days were spent strolling streets of shining white buildings lined with blue flowerpots, practicing my Spanish with the friendly local people or sitting in the panaderías sipping café and working remotely. With my laptop in hand, the only question is: Where do I go next?”

Courtesy Soren Chargois

ForeverDuke

Making the data matter Kristian Lum applies statistics to social-justice issues.

W

ith the preponderance of available data has come a preponderance of concern about how the information is used and who possesses it. Kristian Lum M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’10 counts herself among those concerned. And as lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, she’s in a position to help elucidate data use.

“A lot of my work touches on the ways in which data and machine learning may not work in the way you’d like or hoped,” she says.

In simple terms, she focuses on data fairness. Yes, “fairness” is a subjective term, but in Lum’s work the effort to get closer to that notion is key. Her research includes examining bias in predictive policing systems—analytical techniques used to identify likely targets for police intervention to prevent or solve crimes through statistical predictions. For instance, she’s worked with the City of New York as it seeks to design a fair bail system, by looking at the data it uses to predict the likelihood of recidivism.

“being concrete and grounded in reality.”

She added it as a major. Duke became her choice for a graduate education because, she says, she was impressed with the statistics department and the supportive environment. Still, she had no idea what she was going to do professionally.

She did know she wanted to apply statistics in a meaningful way. More clarity came after a friend told her about the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.

She sent a cold e-mail to executive director Patrick Ball and asked whether she could work “A lot of my work touches on the ways in which data and with him. That led to a machine learning may not work in the way you’d like or hoped." summer job. She kept the group in her periphery as Lum’s work also extends to population estimation, she earned her Ph.D. After working as a research professor at Virginia Tech and with a tech start-up in San which includes looking at better methods to avoid the Francisco, she joined the group full time. underreporting of those killed in times of conflict. It’s Decision makers often use data to make policy deciimportant not just for historical memory, she says, but sions; in her role, Lum sees an opportunity to not only also because the numbers can affect policy. “We look at make those decisions explicitly consider social-justice who was targeted and who was responsible.” concerns, but give those concerns the heft of typically She took an introduction to statistics class about halfway through her pursuit of a math degree at Rice Uniquantifiable issues like cost. “By allowing us to demonversity. “I thought it was fantastic,” she says, still soundstrate patterns of injustice in addition to individual ining smitten. “I felt I had found my home.” Statistics, stances of injustice, it helps to shed light on the scope she says, had the analytical aspect of math paired with of the problem,” she says. —Adrienne Johnson Martin

54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

T

David ♥ Beth BLUE DEVIL LOVE

of curious and amused by how dramatic the letter read. So, it here are parties and then there are parties—the kind was on his mind as he entered the gym and looked up and saw of gathering that gets talked about with giggles and Beth and thought, She’s really cute, and realized that in his hand winks in a hungover haze. Apparently, in September he had the means for a nice conversation starter.

2008, there was a party at the Lofts at Lakeview on Whether he asked her if she was at the party or if she’d gotten Erwin Road that neither Beth (formerly DeFrancesco) Hatef the letter depends on who’s telling J.D. ’10 nor David Hatef M.B.A. ’09 the story—the point is, they started attended.

“He had a perfect smile.” chatting. Beth does remember what They’d both lived at the Lofts for she was thinking of this stranger. a year. Beth is a Connecticut native “He had a perfect smile,” she says. “His teeth were so white, who, a year earlier, had graduated from Johns Hopkins after and he seemed really friendly.” And as the party conversation studying political science. She thought going to law school was winding down, David knew he wanted to keep talking to would give her some flexibility in terms of career choices. “A lot her. “I thought she was smart and well put-together and she had of the law schools I was interested in were locked in the middle a lot of energy. I really liked her a lot.” He asked her out.

Their first date was at a wine bar. Beth doesn’t remember being nervous, but David says he could tell she was, because she was talking a lot. “I was thinking we had a lot in common and we wanted the same things,” she says. It went well.

David graduated first in 2009 and went back to Washington, so during her third year of law school, because she didn’t have classes on Mondays or Fridays, each Thursday Beth would drive there and spend long weekends. She wasn’t not expecting a proposal; they had talked about marriage, even looked at rings. But David says he’d purposely made it seem marriage was further down the road. It happened on Christmas day, 2009. Beth’s mom helped concoct the moment. They’d all gathered in Connecticut for the holiday and were opening the gifts in their stockings. The last box in Beth’s held a ring, and as she opened it, David lowered to FAMILY VALUES: one knee. of the city, and the students were all spread out,” she says. “But Bethany, left, Lily, They married at a chapel on the grounds Duke had this sense of community, and I really liked that.”

Bodhi, and David of Beth’s high school on November 7, David grew up in the D.C. area and had attended the UniHatef versity of Maryland-Baltimore County. He’d adopted a love 2010. Now, they have a daughter, Lily, of real estate from his father and, after school, built a successfive, and a son, Bodhi, who turns three in ful business in that field. But at twenty-eight, he wanted to do October. They live in D.C., where David works as real-estate something different, a search that led to thinking about graduagent with Sotheby’s International Realty and Beth is an attorate school, and then choosing Fuqua. ney specializing in alcohol beverage law at a global law firm.

They hadn’t met when David walked into the complex’s gym, And when you ask what has kept their relationship going, in the last stages of reading a letter from management about the answer circles back to their beginning: Good conversation. that party, a wordy missive that conjured debauchery and de“It’s the same thing we had when we first met: easy communiscribed damage, and asked for help in finding those responsible. cation,” says David. “We’re really like best friends. We have so It sounds like it was a fun party, David thought; he was a mixture much respect for each other.” —Adrienne Johnson Martin DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

55

ForeverDuke Newsmakers

Kunal Pujara A.M. ’93, M.A.T. ’94, left, was selected as a finalist for Illinois’ 2019 Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching.

Gloria R. Boyland M.B.A. ’00, corporate vice president of operations and service support for FedEx, was named to Black Enterprise’s 2019 list of Most Powerful Women in Corporate America.

Emily Berl/Architectural Digest (c) Conde Nast

FedEx.com

Highland Park Community Foundation

Paul W. Downs ’04 and his fiancée were featured in Architectural Digest for their skills in renovating and decorating their Spanish-style home.

Girish Mishra ’88 is the chief of gastroenterology at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Courtesy Zakiya Leggett

Aaron Lazar

Megan Mayhew Bergman A.M. ’07 writes a column for The Guardian on the South and climate change. Her piece about conservatives alarmed about climate change included Zakiya Leggett M.F. ’00, below, a forester and professor at N.C. State.

Office of the Lt. Govenor, Connecticut

Aaron Lazar ’98 is part of the touring company Dear Evan Hansen.

Susan Bysiewicz J.D. ’86 is the lieutenant governor of the state of Connecticut.

56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Elizabeth Henry M.Div. ’14 has been named program director of Thriving in Ministry, an ecumenical program at Millsaps College whose goal is to support clergywomen across the South.

Modern Energy Group, an asset management company focused on investing in sustainable energy companies, founded by Benjamin Abram B.S.E. ’07, raised $13 million in equity.

Bill Gross ’66, the investor, fund manager, and philanthropist, donated $1.1 million to the Orange County (California) Teachers of the Year awards.

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, did a little digging…

Christina Holder

Things got a little down and dirty for me recently, but in a good way. For the Durham

version of Duke Alums Engage, I joined DAA board members in building garden boxes and planting with the East Durham Children’s Initiative, which works to end food insecurity. The organization’s longtime board chair and cofounder is Barker French ’63, a past DAA board president. This is one of nearly 100 wonderful opportunities DAE annually supports in its mission to help alumni serve their communities. This year, during the recent DAE weeks, working with community partners, Duke alumni walked for the homeless in China, cleaned up Puget Sound in Seattle, served lunch to struggling women and children in Baltimore, and more.

My work with the soil was a great way to end a month that also included reunions and the various commencement-related activities the DAA hosts. I’m proud of the alumni association team’s desire to make each class have memorable celebrations, as they leave and when they return. Like DAE, it’s our form of service—to the Duke community. And like tending to a garden, it’s work that perennially blooms. n

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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ForeverDuke

THENNOW

Retro

“Investing in girls and young women is essential to creating a more just and equitable world—yet adolescent girls around the world often remain invisible, silenced, and ignored.”—Denise Dunning ’98 (with coauthor Sarah Gammage), on how adolescents are critical to improving global health and development outcomes

“The job of your circadian rhythm is to get your body to do the right thing at the right time, so you want to align what you eat with when you eat it.”—Michael Crupain ’01, on why timing matters when it comes to food

An imposter on campus For two years, a con man posed as a member of a famous wealthy family. | By Valerie Gillispie

“The light over the basilicas that scatter across the city and St. Peter’s dome was mesmerizing. It caught our breath. And as we lingered, we were transported to another time.”

—Kerry Hannon ’82, on the serendipitous things that can happen on a return visit to a vacation spot

I

n the spring of 1987, Baron Maurice J.L. de Rothschild enrolled in the continuing-education program at Duke. He drove a Honda CRX but told fellow students that he had a Maserati at home in France, where his famously wealthy family lived in a 270-room chateau. He told new friends about dining with President Ronald Reagan and vacationing with the Kennedys on Cape Cod. He carried a cell phone and a laptop computer in the days when both were rare. He joined Sig-

ma Alpha Epsilon and sat behind the bench at men’s basketball games.

There was just one problem. He wasn’t actually a Rothschild. In fact, he wasn’t who he said he was at all.

The campus community realized the ruse in 1989 after a Chronicle investigative story.

At that point, the man had stolen funds from friends, embezzled money, and defaulted on loans and credit cards. Students were left reeling. Who was this stranger?

It turned out that thirty-seven-year old

SMILE: Above, a 1990 yearbook image features Maurice de Rothschild with friends.

58 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

UNMASKED: A Chronicle exposé

Mauro Jeffery Rothschild (he legally changed his name from Cortez) had pulled similar stunts at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas before his audacious fraud at Duke.

He claimed to be a student at UT but was never actually enrolled. In 1982, he moved into a condo with “fellow” UT students, who grew suspicious. “He’d always show off things he said were from other countries,” one of his housemates later told a reporter.

“But all of us knew you could buy those things at Pier One Imports.”

After being exposed as a fraud, he bolted, emerging the following year at Berkeley. He enrolled in a summer program and pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon. An unusual personality, he attracted attention on campus

had been cut off by his parents but would soon have his inheritance, he managed to borrow thousands of dollars from friends and others. He also embezzled money from a charitable fund set up by SAE to help families of cancer patients, as well as funds from a swim-team event.

The jig was up for Rothschild in September 1989, when his odd behavior at a national SAE convention caught the attention of officials. Upon investigating further, they questioned his identity and became alarmed by missing funds and unpaid bills. Rothschild disappeared before being indicted by a grand jury in November 1989 on twelve counts of embezzlement and obtaining money by false pretense.

Rothschild resurfaced in January 1990, when he

“He’d always show off things he said were from other countries.

But all of us knew you could buy those things at Pier One Imports.” by wearing a full-length mink coat. He failed to complete pledge responsibilities, like cleaning up, and was kicked out of the fraternity. Rothschild left town not long after, leaving behind an $11,000 unpaid bill at Neiman Marcus.

At Duke, he was never admitted as an undergraduate but instead attended classes through the continuing-education program, which at the time required only transcripts and a letter of recommendation. Rothschild explained that he had been tutored as a child and therefore had no transcripts. He rented a room in a Durham townhouse, and told guests that his roommate was his butler. He was enrolled in elementary French, which seemed odd for a native French speaker, but still most students took him at his word.

He was often remarkably generous. A Durham Morning Herald article from 1989 reported, “According to SAE members, de Rothschild once bought ‘a tremendous number’ of pizzas for a party—one of each kind—because he said he had never eaten the food and didn’t know what to put on it.” Claiming he

Photography Duke University Archives

was arrested in Florida after being spotted working at a car-rental business. Past crimes, in addition to the Durham-based charges, caught up to Rothschild, and he was eventually sentenced to several years in prison.

The story drew national attention with an article in Rolling Stone and other press.

How could this happen at Duke? Part of it was the time period—without electronic verification, it was easier to pose as someone else. Part of it was the fact that Duke has enrolled many students from prominent families and, while unusual, it wasn’t unthinkable to have a Rothschild on campus. Finally, part of it was the nature of Duke students to be good-hearted and believe what their peers said about themselves.

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans ’39, Hon. ’83, then a trustee at Duke, told the Morning Herald: “I go back to [Alexis] de Tocqueville. I think Americans in general trust people, trust each other, and I think that’s the way it went.” n Gillispie is the university archivist.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Margaret J. Coleman Stroud ’39 of Madison, Wis., on Sept. 19, 2018.

MORE DUKE MEMORIES ONLINE

1940s

Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at

Anna D. Lee Byrd ’40 of Oklahoma City, on Dec. 6, 2018.

Rose G. Kueffner Donnell ’41 of Winnetka, Ill., on Oct. 21, 2018.

Richard L. Cromartie Jr. ’42 of Miami, on July 15, 2017.

Wilma C. Plansoen Dart ’42 of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., on Aug. 31, 2018.

Cecil C. McClees ’42 of Burlington, N.C., on Nov. 26, 2018.

Francis R. Dixson ’43 of Greenville, S.C., on July 20, 2018.

Philip C. Messenkopf ’43 of Erie, Pa., on July 1, 2018.

Jennie B. Frizzelle Andrews ’44 of Southern Pines, N.C., on Dec. 8, 2018.

Horace M. Baker Jr. M.D. ’44, H ’46, H ’51 of Southern Pines, N.C., on July 27, 2018.

Graham A. Barden Jr. ’44, M.D. ’48, H ’50 of New Bern, N.C., on Oct. 19, 2018.

Julia S. Hedrick Campbell ’44 of Pensacola, Fla., on Feb. 9, 2017.

Edmund F. Crotty B.S.M.E. ’44 of Rocklin, Calif., on July 11, 2017.

Katherine E. Matthews O’Briant ’44 of Roxboro, N.C., on Nov. 3, 2018.

D. Paul Spencer ’44 of New Orleans, on Sept. 11, 2018.

Harriet Boddie Childs ’45 of Durham, on Nov. 6, 2018.

Charles G. Gunn Jr. ’45, M.D. ’48 of Winston-Salem, on Sept. 28, 2018.

Hallett W. Jarvis ’45 of Durham, on July 27, 2018.

Loren V. Miller ’45, M.D. ’47 of Tulsa, Okla., on Oct. 28, 2018.

Alice H. Schlueter Packer ’45 of Dallas, on July 18, 2018.

Joseph D. Schweinfurth ’45 of Portland, Ore., on July 27, 2018.

alumni.duke.edu

The Iron Dukes is known for building champions in athletic competition, in the classroom, and in the community. To continue our trajectory of excellence, we must continue to provide the necessary support for the future successes of our su world class student-athletes.

Now is the time to make investments that will build champions. @theirondukes The Iron Dukes The Iron Dukes

Megan Mendenhall

theirondukes

60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Daniel Jones ´20, Football, Redshirt Sophomore

Mia Gyau´21, Women’s Soccer, Sophomore

The Iron Dukes Office, 367 Scott Family Athletics Performance Center, Box 90542, Durham, NC 27708-0542 (919) 613-7575

This year, when you make your gift To Duke, make it

When you designate part or all of your Annual Fund gift to support the Duke University Libraries, you prove that you don’t need superpowers to be a superhero.

Are you one for the books?

library.duke.edu/annualfund

ForeverDuke J. Richard Stein ’45 of Rock Hill, S.C., on Sept. 26, 2018.

Claire Richardson Tucker ’45 of Mountain Brook, Ala., on July 26, 2018.

Lucie M. Oakes Brown ’46 of Basking Ridge, N.J., on July 7, 2018.

James B. Davis ’46, ’47 of Homewood, Ala., on Nov. 22, 2018.

Vivian E. Gambrell Taylor B.S.N. ’46 of Smith Mountain Lake, Va., on Oct. 27, 2018.

Joseph M. Whitley Jr. B.S.E.E. ’46 of Kettering, Ohio, on July 28, 2018.

John J. Coleman Jr. ’47, J.D. ’50 of Birmingham, Ala., on Nov. 29, 2018.

E. Hatcher Crenshaw Jr. ’47 of Richmond, Va., on Oct. 14, 2017.

Arthur F. Dratz ’47, Ph.D. ’53 of Atlanta, on Dec. 1, 2018.

Arthur A. Edwards B.S.M.E. ’47 of Basking Ridge, N.J., on Oct. 10, 2018.

Ezekiel H. Hull ’47 of Greensboro, N.C., on Nov. 11, 2018.

Jean Rockey Metzler ’47 of Lake Worth, Fla., on July 2, 2018.

Margaret G. Taylor Smith ’47 of Indianapolis, on Nov. 19, 2018.

Susan P. Adams Barfield ’48 of Atlanta, on Nov. 28, 2016.

Clara Evans Clark ’48 of Bloomfield, Conn., on May 4, 2017.

Willoughby Lathem H ’48 of Stamford, Conn., on Oct. 4, 2017.

Raymond C. Adam Jr. ’49 of Sun City Center, Fla., on July 10, 2018.

Robert L. Clayton Jr. ’49 of Ocala, Fla., on Dec. 23, 2016.

Henry L. Cranford B.S.E.E. ’49 of Charlotte, on Nov. 22, 2018.

William E. Hackett ’49 of Edisto Beach, S.C., on Oct. 31, 2018.

Emily E. Rumble Jackson ’49 of Rydal, Pa., on May 10, 2018.

Helen L. Farrar Sibley B.S.N. ’49 of Raleigh, on Oct. 16, 2018.

1950s

Ronald P. Baptiste ’50 of Charlotte, on July 20, 2017.

George L. Carr ’50 of Pensacola, Fla., on Sept. 6, 2018.

Jean M. Saunders Donnelly ’50 of Chicago, on Oct. 16, 2018.

Bobbie J. Croom Fisher R.N. ’50 of Lynn Haven, Fla., on Aug. 1, 2018.

Walter W. Hayward Jr. B.S.E.E. ’50 of Loveland, Colo., on July 1, 2018.

Albert W. Highsmith ’50 of Charlottesville, Va., on Oct. 11, 2018.

John G. Hudson Jr. ’50 of Clinton, S.C., on Sept. 7, 2018.

Edwin H. Langrall M.Div. ’50 of Washington, D.C., on Nov. 12, 2018.

Medford M. Leake ’50 of Tupelo, Miss., on Nov. 25, 2018.

Emily W. Stevens Stephenson ’50 of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., on July 27, 2018.

John W. Clowar ’51 of Goldsboro, N.C., on June 16, 2017.

Patricia H. Wright Gwyn ’51 of Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 16, 2018.

Toombs H. Kay Jr. ’51 of Pawleys Island, S.C., on Dec. 4, 2018.

Charles L.B. Lowndes ’51 of Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 28, 2018.

Nancy M. Hunt Nash ’51 of Washington, N.C., on Oct. 15, 2018.

Robert M. Pearce ’51 of Shelbyville, Ky., on Sept. 11, 2018.

Richard M. Smith E ’51 of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Nov. 30, 2018.

Nicholas J. Tronolone Jr. B.S.M.E. ’51 of Knoxville, Tenn., on Oct. 11, 2018.

Raymond D. Allison ’52 of Washington, Ill., on June 17, 2018.

Vivien A. Ridener Cooke ’52 of Sarasota, Fla., on Nov. 26, 2016.

Courtland H. Davis Jr. H ’52 of Winston-Salem, on Oct. 16, 2018.

Jump-Start College Admissions

Alumni Admissions Forum

JUNE J JU JUN UN UNE NE E 20-21, 2020 2 0 21 0-2 21, 12 20 201 2019 019 19 9

Information sessions, panel discussions, and a chance to compare notes with other families

Join our on-campus conference for parents and children with college in their futures. Hear a panel of admissions experts discuss: • searching for the right school • setting your timetable • the applications process • essays and interviews • financial aid • testing Our in-depth format presents the admissions process in two sessions: JUNE 20: Explore Duke – Optional Information Sessions JUNE 21: Jump-Start the Admissions Process

More information and registration:

alumni.duke.edu/admissions-forum DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

63

Hugo Rivera-Scott, Pop América, 1968. Collage on cardboard, 30 x 21.5 inches (76.5 x 54.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Hugo Rivera-Scott.

Photo by Jorge Brantmayer. Pop América, 1965 – 1975 is co-organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition is guest curated by Esther Gabara, E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Romance Studies and associate professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. Pop América, 1965 – 1975 is a recipient of the inaugural Sotheby’s Prize and is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional thanks to the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and to its President and Founder, Ariel Aisiks. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; Fox Family Foundation; Ann Chanler and Andrew Scheman; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; Kelly Braddy Van Winkle and Lance Van Winkle; Parker & Otis; and Karen M. Rabenau and David H. Harpole, MD. Support from Duke University is provided by the Vice Provost for the Arts; the Global Brazil Lab and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; the Dean of the Humanities; the Departments of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies; the Duke Brazil Initiative; the Office of the Provost; and the Office of Global Affairs.

ForeverDuke Ralph E. Kayler ’52, B.Div. ’55 of Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 22, 2018.

Clay V. Ring Jr. ’52 of Winston-Salem, on Nov. 16, 2018.

Ronald F. Bunn A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’56 of Columbia, Mo., on July 27, 2018.

Boyd H. Hill Jr. ’53 of Longmont, Colo., on July 2, 2018.

John R. Lackey B.Div. ’53 of Knoxville, Tenn., on Nov. 16, 2018.

Pamela E. Wace Lalumia ’53 of Bronxville, N.Y., on July 5, 2018.

LaNelle M. Edwards Looper ’53, B.S.M.T. ’55 of Selma, Ala., on Nov. 23, 2018.

William A. Moye A.M. ’53 of Lummi Island, Wash., on Dec. 19, 2016.

Dolphin H. Overton Jr. M.D. ’53 of Rocky Mount, N.C., on Aug. 4, 2018.

Robert W. Borders H ’54 of Bernice, La., on June 29, 2018.

Morgan G. Brenner ’54 of Havertown, Pa., on Dec. 3, 2018.

Herbert F. Johnson ’54, M.D. ’58 of Day, Fla., on Nov. 10, 2018.

Jack C. Schroll H ’54 of Hutchinson, Kan., on Oct. 1, 2018.

Douglas R. Beard ’55, B.Div. ’58 of Pawleys Island, S.C., on Nov. 17, 2018.

Johannes R. Lischka ’55, A.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’70 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Nov. 9, 2018.

Mary M. Hassell Little ’55 of Salisbury, N.C., on Nov. 28, 2018.

Harry G. Long Jr. ’55 of Greensboro, N.C., on June 16, 2018.

Betty Blomquist Matthews ’55 of Burlington, N.C., on Sept. 14, 2018.

Helen B. Hedges Miller ’55 of Naples, Fla., on Dec. 1, 2018.

Doris J. Bullock Nash R.N. ’55, B.S.N. ’57 of Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 15, 2018.

Hamilton Shippee ’55 of Rumson, N.J., on Oct. 28, 2018.

Ruth F. Harrell Capp Bassett ’56, M.D. ’59 of Tucson, Ariz., on Oct. 6, 2018.

William J. Bower ’56 of Pebble Beach, Calif., on Oct. 3, 2018.

Miles H. Colerick ’56 of Utica, N.Y., on July 17, 2018.

Karl T. Dutschmann ’56 of Tequesta, Fla., on June 24, 2017.

Jerome A. Grunt M.D. ’56, H ’57, H ’58 of Kansas City, Mo., on July 30, 2018.

John W. Mitchell Jr. ’56 of Palm Springs, Calif., on June 28, 2018.

Fredlynne A. Granholm Puett ’56 of San Antonio, on June 27, 2018.

Bernard A. Rineberg ’56, M.D. ’60 of Little Silver, N.J., on Sept. 30, 2018.

Donald F. Scott B.S.C.E. ’56 of Brentwood, Tenn., on July 6, 2018.

Paul G. Tuerff ’56 of Ewing Township, N.J., on Oct. 23, 2018.

Minnie M. Franklin M.Ed. ’57 of Durham, on July 25, 2018.

W. Langston Holland ’57 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Nov. 20, 2018.

James C. Meador Jr. ’57 of Lafayette, Calif., on Nov. 16, 2018.

Thomas J. Cavanaugh ’58 of Newport Beach, Calif., on Feb. 11, 2018.

William A. Cheyne Sr. B.Div. ’58 of Van Buren, Ark., on July 12, 2018.

Nancy L. Pennington Davis R.N. ’58 of Newport News, Va., on Sept. 10, 2018.

Frank V. Fazio H ’58 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Nov. 18, 2018.

Nancy R. Davis Hauser B.S.N. ’58 of Charleston, W.V., on Oct. 10, 2018.

Donald D. Hook A.M. ’58 of Lewes, Del., on July 6, 2018.

Elizabeth L. Jordan Mewborne ’58 of Colfax, N.C., on Dec. 3, 2018.

Alan S. Michael ’58 of Gilbert, Ariz., on Sept. 23, 2018.

Gary L. Smith ’58 of Midlothian, Va., on Oct. 1, 2018.

James W. Smith III B.Div. ’58 of San Francisco, on Oct. 24, 2018.

@DukeYouthPrograms @DukeYouthPrograms

YOUTH PROGRAMS LEARNMORE.DUKE.EDU\YOUTH2019 Youth@Duke.EDU (919) 684–6259

Experience SUMMER AT DUKE Since 1983

SESSION 1 JUNE 16–28 SESSION 2 JUNE 30 – JULY 12 SESSION 3 JULY 14 – JULY 26

STEM Camps (Biosciences and Engineering, Neurosciences, Forensics, Computer Programming, Digital Media) Writing Camps (from Novices to Published Writers) Leadership (Activism and Service) N IO Test Prep (SAT) RAT T S I REG W OPEN NO Current Grade Level for School Year 2018-2019

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

65

ForeverDuke Margaret Jones Barbee ’59 of Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 20, 2018.

William F. Gandy B.Div. ’59, M.Th. ’63 of Tampa, Fla., on July 13, 2018.

George H. Jaspert III ’59 of Thomasville, Ga., on Sept. 28, 2018.

Phyllis D. Rankin Lintz M.A.T. ’59 of Sevierville, Tenn., on July 7, 2018.

Richard P. Pharis M.F. ’59, D.F. ’61 of Cochrane, Alberta, Canada, on July 3, 2018.

Dorothy A. Suesens Richman B.S.N. ’59 of Selkirk, N.Y., on July 3, 2018.

John W. Saari ’59 of Rhinelander, Wis., on Nov. 30, 2018.

Gene J. Sowder ’59 of New York, on April 7, 2017.

1960s

E. Dwight Adams Ph.D. ’60 of Gainesville, Fla., in October 2018.

Franklin T. Bonner M.F. ’60, D.F. ’65 of Starkville, Miss., on Nov. 24, 2018.

Phoebe B. Estes Bryan A.M. ’60 of Burlington, Vt., on Nov. 5, 2018.

Ann W. Nash Crichton ’60 of Midlothian, Va., on Oct. 15, 2018.

Phillip W. Farmer ’60 of Indialantic, Fla., on Oct. 28, 2018.

John L. Knapp A.M. ’60 of Charlottesville, Va., on Nov. 16, 2018.

Arthur M. Martin Jr. M.D. ’60, H ’66 of Butler, Ala., on Oct. 23, 2018.

Charlie C. Nolan Jr. ’60 of Winston-Salem, on June 19, 2018.

Edward P. Osteen Sr. B.Div. ’60 of Durham, on Oct. 11, 2018.

Lewis N. Stuckey Jr. ’60 of Tucson, Ariz., in December 2017.

George W. Johnson M.Div. ’61 of Roxboro, N.C., on Nov. 19, 2018.

Johnnie M. Lewis B.Div. ’61 of Rocky Mount, N.C., on March 14, 2018.

Beverly L. Heck Welther ’61 of Falls Church, Va., on Nov. 15, 2018.

Patrick M. Williams ’61 of Los Angeles, on July 25, 2018.

“WE ARE FORTUNATE TO BE ABLE TO SUPPORT DUKE AND WANT TO ENSURE THAT IT REMAINS A TOP

Francis J.D.R. Bentley ’62 of Augusta, Ga., on Dec. 3, 2018.

Grace A. Murray Carter ’62 of Medford, Ore., on Nov. 8, 2018.

Gwyn Hutchinson Harris ’62 of Laurinburg, S.C., on June 14, 2018.

William S. Houck Jr. H ’62 of Florence, S.C., on Nov. 2, 2018.

Patricia B. Ireland ’62 of Decatur, Ga., on Oct. 15, 2018.

Patricia L. Cooke Libby ’62 of Foley, Ala., on June 28, 2018.

G. Barry Montgomery ’62 of Keene, N.H., on Nov. 20, 2018.

Elizabeth L. Klepper A.M. ’63, Ph.D. ’66 of Pendleton, Ore., on Oct. 26, 2018.

Frederick G. McCollum Jr. ’63 of Canyon Lake, Texas, on Nov. 18, 2018.

William C. Pinschmidt Jr. Ph.D. ’63 of Fredericksburg, Va., on Oct. 7, 2018.

Dudley A. Rauch ’63 of Claremont, Calif., on July 26, 2018.

Dale Volberg Reed ’63 of Chapel Hill, on Oct. 19, 2018.

James P. Rush M.Div. ’63 of Spartanburg, S.C., on Sept. 27, 2018.

Robert M. Thompson ’63 of Whiteville, N.C., on Nov. 17, 2018.

John D. Utley Ph.D. ’63, M.D. ’68 of Chicago, on Oct. 18, 2018.

Elizabeth Veeder H ’63 of Scotia, N.Y., on Sept. 22, 2018.

John T. Bonner H ’64 of Fresno, Calif., on Nov. 21, 2018.

Anne F. Galland Chacon ’64 of Madison, Wis., on Nov. 18, 2018.

Robert K. Drummond J.D. ’64 of Palm Beach, Fla., on July 1, 2018.

Donald A. Gary J.D. ’64 of Weston, Conn., on July 5, 2018.

Daniel P. Freitas B.Div. ’65 of Yarmouth Port, Mass., on Oct. 18, 2018.

S. Edwin Veazey Ph.D. ’65 of King George, Va., on Sept. 7, 2018.

Robert S. Verhey ’65 of Santa Ynez, Calif., on Sept. 8, 2018.

D. Edward Bennett ’67 of Ocean View, Del., on July 16, 2018.

Is this your Duke reunion year? Make a lasting impact on the people and places you love at Duke through an estate gift.

Estate gifts count in your class’s reunion total and can be a simple and powerful way to support Duke over the long term.

UNIVERSITY WITH ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.” TANYA ROLLE SMITH ’94, J.D.’98 AND GEOFFREY SMITH ’94 Bequest to support Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and Duke Law School

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66 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

CREATE YOUR LEGACY giftplanning@duke.edu giving.duke.edu/giftplanning (919) 681-0464

5/6/19 2:09 PM

YOUR EDUCATION DOESN’T END WHEN YOU GRADUATE. “I was blown away by the insights provided by the panel!”

- Robert, B.S.E.’90

“All Duke events I’ve attended thus far have been excellent!

They are educational, enjoyable, and provide a great venue to meet new friends and catch up with the old.”

- Nishadi, M.H.S.’10

“Women’s Weekend was a wonderful safe space for me and I left it empowered and inspired.”

- Thamina, A.B.’17

Hundreds of engagement opportunities including...

ONLINE COURSES Launch with Sanyin Siang • Think Again! How to Understand Arguments • Healthcare Innovation & Entrepreneurship • Programming Fundamentals • FinTech Law and Policy • Advertising and Society • Experiments with Sound • Behavioral Finance • Dog Emotion and Cognition

ON CAMPUS PROGRAMS Duke Entertainment, Media & Arts (DEMAN) Weekend • Women’s Weekend • Marine Lab Alumni Weekends • Discover the Duke Lemur Center Weekend • Spotlight Speakers @ Reunions • Alumni Admissions Forum • Volunteer Leadership Conference • Duke Exclusive Half-Day Programs • Duke Gardens Weekend

GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT Faculty Fellow Speakers • Oxford Experience • Duke Alumni Travels • Women’s Forum • Table for 6 Business Networking • Art Basel in Miami • Business Breakfasts Speaker Events • Post-Performance Talk Backs • Special Signature Events

“The faculty were engaging, humorous, and brilliant.”

- Dudley, A.B.’72

“The tutors were experts on their topics.

The quality of the discussions in the class was top notch. The overall level of class questions and comments was highly stimulating and added greatly to the experience.”

- Ruthann, A.B.’75, M.A.T.’76

Forever Learning.

Forever Duke.

www.DukeForeverLearning.com

Sign up for the Forever Learning newsletter to stay up-to-date on Duke education opportunities for alumni.

bit.ly/dukefln

Travel with Duke Your family. Your friends. Your faculty.

Your dream destinations.

Where do you want to go in 2020? #DukeIsEverywhere

www.dukealumnitravels.com

NEW!

DUKE

PRIVATE JOURNEYS

Your Way in the World Contact us or visit us online at alumni.duke.edu/dpj for more information and to request your private journey.

Pearls of Dalmatia: Croatia and Slovenia Sept. 21 - Oct. 5 Photos courtesy of iStock

2020 TRAVEL DESTINATIONS Hamilton’s Caribbean, Jan. 25 - Feb. 1 Cruise the Panama Canal & Costa Rica, Feb. 5-13 Mexico City & Oaxaca, Mar. 6-13 European Coastal Civilizations: Lisbon to London, May 8-17 Exploring Baja’s Magdalena Bay, Mar. 7-12 Legendary Turkey, May 9-23 Exploring the St. Lawrence Seaway, June 5-15 Springtime in Provence, Burgundy & Beaujolais, May 13-21 Cruising Alaska, July 29 - Aug. 5 Barging from Amsterdam to Bruges, May 16-23 Cruising the Great Lakes, Sept. 19-26 Discovering Eastern Europe, May 26 - June 10 Columbia & Snake Rivers, Oct. 13-19 Scottish Isles and Norway’s Fjords, May 30 - June 7 Polar Bears Of Churchill, Oct. 24-29 ACA Sorrento: The Charm of the Amalfi Coast, June 10-18 ACA Grand Seine River & Normandy Passage, June 13-21 Circumnavigation of Iceland: Land of Fire and Ice, June 21-29 ACA Swiss Alps & Italian Lakes, July 22-31 ACA Basque Country: France & Spain, Sept. 19-27 Pearls of Dalmatia: Croatia and Slovenia, Sept. 21 - Oct. 5 Flavors of Northern Italy, Sept. 26 - Oct. 4 Vineyards & Villages of Alsatian France, Oct. 9-17 Sketches of Sicily, Oct. 14-23 Greece & the Greek Isles, Oct. 8-16

Southeast Asian Odyssey, Feb. 13 - Mar. 4 Israel: Timeless Wonders, Mar. 7-18 Insider’s Japan, Mar. 30 - Apr. 11 Along Central Asia’s Silk Road, May 11-27 Trans-Siberian Railway: Mongolia to Moscow, July 12-25 Mystical India, Oct. 8-24

Galápagos, July 24 - Aug. 2 Wonders of Peru with Amazon Cruise, Sept. 3-14 Patagonian Frontiers, Oct. 21 - Nov. 5

Moroccan Discovery, Feb. 21 - Mar. 5 Jordan, Egypt & Greece: Aqaba to Athens, May 6-18 Africa’s Wildlife in Southern Africa, May 31 - June 13 Magical Madagascar, June or July Classic Safari: Kenya & Tanzania, July 26 - Aug. 10 Egypt & the Eternal Nile, Oct. 12-26

Expedition to Antarctica, Jan. 28 - Feb. 10 Arctic Exploration of Svalbard, June 9-19

New Zealand: A Circumnavigation of the South Island, Feb. 18 - Mar. 1

Dates and destinations subject to change

Email us at travel@daa.duke.edu with a list of the trips that interest you.

We will add you to the mailing list and send you more information.

Or call us at (919) 684-2988.

ForeverDuke James A. Corwin ’67 of Midland, Texas, on Nov. 21, 2018.

Henry S. Daniel IV ’67 of Sarasota, Fla., on Oct. 20, 2018.

Robert G.M. Keating LL.B. ’67 of Bellport Village, N.Y., on July 14, 2018.

Judith Moore Scarff Spitsbergen M.Ed. ’67 of Morehead City, N.C., on Nov. 9, 2018.

David C. Tassinari A.M. ’67 of Plymouth, Mich., on Dec. 1, 2018.

David W. Carstetter J.D. ’68 of Jacksonville, Fla., on July 11, 2018.

Hugh T. Fahy M.D. ’68 of Placitas, N.M., on May 27, 2017.

Larry C. Haun Ph.D. ’68 of Strasburg, Va., on July 20, 2017.

Edith Polasek Hughes Cert. P.T. ’68 of New Bern, N.C., on April 6, 2018.

Rosemary Kittrell J.D. ’68 of Atlanta, on Sept. 13, 2018.

Peggy Moon Anderson M.A.T. ’69 of Sequim Bay, Wash., on Aug. 26, 2018.

Calvin L. Chrisman ’69 of Dill Knob, N.C., on Jan. 31, 2018.

James W. Dunlap J.D. ’69 of San Jose, Calif., on July 28, 2017.

Henry G. Gardiner III ’69 of Durham, on Oct. 7, 2018.

J. Thomas McBride M.Th. ’69 of Henderson, N.C., on Nov. 16, 2018.

1970s

Anne Pomeroy Autor Ph.D. ’70 of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Nov. 13, 2018.

M. Douglass Bellis J.D. ’71 of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15, 2018.

Pearson E. Dubar Jr. ’71 of Overland Park, Kan., on July 16, 2018.

Paul C. Elliott ’71, A.M. ’73 of Raleigh, on Aug. 1, 2018.

Arthur B. Simon H ’72 of Chicago, on July 8, 2018.

Earl Wilson Jr. M.Div. ’73 of Monroe, N.C., on July 3, 2018.

Robert R. Wood Jr. ’73 of Scarsdale, N.Y., on Nov. 19, 2018.

WHERE REAL DUKE FANS SHOP!

Get your official Duke Gear @

DUKESTORE.COM Duke Clothing!

Duke Gifts!

Duke Everything!

Wayne C. Anderson B.H.S. ’74 of La Crosse, Wis., on Oct. 27, 2018.

William A. Bailey H ’74 of Lawrence, Kan., on Sept. 7, 2018.

William R. Davies B.S.E. ’74 of Latham, N.Y., on June 6, 2018.

Alwyn L. Featherston Jr. ’74 of Durham, on Nov. 5, 2018.

Edgar W. Hollomon ’74 of Hampton, Va., on Oct. 10, 2018.

William A. Kennedy ’74 of Jefferson, N.C., on July 28, 2018.

Anthony J. Lynn ’74 of Los Angeles, on Dec. 1, 2018.

Richard E. Butler M.Div. ’75 of Kansas City, Mo., on June 29, 2018.

Benjamin D. Killian M.Div. ’75 of Landrum, S.C., on Sept. 28, 2018.

Nyles B. Schumaker ’75 of Harrison, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 2018.

James E. Showen ’75 of Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 2018.

Gerald R. Walsh ’75 of St. Louis, on July 23, 2018.

Thomas E. Marfing Jr. ’76 of Winchester, Va., on Sept. 25, 2018.

Audrey A. Calhoun Albrecht Ph.D. ’77 of Concord, Calif., on June 30, 2018.

Patricia Anne Speth Blackmon ’77, J.D. ’84 of Florence, S.C., on Nov. 8, 2018.

Nancy A. DeLong Dugas ’77 of Glastonbury, Conn., on July 11, 2018.

Linda A. Ahrends B.H.S. ’78 of Mountain City, Tenn., on July 19, 2018.

William C. Banzhaf ’79 of Evanston, Ill., on Sept. 30, 2018.

Roger W. Evans Ph.D. ’79 of Rochester, Minn., on July 4, 2018.

Patricia G. Zenone Ph.D. ’79 of Albuquerque, N.M., on April 23, 2017.

1980s

C. Mark Baldwin J.D. ’80 of Jacksonville, N.C., on Nov. 27, 2018.

Mary J. Brew ’81 of Miami Beach, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2018.

James A. Fieber J.D. ’81, M.B.A. ’81 of Wilton, Conn., on July 14, 2018.

Susan M. O’Connell Rielly M.H.A. ’81 of Greenwood Village, Colo., on Oct. 20, 2017.

Christopher E. Rozek J.D. ’82 of Fredericksburg, Va., on July 19, 2018.

Carol A. Stern Soroos M.B.A. ’82 of Raleigh, on June 28, 2018.

Edward S. Fadel B.S.E. ’84 of Chapel Hill, on Nov. 30, 2018.

Gary N. Greenberg H ’85 of Durham, on Oct. 17, 2018.

Peter M. Grimes M.B.A. ’85 of Exeter Township, Pa., on Nov. 22, 2018.

Carl C. Strickland Jr. M.B.A. ’85 of Winterville, N.C., on Nov. 18, 2018.

Elizabeth L. Graves M.Div. ’86 of Lake Junaluska, N.C., on Nov. 27, 2018.

Nicholas Stevens ’86 of Millington, N.J., on Oct. 12, 2018.

Mary E. Flatley ’87 of Atlanta, on Nov. 4, 2018.

Elizabeth Brous Guevara ’87 of Short Hills, N.J., on Oct. 13, 2018.

Jon R. Henry ’87, A.M. ’91 of San Francisco, on Aug. 6, 2016.

Tracy A. Smith ’87 of Pacific Grove, Calif., on Oct. 26, 2018.

Jason R. Cooper ’88 of Darien, Conn., on July 7, 2018.

Robin Lynn Kay ’88, A.M. ’96 of Lyons, Colo., in 2017.

Charnell C. Kolm M.Div. ’88 of Egg Harbor Township, N.J., on July 17, 2018.

1990s

The only collection of Duke merchandise in the world that actually comes from Duke University

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70 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Darryl E. Smith ’90 of Durham, on July 3, 2018.

Kathryn E. Mitra M.H.S. ’93 of Charlotte, on Dec. 2, 2018.

Scott W. Temple ’94 of Orlando, Fla., on Dec. 6, 2018.

Elizabeth P. Martin Bowe J.D. ’97 of New Rochelle, N.Y., on Oct. 19, 2018.

Marty L. Jones Luna-Wolfe M.Div. ’98 of Sahuarita, Ariz., on June 4, 2018.

2000s

Muriel Gold Roll A.M. ’07 of Chapel Hill, on Oct. 5, 2018.

e uk eive r D ec ou o r ty t en ID es nt Pr de u St

50

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n io at ic pl Ap

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EXCITING

new RENOVATIONS

THE BEST IS GETTING EVEN BETTER! AMENITY FEATURES New 24/7 Fitness Center with Motion Studio | Coffee Bar and Lounge | Study Rooms and Business Center Private Conference Rooms | 24/7 Package Center New Outside Basketball Court | Pool with Sundeck Pet Wash & Dog Run | Outdoor Entertainment with Grill Stations | Serenity Courtyards

“

APARTMENT FEATURES New White Kitchen Cabinets and Granite Countertops Under-mount sink with Stainless Steel Appliances Woodstyle Plank Flooring | Updated Lighting Package New Plantation Blinds | High-Speed Wireless Internet In-Unit Washer and Dryer | Keyless Entry

Hear From Our Residents “Great amenities, good communication among staff! The rooms in Station Nine are fantastic, very spacious and comfortable for having guests and everyday living.” – Nick B.

“I love the newly renovated apartment! The kitchen is my favorite part, and I like that the bedrooms are carpeted but the living room is wood.”

– Sabrina P.

“Station Nine is one of the best apartment complexes I’ve ever lived in. Everything about it is great from the amenities... to the location... to the pool. The customer service from the staff is top notch as well.” –Anonymous

“Lovely apartment complex with very friendly staff.

Grounds are well-kept and amenities are excellent. The location is prime for Duke students and employees.

Would recommend to friends!” – Alexis S.

”

Where 9Th Street Lives

www.StationNine.com | 919.286.3800 2211 Hillsborough Road | Durham, NC 22705

WORKINPROGRESS

A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP

I

grew up by the sea. Hong Kong is right on the coast, and you can catch a view of the ocean pretty much wherever you go. Even if you’re deep in the city or up in the mountains, the ocean is always close by. It was a constant in my life: I grew up with the sense that this massive, beautiful piece of blue was always nearby and that it would always be there, wherever I was in the city.

I didn’t realize how comforting that feeling was until I left Hong Kong. I miss seeing the waves on my way to school, I miss the tangy smell of seawater in the air, I miss hearing the roar of waves at night.

Most of all, I miss the sense of comfort that came from knowing that the ocean is right there, close to me, a walk or short drive away.

Ocean Room is my attempt to re-create a similar, refuge-like space on campus: a life-sized dome, nine feet wide and eight feet tall, designed to immerse visitors in a re-creation of the ocean. Video projec-

72 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

OCEAN ROOM Kora Kwok, junior

Robert Zimmerman

tions of waves fill the walls of the dome; the sounds and scent of the sea fill the space inside. A carpet interior, with two sitting chairs, and notebooks for writing or drawing. The entire space aims to create a sense of safety and comfort, so that visitors can rest, reflect, and relax. I wanted to create a space that feels safe, comforting—a place where anyone can escape from the world for a little while. At the same time, this installation is also my tribute to the ocean.

I wanted to re-create a small part of the sea here, for everyone who—like me—longs for it when they’re here at Duke.

Finally, Ocean Room is an experiment in space: I wanted to explore how art spaces can influence the way we perceive the world and each other. What kinds of thoughts and emotions will the experience inspire in visitors? What happens when two visitors, otherwise strangers, meet inside? Will the shared experience of the ocean room form subliminal bonds? n

.duke.edu

How do you teach 15 super-smart DukeEngage students that conservation matters in the real world? You have them hand release sea turtles off the coast of Thailand so they never forget the feeling. Student experience made possible by you.

Finish the story at giving.duke.edu/hatch-and-swim

Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

PHOTO BY MADDIE GO ’20

hatch and swim

Through gifts to the

HOMECOMING

giving

OCTOBER 11-13, 2019 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. Georgia Tech football game, Party on the Plaza, affinity gatherings, Volunteer Summit 2019, and more!

Visit www.alumni.duke.edu/homecoming for more information.

MAGAZINE

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPRING 2019

DUKE

NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO

SPRING 2019

INVEST IN YOUR CLASSMATES. WE DO. We are a private VC fund exclusively for Duke alums investing together in toptier venture-backed companies—founded or led by fellow alums. If you are accredited and looking for a smart, simple way to add VC to your portfolio, you should check us out. Towerview Ventures is now open to new investors.

LEARN MORE visit www.avgfunds.com/towerview email invest@towerviewventures.com call (603) 945-3877 Each of the various funds of Towerview Ventures is a different series of Launch Angels Funds, LLC, doing business as Alumni Ventures Group Funds (AVG Funds). Each of the Towerview Vetures Funds involves a different investment portfolio and risk-return profile. The manager of each fund of Towerview Ventures is Launch Angels Management Company, LLC, doing business as Alumni Ventures Group (AVG), a Massachusetts-based venture capital firm. AVG is a for-profit company that is not affiliated with, officially sanctioned or endorsed by Duke University or any other school. This advertisement is for informational purposes only, and no offering of securities is made with this advertisement. Offers are made only pursuant to formal offering documents, which describe risks, terms, and other important information that must be considered before an investment decision is made. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and this fund involves substantial risk of loss, including loss of all capital invested.

This advertisement is intended solely for accredited investors who accept the responsibility for conducting their own analysis of the investment and consulting with their professional advisors to receive personalized advice with respect to their analysis of this potential investment. Contact Ali Byrd at ali@towerviewventures.com with questions, or requests for additional information on AVG or this fund may be sent to info@avgfunds.com.

ALL THINGS BEING UNEQUAL How Sandy Darity’s research is being written into the national conversation

M AG A Z I N E