Special Issue 2021

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freedom noun

free·​dom | \ frē-dem Definition: What does it mean to you?

giving .duke.edu

navigating freedom Finding your way through the legal system is extremely challenging without a roadmap. Thanks to the generous support of the Annual Fund and the Thomas Jordan Memorial Scholarship, Arturo Nava is following his passion at Duke Law to provide counsel and support for society’s most vulnerable.

Finish the story at: giving.duke.edu/navigating-freedom Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are

OUTRAGEOUS AMBITIONS:

50 Years and Counting FIFTY YEARS AGO, Terry Sanford persuaded Joel Fleishman to establish a public policy program at Duke. Together, they championed this new field applying multiple disciplines to crucial social issues. Fleishman established a leading undergraduate major and graduate programs that combine rigorous analytic training with real-life experience.

“Public policy analysis does not limit itself to describing a public problem. It requires people to think about how to solve problems,” says Fleishman.

Today, the Sanford School

of Public Policy is led by Judith Kelley, its first female dean. Under Dean Kelley, the school is launching a new Master of National Security Policy program, new programs in cyber and tech policy and new initiatives on diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Public policy was a trailblazer in interdisciplinary scholarship, now one of Duke’s hallmarks. Our singular goal at the Sanford School is to make the world a better place,” says Kelley.

These values and practices will continue to carry the Sanford School forward into the next 50 years.

forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

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A collection of essays and images from Duke faculty, students, staff, and alumni Contributors: ALUMNI:

Hillary Barnes Martinez '12 Deanna Elstrom ’90 Jessica Friedlander M.A.T. ’14 Kimberly Gaubault (McCrae) ’00 Denise Heinze Ph.D. ’90 John Hillen ’88 Ed Magee M.B.A. ’04 Zach Weisberg ’07 Jennifer Yang ’07, M.B.A. ’14

STUDENTS:

Quinn Smith Jr.

FACULTY:

Jed Atkins Matthew Becker Joseph Blocher Bruce Caldwell Nita Farahany Joseph Fernandez-Moure

STAFF:

Brandy Cheico Corbie Hill

From the editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Essays

A peculiar institution by John Hillen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 NMN by Denise Heinze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 A place for them to practice by Jed W. Atkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Q&A with Ed Magee M.B.A. ‘04. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Our messy past by Jessica Friedlander. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Anthem for you by Kimberly Gaubault (McCrae). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 How to leave space for others by Corbie Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 In search of by Duke Magazine Staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Pipe dreams by Zach Weisberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Between guns and liberty by Joseph Blocher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 We call it a free throw by Scott Huler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 “Freedom to” versus “Freedom from” by Deanna Elstrom . . . . . . . . . 38 The prison of discomfort by Scott Huler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 What I thought I knew by Jennifer Yang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Thoughts on an ever-changing market system by Bruce Caldwell. . . . 46 My Indigenous existence by Quinn Smith Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Even our brains can be watched by Nita A. Farahany . . . . . . . . . . . 50 The thrill of wonder by Hillary Barnes Martinez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

ForeverDuke In Memoriam

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DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE 2021 | Vol. 107 | No. 2 | www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine

EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler STAFF WRITER: Corbie Hill CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, senior associate vice president, engagement and development ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, Inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Mychal Harrison ’01, 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 © 2021 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association. ON THE COVER: Individual butterfly images, iStock; statue, Jared Lazarus

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arlier this summer, I got on a plane. Not a big deal. Well, actually a big deal, because it was my first trip since the pandemic had made us all shut-ins, more or less. At last, I was breaking free.

The trip was to New York, which was offering no theater scene, no concert activity. That was okay, because there was lots of art. Over this long stretch, a year and a half and (sadly) counting, I had missed the freedom of heading out and seeing art. Seeing art through the filter of a computer screen is one thing; seeing art through close looking in physical space is the real thing.

With its sprawling show of Cézanne’s work in pencil, ink, and watercolor, the Museum of Modern Art was the main attraction. Cézanne, as the great pioneer of modernism, has always struck me as an exemplar of artistic freedom—the freedom to interpret the world and not simply to record it.

The exhibition was overflowing with drawings that drew, so to speak, on the works of other artists; domestic portraits of the artist’s wife and young son; solo bathers and clusters of bathers; views of nature, from stacked-up boulders and forest paths to the relentlessly rendered Mont Sainte-Victoire; and still-lifes, all those apples, pears, oranges, jugs, bottles, and bowls that seem ready to topple right out of the canvas into the viewer’s space.

In my slow walk through the galleries, I thought about how Cézanne’s free expression—what he referred to as his quest to represent his “sensations”—speaks to our tremulous times. His work is filled with jagged strokes, broken lines, fuzzy borders; forms are incomplete (Madame Cézanne

Sculpture photo courtesy Robert J. Bliwise; iStock

sewing without any visible needles), shapes are ambiguous (a coat thrown on a chair and resembling nothing so much as a landscape of contours and voids). Everything is provisional, nothing is defined. We’re free to make what we will of the world. And the world is free to pull some surprises on us.

I later headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—right up to its roof. There I found Alex Da Corte’s As Long as the Sun Lasts, commissioned during the pandemic. It’s a delightful meshing of the gently turning “mobiles” of Alexander Calder and Big Bird, an impressive avian at eight-and-a half feet tall, who is perched on a crescent moon and clutching a ladder. Scaling that ladder might make it free as a (not so big) bird. In an interview recorded for the Met, Da Corte talks about his Muppets inspiration, but also about another art-historical reference: the series of unicorn tapestries from the museum’s medieval branch. The unicorn, as he described it, is in an enclosed space, but the fencing is low and has openings. So there’s the sense of being anchored, along with the freedom to move on. What he’s representing here is a kind of “soft power” (accented by Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed, laser-cut aluminum “feathers”)—the freedom we all have to make a world, even a whimsical one.

At a time of pandemic-induced lockdowns, assaults on democracy, and battles over free speech, we’ve all been led to think about the preciousness of freedom, the fragility of freedom, the multiple ways of defining freedom. It’s a timely theme linking these pages.—Robert J. Bliwise, editor

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A peculiar institution

By John Hillen

ou take political freedom for granted if you are in the 20 percent of the global population that the nonpartisan think tank Freedom House defines as living in a country that is mostly free.

I certainly took it for granted growing up in the United States. I was very curious about the world but had never left its shores until just after I graduated from Duke in 1988. Within two and a half years of graduation, I had been expelled from a country in Asia after an anti-democratic coup, stood guard on the Iron Curtain in Europe the week it collapsed, and fought in a war of liberation in the most autocratic part of the Middle East.

It was a baptism by fire on the meaning of freedom.

Some thirty years ago I wrote in this magazine about one of those episodes, being stationed on the inter-German border the week “The Wall” came down in November 1989. It was an extraordinary week in many ways.

But what struck me then and remains with me now is the potent reminder from the East Germans about freedom’s fragility, rarity, and preciousness. That reminder often

must come from those who have no freedom or are just emerging from repression into its embrace.

I have many memories of that week of the Iron Curtain’s collapse, particularly the disbelief and shock of East German and Czech families upon crossing the border into West Germany. They would stop and stare into shop windows, marveling at a society that produced a system in which two or three or a dozen different kinds of the same product were available. They would cast about for someone with whom to file their travel plans and were suspicious when no official seemed to care. They were struck by the level of dialogue and dissent allowed on television and the radio. They were flabbergasted, in contrast with their own system, about freedom’s economic and political byproducts in Western Europe: prosperity, democracy, and general contentment. They could not believe how much people smiled.

This explosion of freedom for over 200 million people was not automatic, assured, or even accidental. It was caused and had to be assiduously worked toward. There was a buildup of pressure in the decade prior to 1989

IRON CURTAIN: October 7, 1961. Four-year-old Michael Finder of East Germany is tossed by his father into a net held by residents across the border in West Berlin. The father, Willy Finder, then prepares to make the jump himself.

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LOOKING WEST: East German border guard at Berlin Wall, 1988

neously chanting, “We want God!” President Reagan, on his third visit to the Berlin Wall in 1987, and against the advice of his most senior advisers, turning his criticism of the wall and the system it represented into a personal demand: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other imprisoned dissidents encouraging the U.S. and Europe to live up to their own founding principles: “One should not consider that the great principles of freedom end at your own frontiers, that as long as you have freedom, let the rest have pragmatism. No! Freedom is indivisible and one

At the time of its emergence into political systems and constitutions only a few hundred years ago, it was very much a radical idea. that reversed years of official accommodation with political oppression.

This pressure included many things, but highlights for the East Germans and Czechs I spoke with included a newly elected Polish Pope returning home in 1979 for what authorities called a quiet pilgrimage, and instead being greeted by almost a million Poles at his motorcade sponta-

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from the least free parts of the world. They know something about where freedom is…and isn’t.

Historians remind us that freedom has never been a universal value— even up to our present day.

Great civilizations of the past and many powerful countries of today have no tradition of political or individual freedom. It is a relatively new concept.

At the time of its emergence into political systems and constitutions only a few hundred years ago, it was very much a radical idea. As Seymour Drescher, one of the leading historians of global slavery and abolition, notes: At the time of American revolution, “personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world…. Freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.”

And it is increasingly so. Today in the world, political freedom is retrenching—becoming a rarer and more peculiar institution. It is, of course, imperfectly applied even in the world’s freest places—as our own contemporary debates in America attest. But, in much of the world it is hardly even tried. We are still experimenting with freedom; its permanence should never be taken for granted. It is not a natural condition of humankind. We must work at it. n

Wikipedia ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ESCAPE: East German soldier Conrad Schumann defecting to West Berlin during the Wall's early days in 1961

has to take a moral attitude toward it.”

As I write this, the news is of widespread protests in Cuba featuring crowds chanting, “We want freedom.” Just so. Freedom is the precursor to all else that Cuba needs to end what President Biden called the “decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.” I think here, too, of formerly free Hong Kong, a casualty of our inattentiveness to political freedom during the pandemic.

In both of those countries, freedom protesters carried the American flag, which, despite our own recent round of self-flagellation, continues to inspire freedom activists the world over. The U.S. remains, by far and away, the most desired nation for global immigrants. And especially so for those

Hillen ’88 is former assistant secretary of state and a decorated combat veteran.

He is the James C. Wheat Professor in leadership at Hampden-Sydney College.

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Denise H

ere’s the deal: I don’t have a middle name.

Of my seven brothers and sisters, I’m one of two who didn’t get one. All the other middle names were chosen with great care and consideration, laden with nostalgia, nuance, a bit of poetry. Me, I got zilch. Such, perhaps, is the nature of the middle child, a happy addition to a burgeoning family but spared, or bereft of— depending on one’s perspective—the intense focus on nomenclature that comes in the birth order with firsts and lasts.

Growing up, I’d been of two minds about the absence, wondering whether I’d gotten shortchanged or anointed. I coveted a middle name, but not having one somehow made me slightly edgy, outré. When I’d ask my parents why, Rodney and Miriam were coy, uncharacteristically dismissive. I’d get a sympathetic shrug and shake of the head from my father and a bemused look from my mother that said, “You kids. As if being conceived weren’t good enough.” So, I came to accept the naming as a quirky fact, not realizing until much, much later (miraculously, in the process of writing this essay) the linguistic brilliance of it.

Names, after all, are semantic qualifiers. Even before birth, a child inherits a surname, which automatically positions that child within a particular tribe. A given name is a unique iteration of the tribe. Who an individual may want to become—that innate striving for autonomy and identity—is thus partially predetermined in utero.

Toss in a middle name, and there’s an additional signifier the child must eventually negotiate in the process of becoming. It is both a burden and a blessing, an exercise in how no freedom is absolute, not even self-determination, or necessarily

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desirable, if it means being born into the terrifying prospect of an existential vacuum.

Therein lies the beauty of NMN—“no middle name”—but which I prefer to call the gap.

That space between my first and last name is an opening, a microscopic fissure into which I may venture to create something out of nothing, or to leave well enough alone. There are many such gaps in a lifetime, those with increasing import and possibility, risk and reward. History, too, is rife with change agents who opted not to leave well enough alone. For them, freedom didn’t entail minding the gap; it meant stepping into it.

Doing so is often brazen, fraught with danger, perhaps suicidal, and quintessentially American.

For the intrepid European settlers, the New World itself was a gap, a yawing chasm of possibility, exploitation, and reinvention. It was also an illusion. The continent was not a tabula rasa awaiting the imprint of Western Europeans; it had already been inscribed by millions of Native Americans.

Still, the settlers came, blinded by a quest to make it new, blindsided when running headlong into those who had beaten them to it. In the early going, there was room for everybody, and ample geography to go around. Temperance Flowerdew, one of the first female settlers in Jamestown, left behind the security and comforts of a genteel English life and flourished in colonial Virginia as a

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Heinze That space between my first and last name is an opening, a microscopic fissure into which I may venture to create something out of nothing, or to leave well enough alone. woman with uncommon power, land, and means.

Another woman Temperance most likely knew, a Powhatan chief ’s daughter, also reinvented herself, becoming the darling of seventeenth-century London society. Her given name was Matoaka, though we know her today as Pocahontas. Both of these remarkable figures were minor players in the American experiment, and yet, they played, against odds no bookie would touch. Young, female, and, in Matoaka’s case, Native American, they could not be faulted had they succumbed to a preordained fate. Their lives were neither fully realized nor without pain and suffering. They both died young. But they found the cracks in the veneer and remade themselves in their own image.

Others followed, seizing the unsurveilled gap as salvation. George Washington and his men sought the icy expanse of a river in the dead of night to ambush the hired help of a tyrannical superpower. Frederick Douglass understood escape from slavery not as something to do but

be. Isabella Baumgartner changed her name to Sojourner Truth and became a symbol of both.

Harriet Jacobs’ freedom bus was a nine-by-sevenby-three garret, a self-imposed prison in which she hid from her master for nearly seven years, and found herself. Earhart and Lindbergh, Glenn and Ochoa catapulted into the great beyond, knowing as Toni Morrison wrote, “If you surrendered to air, you could ride it.”

Curmudgeons, mavericks, and misanthropes, all see the gap as a clarion call, a last gasp effort at the purest form of selfhood. They take heed to the likes of Emerson: “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

These serial resisters are confounding, mystifying, even infuriating. In the midst of a global pandemic, for instance, they are the unmasked, essentially asserting their right not to mind the gap—to leave off from a world circumscribed even at the level of one’s own breath.

Perhaps in not conferring a middle name upon me, my mother and father also took a breath, from the demands of naming multiple children, from the responsibility of assigning meaning or from the exhausting dictates of convention. I can hear my mother say simply, “Rodney. They all don’t have to have middle names.” And my father would answer, “Okay, Mama.” I like this third scenario best because instead of a lapse in parenting, it suggests my mother and father had had a moment. They would have simultaneously entered one gap and created another, within which their fifth child could discover the liberating power of language and thereby christen herself. n

Heinze Ph.D. ’90 is the author of the novel The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew.

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A place for them to practice

conservative student announces to the class that his experience during his first semester in Duke’s Visions of Freedom Focus program dispelled prior concerns that he would be ostracized by his fellow students and penalized by his professors on account of his political beliefs. Instead of condemnation, he encountered spirited debate within an intellectually diverse community of friends.

A political progressive visiting Duke for Parents’ Weekend shares how her son’s coursework on the history of ideas of liberty and equality enriched their family’s conversations and enabled her for the first time to understand some of the reasons for the political positions of those who disagreed with her.

Two students who differed in many ways—gender, religious identification, ethnicity, politics—spent a class dinner arguing about a contentious political question.

Though they passionately held different views, at the end of the dinner they hugged and remained friends throughout the semester.

These anecdotes reflect some fruits of my efforts to make my classrooms into places where the free, open, and frank discussion of ideas thrives. In the process of working with my students to achieve such a vision, I have learned some valuable lessons about cultivating intellectual freedom in the classroom.

Intellectual freedom does not simply consist of the right to say whatever you want. Freedom in the classroom is not what political theorists call negative liberty, the absence of external interference. A course where students were merely left alone to say what was on their minds without interference would not be worth

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By Jed W. Atkins

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much, certainly not the price of a Duke education. When I create my syllabi, select readings, prepare discussions, and invite speakers, I aim to cultivate conversations that will lead students to draw greater insights about themselves and their world. Leading and participating in conversations that illuminate truths about ourselves and the world is a skill as much as playing the piano. (Indeed, I have increasingly grown fond of Oscar Wilde’s description of university education as learning “to play gracefully with ideas.”)

This view of freedom means that, much like learning to play the piano, guidance and training are necessary for students to be free in the classroom. Pianists have their sheet music, professors and students, their syllabi. This guidance is important; the arbitrary exercise of power (or even the possibility of such) can destroy freedom. Students who are unsure what a professor’s policy is toward classroom discussion of controversial topics tend to self-censor. I make clear my commitment to open conversation up front; I model it

Just as a musician may practice scales or licks,

skills or (to use an older word) virtues to by promoting lively discussion on the first day and throughout the semester. I try to keep my own political views out of the classroom and expose students to a variety of viewpoints through course readings and guest speakers.

Just as a musician may practice scales or licks, students and professors, too, may practice some skills or (to use an older word) virtues to ensure free and productive classroom conversation. The first is charity. While some worry that calls for charity chill speech and minimize disagreements, I have found that the practice of charity is an indispensable prerequisite for free, inclusive, and productive classroom conversations.

Practicing charity means listening well to others and trying to understand their arguments and concerns. It means interpreting their words so that they convey their argument in its best and strongest form (sometimes called the “principle of charity”). When students and faculty choose to take one another

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at their best, constructive disagreements lead to intellectual friendships that benefit all.

The second is humility. Humility recognizes that we are all still learning and growing, and that we can learn from one another.

The last is friendship, a commitment to one another as members of a common intellectual endeavor. Much of the ugliness of our polarized political climate arises from the depersonalized exchanges fostered by social media. When you interact with your political “opponents” outside of the classroom and learn their stories, it becomes much easier to see them as equal participants in a shared intellectual endeavor.

I have found the very human act of sharing meals to be an especially effective means of promoting such friendships.

Meals are an important feature of my Arete Initiative-sponsored course “Democracy: Ancient and Modern” and Duke’s Focus program—the program, in which I teach, that enrolls first-year students in interrelated seminars and immerses

students and professors, too, may practice some ensure free and productive classroom conversation. them in a community of fellow learners. This coming fall my Visions of Freedom Focus faculty and students will hold meal-time conversations about the futures of conservatism, liberalism, and progressivism based on panel discussions organized and moderated by me and my fellow Focus professors.

In my experience, free classroom conversation among those from different backgrounds is more an achievement than a right. In today’s polarized political climate, it requires extra work and commitment by both professors and students. But as I have seen firsthand, the effort is worth it. n Atkins is the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of classical studies and associate professor of political science, director of the Arete Initiative of the Kenan Institute of Ethics, and the chair of the department of classical studies.

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e began a conversation with

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on another topic, and we ended up deep in discussion about racism, anti-racism, and the enormous complexity of our moment. So when the topic of freedom came up, we naturally reached out to him,

and he leapt at the chance to share his thoughts. “I’d kick off the conversation with the Nina Simone quote that the meaning of freedom is simply ‘no fear,’ ” he said in an email. Simone’s famous quote comes from a filmed interview in which the High Priestess of Soul responds to the question, “What does ‘freedom’ mean to you?”

“It’s just a feeling,” she says, and then upon further reflection, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.” In her response, she rhapsodizes about the freedom of being a child and the freedom she feels when performing and finally concludes that freedom is “a new way of seeing.”

Magee works as head of operations at Fender Musical Instruments Corp. and is co-president of the Fender Play Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit focused on increasing children’s access to musical instruments, instruction, and inspiration. He’s also the executive sponsor of Fender’s Black Employee Resource Group, called Black in Business. Fender created the ERG following the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide response to socialjustice issues.

PRIESTESS: Singer/activist Nina Simone

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Q&A

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ED MAGEE: For a long time, I felt that just being a successful African American was enough. I was doing my part. I now believe that I have the responsibility to enable and facilitate dialogue around race and racism—with people and communities that I care about. How do we create spaces where we can have thoughtful, reflective, factual conversations about race, despite the volatility of the topic?

DUKE MAGAZINE: Does this relate to freedom?

EM: Absolutely. Nina’s comments are burned into the

psyche of African Americans in our country. There have been more than a couple of occasions when I hear or read conversation detractors like, “Well, you guys need to get over that,” whenever we delve into topics around structural racism from our country’s history (slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc.). Well, okay, let’s talk about what you’re asking me to get over within the context of living with no fear. One simple example is the conversation called “The Talk” that I’ve had with my kids about how a person of color engages with the police, based upon the very history that you’re asking me to “get over.” Fear is something that we contemplate every time we leave the relative safety of our homes. It would require an incredible level of historical revisionism for the collective African-American psyche to say that we’re engaging the American Dream, devoid of history, with no fear. But it’s also an exercise and lived experience that has created an incredible amount of resilience in the Black community—and equally important, opportunities for allyship.

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“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: DM: How does allyship relate to freedom? To “no fear”?

EM: Here’s a specific example: A few months ago, I had lunch with a couple of mid-twentyyear-old African-American business owners who were in Washington, D.C., during the protests following George Floyd’s murder. They relayed an incredible story about one particular night of protests where the police were advancing against a line of protesters. These twenty-year-old, college-educated American citizens were getting hit by batons and pepper-sprayed, no different than what occurred during the Civil Rights era that some have asked them to simply “get over.”

The police started advancing against the line of protesters. They conveyed the incredible moment when a group of white women walked between them and the police, sat down and locked arms. The police then stopped advancing.

I was humbled both by their story and the incredible courage that both protesters and allies demonstrated through their actions. These kids, in the face of rubber bullets, pepper spray, and batons, were demonstrating the power of believing that their protests could bring about change. The allies who sat down and risked bodily harm demonstrated equal courage and their commitment to protecting the protesters’ right to peacefully advocate for progress.

But let’s also acknowledge what “no fear” means at the other end of the protest spectrum.

The citizens who on January 6 strolled into the U.S. Capitol, openly conveying the desire to kidnap sitting congressmen and senators and overthrow the government in order to change the outcome of a valid U.S. election, appeared to exercise a level of fearlessness that equally shocked and terrified me.

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DM: So the freedom to act fearlessly looks different depending on your status: white or Black, minority or majority, powerful or powerless.

EM: It’s the fundamental challenge of racial justice and historical reckoning that we’re facing in this country today. What is the truth? What are the facts? How do we move forward when our country’s political leadership and media are so divergent on what constitutes the truth? The purpose of social justice is not to supplant white with Black, majority with minority, or powerful with powerless. It’s simply the recognition and acknowledgement of the humanity of all American citizens.

DM: So: freedom is lack of fear, and racism keeps us unfree by inciting fear of one another based upon things like skin color. How do we get to freedom when we’re so distant and so afraid of one another?

EM: We’re having a truly engaging conversation about that right now in our Employee Resource Group. What is the critical thinking we need to do around the topic of race? We have to provide context and set the table to have engaging discussions around topics like the meaning of anti-racism. These conversations require critical thinking and acknowledgement of facts, but most important, a level of trust between people engaged in what could be a very emotional and risky discussion. But isn’t that what good leaders do? Create space and an environment where stakeholders can have tough, challenging, imperfect conversations and ultimately find common ground to solve problems together.

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DM: So freedom—the lack of fear—to speak

out, and maybe hear yourself say something awkward, is an important part of that challenge?

EM: Yes. In our last ERG conversation, we dove

right into the topic of slavery, and the lack of acknowledgment of the structural racism that occurred post-Civil War and that resulted in a number of terrible consequences for Black communities across the country. Honestly, it was an exhausting conversation for our Black employees, but one that we prepared for and were ready to engage authentically with our fellow resource-group members.

We were very acutely aware of [researcher] Brené Brown’s insight that shame is not a weapon for racial justice. You can’t shame people into progress. Oftentimes, when you get into these conversations, people feel ashamed of what happened over our 246 years of slavery as an institution in America. They feel ashamed of what happened during the Jim Crow era. Part of today’s critical thinking that enables authentic conversations about race is simply acknowledging that people today are not responsible for those historical decisions. But it is equally important to acknowledge and reflect upon the consequences and impact of those decisions—we can’t simply “get over” them.

F R E E D O M

As a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, I know that the ideals of our Constitution are not a zero-sum game. It is only when we force ourselves to think of our ideals as limited resources, when we succumb to the fear of false equivalences, when we choose not to acknowledge the humanity of our fellow citizens, that we lose an incredible opportunity to engage, debate, and learn from our imperfect history.

DM: Freedom equals no fear, which may be impossible. But does the goal of no fear itself offer a kind of freedom—that “new way of seeing” that Simone urged?

EM: I mean, no fear: What an aspiration! But the path to embracing this “new way of seeing” requires trudging through fear echo chambers, reflecting upon the consequence of decades of mistrust, and occasionally suppressing the emotional baggage of our lived experiences. There are equal parts risk and courage in having those conversations. But the worst thing we can do is not have them with people that we care about.

That’s my fear. n

no fear.”

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Our messy past

S

By Jessica Friedlander Illustration by Peter Oumanski

ocial studies is the lowest-priority core class, always. History is not viewed as being as central or important as math and English, and science got a huge boost with Sputnik, the growth of the U.S. space program, and now the focus on STEM areas. I’ve always somewhat begrudged the lack of attention. History teachers have always banded together in the knowledge that we provide the most important core content; after all, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you can’t know where you are going.

We have commiserated over the lack of attention. Why does science education get all the cool, fully funded professional development?

But I’m beginning to feel the repercussions of “be careful what you wish for.”

The thing is teaching history—heck, teaching any subject—is never free from oversight and conflicting opinions. In general, K-12 education has been subjected to ever-changing perspectives and demands, some rooted in education-based research and some in generalized public opinion or political agendas. But teaching American history has come under much more public scrutiny in the past several years. This attention has felt more restrictive than the usual focus on test scores or a new instructional methods.

This attention is focused on what we teach, from changing the curriculum, to new textbooks, to public discussion of appropriate historical topics, to current legislation trying

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As I’ve grown as an educator, it has become clearer—and I have become more resolute in my knowledge—that teaching American history is an inherently political act, despite all the years of advice on how I should work to disassociate teaching and politics. to restrict what topics can even be brought up in the classroom.

To teach American history today is different from when I started teaching seven years ago. I’ve taught through the heritage versus hate discussion, Confederate statues coming down, increased

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public support for and the backlash against Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump’s election and presidency, and the rise of both the accusations of “fake news” and actual fake news.

As the concept of the truth has eroded and the need for facts or evidence has dissipated, I have

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become hyper-aware of the importance of my job. It seems public-policy makers are also aware of our critical role, because now we have the controversy surrounding critical race theory, which has led to a plethora of states introducing bills or working to find other ways to limit classrooms teaching about racism.

As I’ve grown as an educator, it has become clearer—and I have become more resolute in my knowledge—that teaching American history is an inherently political act, despite all the years of advice on how I should work to disassociate teaching and politics. If you try to not be political, you are inadvertently supporting the pervading dominant narrative. For example, if one taught only from the textbook (depending on the textbook), a student may never learn about Ida B. Wells and her groundbreaking work as the first Black female investigative journalist, her range of achievements, or about her integral work in the suffrage movement. Textbooks, state curriculum, and even some standardized tests don’t include Black women as central to the suffrage movement, thus whitewashing history.

Both the content and the manner in which content is taught are political acts: They can support the dominant Eurocentric virtuous narrative of American history, or they can challenge it. As an American history teacher, one can teach patriotism as blind pride and allegiance or as thoughtful criticism and questioning.

Some teachers believe that history should be “free from an agenda, just the facts.” But which facts? Whose truth? Which version? Whose voices will you lift up? How are these facts and stories portrayed? History is never free from an agenda. I want my students to know that. I believe it is my job for students to know that.

I have had more students ask for “the real history” or “the stuff they don’t want us to know.”

I tell them that it is important to know I am just one person with my own biases, and they should know my biases because what I choose to teach and not teach is shaped by my biases.

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They appreciate my candor. They love learning about people outside of the textbook. They truly engage with articles and podcasts, making connections between present-day and our past, complicating their understandings of truth and history. I have had students leave American history saying they never liked a history class before this, but my class was great. They enjoyed it: the content, the way they learned.

I’m lucky to teach in Durham. I have not had to fear angry mobs of parents fighting the administration or trying to get me fired for teaching American history that is not sugar-coated white-savior revisionist history. I can, and do, teach topics that complicate our history, and I weave race, sex, and class throughout it all. For example, I teach about redlining and its lasting impacts on housing, education, and financial opportunities, and use local history to highlight both triumphs and issues for the Black community. I have students assess the storytelling aspect of history, comparing textbooks to various sources on the same content.

America was founded with ideals of freedom, and it is my job to try to show those ideals and how we’ve fallen short, in hopes that the next generation works their way toward a freer United States. My job is being made harder as my own freedoms as a teacher are being increasingly infringed upon by changing curriculum standards and pressures from the state legislature to teach American history through a lens of pride. Here in North Carolina—and across the country—legislation is being written to systemically oppress teachers’ freedom to teach multiple perspectives, to uplift the voices of historically marginalized groups, to share controversial pieces of history and help students learn to engage critically.

I will keep teaching the multilayered and messy version of American history. Students ask for “the real history” all the time. They need to know our past is complicated, so they can continue working on becoming a more free and fair country. n

Friedlander M.A.T. ’14 is a social studies teacher at Riverside High School in Durham.

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UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

Anthem for you

By Kimberly Gaubault (McCrae)

www.

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I understand that on some days you will nurse lonely you will argue with mirror swallowing distorted images telling yourself that you are not this kind of ugly you will select colors that say “available” and draw on a face that will make you believe that the last one who doubted your beauty was both blind and stupid I fear that in those moments you will forget in the middle of lonely is one you are the one who has overcome insurmountable obstacles maybe not the same as mine but they were your mountain to climb and you climbed it scaled it to peak and met thin air but thickened resolve you a perfectly shaped masterpiece with flaws and failures that make you irreplaceable you are not the catch line to a phrase nor the chorus to the latest song you are a bridge a bridge the bridge the connection between a broken yesterday and a whole tomorrow you will never pass this way again and you are glad about it and this way will miss you will covet your strong stance and your sturdy stride as they will try to pull you back will not know why but will try nonetheless and you will NOT let them you will keep walking will not expend energy on running

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from that which cannot follow it cannot follow they cannot follow you cannot go back they cannot follow you cannot go back they cannot follow you will not go back you are made of more than tearful moments and well-crafted insults you are affected by words that sting words carelessly placed to harm you you acknowledge it all but never crumble you are sand you are waves you cannot be still you are waves you cannot be silent you are waves at times white capped and wily you are waves you are ebb and you are flow and all the while you are God’s rendition of peace be still you will stretch your hands to the sky remind the sun, “This spirit created you” and you will walk like a million sunsets are bowing at your feet you unbreakable you and you will be here long after your spirit has evacuated the shell that you have painted perfection I understand that on some days you will nurse lonely but you will be defined by the snow angels you left behind when you fell stretched steadied yourself and got back up again Gaubault (McCrae) ’00 is an intentional lover of people and advocates for defining one’s personal freedom. Hear Gaubault (McCrae) recite her poem at alumni.duke.edu/magazine

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How to leave space for others

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By Corbie Hill

make my living with words, and that’s what rap is—words—but I can’t freestyle. I nerd out on the linguistic intricacies, the staggering poetry and ironclad rhetoric, the references-within-references-within-references of billy woods and Jean Grae and Quelle Chris and Open Mike Eagle; of Q-Tip and GZA and MF Doom and Andre 3000. But I can’t freestyle. If I tried,

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I’d be like Jemaine Clement in Flight of the Conchords, spitting exactly two lines (“I am the hip-hop-opotamus / my lyrics are bottomless”) and then staring dumbly, mouth hanging open, completely out of ideas as the beat moves on without me. Rapping is hard, and rapping well is even harder.

I can’t freestyle, but I know how to improvise.

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Through the wildly inventive (and wildly wild) musicians I met in that town’s underground music scene, I learned to improvise as one part of a whole.

I started trumpet in the sixth grade, but it never spoke to me like guitar did. I got a Fender acoustic the next year and stumbled around the fretboard until I got comfortable. I grew my hair long. I wore flannel and Chuck Taylors. I knew entirely too much about Pearl Jam. Hey, it was the ’90s.

Even before I knew what I was doing as an instrumentalist, I was completely comfortable improvising with others. At first, I was my version of flashy. I wanted to show off the oddball techniques I’d been tinkering with, and I had accepted the mainstream idea of the guitar as the lead instrument doing the loudest things; doing the most things. By its nature, though, this kind of playing limits the creative freedom of everyone else in the room. It’s very More me; less you.

I was in the middle of my twenties in 2006 when I moved with my now-wife to Greenville, North Carolina, where she attended grad school and I received an informal artistic education by night. Through the wildly inventive (and wildly wild) musicians I met in that town’s underground music scene, I learned to improvise as one part of a whole.

I started collaborating with more hip-hop artists— specifically, a Greenville rap crew I became friends with—and while some of my rapper friends tried to teach me to freestyle, it never took. I was thrilled, though, to back my friends up instrumentally, which was an important lesson in collaborative tact.

I remember one house party in particular when a drummer and I backed up three freestyling emcees. I listened carefully to their verses as I played, changing my guitar’s voicing and phrasing to fit each rapper’s

07

style, or killing my volume and laying out when that’s what served the music.

Improvising, as I’ve learned through the musicians I’ve been fortunate enough to play with, isn’t about showing off and soloing, but is about collectively creating a new and interesting sonic world. It’s inherently Less me; more us. And you can only do that by listening, by knowing how to leave space for others to develop and present ideas.

Listen: As a hetero white male, I was born with a microphone. By thinking I should learn to freestyle, I was asking for the mic while I was already holding one. Women and minorities in the U.S. have to work a lot harder to be heard, since our society is structured so that the hetero white male voice carries a lot further, whether the person speaking means for it to or not. Historically and culturally, the hip-hop I adore developed to amplify the voices of people without this advantage, without white privilege.

But I don’t need amplifying. What I need is to turn in my mic when I can—to shut up, to listen, to step back when that’s what serves society best.

Learning to listen by playing improvised music with my friends has taught me a great deal about recognizing my own white privilege and how even its passive influence affects others. An equitable sharing of the figurative microphone takes massive structural change, which I want to believe is happening, but which I also know happens one person at a time.

I’m not saying I occupy some moral high ground or that I’m even any good at this—I’m saying that I see the problem. I’m saying that I’m trying.

I’m saying that I can’t freestyle.

I’m saying that’s okay. n

Hill is the magazine’s staff writer.

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XX |

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By XX

In search of In America, among Americans, “freedom” is a paramount concept. Perhaps that’s why when you plug the word in to Duke’s libraries digital repository search bar, a range of historic photographs, advertisements, and texts pop up. From civil rights to transportation to feminine hygiene, in prose, poetic, and epistolary form, the notion of being unrestricted is prized, hailed, and demanded. Do your own search at repository@duke.edu. n

I was a little bit amazed as to why the selection of the role of black women in the world. I just said to Bernice Reagon that I have never been one to feel great needs in the direction of setting myself apart as a woman. I've always thought first and foremost of people as individuals.

—Ella Baker in a speech, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle: The Long View,” given at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, 1969

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Pipe dreams

By Zach Weisberg

A CATCHING A WAVE: Weisberg on his board

t Duke University, surfing is not a career. Period.

Nor should it be. On the surface, it makes no sense. Blame geography. Durham overflows with charm, intelligence, and ambition, but shrivels raisin-dry when it comes to opportunities associated with riding open-ocean swells. If I wanted to ascend the ranks at Goldman Sachs, steer the ship at Apple, or direct policy in the White House, Duke offers a time-tested launchpad. If I hoped to make a meaningful contribution to the eccentric tapestry of surf culture, I’d be best served combing the California coast.

About halfway through my undergraduate journey, though, I discovered that building a life and livelihood that revolves around the ocean was a distinct, magnetizing possibility. Traditional? Linear? Safe? On all accounts, no. Achievable? Very.

Photo courtesy Zach Weisberg

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...I had no question as to

I only needed to I grew up surfing in the Outer Banks each summer, where I was fortunate enough to toss pizzas and wash dishes by day and obsessively hunt for surf every moment off the clock. I vigilantly monitored the mercurial confluence of swell, wind direction, and tide required to produce ideal conditions. Those summers also served as an intoxicating counterpoint to the athletic endeavors that secured me a spot at Duke: wrestling.

Wrestling is the opposite of surfing.

It’s an ascetic lifestyle where I learned the value of discipline, hard work, and sacrifice. In reductive terms, I’d starve myself and wake up at dawn to fight people for most of the year. If I eliminated the satisfaction derived from succeeding (read: winning), it was mostly insufferable.

That voluntary misery came to a screeching halt in the summer. During the year’s hottest months, I was surfing.

When compared with the oppressive demands of wrestling, surfing truly represented freedom. I realized surfing might also afford a career path when my D.U.D.E. degree (Duke University Department of English...they even make T-shirts!) fit my unpaid summer internship at Surfer magazine like a glove.

Before I drove across America, my boss joked that as long as I was cool washing

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Photo courtesy Zach Weisberg

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what I wanted to do. decide if I had the audacity to do it. his car a couple times a month, we wouldn’t have issues. I never had to wash his car. But I did write twenty pieces for the website and got a byline in “The Bible of the Sport” that summer.

When he offered me fifty dollars for each piece I wrote, I was shocked. I felt like I just tricked the world. It’s possible to get paid to write about surfing. I entered the “Magazine Journalism” class with a puffy chest my senior year. After all, I had a byline in Surfer magazine.

My peers had returned from internships at The Economist, The New Republic, and The Atlantic.

They seemed none too impressed. Maybe they didn’t hear me right. I said, “Surfer magazine.”

After that summer, I had no question as to what I wanted to do. I only needed to decide if I had the audacity to do it. My decision felt binary: follow a path to join the ranks of a tribe cast largely as derelicts and misfits, or do what Dukies do and ace that LSAT. LSAT just wasn’t in the cards. After graduating, I zipped back to California to accept a position as the online editor at Surfer. After three years internally championing the impending virtual revolution with no success, I left to start my own digital media outlet, The Inertia, and I haven’t looked back. Last September marked its tenth anniversary; Surfer didn’t survive the digital revolution.

I often struggle with how trite and self-indulgent surfing is (at its worst) when compared with the world-changing opportunities available to

me at an institution like Duke. Consequently, I attempt to infuse everything we do with a greater sense of purpose. We approach the natural world with curiosity, optimism, and respect. I take great pride in finding opportunities to elevate the stature of surfers and outdoor enthusiasts wherever possible. The Spicoli stereotype of the surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a fallacy. Ask William Finnegan, who won a Pulitzer for writing about his relationship with the ocean.

Famous bodysurfer Barack Obama loved his book Barbarian Days.

I was mistaken. Our paths aren’t binary. Few things are.

I did pick up this quote from Thoreau, a fellow admirer of the natural world, in an English class at Duke, and it has always guided me, in a sense, toward freedom. “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished at The Inertia in the past decade, but I know better than to take any of it for granted or resist innovation.

We’re a long ways from our potential.

The ocean has been an excellent teacher, indiscriminately doling out its lessons. Like most surfers, I just try to observe and appreciate the conditions for what they are, make the best decisions I can, and enjoy each moment of the ride while it lasts. n

Weisberg ’07 is founder and publisher of The Inertia and a former editor at Surfer.

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Between guns and liberty

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By Joseph Blocher Illustration by Giorgio Fratini

lthough it was ratified in 1791, the Second Amendment has undergone a radical transformation in the fifteen years since I graduated from law school. My introduction to the Second Amendment came in 2007, a few months after starting work at a Washington, D.C., law firm. My boss—former U.S. Solicitor General and future Duke colleague Walter Dellinger—asked me what I knew about the amendment. There was little to say: For more than two centuries, the amendment was overwhelmingly interpreted by courts to protect only the right to keep and bear arms in connection with organized militia service, and no federal case had ever struck down a gun law as violating the Second Amendment.

That fall, though, the case that would become District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was already working its way up to the Supreme Court, challenging the district’s citywide handgun ban on the basis that it vio-

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What about nonviolent felons? lated the right to keep and bear arms. I helped write the district’s brief defending the gun law; Walter argued the case before the Supreme Court. By a 5-4 vote, the justices agreed with the challengers that the Second Amendment protects an “individual” right to bear arms that encompasses a right to do so for private purposes, including self-defense in the home.

But Heller also emphasized that the right to keep and bear arms, like all constitutional rights, is subject to regulation. The court singled out as “presumptively lawful” those gun laws prohibiting dangerous and unusual weapons, possession by felons and the mentally ill, and carrying guns in sensitive places like schools and government buildings.

Heller also left many other questions open.

What about gun possession by minors? By people convicted of misdemeanor crimes of do-

mestic violence? What about nonviolent felons?

More fundamentally, how are we to evaluate the constitutionality of such laws? By historical analogy? By contemporary cost-benefit analysis?

I joined the Duke Law School faculty the year after Heller was decided and have spent much of my career trying to work out answers to those questions. One central challenge for current law and scholarship is how to mediate between gun rights and regulations in public places.

The plaintiff in Heller simply wanted to have a handgun in his home for purposes of self-defense, and the court’s decision is correspondingly framed around the paradigmatic scene of a person defending his home from a criminal invader.

That paradigm scene doesn’t capture the full universe of gun use, particularly as it has changed in the past ten years with increasing gun displays in shared public spaces. Those

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By people convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence? scenes raise different questions and involve different kinds of harms. Consider that last spring, heavily armed protesters stormed the Michigan state capitol, forcing the temporary suspension of a regular legislative session. Some people sympathetic to the protesters said that no one was harmed in the incident. But that is true only in the narrow sense of there being no bullet-riddled bodies. Reva Siegel (Yale Law School) and I have argued in recent work that the harm was to the body politic itself—to the ability and freedom of others to engage in democratic self-government.

Those intersecting freedoms—in addition to the influence of lobbying groups, cultural differences, and naked partisanship—are part of what make the gun debate so difficult. In a 2010 opinion, the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.” He explained that “in evaluating an asserted right to be free from particular gun-control regulations, liberty is on both sides of the equation. …Your interest in keeping and bearing a certain firearm may diminish my interest in being and feeling safe from armed violence.” Justice Stevens was writing in dissent in that case, as he did in Hell-

er, but his observation about the relationship between guns and liberty was undeniably and profoundly correct.

Years later, Justice Stevens sent a letter to me and my law school colleague Darrell Miller, gently chiding us for our recent book, which accepts the legitimacy of Heller. But I continue to believe that gun rights and regulation can coexist, as they have since the founding of the country. Heller itself invokes William Blackstone, the great chronicler of the common law, who wrote that “riding or going armed, with dangerous or unusual weapons, is a crime against the public peace, by terrifying the good people of the land….” The “peace” that the law protects encompasses more than physical safety; as Blackstone made clear, “terrifying the good people of the land”—not just attacking them— was itself “a crime against the public peace.”

In contemporary terms, that means better enforcement of laws against brandishing and menacing, as might have been done in Michigan (where none of the armed protesters were arrested). And, more broadly, it means giving due weight to all the freedoms implicated by public gun use—not only the rights of gun owners. n

Blocher is the Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of law and faculty codirector of the Center for Firearms Law, which he cofounded with Darrell A.H. Miller, the Melvin G. Shimm Professor of law. He and Miller are coauthors of The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge 2018).

sion by minors?

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We call it a

free throw

, but to get it you need

to absorb punishment. Miss your shot while getting whacked and you get two or three of them; make your shot and you get an extra one. If you’re good, it can help you make a team; if you’re bad, it can be why you’re cut.

But shooting a free throw is the one time in basketball—it’s the one time in ball sports—that a player can score points with no defense and no time elapsing.

Time stops. Everybody History

The free throw didn’t used to be a throw at all: When James Naismith created basketball, the original rules stated that two fouls in a row for one team equaled a basket for the other.

Soon that shifted to a twenty-foot free shot, then a fifteen-foot one, worth a single point.

Anybody on the team could shoot it, though in 1924 the rules changed so that the players fouled had to shoot their own free throws.

BOUNCE: Top, Naismith as University of Kansas athletics director, c. 1920.

Left, the original 1891 "Basket Ball" court in Springfield College. It used a peach basket attached to the wall.

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has to stand still except the player with the ball.

All the player at the line has to do is take a breath and put up a shot.

The free throw, free or not, has played a large role in some of Duke’s most memorable games.

In a 2017 interview with Business Insider, JJ Redick shared some thoughts on free throws:

Give It Back On February 8, 2020, the Duke men’s basketball team trailed Carolina in the Dean Dome by ten with under two minutes to play.

Duke guard Tre Jones found himself on the free-throw line with 4.4 seconds left, the second of two shots remaining, and Duke still down by two. Fortunately, in recent practices associate head coach Jon Scheyer ’10 (who will soon replace coach Mike Krzyzsewski) had urged Jones to consider just that situation. So Jones was prepared to purposely clank the shot off the front of the rim, grab the long rebound to the right, and wrestle his way to a buzzer-beater to tie the game.

Duke won in overtime, but not on a free throw.

Again With The Miss On April 5, 2021, the Duke men’s team led Butler in the national championship game by a point with 3.6 seconds left when Butler fouled Duke center Bian Zoubek. Zoubek calmly drained the first free throw. But with Butler out of timeouts, Coach K felt that one more point meant less than those ticks on the clock, and he told Zoubek to miss the second. It bounced high, the clock staying at 3.6, until Butler star Gordon Heyward gathered it in and Photos courtesy Duke Sports Information

“I have shortened my free-throw routine so I that I stop thinking so much.

Now it’s just one dribble, spin, shoot.”

put up a half-court prayer.

That missed. Another wise free-throw miss by Duke.

Speedo Guy In 2003, Carolina played the Duke men’s team in Cameron, and with Carolina ahead by three, Carolina guard Jackie Manuel was fouled about halfway through the first half. At

the direction of a Cameron Crazie named Viking Guy, the entire graduate student section behind the backboard crouched. Patrick King M.Div. ’04 crouched with them, ripping off his clothes. And as Manuel stepped to the line, King, wearing only a Speedo swimsuit, rose slowly from the silence and began undulating like a cobra.

Manuel, unstrung, missed the first free throw; with King dancing he missed the second, too. Duke won the game, and King—forevermore Speedo Guy—ended up with an off-the-books assist. Coach K was less impressed, publicly declaring further Speedo displays too crazy even for Cameron.

King’s brother’s girlfriend, however, recognized true love when it showed up in a Speedo. She and King are married now.

BALLERS: Clockwise, Zoubek, Reddick, and Jones

JJ Redick If teams could still send their best shooter to the line, a few more banners would probably hang in Cameron. Duke has had many wizards of the free throw line, but none compared with JJ Redick ’06. In a long NBA career, Redick is ninth-best alltime, hitting 89 percent of his free throws, but he was even better at Duke: 91 percent overall (best in ACC history), and in the 2003-04 season hitting an astonishing 95 percent (143-150), best in ACC history (fifthbest in NCAA history).

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“Freedom to” versus “Freedom from”

By Deanna Elstrom

watched the COVID-19 pandemic unfurl from Tokyo, where my family lives.

In Japan, a strong cultural imperative compels individuals to be sensitive to the needs of others. This requires complying with rules that can be inconvenient, and even nonsensical, but are understood to be for the common good.

This understanding manifested itself through COVID. Though not legally required, nearly everyone on the streets donned masks. In the first months, people uncomplainingly

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followed government requests to limit travel and stay home.

Playgrounds were taped off and public institutions were closed. Though the experience has been just as disappointing and challenging as elsewhere, a sense of mutual cooperation continues to prevail. This demonstrates a fundamental difference in American and Japanese ideas of freedom.

Japanese culture is rooted in a collectivist orientation, as are cultures in most countries with rice-farming pasts. Rice farming requires the sharing of water resources. In this context, the

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and showing consideration to your safety as well as their own.

In the United States, on the other hand, we start with a “freedom to” do as we like.

European settlers came to America for freedom from rigid economic, societal, political, class, and religious structures.

American immigrants came for the freedom to do or be what we want as individuals. Certainly, these freedoms existed only in principle for vast swathes of the population and continue to be a work-inprogress. Yet the promise of freedom continues to inspire and motivate those who choose to immigrate and those who strive to improve the U.S. to become a nation whose reality is aligned with its founding principles.

Ongoing since the earliest days of the republic has been a continuous balancing of individual rights versus collective rights. In times of collective crisis, like the Great Depression or World War II, collective rights have sometimes taken precedence, if only temporarily. In a nation where rugged individualism is venerated, however, individual rights eventually take precedence. This passion for individual rights shows up in debates over gun control, education, conservation, and health care.

The pandemic has made this issue ever more relevant and urgent. In nearly every other country, citizens understood that masking and staying home were public-health necessities. Yet across much of the U.S., individuals refused to comply with mask mandates or get vaccinated, claiming to be standing up against government “tyranny” in the name of individual freedom.

But freedom is not an absolute. It is an abstract concept whose meaning depends on circumstance and cultural context. As Graham Mooney writes in The Atlantic, “Freedom, after all, is a flexible concept, and Americans’ freedoms surely include the opportunity to minimize the collective risk of random viral death.”

To function effectively within Japanese society, one must be sensitive to what others want, need, and feel, so one is required to pick up on nonverbal cues, creating an orientation toward the other that underpins Japanese social relationships.

Those who get along well with others are adept at “reading the air.” Individuals are encouraged to practice self-restraint and avoid imposing on others. In the extraordinary level of service at restaurants, hotels, and even the convenience store, we can see this hypersensitivity to the needs and feelings of others.

The past year has stretched my understanding of freedom. If each of us places the rights of others on par with our own freedom as individuals, we all benefit. We are all freer. n

...daily life in Japan offers freedoms that can only be found in a society that places a high importance on the group as well as the individual.

greatest value is placed on maintaining harmonious relationships. If you act selfishly and upset your neighbors, your water supply and your livelihood can be quickly cut off.

From children’s earliest years, Japanese preschools and kindergartens teach the importance of cooperation and to not cause bother to others. Children learn to clean up after themselves and each other, cleaning schools and helping serve and clean up lunch. The value of being useful to others is nurtured. Every meal (even when eaten alone) starts with the phrase itadakimasu, or “I am receiving.”

This is not to present Japan as a utopian fantasy. Japanese society has problems, tensions, and inequalities. Yet, daily life in Japan offers freedoms that can only be found in a society that places a high importance on the group as well as the individual. It is the “freedom from”: from the fear of being taken advantage of, of random hostility in the checkout line, of danger when walking alone at night or in an unfamiliar neighborhood. In the context of COVID, that foundational “freedom from” results in the “freedom to” relax and feel secure, knowing that others are wearing their masks properly

Elstrom ’90 is the founder of Somi Insights, a Tokyo-based brand insights strategy agency.

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The prison of discomfort

oseph Fernandez-Moure wants to free you.

He wants to get you out of jail. But he’s not baking a cake with a file in it; he wants to get you out via injection.

So, no, he’s not talking about the I’ve-committeda-crime jail, of course. The metaphorical jail this trauma surgeon is talking about comes from the limitations people face when they suffer one of the least-studied injuries people encounter: rib injuries.

“A lot of people have become really complacent with rib care, saying we have nothing to offer,” he says. “I refuse to accept that as an answer for anything in this modern age of surgery.” You can’t splint a rib injury—the patient wouldn’t be able to breathe. And invasive surgery to implant a plate or screw, except in the most extreme cases, is often more traumatic than the injury itself. So, often physicians, at a loss for what else to do, prescribe pain-management techniques and send patients home: It’ll feel better in a few months.

“But people don’t have six months to be jailed up for. Because rib fractures are like a jail sentence at times,” says Fernandez-Moure, a trauma specialist and assistant professor of surgery at Duke School of Medicine. More serious rib injuries may require hospital care because of extreme pain, possibly resulting in drug dependence. And much like spinal injury, “rib injury impairs people significantly when they get home.” Breathing is hard; picking up a child or bag of groceries is hard; twisting for shower or bathroom care is hard.

“So I have envisioned my role as trying to give people back their function. It’s serendipitous that freedom is the word selected, because you’re really giving people back the freedom of mobility, the freedom to go home.”

With his partner-scientist Matthew Becker, Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor of chemistry, he’s working on a project to free rib-injury patients from their prison of immobility and discomfort.

The project involves the development of an adhesive that can be injected into ribs to stabilize fractures, both to decrease pain and to improve healing.

Becker had done research into an adhesive based on a material produced by the caddisfly larvae for use underwater. The adhesive doesn’t impair cell functions and shows possibility for use in bones. They’re currently at work “to optimize its mechanical and biological functions to target fractures”—so that it can eventually be injected into fractured ribs, where it would stabilize them as they naturally heal. “The next steps will be testing it on stem cells to understand whether it will allow for cell osteodifferentiation.” That is, to make sure that the cells in the area of the adhesive can turn into bone cells.

Next will come testing in an animal model, and then ultimately testing on people. “But again, not a lot of [researchers] are in this space. Most people focus on long bones. Because for the longest time, everyone was like, ‘You can’t do anything about ribs. Why do you want to focus on them?’ There isn’t a lot of study that has been done on it from a mechanical standpoint.”

There’s a long way to go, but he is hopeful he and Becker will make progress and that, within a decade, doctors will be able to inject an adhesive into your fractured ribs, and you’ll be able to breathe and rotate and pick up your kids while you heal.

For more severe cases, he’s also at work on ways to apply the screws and stabilizers without having to perform major surgery. “We can do thoracoscopic surgery,” he says: small incisions in the chest, through which the lab is designing special tools that will allow surgeons to, say, turn screwdrivers in any direction. Not unlike the tools you wish you had when you’re working under the sink, only for inside the chest of someone with severe rib injuries. Those tools, too, will take several years before they’re ready for use, but anything that diminishes the sentence of people with rib injuries is, for Fernandez-Moure, a win.

“If I tell someone who relies on working with their hands that they can’t do that anymore, and it’s gonna take them six months to get back to normal,” he says, “you’re taking food off people’s plates. That to me is completely unacceptable.”—Scott Huler

It’s serendipitous that freedom is the word selected,

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iStock

13 because you’re really giving people back the freedom of mobility, the

freedom to go home.

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Don Uhrbrock / Contributor / Gettty

AUTHOR: Harper Lee

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What I thought I knew

By Jennifer Yang

n March 16, 2021, a gunman opened fire in an Asian-owned business in metro Atlanta, killing four people. He then drove about thirty miles south targeting another Asian business, where he killed three more people. And then, he crossed the street to a third Asian business and killed another person. In the span of an hour, eight people were fatally shot, six of whom were Asian women. Two days after the shootings, my favorite teacher from high school, a man I admired, took to social media and declared that race had nothing to do with the crimes.

I was struck by my teacher’s freedom to speak so carelessly, with the certainty of safety, that he could wade into the shallow end and megaphone his uninformed hot take of this deeply complex series of events, in which a minority group is profoundly affected by a majority offender. In contrast, I think about the times in my life when it was to the benefit of my social buoyancy and

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physical safety to ignore offensive noise, acting as if it had never happened. But in facing this directly, with an eye toward healing, I gained an unexpected view of my own freedom.

The only thing I can liken this new perspective to is what happens in Go Set a Watchman.

Of course, what happens in Harper Lee’s second (or first) novel is made extraordinary in relation to what we already know and hold dear in To Kill a Mockingbird. As we understand it now, Lee completed the Watchman manuscript before Mockingbird was ever written. And in perhaps the finest stroke of editing, she scrapped it all, save for mention of a trial. She rewrote the story and changed the heroine from a twenty-something Jean Louise to a six-year-old girl who prefers to go

by Scout.

For me, Mockingbird is the essence of dependability. I can always step back into those summers in Maycomb County, where there is a lesson in

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It was not until enough years had gone by that I could

It was because I had yet to be its pages for every situation. And when things get tough, I picture Gregory Peck, who starred as Atticus in the 1962 film version, reminding me that you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. I still own the original copy of the book that I read in eighth grade. It sits lovingly on a bookshelf next to its new (old) companion.

I consumed everything I could find surrounding the discovery and forthcoming publication of Watchman in 2015. The revelation of Lee’s antecedent voices for her iconic characters captivated me. Among the fanfare, I scrolled past the dread that some expressed about the risk of tainting a classic. I did not sympathize with most of this chatter, what seemed like people grieving that anyone would mess with Atticus. It was not until enough years had gone by that I could look back and understand why I could not relate. It was because I had yet to be let down by someone I adored.

This meta-story is how I have processed the reality that my former teacher is not the noble figure I had built him up to be these many years since I last sat in his classroom. Reading his post was disorienting, like how Jean Louise must have felt when she snuck into the courthouse and found Atticus speaking at what amounted to a “Concerned Citizens” rally. It was simply impossible, irreconcilable. This person whom we all looked up to in high school, who told us about Plato and Nietzsche, who was our Atticus—he was far more complex than I had imagined.

I have long taken the stance of not engaging

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in debate on social media, but I felt compelled to comment publicly to his post. My response to one nonsense Facebook post and his subsequent replies—which included a private message that doubled-down to explain why my views were invalid—is an example itself of the difficulty Asians face when we choose to engage. When we find the words, momentum, and opportunity to speak we are often reasoned away.

The activity in this one post reflected so much of what I was seeing online: Two completely different conversations were happening, one in which people were finding every reason to explain how the shootings were not fueled by the previous administration, and the other in which Asian Americans were constantly having to prove that their experiences are real. Yes, there is freedom of speech. But what are we achieving when there is talk without the intention to understand?

Instead of using his experiences to interpret something that was not about his experiences, he could have listened to those who have something at stake. In doing so, he might have learned that racism, sexism, unwanted sexual advances, and violence are pervasive and deeply woven into the lives of Asian women. To be clear, hyper-sexualization is racism against Asian women. Instead of using his place as a public-school teacher to espouse a narrow and hurtful point of view, he could have amplified an Asian-American voice.

In the days following the shootings, I received several messages from friends and colleagues expressing astonishment that prejudice and violence against Asians were issues. While I had come to

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look back and understand why I could not relate.

by someone I adored.

llet et down down

ACTOR: Gregory Peck

know these as facts of life, I needed to connect the dots, for those who could not see them, of my personal experiences with racism to the broader

context of violence in my hometown and across the country. I shared a reflection on social media regarding the exchange with my teacher and other racial awakenings from the past year, and it led to incredible conversations with people spanning my childhood and adult life. The result was a parley of apologies for our shared humanity, affording me the opportunity to make amends with those whom I, too, have hurt in the past.

While on the surface they appear as disparate characters, one reading of the “new” Atticus confronts the possibility that he is the same person in both Mockingbird and Watchman. The difference, as time revealed to me, lies in the eyes of a grown woman versus those of a child. The remembrance of the older Jean Louise alongside young Scout gave me the liberty to reexamine what I thought I knew. The capacity to go back and edit, to refine my thinking, to forgive, is the freedom to be human. n

Yang ’07, M.B.A. ’14 is a first-generation Asian American who lives in Atlanta. She enjoys storytelling as a means to raise awareness, generate conversation, and create momentum for change.

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15

I

Thoughts on an ever-changing market system

By Bruce Caldwell

began studying the writings of Friedrich A. Hayek, the social theorist and Nobel laureate in economics, back in the 1980s and quickly became hooked. My initial interest was in his insights about the limits of economic science, that when dealing with an ever-changing complex adaptive system like the economy, the sort of prediction and control we might hope to exercise over it is severely limited. In Hayek’s words: The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.

As an economist, I was trained to recognize that a free-market system is an effective means for allocating resources, but that it can be plagued by “market failures” that require government intervention. Hayek’s writings suggest additional reasons both to favor a market system and to be skeptical about the effectiveness of government intervention. His insight that a well-functioning market system allows individuals to make use of dispersed and localized knowledge comes into play in both respects.

Mainstream economists have long criticized policies that involve price-fixing because, though politically popular, such policies have adverse unintended consequences in terms of efficiency.

For example, agricultural price supports cause too many resources to be used to produce farm goods,

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a misallocation of resources. This can lead to further policies to try to correct for the mistake, some quite absurd—like paying farmers to take land out of production.

Hayek’s work supplements such basic economic reasoning by showing how flexibly adapting market prices also help people to make the best use of knowledge.

Ever-changing market prices both reflect the decisions of millions of market participants, decisions made on the basis of their own local knowledge, and enable the market participants to make better decisions by providing them with knowledge about relative scarcities of the goods and services that matter to them. The system promotes the effective use of resources and of people’s knowledge. It is crucial to note that none of this happens because of some government directive. As Frédéric Bastiat pithily observed in the nineteenth century, “Paris gets fed” every day, through the freely made decisions and efforts of millions of market participants, none of whom has the job to feed Paris.

Of course, sometimes markets go awry. Hayek was particularly worried about the effects of money (which he once dubbed a “loose joint”) on the larger system. He had lived through the Austrian hyperinflation of the 1920s and saw the damage that excessive money creation could do. But he was equally worried about the attempts of reformers to improve the economic system through the exercise of conscious control. Such reforms can interfere with the system’s ability to respond to changing knowledge. They also typically require that government regulators have more knowledge than they can ever possibly possess. In a world of dispersed and rapidly changing knowledge, mar-

In a world of dispersed and rapidly changing knowledge, market competition is often the best “regulator.”

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ket competition is often the best “regulator.”

Like Adam Smith, he was also sometimes suspicious of who the true beneficiaries were when regulation was undertaken that purportedly served the public interest. Trade protectionism, industrial policy that picks winners and losers, and regulations that restrict entry into professions are always defended as benefiting society, but the true beneficiaries are more often the incumbents who lobby for it. Sometimes there are overtly political ramifications. Both Republicans and Democrats have favored protection for the steel industry because steel is produced in swing states that are vital in every presidential election cycle. Antitrust can be used to promote competition, but it can also be used by firms that fail at the competitive game to punish those better able to serve the consumer.

All such policy abuses are examples of the sort of crony capitalism or political favoritism that Hayek spent his life criticizing.

Hayek is most famous for his critique of socialism, which takes the piecemeal planning we see

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everywhere today and extends it to the economic system as a whole. Recent polls suggest that a majority of college students prefer socialism to capitalism. This suggests that they do not understand the textbook definition of socialism—state ownership of the means of production—and are also ignorant of the track record of regimes that have embraced central planning. The Berlin Wall was not constructed to keep West Germans from the socialist paradise that lay behind it. Those who live under such totalitarian systems have fewer goods, but also fewer freedoms: of speech, of association, of religious practice, of meaningful political participation, of personal liberty. Hayek articulated an alternative. A well-functioning market system in a democratic polity with strong constitutional protections of the private sphere of economic activity and of individual liberties was his ideal system.

He did not think we were there yet, of course.

But he held it out as an ideal to be striven for every day. n

Caldwell is a research professor of economics and director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke. He is the general editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek and coauthor of Hayek: A Life, to be published next spring by the University of Chicago Press.

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My Indigenous existence

I

By Quinn Smith Jr.

was born and raised away from the reservation, like the vast majority of Native youth of my generation. However, my grandfather grew up on the family allotment near Ada, Oklahoma. Papaw was the biggest cultural defender in my family.

He was a Chickasaw artist who could draw, paint, sculpt, and carve with equal beauty.

When I was a toddler, Papaw carved me a bow and set of arrows so I could accompany him during archery practice in the garage. He told me that we must always use a bow to hunt because it wasn’t fair to the animals to hunt with guns. Papaw’s lithographs of Geronimo and Sitting Bull smiled down upon us as we practiced.

Papaw passed away when I was just nine, and even now, his death remains

my heritage, or receive accurate information about other Indigenous people, until much later in life.

I shouldn’t have had to go to college to learn that the U.S. allows approximately 65,000 Diné (Navajo) people to live without tap water—I live only a few hours away from the Diné homelands. I shouldn’t have had to wait until college to learn about the Trail of Tears—I am a Chickasaw person.

I didn't learn until much later in life that my Grandma Great, Papaw’s mother, had been forced to attend a residential school, along with her sisters. My Grandma Great worked as a cook, and she would steal food for her sisters so they didn’t starve.

They all tried to run away but didn’t know the way back home. Since Grandma Great died just a few years before Papaw, I didn’t know her long enough to ask her questions about our family.

I didn’t even learn about the true horrors of residential schools, or that the last one didn’t close until the early 2000s, until I attended LINEAGE: Smith college. with Papaw I wish that the U.S. government, schools, and the media gave me the tools to become a well-adjusted Indigenous person in the twenty-first century. There are few burdens heavier than having to justify your Indigenous existence to a non-Indigenous person.

As an Indigenous person, it is impossible for me to do anything without feeling intense internal turmoil. Above all, freedom for me as an Indigenous person means freedom from this shame. I wake up every day with the guilt that I am living on another Indigenous peoples’ land. As I walk into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee, I grow angry thinking

I only learned about Indigenous people in the first chapter of my history textbooks and from works like Disney’s Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger. the most traumatic loss of my life. It became my father’s responsibility to teach me my culture. Sadly, my father wasn’t a very good teacher. He was an alcoholic, and his lesson plans included repeated physical, mental, and emotional abuse.

School and the media didn’t help much either. I only learned about Indigenous people in the first chapter of my history textbooks and from works like Disney’s Pocahontas and The Lone Ranger.

While I was lucky enough to grow up in a place where Native culture is visible—Albuquerque, New Mexico—harmful depictions of Indigenous people had the biggest influence on my childhood.

I didn't begin to piece together the broken shards of

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Courtesy Quinn Smith Jr.

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PAINTING: Depiction of the Chickasaw Nation’s removal to Indian Territory

about the people who displaced my Papaw off his allotment in Oklahoma. I grieve even more because Oklahoma isn’t even where my people are from. We are from so-called “Tennessee,” “Alabama,” and “Mississippi,’’ and cannot return.

Land for Indigenous people is much different than for others because our entire identity is tied to a very specific part of the world.

Freedom for Indigenous people means that non-Indigenous people share this shame with us and take action to help us in the healing process.

We have somewhat seen this through the invention of “land acknowledgements,” through which institutions bring attention to their own role in Indigenous land theft and genocide. A land acknowledgement effectively allows non-Indigenous people to share in the reality that Indigenous people cannot escape.

While a land acknowledgement is a step in the right direction, a land acknowledgement is not enough; reparations are mandatory. But land acknowledgements and reparations are not intended to shame non-Indigenous people or institutions. Instead, they are designed to involve non-Indigenous people and institutions in the process of healing.

I want my Chickasaw children to live in a world where their mothers, aunties, and sisters are not ten times more likely to be murdered and where other Indigenous people have their basic necessities provided. I want the world that they’re born into to already have an accurate understanding of Indigenous people: their histories and current realities. I want my future Chickasaw children to be supported in remembering their culture. They will know how to stomp dance and to cook pishofa, and it will be as easy for them to learn as baseball or Christmas. I want them supported in being different instead of fighting to be equal.

I do not want to forget what the U.S. and other institutions have done to Indigenous people over the last 500 years. But one day, I want to sigh in relief because the United States government, institutions, and people all over Turtle Island are making concerted efforts to join Indigenous people in the healing process. With the way things are right now, this is hard for me to even conceptualize. A lot of healing is needed.

Focusing on truth and healing instead of shame and guilt is what ultimately offers me the hope to press on. n

Smith, a rising junior, is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a 2021 Udall Scholar for work in tribal public policy. He is currently with the Duke Gardens Equity through Stories Program to bring Indigenous voices into a space that sees over 500,000 visitors annually.

Painting © Tom Phillips, courtesy Chickasaw Nation

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17

Even our brains can be watched

By Nita A. Farahany Illustration by Anthony Ventura

W

ell before COVID-19 rooted us firmly into the digital world, people had embraced digital connectivity. Wearables like Apple Watch, FitBit, Oura rings, and more are so popular that nearly one out of every five Americans is wearing them. People have become increasingly more comfortable sharing sensitive information to gain insights about themselves.

Most of us realize that corporations use the information they gather from wearable devices to learn more about consumer behavior. But few are aware that the same data are also being used to understand the habits, productivity, alertness, and fatigue of workplace employees.

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Tesco was one of the first corporations to embrace wearable devices for its employees.

In 2013, it started to require its employees in grocery warehousing facilities in Ireland and the U.K. to wear armbands to track their productivity. The armbands allowed Tesco to detect when an employee picked up inventory from one place and moved it to another. Tesco used the armbands to track everything from employee movements throughout the warehouse, to when an employee took an unscheduled break. And then made choices about employee advancement based on the insights they learned.

There was an uproar by the employees. They felt like Big Brother was watching them. And they really didn’t like it, even though in many ways it did make their jobs easier.

Perhaps you’re thinking—well, too bad! Employees shouldn’t take unscheduled breaks! Or they should quit and work somewhere else! But most of these workers didn’t have the luxury of upward mobility. And it didn’t take long before the same practices were adopted by other corporations worldwide.

In 2018, Amazon was awarded a patent for a wristband to track warehouse employees in its distribution centers worldwide. And in December 2020, Amazon made its corporate surveillance tools, including its hardware and software development kits, available to corporations worldwide.

It isn’t just armbands that employers are using, and it isn’t just factory workers who are being tracked. As the COVID-19 pandemic sent employees home and into remote settings, employers have fully embraced surveillance of even their white-collar workers while at home. In a recent survey, 2,000 employers and 2,000 employees who work in a remote or hybrid capacity were asked to reveal the extent of employer surveillance. Despite most employers having ethical concerns about monitoring their employees, 78

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They have created a system called Focus UX that reads real-time human cognitive states and shares personalized feedback with employees, and their managers tracking them, on their cognitive performance (load, stress, attention levels) while at work. percent admitted to using monitoring technology to track employees’ emails, calls, messages, videos, websites visited, screens, or even to take

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periodic screen captures of their employees.

And now? Employers are shifting from just tracking movements to tracking minds.

In a recent talk to corporate executives at the Fortune Global Tech Forum, Emotiv president Oliver Oullier extolled the company’s new enterprise-based neurotechnology solution, the MN8, for improving workplace productivity. While the MN8 looks like standard ear pods (and can in fact be used to listen to music or participate in a conference call), the device has embedded electroencepholography (EEG) sensors, which allow employers to also track employee’s brainwaves for stress and attention levels while they are working. As Oullier explains, they believe brainwave monitoring is critical to employers because “we’re not equal when it comes to focusing. Some people can focus very, very deeply for forty-five minutes. Others for two hours.”

SAP SE, a German multinational software corporation based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, has teamed up with Emotiv to help employers track their employees’ brains. They have created a system called Focus UX that reads real-time human cognitive states and shares personalized feedback with employees, and their managers tracking them, on their cognitive performance (load, stress, attention levels) while at work.

Other companies offer similar technology, such as Lockheed’s real-time cognitive workload assessment, called CogC2 (Cognitive Command and Control), which provides companies with real-time neurophysiological workload assessments that can enable a company to “optimize loading distribution across a team of employees,” and “understand the performance cycles of indi-

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viduals and teams,” or improve workplace safety by “identifying signatures indicative of fatigue or inattention before an incident occurs,” by monitoring “employee physiological status and well-being,” all to “optimize their workforce for increased productivity and improved employee satisfaction.”

This isn’t science fiction, and brain monitoring is already happening in workplaces worldwide.

Over the last decade, SmartCap Technologies Pty. Ltd., based in Brisbane, Australia, has manufactured and sold an enterprise brain-sensing device to enable real-time fatigue-monitoring of workers. SmartCap’s technology assesses real-time fatigue levels by monitoring the brainwaves of its users for oncoming microsleeps that create safety hazards. More than 5,000 companies worldwide have adopted their technology, ranging from mining to construction, trucking, aviation, trains, and other industries. And in China, thousands of workers in government-run corporations are regularly having their brains monitored while at work. On production lines, at the helm of high-speed trains, in the military, and more, EEG sensors have been embedded into these employees’ headwear to track their brain activity throughout their workday.

Today, employees have very few rights to limit employers’ use of surveillance technology. And that just may mean that even our brains can be watched.

Many people have all but given up on personal privacy. But it matters that mental privacy still stands. Not because it is the last form of privacy that will also inevitably fall, but because it is the one that must never be allowed to do so. n

Farahany, Robinson O. Everett Professor of law and professor of philosophy, is the founding director of Duke Science & Society. Appointed by President Obama, she served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues from 2010 to 2017. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Battle for Your Brain: Big Brother and Big Tech Want to Know What You’re Thinking (St. Martin’s Press).

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18 I wanted to experience the small thrill of growing something edible from a tiny seed, the everyday joy of watching a shoot rise out of the dirt and blossom.

SOIL: Ground level in Barnes Martinez's garden plot

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The thrill of wonder

By Hillary Barnes Martinez

n March 2020, as it became clear that we would be spending more time cloistered in our homes than ever before, I took up gardening. In the midst of chaos, digging in the dirt felt fitting, I decided. I would participate in a human experience that went back for millennia, in times of crisis and in times of peace. It felt universal.

Still, gardening was, for me, almost entirely foreign.

I grew up in the arid landscape of Southern California, and until moving north, the only plants I tended to were succulents that required a few drops of water a month. But as I listened to the radio and read the headlines last spring, I knew that succulents weren’t going to be enough anymore. I wanted to experience the small thrill of growing something edible from a tiny seed, the everyday joy of watching a shoot rise out of the dirt and blossom.

The Buddhist concept of shoshin, often translated as “the beginner’s mind,” refers to the practice of approaching a subject with a spirit of freshness, curiosity, and even wonder. In the midst of a traumatic event like a global pandemic, pursuing wonder can feel simultaneously frivolous and daunting. Nevertheless, over this past year and a half, on days when it felt like my world was spinning out of control, discovering a tiny fringe of sprouts that might someday become a handful of carrots felt exhilarating, bordering on miraculous.

Still, my new undertaking was not without it challenges. As I pored over directions on the back of seed packets, my fear of failure threw me into a tailspin of worry. How should I take into account the appropriate row spacing for the tomatoes I was planting in a cylindrical container? What was the proper method for thinning zucchini? What if I watered the seedlings too much or too little and nothing grew?

Each time these concerns that my hobby garden might fall short of perfection cropped up, I tried to

stop and breathe. If I plant my radishes six inches apart instead of ten, the world won’t come crashing down. If I miss a day of watering, my backyard won’t become a barren wasteland. Of course, in some instances my fears of failure came to fruition. Earlier this year, a basil plant that was “100% guaranteed” to grow never sprouted from its windowsill pot, leaving me slouching off to the garden center for another packet of seeds. Still, most of the time, plants do what they’ve always done: They find a way to grow. And though my ragtag collection of raised beds won’t be featured on the cover of Better Homes & Gardens anytime soon, this ordinary hobby is deepening my understanding of the beginner’s mind. I’m reminding myself that it’s okay to not have the answers. It’s okay to be mediocre. It’s okay to fail.

When I strive to cultivate a beginner’s mind, I’m better able to face challenge and uncertainty in my work, my relationships, and in my own heart. If my offhand remark hurts a friend’s feelings, my apology comes more readily. I don’t hesitate as long before admitting that I don’t have the answer to a student’s question. Perhaps most important, as I learn to embody the beginner’s mind, I hold fast to the liberating truth that I don’t need to get things right the first time after all. If I return to a familiar situation with curiosity, less bound by my own preconceptions, with more space for nuance and marvel, I might have an entirely new experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic is slowly coming to an end, but I can still be found, from time to time, in my garden. As I undertake haphazard weeding and celebrate the harvest of a handful of anemic tomatoes, I’ll also try to celebrate the joys of mediocrity, of failure, of trying again with a happy heart. And some days, with my knees on the ground and my hands in the dirt, in a state of openness and wonder, I might find freedom. n

Barnes Martinez ’12 is a writer and educator living in southcentral Alaska.

Photos courtesy Barnes Martinez

DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE 2021

55

ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Grace Fletcher Chauncey ’39 of Greenville, N.C., on Jan. 5, 2021.

1940s

Melbourne Greenberg A.M. ’41 of Roslyn Estates, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 2015.

Maggie Stowe Williams ’43 of Wilmington, N.C., on May 11, 2021.

Dorothy Churan Bigos R.N. ’44 of Wernersville, Pa., on June 20, 2021.

Gordon Gerber ‘44 of Lansdale, Pa., on Feb. 23, 2021.

Mel Taub LL.B. ’44 of Boca Raton, Fla., on Jan. 6, 2018.

Cay Beattie Trask ’44 of Wilmington, Del., on June 27, 2021.

Rosalind Smith Abernathy ’45, M.D. ’49, H ’51-’53 of Durham, on June 17, 2021.

Marian Sprague Harkness ’45 of Davidson, N.C., on Feb. 10, 2021.

Frank Reda Jr. ’45 of Pittsburgh, on April 27, 2021.

Jane Davis Swan B.S.N. ’45 of Andrews, N.C., on March 1, 2021.

Constance Shapiro Rossoff A.M. ’46 of Moriches, N.Y., on April 30, 2021.

Barbara Sachs Schwartz ’47 of Raleigh, on July 11, 2021.

Jean Bundy Scott R.N. ’47 of Blacksburg, Va., on April 13, 2021.

Jean Roger Holt ’48 of Downingtown, Pa., on Jan. 24, 2021.

Polly Walker Schwendener ’48 of Okemos, Mich., on Dec. 20, 2020.

Edwin Stancik ’48, A.M. ’49 of Burlington, N.C., on July 1, 2021.

Ed Carson III ’49 of Vero Beach, Fla., on April 24, 2021.

Allison Waggoner Duncan ’49 of Sandy Springs, Ga., on June 13, 2021.

Charlotte Mill Hamity ’49 of West Des Moines, Iowa, on April 23, 2021.

Audrey Walker Hochuli ’49 of Wichita, Kan., on Nov. 27, 2020.

Earle Paylor Jr. M.Div. ’49 of Richmond, Va., on April 7, 2021.

Milly Smith Prevatt B.S.N. ’49 of Monroe, N.C., on Feb. 5, 2021.

More Duke memories online Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at

alumni.duke.edu

1950s

Bill Snead

Wallace Barnes ’50 of Columbus, Ohio, on May 3, 2021.

Golde Steiner Lubman Feldman ’50 of Richmond, Va., on June 29, 2021.

Bob Hampton ’50 of Greensboro, N.C., on Nov. 14, 2019.

Louise Osteen Harrell ’50 of Bethesda, Md., on April 21, 2021.

Paul Leitner ’50 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on May 22, 2021.

Jimmie Cranford Jr. M.D. ’51 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 7, 2021.

Charles Dorman ’51 of Raleigh, on June 13, 2021.

Jack Grantham Ph.D. ’51 of Kingsport, Tenn., on Feb. 8, 2021.

Dorrie Paetzell Neligan ’51 of Eatonton, Ga., on June 28, 2021.

John Brown III ’52 of Rye, N.Y., on May 29, 2021.

Fay Cobb Cole ’52 of Arlington Heights, Ill., on June 18, 2021.

Bill Collins ’52 of Long Beach, Calif., on Feb. 19, 2021.

Tom Flint ’52 of Fort Myers, Fla., on June 28, 2021.

Ken Foster ’52 of Wilmington, N.C., on June 19, 2021.

Jane Linsay Koke ’52 of Indian Harbour Beach, Fla., on Feb. 4, 2021.

Frank Magill M.D. ’52 of Peterborough, N.H., on May 7, 2021.

Patricia Rodgers Merwarth R.N. ’52 of Pittsboro, N.C., on Jan. 7, 2021.

Randolph Beard Jr. ’53 of Vero Beach, Fla., on April 26, 2021.

Jean Griffith Borrelli R.N. ’53 of Methuen, Mass., on June 12, 2021.

Carl Bramlette Jr. Ph.D. ’53 of Austell, Ga., on June 5, 2021.

Joyce Mouillesseaux Hartwell R.N. ’53 of Peachtree City, Ga., on June 28, 2021.

John Herron ’53 of Seminole, Fla., on May 31, 2021.

Joe Isley Jr. H ’53-’55 of Fort Myers, Fla., on June 24, 2021.

Allen Jelks Sr. B.S.M. ’53, M.D. ’55 of Sarasota, Fla., on May 26, 2021.

Gordon Morison A.M. ’53 of Silver Spring, Md., on May 5, 2021.

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ForeverDuke Janet Brokenshire Ross ’53 of Akron, Ohio, on April 26, 2021.

Carol Smedley Atkins ’54 of Gastonia, N.C., on April 11, 2021.

Joan Ripple Clark B.S.M.T. ’54 of Pittsboro, N.C., on June 1, 2021.

John Eagan Sr. H ’54, H ’58, H ’60, of Birmingham, Ala., on July 21, 2019.

Marian Floyd M.D. ’54 of Orlando, Fla., on March 9, 2021.

Alette Olin Hill ’54 of Loveland, Colo., on Feb. 10, 2021.

Ronald Milburn Ph.D. ’54 of Pacific Grove, Calif., on May 13, 2021.

Royce H. Riddick Jr. ’54 of Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 12, 2019.

Charles Yarbrough ’54, M.Div. ’58 of Chapel Hill, on Dec. 31, 2018.

Joan Brett Ackerman ’55 of Southwick, Mass., on July 6, 2021.

George Andrek ’55 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 4, 2021.

Annabelle Bivona Barnes A.M. ’55 of Walnut Creek, Calif., on May 6, 2021.

Mary George Kelly Detweiler ’55 of Baltimore, on Feb. 20, 2021.

Gene Greear Gore R.N. ’55 of Fort Myers, Fla., on March 20, 2021.

Beverly Rowlain Norris ’55 of Edina, Minn., on June 2, 2021.

Marilynn Skidmore Sawin G ’55 of Longmont, Colo., on March 16, 2021.

Winnifred Addison ’56, M.D. ’60, H ’60, H ’62, H ’65, H ’72 of Durham, on June 26, 2021.

Mary Emily Satterfield Blackburn ’56 of Nashville, Tenn., on June 2, 2021.

Martha Bell Blake-Adams ’56 of Durham, on April 22, 2021.

Jim Cavenaugh Jr. ’56 of Winston-Salem, on June 1, 2021.

Verne Caviness Jr. ’56 of Rockport, Mass., on July 6, 2021.

Carolyn Williams Hampton ’56 of Greensboro, N.C., on May 17, 2021.

James Johnston Jr. ’56 of Statesboro, Ga., on April 30, 2021.

Charles McNeer ’56 of Abington, Va., on May 18, 2021.

Linwood Savage ’56 of Raleigh, May 24, 2021.

John Swartz ’56 of Peoria, Ill., on May 21, 2021.

John Williams III ’56 of Fayetteville, N.C., on Feb. 26, 2021.

Bret Burquest ’57 of Indian Trail, N.C., on May 27, 2021.

Cornelius Courtney Jr. ’57 of Newport News, Va., on April 1, 2021.

James Ebert A.M. ’57 of Lumberton, N.C., on May 23, 2021.

Anne Ausley Heaton ’57 of Tallahassee, Fla., on April 12, 2021.

Virginia Johnston Neelon B.S.N. ’57, Ph.D. ’72 of Durham, on June 15, 2021.

Jim Sample III ’57, Th.M. ’71 of Charlotte, on June 10, 2021.

Sarah Cochran Warm B.S.N. ’57 of Munson Township, Ohio, on Oct. 2, 2017.

Richard Blocker B.Div. ’58 of Charleston, S.C., on June 16, 2021.

Jim Matthews ‘58 of Baltimore, on June 11, 2021.

Sidney Reese Jr. ’58 of Stuart, Fla., on April 25, 2021.

John Staples ’58 of Kernersville, N.C., on March 16, 2021.

Lillian Blanton Tucker ’58 of Palm Beach, Fla., on March 30, 2021.

Dabney Walters M.Div. ’58 of Portsmouth, Va., on May 20, 2021.

John Baay H ’59 of Amarillo, Texas, on March 13, 2021.

John Bruton ’59 of New Orleans, on June 16, 2021.

Winnie Satterfield Cheney ’59, A.M. ’08 of Clemmons, N.C., on June 28, 2021.

George Engstrom M.D. ’59, HS ’59-’61, HS ’61-’62 of Concord, N.C., on April 28, 2021.

Henry Freye M.D. ’59, H ’61, H ’62 of Mystic, Conn., on May 1, 2021.

Jack Leister ’59 of Wilmington, N.C., on June 20, 2021.

William Mitchel A.M. ’59, Ph.D. ’65 of Clarksville, Tenn., on Nov. 23, 2019.

Patsy Apple Morse R.N. ’59 of Clemmons, N.C., on April 30, 2018.

Mary Gott Puckett ’59 of Potomac, Md., on March 23, 2021.

Jerry Robertson ’59 of Burlington, N.C., on June 7, 2021.

Explore strategies to help you

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58 www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine

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ForeverDuke Thomas R. Taylor ’59 of Louisville, Colo., on Dec. 17, 2020.

Robert Torray ’59 of Washington, D.C., on May 10, 2021.

Ellen Grainger Whitaker ’59 of Kinston, N.C., on May 21, 2021.

1960s

Danny Arichea Jr. M.R.E. ’60, Ph.D. ’65 of Taguig, Philippines, on June 1, 2021.

Charlie Crocco Jr. ’60 of Dover, N.H., on May 20, 2021.

Katharine Walker Cummings ’60 of Raleigh, on July 3, 2021.

George Eaton ’60 of Nanterre, France, on March 18, 2021.

Martin Kreshon Sr. H ’60 of Charlotte, on June 20, 2021.

Linda Visco Mathison ’60 of Bend, Ore., on June 24, 2021.

Guy Odom Jr. ’60 M.D. ’65 of Bassfield, Miss., on June 11, 2021.

Walter Parkerson B.S.M. ’60, M.D. ’60 of Charlotte, on Dec. 4, 2020.

Terry Reynolds III ’60 of Lexington, N.C., on March 29, 2021.

Jack Rogers M.F. ’60 of Pullman, Wash., on June 14, 2021.

Jimmie Suttle M.A.T. ’60, A.M. ’65 of Ferguson, N.C., on June 30, 2021.

Jim Swofford ’60 of Wilkesboro, N.C., on June 5, 2021.

Sandra Walsh Ph.D., B.S.N. ’60 of Burlington, Vt., on May 21, 2021.

Frank M. Bunch III ’61 of Wilmington, Del., on July 4, 2021.

Charles Hutchinson B.Div. ’61 of Salisbury, N.C., on March 29, 2021.

Marilyn Peterson Kerwin B.S.N. ’61 of Boston, on May 23, 2021.

James Ledman ’61 of Columbus, Ohio, on Feb. 8, 2021.

Lauren Miralia ’61 of Larchmont, N.Y., on Oct. 7, 2020.

Jeanne Allyn Molzon B.S.N. ’61 of Clarkston, Mich., on Feb. 16, 2021.

Sherri Stewart Neri ’61 of Palm Beach, Fla., on May 25, 2021.

Bev Brown Peace M.R.E. ’61 of Lake Forest, Calif., on May 12, 2021.

Ida Riddle M.S.N. ’61 of Tyler, Texas, on April 18, 2021.

Carol Kreps Sackett B.S.N. ’61 of Durham, on Oct. 3, 2020.

Jerry Vaiden Jr. B.Div. ’61 of Stafford, Va., on Jan. 22, 2019.

Clarence Virtue H ’61 of Tacoma, Wash., on Feb. 3, 2021.

Joseph Wuchina ’61 of Beaver, Pa., on May 20, 2021.

Oliver Clark Jr. M.Div. ’62 of Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 26, 2020.

Olgard Dabbert H ’62 of San Diego, on March 20, 2021.

Jack Hirsch ’62 of Charlottesville, Va., on April 9, 2021.

Hyun Kim ’62, Ph.D. ’69 of Bowie, Md., on June 22, 2021.

Robert McConnel Ph.D. ’62 of Knoxville, Tenn., on April 11, 2021.

Albie Oettinger Jr. ’62, M.F. ’66 of Sophia, N.C., on June 24, 2021.

Bob Rankin Jr. ’62, LL.B. ’65 of Durham, on May 24, 2021.

Charles Boll ’63 of Charleston, W.Va., on May 25, 2021.

Sal Buccino Ph.D.’ 63 of New Orleans, on May 24, 2021.

Jim Derby ’63 of Kerrville, Texas, on May 30, 2021.

Thomas Howell ’63 of Rugby, Tenn., on May 1, 2021.

Edward Jones Ph.D. ’63 of Greenville, S.C., on May 28, 2021.

William Nicholson Jr. ’63 of San Antonio, on Feb. 11, 2021.

Robin Vollmer ’63, M.D. ’67, H ’73 of Durham, on June 8, 2021.

Pete Widener ’63 of Houston, on Feb. 4, 2021.

Paul Clouser Ph.D. ’64 of Swampscott, Mass., on Jan. 31, 2021.

Chan Robbins III ’64 of Sarasota, Fla., on June 14, 2021.

Steve Salisbury ’64 of Raleigh, on April 29, 2021.

George Schultz Ph.D. ’64 of Hampton, N.J., on May 15, 2021.

Orba Smith B.Div. ’64 of Asheville, N.C., on Sept. 25, 2020.

Richard Tester H ’64 of High Point, N.C., on Feb. 19, 2021.

Willard Berry A.M. ’65, Ph.D. ’71 of Washington, D.C., on April 13, 2021.

DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE 2021

59

WHERE DO YOU WANT Costa Rica’s Natural Heritage,

Island World of New Zealand,

Feb 19 – Mar 1

Mar 10-25

Scottish Isles, The Faroe Islands & Iceland, May 4-16

Along Central Asia’s Silk Road, May 7-23

TO TRAVEL WITH DUKE? EUROPE & RUSSIA Holland & Belgium: featuring The Floriade 2022, Apr. 25-May 3, 2022 Iberian Treasures: Less Traveled Spain & Portugal, May 4-15, 2022 Scottish Isles, the Faroe Islands & Iceland, May 4-16, 2022 European Coastal Civilizations, May 11-20, 2022

NORTH AMERICA

Discovering Eastern Europe, May 24-June 8, 2022

A Civil Rights Journey, Mar. 6-12, 2022 Exploring Alaska, June 12-19, 2022 The Great Lakes, Sept. 24- Oct. 1, 2022

Seine River & Normandy Passage, May 29-June 6, 2022

Swiss Alps & Italian Lakes, May 25-June 3, 2022 Barging Amsterdam to Bruges, with The Floriade 2022, June 1-9, 2022 The Amalfi Coast, June 8-16, 2022 Norwegian Splendor, June 27-July 12, 2022

MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN

Circumnavigation of Iceland, July 24-Aug. 1, 2022

Exploring Costa Rica, Feb. 19-Mar. 1, 2022 Whales of Baja & Magdalena Bay, Mar. 4-9, 2022

Cappadocia, Coastal Turkey & Greek Islands, Oct. 12-24, 2022

Flavors of Catalonia, Oct. 1-9, 2022 Alsace of France, Oct. 2-10, 2022 Sicily in Depth, Oct. 9-20, 2022

Cuba: Featuring Afro-Cuban Heritage, Nov. 11-18, 2022

ASIA & THE FAR EAST Insider’s Japan, Apr. 18-30, 2022 Along Central Asia’s Silk Road, May 7-23, 2022

AFRICA & THE MIDDLE EAST SOUTH AMERICA Patagonian Frontiers of Argentina & Chile, Feb. 24-Mar. 11, 2022 Galápagos, July 1-10, 2022

Egypt & the Eternal Nile, Mar. 7-21, 2022 Israel: Timeless Wonders, Mar. 24-Apr. 4, 2022 Madagascar, June 19-July 3, 2022 Classic Safari, July 30-Aug. 14, 2022 Southern Africa, July 31-Aug. 13, 2022 Moroccan Discovery, Oct. 16-29, 2022 Egypt & the Eternal Nile, Oct. 17-31, 2022

OCEANIA New Zealand, Mar. 10-25, 2022

ARCTICA Expedition to Antarctica, Jan. 6-19, 2023

Photos courtesy of iStock

Email us with interest or questions at

duketravels@duke.edu | www.duke-travels.com **Please note that departures and dates are subject to final confirmation.**

TRAVELS

ForeverDuke Joseph Cowart Sr. A.M. ’65, Ph.D. ’71 of Lucedale, Miss., on May 11, 2021.

James Lewark ’65 of Palo Alto, Calif., on Feb. 11, 2021.

Chrysostom Manuel Th.M. ’65 of Fayetteville, N.C., on June 11, 2021.

John Miller Jr. ’65 of Mitchellville, Md., on May 2, 2021.

Richard Predmore Jr. ’65 in Spartanburg, S.C., on Feb. 15, 2021.

Dudley Salley A.M. ’65 of Tarpon Springs, Fla., on July 3, 2021.

Charles Wright Jr. ’65 of Lake Lure, N.C., on May 29, 2021.

Bob Cabe LL.B. ’66 of Little Rock, Ark., on May 14, 2021.

William Carr Ph.D. ’66 of St. Augustine, Fla., on Jan. 29, 2021.

Bill Giles II Ph.D. ’66 of Auburn, Ala., on May 24, 2021.

Cary Gravatt Jr. Ph.D. ’66 of Durham, on May 29, 2021.

David Hartgen Ph.D. ’66 of Concord, N.C., on May 22, 2021.

Bill Jones ’66 of Richmond, Va., on June 26, 2021.

Michael Morrison ’66 of Sanford, Fla., on March 20, 2021.

S. Douglas Smith M.H.A. ’66 of Nashville, Tenn., on June 10, 2021.

William Christopher Barrier LL.B. ’67 of Little Rock, Ark., on July 3, 2021.

Glenn Lambert Jr. ’67 of Louisville, Ky., on May 26, 2021.

Bob Avinger Jr. Ph.D. ’68 of Davidson, N.C., on June 23, 2021.

Michael Rotman H ’68, H ’71 of Austin, Texas, on March 3, 2021.

Anne Wilson Rueter ’68 of South Lyon, Mich., on June 25, 2021.

Phyllis Eagan Cassidy ’69 of Metairie, La., on May 16, 2021.

David Gagan Ph.D. ’69 of Burlington, Ontario, on May 31, 2021.

Rod Mayo Jr. ’69 of Worthington, Ohio, on Feb. 7, 2021.

Bill Smalling M.Div. ’69 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on June 1, 2021.

1970s

Joe Cox Jr. ’70 of Pinehurst, N.C., on June 26, 2021.

Denis Craig ’70 of Alameda, Calif., on March 15, 2021.

Richard Cunningham J.D. ’70 of Stamford, Conn., on July 4, 2021.

Robert Dunn M.Div. ’70 of Rochester, Minn., on Feb. 7, 2021.

Robert Roxby Ph.D. ’70 of Rockport, Maine, on Dec. 29, 2019.

John Russell Sanders ’70 of Charlottesville, Va., on Jan. 24, 2021.

George Todd M.A.T. ’70 of Peoria, Ariz., on Jan. 26, 2020.

Brenda Cole ’71 of Wilmington, N.C., on May 31, 2021.

Anita Price Davis Ed.D. ’71 of Spartanburg, S.C., on June 27, 2021.

John Flynn A.M. ’71, Ph.D. ’75 of Slingerlands, N.Y., on May 18, 2021.

Bill Ogden H ’71 of Lake Waccamaw, N.C., on June 15, 2021.

Craig Zimmers ’71 of Worthington, Ohio, on April 28, 2021.

Robert G. Atcheson ’72 of Dallas, Ga., on Jan. 21, 2021.

William Brown ’72 of Glen Burnie, Md., on June 14, 2021.

James Buie Ed.D. ’72 of Darlington, S.C., on Dec. 1, 2020.

Kuo-Ming Chen M.F. ’72 of Kirkland, Wash., on April 19, 2021.

A.J. Frank ’72 of La Jolla, Calif., on March 17, 2021.

Nancy Jernigan H ’72 of Raleigh, May 11, 2021.

Lloyd McClelland Sr. M.Div. ’72 of Sun City Center, Fla., on May 2, 2021.

Rich Moore ’72 of Nashville, Tenn., on Dec. 30, 2020.

Duane Russell ’72 of Dallas, on Jan. 30, 2021.

Rick Suberman H ’73 of Chapel Hill, on June 25, 2021.

Emil Weber H ’72 of Evansville, Ind., on May 24, 2021.

Dick Weisiger M.D. ’72, Ph.D. ’74 of Marin County, Calif., on April 24, 2021.

Paul Auerbach ’73, M.D. ’77 of Los Altos, Calif., on June 23, 2021.

Marilyn McKim Barnes B.S.N.’73, of Gainesville, Fla., on April 30, 2021.

Marvin Carriker Jr. M.A.T. ’73 of Aberdeen, N.C., on April 20, 2021.

Sherrie Gibble J.D. ’73 of Ewing, N.J., on April 27, 2021.

Anne Dellinger J.D. ’74 of Chapel Hill, on April 21, 2021.

Samuel Owen Jr. ’74 of North Chesterfield, Va., on Nov. 10, 2020.

William Pauley III ’74, J.D. ’77 of East Quogue, N.Y., on July 6, 2021.

Joanne Swamer Kopp ’75 of Portland, Ore., on May 1, 2021.

Tom Moore Jr. ’75 of Highland Village, Texas, on April 15, 2021.

Frank Owen ’75 of San Luis Obispo, Calif., on June 12, 2021.

Jamie Hingle J.D. ’76 of Covington, La., on May 18, 2021.

Gary Lamphere H ’76 of Exeter, N.H., on June 16, 2021.

Ian Methven Ph.D. ’76 of Prince William, New Brunswick, on April 19, 2021.

Christopher Wilson ’76 of Swannanoa, N.C., on April 9, 2021.

Arthur Fritz HS ’77-’79, HS ’80 of Exmore, Va., on May 18, 2021.

Lawrence Valenti ’78, M.H.A. ’81 of Charlotte, on May 24, 2021.

Michael Mumma ’79, M.D. ’83 of Sarasota, Fla., on July 8, 2021.

Chris Soufas Jr. Ph.D. ’79 of Metairie, La., on Dec. 28, 2020.

1980s

Kathy Carroll Chivian ’80 of New Haven, Conn., on Dec. 28, 2020.

L. Jeannine Petry H ’80-’83 of Speedway, Ind., on Dec. 26, 2020.

Carol Burney Wallace ’81 of Nashville, Tenn., on May 24, 2021.

James Armstrong Jr. ’82, M.B.A. ’06 of Tiberon, Calif., on June 18, 2021.

Mary Swann-Trainor ’82 of Richmond, Va., on May 18, 2021.

Mary Poese B.H.S. ’83, M.H.S. ’96 of Knoxville, Tenn., on June 11, 2021.

Jim Hurlock III ’84 of New Canaan, Conn., on May 12, 2021.

Sharon Kenny B.H.S. ’88 of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Dec. 18, 2019.

1990s

Sean Burke ’90 of Elizabethtown, N.C., on April 5, 2021.

Patty Spencer Workman M.S.N. ’96 of Charlottesville, Va., on April 12, 2021.

2000s

Stephanie Ogidan Preston ’01 of Providence, R.I., on June 28, 2021.

Reza Sadeghian M.B.A. ’02 of Los Gatos, Calif., on May 1, 2021.

Jorge Fernandez M.B.A. ’03 of Vero Beach, Fla., on May 3, 2021.

Matt Simmons ’03 of Atlanta, on May 14, 2021.

2010s

Phil Weiser ’10 of Durham, on June 10, 2021.

Aonghus Cheevers LL.M. ’11 of Donegal, Ireland, on April 6, 2020.

James Black M.M.C.I. ’17 of Tucson, Ariz., on April 14, 2021.

Caley Buxton M.S. ’19 of Centennial, Colo., on May 31, 2021.

DUKE MAGAZINE

SPECIAL ISSUE 2021

63

D E F I N I N G

F R E E D O M

19

To me, freedom means being able to live authentically by embracing all of the magnificent things that make us who we are.

By embracing ourselves wholly, we gain a greater appreciation for the human experience. Because at the end of the day, we are more alike than not and can create something truly beautiful when we come together in service of one another. n

Brandy Chieco is an assistant director of marketing and communications at Duke University and a freelance lettering artist and designer. She is a wife and mother, and she considers her two young boys to be her greatest creations.

64 www.alumni.duke.edu/magazine

giving .duke.edu

navigating freedom Finding your way through the legal system is extremely challenging without a roadmap. Thanks to the generous support of the Annual Fund and the Thomas Jordan Memorial Scholarship, Arturo Nava is following his passion at Duke Law to provide counsel and support for society’s most vulnerable.

Finish the story at: giving.duke.edu/navigating-freedom Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are

OUTRAGEOUS AMBITIONS:

50 Years and Counting FIFTY YEARS AGO, Terry Sanford persuaded Joel Fleishman to establish a public policy program at Duke. Together, they championed this new field applying multiple disciplines to crucial social issues. Fleishman established a leading undergraduate major and graduate programs that combine rigorous analytic training with real-life experience.

“Public policy analysis does not limit itself to describing a public problem. It requires people to think about how to solve problems,” says Fleishman.

Today, the Sanford School

of Public Policy is led by Judith Kelley, its first female dean. Under Dean Kelley, the school is launching a new Master of National Security Policy program, new programs in cyber and tech policy and new initiatives on diversity, equity and inclusion.

“Public policy was a trailblazer in interdisciplinary scholarship, now one of Duke’s hallmarks. Our singular goal at the Sanford School is to make the world a better place,” says Kelley.

These values and practices will continue to carry the Sanford School forward into the next 50 years.

forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

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M AG A Z I N E

SPECIAL ISSUE

freedom noun

free·​dom | \ frē-dem Definition: What does it mean to you?