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Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

What if

Weathering the rankings storm

there was a way for everyone in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

M AG A Z I N E

SPRING 2015

Travel with Duke

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

p.24

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30

Where do you want to go in 2015?

www.dukealumnitravel.com

nions 2016 evilishly Good Time.

It never gets old Five views of a fifth title p.20

15-17, 2016.

The chapel’s many roles p.24

The new DukeAlumni.com

All for One First-generation students—10 percent of

A student works for justice p.36

undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus.

p.28

| The meaning of eating

p.38

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

SPECIAL ISSUE

Coming Fall 2014

POWER

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

Paris Immersion, Oct. 11-22

24

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Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

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+ At the Marine Lab, and other labs across campus, are taking research to new heights.

by you.

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An Epic Project

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Veteran Workers

32

38

Diagnosis & Discussion

If your class year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.

It never gets old

The chapel’s many roles p.24

Five views of a fifth title p.20

April 15-17, 2016.

The new DukeAlumni.com Coming Fall 2014

All for One

First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28

A student works for justice p.36

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

| The meaning of eating

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

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Now can he get back to the lab? p.24

p.24

Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R

made

Full Strength

Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

by you.

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31 T H E LA N G UAG E ISS U E

For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28

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At the Marine Lab,

E

and other labs

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SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

WINTER 2017

Go out there and learn

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

“We just love it there!”

Made possible by you.

across campus,

DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.

With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary?

We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short video on drones at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

Whose home is this?

Vince Price

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

Epworth Forever

A New President Takes Center Stage

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

Jared Lazarus

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

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Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change,

Please support Duke Magazine. Checks payable to Duke Magazine (in the amount of your choice)

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

can be sent to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, N.C. 27701.

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

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To those just-as-wise-loyal-and-nice-looking readers who have meaning say, go tovarsity gifts.duke.edu, Inside thebeen making of theto, firstwewomen’s softball teamandp.24 type Duke Magazine in the search box or send your checks payable to Duke Magazine to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, NC 27701.

Or donate online.

Go to gifts.duke.edu, type Duke Magazine in the search box, and select it in the drop-down menu

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ISSUE FEAR—along with its close neighbor, anxiety— is everywhere. Fear of immigrants. Fear within immigrants. Fear around the future of democratic institutions. Fear that artificial intelligence will overwhelm human endeavor. Fear that hotter temperatures and elevated sea levels will overwhelm nature’s balancing act.

I F YO U DA R E

And consider this item from the latest Harper’s Index: Among Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, twice as many are fearful

Edgardo Colón-Emeric M.Div’97, Ph.D.’07, assistant professor of Christian theology, is the new director of Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation.

Here, he teaches lessons of healing and harmony to Duke Divinity students and graduate students visiting from Central America.

and the chance to engage with your alumni community.

Epworth Forever

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Made possible by you.

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To those wise, loyal, and beautiful readers who sent generous donations in support of Duke Magazine, we say,

“thank you, oh, ones most blue!

We live only to serve thee!”

possible

How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling.

s this?

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Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

Weathering the rankings storm

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30

Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18 Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

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YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .

F I N D A LU M N I A N D S TA R T YO U R N E X T A DVEN T U R E .

Where do you want to go in 2015?

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Travel with Duke

Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

www.dukealumnitravel.com

NO. 3, VOLUME 104

THE

24

C. Ray Walker

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Crossing ethnic and denominational boundaries. Challenging poverty and inequity.

Reconciling differences. Gifts to Duke support the people, places and programs that empower us to complete our enduring mission of knowledge in the service of society.

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Justice and transformation

there was a way for everyone in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

DON’T MISS IT!

Reunions 2016 Always a Devilishly Good Time.

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In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

Jared Lazarus

M AG A Z I N E

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What if

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

DUKE

A New President Takes Center Stage

48

MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2014

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

Made possible by you.

e, it was a place inspiration and s, as revelation. ng on page 38. s by Alex Harris

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Go out there and learn

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MAGAZINE

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A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, “We just love it there!” and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

Vince Price

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2018

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A student experience like no other

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TH ES EC

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FALL 2017

SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

video on drones at the Marine Beaufort,p.N.C. For students, missing out isn’tLab an inoption.

28 Photo by Chris Hildreth

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BEHINDTHESCENES

With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary?

We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short

Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31

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possible

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

DUKE

SUMMER 2017

DRONES and ROBOTS

How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

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G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

made

Full Strength

MAGAZINE

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REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

Now can he get back to the lab? p.24 It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

DVEN T U R E .

DUKE

COVERSTORY

M AG A Z I N E

WINTER 2015

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

D THE QUAD. RSE .

Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

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Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

Photos courtesy of iStock

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Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18

ON’T MISS IT!

rt planning now for your Duke Reunion: April Reunions.com for more information.

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rather than hopeful about the future of the country.

This issue explores some of the ways that fear factors into our lives. READ ON. And find some

Whether debating rat clauses or Robin Hood, the Honor Council fights for campus integrity.

fearless explorations into the theme of fear.

p.26

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #MadePossibleBy

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Competing at the highest level Scholars on the field. Champions in the classroom. Elite performers in athletics, orthopaedics and sports medicine. Thanks to planned gifts supporting athletic scholarships, Duke students are transforming sports aspirations into world-class learning experiences.

Made possible by you.

April 12-14, 2019

During his outstanding Duke Football career, offensive tackle Gabe Brandner ’17 discovered his passion for health care. Here, Gabe conducts research in the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory to help prevent injuries in fellow athletes.

Read about Duke alumni and legends Jim and Muff Urbaniak’s planned gift to support Duke studentathletes on page 59.

Celebrate. Reminisce. Reconnect.

Come back to Duke Reunions and remember what it means to be Forever Duke.

CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994,

1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and the Half Century Club

Learn more about the weekend, see who's coming, and add your name to the list:

www.DukeReunions.com Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

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INSIDE

Fall 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 4

COVER

To the deepest roots

Critical zone science, a new cross-disciplinary field of study, unearths secrets held in the organisms that sustain us

By Scott Huler

.

30

Scott Huler

4

FEATURES:

FORUM

It’s his call

9

THE QUAD

For David Shumate, the radio voice of Duke football and men’s basketball, play-by-play success is measured in seconds. By Lucas Hubbard

Record-breaking efficiency, a Trekkie’s view on evolution, a first glimpse of DKU

44

Alex Boerner

FOREVER DUKE

The empathy piece

Ryo Ragland ’07 is building community in Belgrade with his anticafé, yet he hopes to build vehicles for change in Serbia.

Saša Čolić

The quest for “hard skills” exerts its pull.

But Duke’s schools also respond to a different imperative: Future professionals should serve interests larger than themselves. By Robert J. Bliwise

64

WORKINPROGRESS

Junior Ashleigh Smith re-contextualizes memories.

24

Scala / Art Resource, N.Y.

38

FULLFRAME GAME ON: A little spike ball action on East Campus, in front of Baldwin Auditorium and Benjamin Duke Photography by Bill Snead

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

W

ith Hurricane Florence headed for North Carolina in mid-September, the vital parts of Duke were appropriately prepared. For Duke Dining, that meant securing 400 pounds of rice, 460 pounds of broccoli, 1,000 pounds of potatoes, and 1,200 pounds of chicken. There was attention, of course, to other vulnerable populations: The Lemur Center reported that its dry-storage areas had been “stocked with several weeks’ worth of nutritionally complete primate chow,” while staff had filled water barrels, removed potentially windblown hazards like signs and banners, and cut four days’ worth of “browse,” or fresh leaves critical to the digestive health of sifakas.

Even as the main campus would be A “natural largely spared, the coastal campus, the disaster” is Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, would suffer some structural damage. Pre-hur“at least half ricane, the lab was evacuated; its official non-natural, tweets declared that “the hatches are batthe product tened down.” The tweeting also boasted Beaufort’s “first-responder mayor,” of a natural about Rett Newton, a retired Air Force colonel event and the and a Duke doctoral student. CNN and infrastructure NPR, among others, were featuring him that it floods, as he surveyed the rain-drenched and scene. shakes, or windswept As Florence finally faded, various Duke ignites.” experts were assessing the aftermath. The New York Times highlighted the insights of Avner Vengosh, a professor of earth and ocean sciences, on health issues linked to coal ash—the toxic, powdery substance that remains after burning coal.

Some coal ash was released with the rising floodwaters, but, as Vengosh pointed out, in hard-to-discern quantities.

The hurricane also flooded dozens of waste lagoons, which brought new relevance to a Duke study of industrial-scale hog farms. The study’s primary researcher was Julia Kravchenko, an assistant professor in the surgery department who participates in the Environmental Health Scholars Program. She told The News & Observer of Raleigh: “We can tell that proximity to large

hog farms is definitely associated with worse health outcomes for certain diseases.”

Writing on The New Yorker’s website, law professor Jedediah Purdy tied some of what Florence fomented—including the coal-ash and waste-lagoon issues—to long-enduring inequities. He noted that the modern environmental-justice movement was born in Afton, North Carolina, in a fight over the state’s decision to dump contaminated soil near a poor, historically African-American community. A “natural disaster,” he noted, “is at least half non-natural, the product of a natural event and the infrastructure that it floods, shakes, or ignites.”

If there was a hurricane-commenting voice that was both expert and poignant, it belonged to Orrin Pilkey.

An emeritus professor of earth sciences, Pilkey has written numerous books about living with water and an eroding coast, including coauthoring Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change.

State law favors property-development interests, he told NPR, and it assumes the sea will rise only inches, while scientists predict sea-level rise measured in feet.

His tough message in the wake of Florence: Not all of the communities devastated by the hurricane should be allowed to recover.

Pilkey’s writing has extended to Duke Magazine. In an essay for the magazine, he lamented the notion that “nature at the beach is something to be confronted and defeated” and the resulting push for “beachfront urban renewal.” The potential for damage from hurricanes increases every year, he said. “Sea level is rising, and the rate of this rise should soon accelerate. Global warming is expected to increase storminess in the North Atlantic, and more storms generally mean even more erosion. More buildings crowd the retreating shoreline, and, each year, the average size of threatened beachfront buildings becomes larger.”

In the policy realm, though, ideology often triumphs over empirical reality. Pilkey wrote that essay back in the summer of 2005. And since then, development in coastal states like North Carolina has hardly retreated from the sea. —Robert J. Bliwise, editor

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2018 | Vol. 104 | No. 4 | www.DUKEMAGAZINE.duke.edu EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler CLAY FELKER STAFF WRITER: Lucas Hubbard ’14 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Laura Meyer Wellman ’73, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2018 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

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An Epic Project 32

Veteran Workers 38

Diagnosis & Discussion 48

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DUKE

MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2014

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

What if there was a way for everyone

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

DON’T MISS IT!

Reunions 2016 Always a Devilishly Good Time.

If your class year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: April Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.

It never gets old

The chapel’s many roles p.24

Five views of a fifth title p.20

15-17, 2016.

The new DukeAlumni.com

All for One

Coming Fall 2014

First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28

A student works for justice p.36

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

| The meaning of eating

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

SPECIAL ISSUE

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STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

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p.38

C. Ray Walker

NEWFOREVERDUKEINSIDE

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Now can he get back to the lab? p.24 It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

Weathering the rankings storm

F I N D ALU M N I AN D S TAR T YO U R N E X T ADV EN T U R E .

p.24

Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

Paris Immersion, Oct. 11-22

Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

made

Full Strength

www.dukealumnitravel.com

Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18

Game on!

REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

In praise of Mr. Wolfe I enjoyed your Forum [Under the Gargoyles, Summer 2018] column on Tom Wolfe, my favorite author/journalist. I Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling. just wanted to point out that Mr. Wolfe began his forays to Duke some twenty-five years before the 1998 visit you mention. In 1973, he previewed the movie The DUKE Last American Hero based on an article of his, after which he gave a talk and held a Q&A. That visit was the start of my lifelong love affair with his writings.

Bill Overend ’74 Laguna Hills, California And it’s all

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30

Where do you want to go in 2015?

M AG A Z I N E

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .

Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

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Travel with Duke

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possible

by you.

How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31 T H E L A N G UAG E I SS U E

For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28

Photos courtesy of iStock

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THESECRE

At the Marine Lab,

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SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

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Go out there and learn

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

Inside the making of the first women’s varsity softball team p.24

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

“We just love it there!”

Made possible by you.

and other labs

across campus,

DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.

With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary?

We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short video on drones at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?

Whose home is this?

Vince Price

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

Epworth Forever

A New President Takes Center Stage

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

Jared Lazarus

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

AF_Made Possible By You_Back_F.indd 1

10/9/17 2:54 PM

Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change, and the chance to engage with your alumni community.

Please support Duke Magazine. Checks payable to Duke Magazine (in the amount of your choice) can be sent to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, N.C. 27701.

Or donate online.

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To those wise, loyal, and beautiful readers who sent generous donations in support of Duke Magazine, we say,

you, oh, ones most blue!

Music to her ears “thank We live only to serve thee!”

I read with great interest (and emotion) your article about Rodney Wynkoop [“His moment has come,” Summer 2018]. What a gift he has been to the arts at Duke and to so many whose lives he touched through his work with the choir and choral groups.

One of those people he deeply touched was my dad. Waldo Beach was a professor in the divinity school. He retired in 1986 after forty years of teaching. His time in the classroom was extremely rewarding to him, but it was his participation in the Choral Society of Durham and the music in the Duke Chapel that meant as much to him. He never missed a Wednesday-night rehearsal or the many, many concerts in Page Auditorium or in the chapel. He continued to sing with the Choral Society after his retirement, and the arrival of Rodney Wynkoop in 1989 added to his determination to keep doing what he loved.

My dad passed away in 2001. His memorial service in the chapel was appropriately on January 15, 2001, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We as a family knew there had to be a musical element to the service and asked Rodney if he would be kind enough to help. Rodney put out a call to the Choral Society and to the Duke Chapel Choir. The response was overwhelming. So many beautiful voices singing in that extraordinary setting where he had delivered so many meaningful sermons and had sung in so _

To those just-as-wise-loyal-and-nice-looking readers who have been meaning to, we say, go to gifts.duke.edu, and type Duke Magazine in the search box or send your checks payable to Duke Magazine to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, NC 27701.

Whether debating rat clauses or Robin Hood, the Honor Council fights for campus integrity. p.26

many concerts. They sang Brahms and Bach, and then Rodney conducted them in singing “A Cradle Song,” a carol written by my dad. I will never forget how moving and perfect it all was.

So, I add my thanks and “amen” to your article and wish Rodney all the best.

Margot Beach Sullivan ’70 Gladwyne, Pennsylvania A past connection It was with great interest that I read Dr. Price’s interview [“From the president: A campus view,” Summer 2018]. I was particularly interested that he named Samuel DuBois Cook as a figure out of Duke’s past with whom he would like to have a conversation. Dr. Cook was hired in 1966 as the first black professor since Reconstruction to hold a regular faculty position at a white Southern university.

I wish President Price had had such an opportunity, because Cook was an extraordinary individual who had the unique ability to fill a room with both intellectual challenge and great humor.

He recounted several times that I was the first person from Duke he met after he had been hired. We had both stopped at

the same gas station in Charlotte on the way to the fall semester in 1966. He noticed my Louisiana license plate and the Duke and Pi Kappa Alpha stickers on the rear window, and approached me and introduced himself. We quickly realized that I would be in his first class. We hit it off from the first conversation.

I often wondered whether he wondered how my state plates and fraternity stickers would predict the greeting, but he always said that his first meeting with a Duke student was a warm welcome. I count myself lucky to have been one of Cook’s students.

Michael S. Tudor ’67 Alexandria, Louisiana Short, not sweet President Price’s decision to remove the Lee statue from the chapel was a gutless, knee-jerk reaction to a deliberate and illegal act of vandalism [“Not cast in stone,” Summer 2018]. Price caved right in. End of story.

Mary Martin Davis Bowen A.M. ’59 Decatur, Georgia Do your research A brief comment is needed for Miscellany [DR/TL*, Summer 2018]. Duke climate scientist Drew Shindell selected necessarily short passages from a leaked U.N. report that he was part of preparing. An important part he omitted (didn’t read/ too long?) were some of those passages that warned and explained that humans cannot control the Earth’s climate by lowering emissions to zero and adjusting the level of atmospheric CO2.

Another report, the Climate Science Special Report 2017, also addressed the better-than-even chance of stopping global warming. Those researchers concluded that it is not enough to halt the growth of annual carbon emissions to eventually reach zero. Negative emissions (geological CO2 burial) will be necessary.

These combined tasks are much too large and would take hundreds of years, and the costs would be astronomical. Just 1 part-per-million of CO2 is more than 2 billion tons, and 50 is 100 billion tons.

The world can never achieve the plan of returning the Earth to 350 ppm, the DUKE MAGAZINE

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stated goal, with so much oxidized carbon to deal with.

Ken Towe ’56 Eatonton, Georgia Drew Shindell responds: Human influence is now so large that we do in fact control the Earth’s climate. The science is clear that bringing emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases to zero, while keeping emissions of shorter-lived compounds constant, will stabilize the planet’s temperature. The story in the magazine was correct in saying that to have a good chance of meeting internationally agreed targets of limiting warming to levels of 1.5C to 2C, we have only a decade or two to reach zero emissions.

Lower targets, such as 0.75C or 350 ppm CO2, have already been passed and so would require negative emissions (which are expensive and do not exist at scale) to be widely deployed in order to return to those levels. Though it is in principle possible to reduce emissions to zero within two decades, it would require challenging and unprecedented rates of change in our energy, transportation, industry, and agricultural systems. Although humanity controls where our climate will eventually stabilize, our current trajectory is inconsistent with this challenge and is sadly toward levels far exceeding those that every government in the world, save ours, agrees would be dangerous to our well-being.

It’s a miracle Thanks to Professor David Morgan, chair of religious studies, for citing examples of statues of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary crying real tears [Q&A, Summer 2018]. One such miracle is taking place right now on the other side of our new home state in Hobbs, New Mexico (under investigation, it appears to be tears of blood).

Hobbs is close to the border, riddled with crime, and very poor, i.e., the kind of humble place she chooses to authentically manifest herself most often. One hopes this is a strong Marian message for those toying with Ouija boards, an evil pathway to the occult like no other. Our world is hurting for the singular 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

truth of her son’s redemption, yet mired in the relativist thought prevalent in all Western societies.

Ave Maria.

Don Meccia M.B.A. ’89 Santa Fe, New Mexico

Give us the full story I enjoyed reading about the history of Duke’s freshman living arrangements [Retro, “A place to lay their heads,” Summer 2018], especially in light of the recent decision to end preselection of roommates for the incoming class. I applaud Duke for making a change that will encourage a more expansive freshman experience.

However, the article, while providing a rich summation of history leading to changes in freshman living arrangements in the 1930s through the 1990s, fell short on communicating the controversial background and history of events that led to this current change. The article read as if it was skirting the subject and left me feeling as if it was decided that Duke alumni don’t deserve the full story.

Susan Haynes Little D.N.P. ’17 Wendell, North Carolina There are lies and there are lies I see two letters suggesting that the focus on Trump [“The facts just keep on coming,” Spring 2018] was biased and should have been balanced with tests for Democrats. Please. Do these folks not recognize that the lying is qualitatively different? All politicians dissemble, but Trump lies on matters large and small, verifiable and bizarre, every day of his life. It’s a false comparison to say Pelosi or Sanders does the same.

Charlie Appler ’69 Dallas About that bracket…

Kudos to the Duke alums who challenged our students’ bracket decisions during March’s Spring Breakthrough class: “Presidential March Madness” [Under the gargoyles, Spring 2018]. We were as surprised as they were about Jimmy Carter’s shocking second-round upset over Thomas Jefferson!

To their credit, though, the students thought hard about what makes a president “great.” Morality—based on present-day interpretations of morali-

ty—became one of several key traits by which to judge our nation’s chief executives. Slave owners lost points. In their evaluation, Jefferson’s otherwise great strengths were superseded by his treatment of enslaved Americans. (Washington, also a slave owner, was evaluated less harshly, in large part because he freed his slaves in his will.)

Ranking presidents is not an objective science.

Who can forget the first Schlesinger Poll of Presidential Greatness in 1948, when fifty-five experts ranked Andrew Jackson among the six greatest presidents, while Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover joined the likes of James Monroe and James Madison as “average” presidents? Or the 1962 Schlesinger poll of seventy-five experts that ranked Dwight Eisenhower below Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, and yes, the very same Herbert Hoover?

Years from now, we may look back on today’s rankings with wonder and ask, “Why did experts ever think so-and-so was worthy of a high ranking?”

Of course, our class is not really about getting the answer “right.” It aims, rather, to inspire students to think about the country they want to live in and the kind of president they want to lead it. Stay tuned to hear how this year’s class tackles these timely questions.

Fritz Mayer, director, and B.J. Rudell, associate director of POLIS (The Center for Political Leadership, Innovations, and Service) Durham She likes us I often skim through this magazine but must admit but I don’t tend to give it a thorough read. The Summer 2018 issue is really outstanding. The mixture of short and long articles, the writing, the graphics: All of it is really very good. I enjoyed the articles on Rodney Wynkoop and the Honor Council. I like the short Q&A with the new president. My husband is really looking forward to the article on immunotherapy; I’m not even finished reading it myself.

Thank you for a really good issue.

Well done.

Sara Elizabeth Jones Hyre ’89 Seattle So does he Your magazine covers are consistent-

ly very good. The new issue’s cover is very sharp—excellent. Cool and savvy design.

George Rothman ’67 Bethesda, Maryland A time for ethics It was very discouraging to read that Duke is not only not a leader in university ethics, but that the next president of the Honor Council chose Duke because it is a “project” in that regard [“A matter of integrity,” Summer 2018]. Character degradation is a slippery slope. Ever-coarser profanity, sex scenes, and graphic violence in movies, TV, and video games flaunt our traditional values and tear at our cultural and moral fabric. Too many people worship badly behaving celebrities, ridicule “Boy Scout”

wealthier than they are are mostly greedy, while they, their like-thinking friends, and poorer citizens are mostly good and therefore deserving. Oh, and by the way, only the deserving should determine who is allowed to speak on campus.

I hope that an effective Honor Council at a university with such a strong Methodist affiliation—and especially with its dominating chapel—will become a source of pride to its students, faculty, and alumni. That said, I don’t think it’s necessary to require students to “act if the Standard is compromised.”

Leave that to the sanctimonious, and let each student focus on his or her own ethical behavior.

Charles Philip Clutts ’61 Harrisburg, North Carolina

“I don’t think it’s necessary to require students to ‘act if the Standard is compromised.’ Leave that to the sanctimonious, and let each student focus on his or her own ethical behavior.”

behavior, and deem sex with an intern in the Oval Office as “no big deal” or even admirable. Society’s examples and the words and actions of our political leaders, including our current president, do little to restrain an impressionable student from trying to get away with what he or she can to gain an academic advantage over his or her peers.

Moreover, as a self-absorbed student sees journalistic integrity replaced by fake news, he or she can readily succumb to the temptations of résumé enhancement and “unpermitted collaboration.”

Whether Robin Hood is right or wrong to redistribute wealth is easy to decide when people assume that those CORRECTION: In

Tell on yourself I’m delighted Duke has an honor code.

My husband, Rob, graduated from Haverford College, which has had a self-regulated honor code since 1897 that is taken very seriously.

During his freshman year, one of his friends was spotted cheating. Rob said he and five friends got together to discuss how to handle this. They knew the guy would be expelled, which would seriously hurt him, but they believed in the honor code and decided to ask him to turn himself in, which he did. He left the college that day. He promptly enlisted in the Navy, later getting a degree from a state college, and remained in contact with Rob and the other five, but

the Summer 2018 issue, the caption of the Full Frame image depicting the work of local artists on the grounds of the Arts Annex contained an error.

The artists painted inactive satellite dish antennas. In the same issue, the list of books

by Duke alumni and faculty included an incorrect book cover for Darwin’s Ghosts by literature Professor Emeritus Ariel Dorfman.

did decline to attend class reunions.

For a cheater to turn in himself or herself helps to remove some of the sting from the deed and relieves the witnesses from being tattletales.

Audrey Earle Nevitt ’56 Washington, D.C.

Some of us followed a code

In reading your Summer issue regarding the honor code, I noted an omission. I was a member of the School of Nursing Class of 1968. Definitely, during the four years that I was a Duke student, nursing school students were subject to a strict honor code, something I believe was important given our chosen profession. Our exams were never proctored, and we signed the code numerous times.

Some professors from elsewhere in the university (Dr. Klopfer comes to mind) respected our honor code. They separated the nursing students from the rest of the class, and we continued to take our exams without proctors. It made for a less-tense testing situation. I think this unique and likely long-standing honor code should have been mentioned in your article.

Patricia Kohms Ketcham B.S.N. ’68 Conroe, Texas

Honor brigade

I read your Summer 2018 cover story with great interest, having been part of the history of honor and integrity at Duke. In 1982-83, I participated on a committee formed from representatives of the student government at the request of university President Terry Sanford. At the end of the school year, Sanford invited all those on the committee to a celebratory lunch. He took a personal interest in this project to create an honor pledge for students.

Melanie Blandon ’83 Denver A matter of principle Spell checkers used to be human.

In 1950, Dr. Bevington taught the principal difference between “principal” and “principle.”

He would have written [“A matter of integrity, Summer 2018], “The Duke community standard has three principles.”

Perry M. Stewart ’54 Yellow Springs, Ohio DUKE MAGAZINE

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Only the strong survive It has been my experience that when a human mob exists, there is no support for the weak [“Kindness for weakness,” Spring 2018]. In fact, the opposite occurs. Violence is rampant and out of control. This terror occurs even when the mob’s athletic team wins!

I experienced a terrifying invasion of my classroom at UNC after Kent State. Had it not been for the veterans in my class, I would have been attacked for merely holding class for those who chose to attend. I will never forget the shock and fear I experienced.

Pamela Gill ’67 Charlotte DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2018

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Christians generically, but with those who fail to follow the example of Jesus as the founder of Christianity.

Thomas F. Harkins Jr. J.D. ’81 Fort Worth, Texas Let’s take it slow My time at Duke and my time afterward with my classmates have been nothing short of incredible. Probably the most positive experience of my life.

So, when I get my Duke Magazine, why would the second sentence be “fear of immigrants?” I understand it’s the fear issue, so positivity is not the goal, but why do we have to go there right from the beginning? Let me enjoy the magazine at least a little before you remind me everyone is a racist, the world will be over by 2020, etc. No matter which side of the argument you’re on, it’s not going to put your mind in a good spot for reading, reflection, and learning.

Dan Porcaro M.B.A.’15 Richmond, Virginia Let’s go into the light I am writing to share my disappointment with your creative and editorial choices in the summer Special Issue [2018] regarding “Fear.”

First and foremost, I find the choice of cover art—a vicious ghoul—repulsive and not suitable for gracing the cover of Duke Magazine. Surely a better image, perhaps a real live person/alumnus—a fear overcomer—could have been selected to grace the cover.

A number of essays in the work are inspiring, but several others contain curious content, including imagery that suggests what I would call “darkness.” The overall tone of the publication is “dark.” I did not find it particularly inspiring.

Given all the “light” and accomplishment that resides on campus, within the alumni community, and within the larger Duke family, I am amazed at the decision to focus an entire issue on “fear”—almost in celebratory form. Why? In my view, this issue is an editorial and artistic failure.

I will look forward to reading future stories about Duke champions, overcomers, achievers, change agents and the like. I hope those stories will be framed in an aura of positivity, uplifting imagery, and victory—not darkness, THE

n

nging poverty and inequity. ple, places and programs that edge in the service of society.

ISSUE

y you.

FEAR—along with its close neighbor, anxiety— is everywhere. Fear of immigrants. Fear within

immigrants. Fear around the future of democratic institutions. Fear that artificial intelligence will overwhelm human endeavor. Fear that hotter

temperatures and elevated sea levels will overwhelm nature’s balancing act.

I F YO U DA R E

And consider this item from the latest Harper’s Index: Among Americans between the ages of

eighteen and twenty-nine, twice as many are fearful rather than hopeful about the future of the country.

This issue explores some of the ways that fear factors into our lives. READ ON. And find some fearless explorations into the theme of fear.

ct with an nerating ideas, PossibleBy

7/9/18 10:02 AM

That issue was special I was so moved by all the contributions to this issue [Special Issue 2018]. I read it cover to cover and will hang on to it for a while and share it with others not so fortunate as to have read it. Thank you.

Maria Sorolis ’81 Louisville, Kentucky

In agreement

I greatly enjoyed reading the “Fear” Special Issue [2018]. The “Speak Up” essay by Rusty Wright ’71 was excellent in pointing out the traumatic yet rewarding effort of taking a stance on a controversial issue in a classroom context, particularly with the professor having a contrary view on the point.

Also, I agree with Wright’s position that the problem with racism is not 8 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

deadness, and ghoulishness.

You can do better. Please do.

Wes King M.P.P. ’96, M.B.A. ’97 Long Beach, California An act of bravery Thank you for sharing your fears in this public space [“I Can’t Just Stand By” by Leah Abrams, Special Issue 2018]. I admire your courage to advocate for justice and to push others not to be complicit in the continuation of social inequalities.

Change can be slow, and sometimes people need to help it move along faster!

Grace Chen ’98 San Carlos, California What a nice surprise The Special Issue [2018] of Duke Magazine was stunning. My first reaction was to check to see whether there was a new editor. I was happy to learn that there was no change in that position.

While quickly flipping through the pages expecting to find nothing of interest, two lines caught my attention: “I borrowed…under my raincoat.”

“What is this?” I whispered. I read the article. Not only was I intrigued by the experiences of the writer, but I was also happy that the journalist had the curiosity to ask important questions and the courage to search for the answers. Only after I had read the essay did I look for the author’s name. Mark Pinsky ’70 and I were undergraduate classmates. I have wonderful memories of his contributions to The Chronicle.

Thanks for the special issue. Complacence is an impediment to progress.

James S. Dorsey ’70, M.D. ’74 Berwyn Heights, Maryland SEND LETTERS TO: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. Published letters represent the range of responses received. For additional letters: www.dukemagazine.duke.edu.

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LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

NIGHT LIGHT Class of 2022 gets its horns

ART WALK Leaving the Nasher

Bill Snead

Megan Mendenhall

SWING TIME at RecFest

GLOW The chapel at sunrise

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Loud and clear

In a show that features long-ignored artists, the Nasher reveals a sprawling contemporary collection that speaks to its youth and its canonical vision.

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he Nasher Museum of Art was born in 2005, making it a toddler in the art world. That youth might seem like a hindrance. After all, a museum’s collection is what most defines it, and a collection tends to accrue steadily with the passage of time.

But Trevor Schoonmaker, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and the Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of contemporary art, calls the Nasher’s youth a “huge advantage.” As peer institutions work to diversify collections that have historically skewed white and male, the Nasher’s task is easier. “We don’t have a ton of blind spots, because we’re so young,” says Schoonmaker, noting that the Nasher, which already draws from a “foundational base” of works from artists of African descent, doesn’t have to respond to and rectify a collection built in a bygone era.

With that in mind, the Nasher’s latest exhibition, “People Get Ready: Building a Contemporary Collection,” represents both what the Nasher has accomplished in its first dozen years and “a statement about what we’re trying to do,” Schoonmaker says, as the museum grows into its teens and beyond.

In some ways, it’s a highlight reel—attendees will note a number of works previously on display, especially in the recent “Southern Accent” exhibit, also curated by Schoonmaker—and a step forward, boasting a number of key new acquisitions.

One such piece is Fifty Shades of White, a re-mapping of the United States from Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. On the canvas, north and south of the country’s borders lie vibrant teals, reds, and yellows, but inside exists nothing but pasty, homogenous hues. Gone are names like North Carolina and Georgia, replaced instead with “Breakwater White” and “White Peach.” A closer look reveals smaller, bolder text: This Country was Brown for thousands and thousands of years, it says. White is only temporary, by 2030 this country will be Brown again. “The idea isn’t to have just this black-white dialogue,” Schoonmaker explains—Smith is Native American—“but a broader conversation.”

At times, the exhibition reads as an unstoppable wave of outrage, a celebration of underappreciated and underrepresented artists who have long deserved the spotlight. They

now have it, but they’re justly peeved at having had to wait so long. There’s Gary Simmons’ Erasure Chair, a complete covering of a schoolroom desk and chair with dark felt erasers—its central placement in the gallery amplifying the vacancy it presents. There’s Dario Robleto’s colorful trio of fake folk albums, notably Americana Materia Medica, envisioning tracks with self-effacing yet direct titles like “Biochloride of Patriotism” and “A Material That Fuels a Dream Ignites Itself.” And there are even crazier titles that turn seemingly serious double images into painful zingers—as in Rashid Johnson’s Self-Portrait as the Professor of Astronomy, Miscegenation, and Critical Theory at “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club” Center for Graduate Studies.

“I’d rather have an ‘A’ work by an artist that people don’t know,” than include a lesser work by a big-name artist, says Schoonmaker.

“People Get Ready” is a collection show—and a sprawling one, filling the modern exhibition space and spilling over into the museum’s historical art galleries. Developing the Nasher’s holdings with such a focus on diversity will have similarly widespread effects, from the university’s scholars who will analyze the works, to the marginalized artists who, whether featured here or inspired by the collection, will benefit from the potential shift in the canon.

The hope is to build shows with more targeted themes, such as an exhibition devoted to music and sound, which Schoonmaker describes as “the primary source of inspiration for what I do.” (“People Get Ready,” he quickly points out, comes from the 1965 single by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.)

But above all, Schoonmaker emphasizes, it’s powerful to take this step in Durham, in North Carolina. The collection reads differently in the South, in a city and a state that were part of the battleground for the civil rights movement. “People Get Ready” is a statement, one that’s emphatic if not bold, that such a focus will continue to be meaningful.

“The conversation is never-ending,” says Schoonmaker, of the continued work necessary to find and amplify these long-ignored voices. “I think it’ll always be topical, and it’ll always be pertinent.”—Lucas Hubbard

“The idea isn’t to have just this blackwhite dialogue, but a broader conversation.”

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Images courtesy Nasher Museum of Art

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INCLUSIVE: Clockwise starting above, Maria Berrio, Syzygy, 2017; Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” Might Not Hold True For Much Longer (2013); Hassan Hajjaj, Nisrin (2010/1431); opposite page, Genevieve Gaignard, Pallets & Pepsi (2015)

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A good use of their energy How engineering students broke a record for fuel efficiency

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s the last months of Patrick Grady’s time at what Grady calls “a much more motivated approach” and Duke wound down, and then the spring breaking through in 2017 with their first-ever victory. turned into summer and endless eighty-fiveThe team blazed into the 2017-2018 school year with hour weeks in the Gross Hall basement’s cluteven higher hopes. They broke down the vehicle into its tered and flourescent makerspace, his faith came from the various subcomponents, the seventeen students working formulas. “The math said that we could beat [the record], in small groups to optimize the steering, propulsion system, aerodynamics, and more—leaning into the analysis said Grady ’18, the then-president of Duke Electric Vehicles, “but there was a big gap between the math saying to find the greatest efficiency. that and actually doing that.”

It was a constant balancing act. “It’s really easy to chase Yet by the third week of July, after a 4 a.m. wakeup call one thing to the end of the Earth, and then you have two to beat the North Carolina or three other things that have heat, the groggy team of enreally obvious, gaping holes in “Even though we had to wake gineers had managed to open them,” Grady says. The team a different gap: between the added a “cost sensitivity” metup super early, we were all ric to make sure they weren’t old world record for fuel effinervous, excited, and hopeful overpaying for mere marginal ciency and the standard their own vehicle set. Smashing that it would work this time.” improvements. the previous standard by 13 Perhaps the biggest gains percent, the club had its own came from the design of the place in the Guinness record books. car’s hydrogen fuel cell, a process led by seniors Gerry Chen Previously, Duke Electric Vehicles was a smaller, more and Shomik Verma, informed by their yearlong independent-study project. “I just wanted to get a fuel cell working laidback organization; the appeal was in testing different for the competition, and I thought in future years we could theoretical designs with MATLAB software, or even just build upon it, make it more efficient, and then go for a building the vehicles in the Foundry (the basement makerspace in Gross Hall), assembling the electronics with world record,” says Verma. “But when we saw how well the a soldering iron and cutting fiberglass to match a foam car was performing…as the year went on, our expectations mold of the car body. At the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas changed and our goals for the year changed as well.” competition each spring, they’d take notes from the bestIn April, the team ran away with the Shell contest, the in-class, trailing in the wake of those teams before trying car so beyond that of the competition that other teams

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Photos courtesy Duke Electric Vehicles

had—in a role reversal—startand then we test, and it ed taking notes of Duke’s dedoesn’t work,” says Grady. sign, Grady says. They didn’t “But we pushed through.” yet have the record, but the Fortunately, they had numbers were close enough support—mostly, the independent judges being very for some team members to willing to come back the keep arguing over micro-efficiencies on many summer following week—and motivation, given how close they evenings in Gross Hall. had initially been. The set of To enter the Guinness book, failures also provided ample the car would have to travel an average of (at least) 15 data to identify the final, miles per hour for 8.5 miles, necessary tweaks.

ENERGIZED: The Duke Electric Vehicles team and inevitably along an “accelerAnd so, with Anna Li ’18 their record breaker ate, cruise, accelerate, cruise” slotted in the driver’s, uh, pattern, explains Verma. The chair (“it’s a really hard job— team added a supercapacitor bank to harness the excess there’s no suspension,” says Verma), by 8 a.m. the team energy from the acceleration periods, enabling the use of a was on its way to a record. This time, the math added up. smaller fuel cell. They shrank the hydrogen tank. And the Now with Verma as president, Duke Electric Vehicles team employed riskier—but potentially faster—tires and expects to chase a similar efficiency record this year with wheel hubs. an electric car, instead of a hydrogen-powered one. Grady By mid-July, the team was ready for the trek to GALOT will continue to pursue formulas, if not Formula One records, in the robotics Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech.

Motorsports Park, an hour’s drive (at proper highway But barely a month after setting the new standard, speeds) east of Duke. But after three runs, they had had Grady thinks back on it. And when asked to speak about three failures: First, they were a hair under the required the lessons he learned, for once, the engineer loses his preaverage speed; then, a fuel cell broke. By the third run, the cise phrasing and speaks with an air of awe. “When you whole apparatus was struggling in the 92-degree weather. really go all out, 100 percent, you can get some pretty craIt was demoralizing. “We’re already so far out on a zy results.”—Lucas Hubbard limb—nobody really knows if it’s going to work or not—

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

ANIMALS

MISCELLANY

Alligators on the beach and mountain lions in the park turn out not to be unexpected results of animals expanding their territory; animals may actually just be returning to TERRITORY they traditionally inhabited before their populations collapsed. / It was a busy LEMUR SEASON. Two pairs of twins were born, both to critically endangered species: Mae and Judith to red-ruffed lemurs, and Harriot and Helene to black-and-white ruffed lemurs. Elagabalus, a Coquerel’s sifaka, was born to mom Pia, once the mate of Jovian (famed as Zoboomafoo, who died in 2014). Elagabalus is the first offspring of his dad, Pontius. (All sifakas in that family are named for Roman nobles; Elagabalus, since you’re wondering, was Roman emperor from 218 to 222). / Three babies were born to blue-eyed black lemurs, one of the most ENDANGERED SPECIES in the world, including one, Ranomasina, by C-section to parents who may be the last lemurs the Lemur Center ever imports from Madagascar. / The way animals use energy to move— whether with muscles, like mammals, or, say, with spring-like arrangements of exoskeletons, like fleas or lobsters—appears to follow general principles common to animals, plants, fungi, and machines that use elastic structures to maximize KINETIC ENERGY.

FRACKING might be just as dangerous to water supplies as your environmentalist friends have been claiming it is. / Not only can research labs use different cells to perform different parts of a bioengineering process, they also can come up with a framework to know when using MULTIPLE CELLS is the way to go. / Worldwide, less than one-third of RADIOLOGISTS are female; the percentage is even lower in the United States (27.2). / An enzyme inhibitor that didn’t live up to its promise as a cancer drug may provide hope as a treatment for TUBERCULOSIS. / Happy with the way STORMWATER RETENTION PONDS filter nitrogen from rainwater, preventing both erosion and algae blooms in the rivers they feed, scientists still worried that with all that filtered nitrogen the ponds might emit the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Not to worry: In that capacity stormwater ponds behave no differently than other ponds. / Turns out GUNS actually do kill people. If you replaced larger-caliber with smaller-caliber guns and changed nothing else, you would reduce gun deaths by 39.5 percent. / Duke scientists will be involved in an effort to make the world’s first practical QUANTUM COMPUTER. (We would try to explain how quantum computing works, but it would just make you cry. Us too.)

PEOPLE Historically black colleges and universities pay more to issue BOND DEBT than nonHBCUs. Can you guess the reason? Yep. That’s the reason. / Since 1989, SENIORS have grown wealthier and families with children have become poorer. Within the groups, the wealth gap between the richest 1 percent of seniors and seniors overall has remained relatively stable; but while the richest families with children have seen their net worth rise significantly, overall FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN have seen their wealth diminish. / Every little bit helps— even climbing stairs or walking across a parking lot. Short bursts of EXERCISE throughout the day reduce risks of disease and death. / Children share more when they believe SHARING is right; belief that sharing is a rule or is popular influences them less. / After high school, WOMEN’S EXERCISE rates quickly drop; the drop is especially significant for women of color. / Black men have a higher chance of dying from PROSTATE CANCER than white men, but they may respond better to hormone and steroid therapies for that cancer than white men. / Chances are you can see your pet better than your pet can see you; HUMAN EYES may see at least four times as much detail as a cat or dog does, and many more times the detail perceived by species like fish or insects. / An adhesive based on that produced by the SANDCASTLE WORM might help improve surgical interventions in human bone healing. / LOCAL NEWS DESERTS are widespread and bleak; 20 percent of small communities in a study did not have access to a single local news story in a week.

DUKE After twelve years as director of the Duke Lemur Center, ANNE YODER stepped down.

During her tenure, the Lemur Center got its new name (it used to be the Primate Center), enjoyed a $10.4 million remodeling, and saw the birth of 285 lemurs. GREG DYE, director of operations and administration, serves as interim director. / PHAIL WYNN, longtime vice president for Durham and regional affairs, died in July, shortly after his retirement; 1,800 people attended his memorial service in Duke Chapel. STELFANIE WILLIAMS ‘98 takes over the position, now called vice president for Durham affairs. / STEVE NOWICKI left his role as dean and vice provost for undergraduate education to return to teaching, also leaving a position he was the first to hold in 2007. He was succeeded by GARY BENNETT Ph.D. ’02, a psychology and neuroscience professor and founding director of Duke’s undergraduate global health major. / ROBERT P. BEHRINGER ’70, Ph.D. ’75, James B. Duke Professor of physics, died in July; he was a pioneer in the physics of granular materials like sand. / DUKE DINING banned the use of disposable plastics from all thirty-four campus eating venues. / After seven years at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN), R. ALISON ADCOCK has been promoted to the position of director. / PAULA D. MCCLAIN, dean of the graduate school, has been elected the next president of the American Political Science Association. / DAVID KENNEDY, who has helped lead record-setting fundraising efforts at Stanford, is the new vice president for alumni affairs and development.

Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu for links to further details and original papers.

* Didn't Read?/Too Long? Well, we did, and now we're all smarter.

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ROOMMATES

FEW HH ORIGIN STORY: When Gustavo arrived from Arizona during Latino Student Recruitment Weekend in April of 2015, his flight had been delayed, his luggage lost; he arrived at the Bryan Center “stranded” around midnight. But his host had given José—Gustavo’s roommate for the weekend—his number, and they managed to meet up, José making the trek over from East Campus. “My first impression? He was my savior,” says Gustavo, laughing. That summer, after both committed to Duke, José reached out during the first-year roommate selection process, and the rest was history: This is their fourth year living together.

Gustavo Andrade STUDIES: Mechanical Engineering HOMETOWN: Tucson, Ariz.

MUSICAL OUTLET: A cappella (Pitchforks) TRAVEL ABROAD: Madagascar, Liberia SUPER SMASH BROS CHARACTER: Sonic

CRAZIE TIMES: Even though neither grew up as a big basketball fan—the one jersey in their dorm is José’s, of soccer player Giovani dos Santos—all three years here they’ve black-tented, the most serious form of tenting for the Duke-UNC home game. (Perhaps relevant: Their first weekend on campus was just after Duke won the 2015 NCAA championship.)

Which means, beyond the games and their tent’s post-Christmas white-elephant gift exchange, some treacherous conditions. “They were scrambling because we didn’t want our tent to fall down,” says José, recalling a winter night when Gustavo and a friend had to stand up, around three in the morning, and hold the tent up for a half hour from the inside to prevent it from collapsing in the wind. José, one of the ten in the tent, saw this...and went back to sleep.

INSEPARABILITY: Whether making latenight trips to Pitchforks in McClendon Tower, studying in Perkins until 4 a.m., or going to La Superior, a Mexican grocery store in Durham, the two are known to never be far apart. “Our friends—they always see us together, so when one of us isn’t there, they’re asking where the other is.” It’s a connection that extends to even outside the standard academic calendar: Gustavo has spent Thanksgiving with José’s family in nearby Hillsborough; this past summer José did DukeEngage in Tucson (Gustavo’s hometown), where the two were “gym buddies.”

—Lucas Hubbard, Photography by Chris Hildreth

José Ortega STUDIES: Neuroscience HOMETOWN: Hillsborough, N.C. MUSICAL OUTLET: Clarinet (Duke Wind Symphony) TRAVEL ABROAD: Australia, Italy SUPER SMASH BROS CHARACTER: Yoshi

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FROM THE PRESIDENT: A CAMPUS VIEW

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A Walk in the Forest

y wife, Annette, and I were bounding down the Duke Forest trail, our dogs pulling us between squirrels and startled birds, when our guide called for us to stop next to an ordinary-looking beech tree. “Look closely,” she said.

“They’re dancing.”

Annette and I peered in. Sure enough, thousands of aphids, like tiny puffballs, were scurrying along a branch, gleefully eating sap in symbiotic harmony with the fungus growing at the bottom of the tree. The branch looked like it was covered in fresh snow, but it was jiggling ever so slightly as the bugs made their way along.

Here, just four miles from Duke Chapel, we’d discovered a complex biological system— one quaking with life.

We surely would have passed this scene by were it not for our sharp-eyed guide, Duke Forest Director Sara Childs. She oversees conservation, research, and recreation in Duke’s 7,000 acres of protected woodlands.

But on this morning in August, she seemed happy to play host to me, Annette, and our dogs, Scout and Cricket.

We began our tour just inside a gate to the Korstian Division, a vast tract that falls on both sides of New Hope Creek. This area, which spans 1,800 acres in northern Orange County, was part of the original land purchased by Duke to serve as a forested teaching and research laboratory.

In those early years, the hills were rutted with the scars of subsistence agriculture, but the forest has made a remarkable comeback in the WOODSY: Duke Forest eight decades under Duke Director Sara Childs, conservation. The managed right, and Operations growth of the pines first plantManager Jenna ed by Duke Forestry professor Schreiber with the Clarence Korstian has allowed Prices and their dogs, for the recovery of hardwoods, Scout and Cricket which in turn support a re-

newed ecosystem of plants and animals.

“It’s a goldmine and a treasure in this area, largely untouched since 1931 except for some pockets of active forest management,” Sara told us. “We’re able to conserve and protect many plants and animals that are disappearing from Central North Carolina.”

As we approached a large rocky bluff overlooking the creek, she showed us one example: Catawba Rhododendron. We tend to associate rhododendron with the Blue Ridge mountains, two hundred miles to the west.

But this threatened species has been native to the area since the last Ice Age, and Sara and her team are now working with the North Carolina Botanical Gardens to preserve this ancient survivor.

The geology of the Korstian Division shows more evidence of this ancient Duke history.

The terrain was carved some 660 million years ago, and the flow of what is now New Hope Creek created the plateau of rock that is now home to West Campus.

A few thousand millennia later, the connection to campus is strong. Nicholas School faculty and students engage in forest management, including controlled burns to promote hardwood regeneration and to manage pine stands. Stream scientists measure the water quality of New Hope Creek, which is at its cleanest when it leaves the forest. Engineers test fly their drones in a Duke Forest meadow. And tens of thousands of members of the Duke community head to the forest each year to hike, run, mountain bike, horseback-ride, fish, and, yes, walk their dogs—on leashes, of course.

Scout and Cricket bid their farewells to the squirrels and birds, and Sara led us back to the trailhead for the quick trip back to West Campus. All around us, I noticed now, the forest was full of life, from the whir of the cicadas to the lichens clinging to the hardwoods. I knew then that we would be back soon—and often— to continue our exploration of this special place.

“We’re able to conserve and protect many plants and animals that are disappearing from central North Carolina.”

—Vincent E. Price

Megan Mendenhall

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From the ground up

Noah Pickus, an associate provost at Duke and DKU’s dean of undergraduate curricular affairs and faculty development, shares a glimpse of life on campus

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HAT DOES AMERICA MEAN TO YOU?” I ask the twenty students in my American studies seminar. It’s the first day of class at Duke Kunshan University.

We are sitting at a dark-wood, rectangular table in the Conference Center. The shades are drawn to keep out the afternoon sun, though you can see through them to the Innovation Building that is going up next door. The occasional thump of construction punctuates our conversation.

“Individual rights, risk-taking—the American Dream,” come the first set of answers. Then doubts emerge. “It seems like everyone loses their roots in America and becomes disconnected,” says Chris, who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. “And what about all the homeless people in America?” asks Yizhou, who is from Jiangsu province in China.

“Why is no one responsible for them?”

The course is about American notions of freedom and identity and about how Chinese writers have understood the “Beautiful Country,” as the United States is called in Chinese. I am co-teaching with Selina Lai-Henderson, a new DKU faculty member from Hong Kong who recently published her first book, Mark Twain in China.

Our class is the most global I’ve ever taught in twenty-five years. Half the students come from all over the world: Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Serbia, Pakistan, and the Philippines, as well as from New York to North Carolina. And half the students come from Shanghai, Zhejiang, Beijing, Shandong, and a handful of other Chinese provinces.

Even within that broad range of locales there is a deeper complexity to these students’ lives.

Honey, from Pakistan, speaks five languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. She wasn’t raised in China but helps foreign students navigate it with ease: ordering goods from Taobao (China’s Amazon), arranging food delivery from town, or translating at a restaurant during the regular outings of “Honey’s Food Group.”

Here, there’s too much diversity for one way of thinking to become the default. “What would be the most controversial thing you could tell your parents about DKU?” I ask the students. “That I’ve become a Socialist,” says Rachel, from New Rochelle, New York. “That I don’t want to join the Party,” offers Yue, whose home is in Huzhou.

These students enrolled in a university that has no graduates, that had just begun to hire its faculty, and that offers non-traditional majors taught in experimental formats. They are pioneers who want to create something new.

“It was exciting to think that no one else had been a student here before,” says Rachel. “I wanted to start things from the ground up and not fit into a culture.” She first visited China in the ninth grade, and coming back was also a major draw: “I wanted to be an ambassador to China for black people, to see what I could learn about being Chinese and what

“It was exciting to think that no one else had been a student here before. I wanted to start things from the ground up and not fit into a culture.”

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I could teach about being black.”

Chris, who started studying Chinese on her own in Asheville, was drawn to DKU after years of listening to Chinese music and watching Chinese TV. She wanted to experience China’s “collective spirit” firsthand, and to “get a different view of America,” she says. “China is the future,” adds Mia, from Ethiopia. “And I’m here to build bridges.”

For Chinese students, a major draw was the chance to expand their options. “I’d seen in films and TV how different America is,” said Yue. “I wanted to be part of a more global world with choices about where I might work and live.” “I want to be rooted in China,” said Yuchen, who comes from

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First-year students in the new undergrad degree program:

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Students from mainland China:

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Western stereotyping of the “Third World,” students pointed to Taylor Swift’s ”Wildest Dreams” video as a two-minute distillation of colonialism.

The students’ adventurous Institutional spirit is on full display at the references weekly dinners that my teenon the diploma: age daughter, Mira, organizes at our faculty apartment. The first —Duke Kunshan week, she teams up with Honey, University and Momoko (Zimbabwe), Heibai (Anhui province), Krista (New Duke University Zealand), and Zarfishar (PakiNew faculty stan) to make pancakes. Maple teaching: syrup is in short supply here, so the cooks improvise with chocolate and bananas. Like magic, twenty students apparate at our Duke faculty door to feast. teaching: The next week, Kali, who is from Ethiopia, and Yuchen help make pakoras and bhindi masala. Thirty students show up and cluster around the kitchen’s white countertop and wooden dining table. Kali, a whirlwind of energy, wants to become a family therapist. She’s taking the course on love and marriage taught by Yu Wang, a sociologist who came to DKU from the University of Wisconsin.

“Students didn’t come here to drink and hook up,” says Kali.

“They’re looking for more serious, long-term relationships.”

Yuchen focused on science in high school, because, he says, he was bored with the way they taught social science and humanities. But he came to DKU because he read Machiavelli and fell in love with history and politics as part of a Model UN. Here, he’s one of the six student fellows selected to participate in the newly launched Planetary Ethics and Artificial Intelligence humanities lab.

Throughout the cooking, eating, and cleaning, the range of topics all these students are discussing is dizzying: Elon Musk, safe spaces, Trump and Xi Jinping, the point of a college education, gender relations in China, the meaning of home. “We didn’t come here just to learn about each other’s cultures,” says Momoko. “We came here to debate and to challenge each other.” n Students from the U.S.:

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Qingdao, on the coast east of Beijing, “and BEGINNING: An overview connected to the world.” of the DKU Now that they are here, the students are campus taking classes that draw on sources from different cultures. On one day in the “Foundations of Social Science” course, they compare the story of Genesis and the teachings of Confucius. In different classes, they examine ideals of love, marriage, and family in Eastern and Western societies, debate the ethics of AI and of world poverty, and plunge into Chinese and global environmental and health issues.

All students take at least two intensive seminars over seven weeks, rather than the standard four classes over fourteen weeks. The pace is breakneck, especially so for some of the non-native English speakers. Students feel under stress from multiple factors—the compressed schedule, the new environment, and, for some, the new expectation that they participate actively in class. “I came here to build my confidence,” says Yanfei, whose home is in Jiangsu province. “DKU is helping me do that, but right now it’s very hard to adjust!”

The faculty have been preparing for these challenges for a year; there is a constant conversation about teaching strategies. For Emily McWilliams, a philosopher who came to Duke from Harvard, there’s a clear advantage to the coursework: “I adore how immersed and invested the seven-week structure allows the students to be. At every other place I’ve taught, it feels like my class is competing for attention. Here, students come to class ready to dig in.”

In other cases, student uptake of concepts is immediate.

Scott MacEachern, an archaeologist who taught at Bowdoin College for twenty-five years, has predominantly Chinese students in his social-science section. During a discussion about

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Happy to make a comeback

Opening a coffee shop on campus gives an alumnus memories of his beginnings.

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Scott Huler

uring a sunny lunchtime on the Bryan Center people he trusted and people he looked up to lose their jobs, Plaza in the first week of classes, a throng of “it became less about money,” he says. “I lost that appetite students crowd around Dorian Bolden ’02, just working for someone else in general”—and he left. He surrounded by his wife, his kids, and some quickly stepped into the retail jobs he had held all his life, associates, as he uses a giant pair of Duke and got work in a coffee shop, which he found suited him.

Blue scissors to cut a long Duke Blue ribbon in front of his “I enjoy making a person’s day brighter,” he says. “I think brand-new coffee shop, Beyu Blue. “It is by far the coolest there’s a level of nobility in that: A smile, and ‘have a nice thing as an alum to come back on campus,” Bolden says, day’ has value. We forget that.” And when it was time for “and be among all of us students.” He laughs. “Well, all of Taineisha to go to medical school at UNC, “I knew it was you are students,” he says. time to take the chance and It’s an easy stumble to follow her.” make—time has flown.

That’s a Duke story in itself. Dorian and Taineisha That Bolden finds himself back on campus as a met cute at the Bryan Center. Taineisha, new to cambusiness owner is satisfying; that his business sits a pus, couldn’t locate an event few steps away from where for her B.N. Duke Scholarship program. Dorian, workhe met his wife, Taineisha ing the information desk, Bolden ’04 (then Sledge), explained that he couldn’t is delightful. direct her to her event if she But “the irony,” Bolden didn’t know where it was. says, “is I never thought She expected more help, I would be doing something with my major.” which “started an argument,” He started out aimDorian says, laughing, and ing to study computer more than fifteen years, one CAFFEINATED: Beyu Blue sits on Bryan Center Plaza. science, but a misplaced business, and two kids later semicolon convinced him they’re still working things to give up on programming within his first couple days. out. Taineisha is a physician, working in Roxboro. “Beyu is “I fell in love with sociology, first class,” he says. “How do his thing,” she says, smiling, though she calls finally seeing you identify? Who are you? How do you identify yourself?” it fully open on campus “surreal.” When the space came Everyone in the classroom saw himself or herself as belongavailable and Duke approached Beyu, “I was more excited ing to some race, class, gender, or other group, and Bolden than he was.” was hooked on figuring out how we decide who we are. The Beyu Blue is its first satellite location. The spot opened name he selected for his downtown Durham coffee shop, up after a much-publicized incident last spring in which, “Beyu,” is pronounced—and it means—just what it looks after a Duke administrator’s complaint about music at coffee shop Joe Van Gogh, two employees were fired; soon like: Be you. afterward, Joe Van Gogh cut its ties with Duke.

At Duke, Bolden majored in sociology and economics, Opening a second location, on campus, pleases that old with a certificate in markets and management—but upon sociology major. “When I was at Duke, white was the magraduation, he almost immediately went to work in finance, jority, and now nonwhite is the majority.” He sees the Beyu living with Duke friends in New York. He experienced two message as an opportunity to remind the Duke communilife-changing events while there: For one, he traveled to Jamaica. Bolden grew up in Decatur, Georgia. Despite the ty: We have “so much more in common than we do differences.” He knows the students walking the Bryan Center fact that he found Duke eye-opening (“I had never been Plaza, noses in their phones, will face a world changing as around so many white people!”), he says he first saw real rapidly as the composition of the Duke student body has poverty in Jamaica, and he began “fighting for the changes changed. “People try to find a way of dividing us, polarizI want to see.” For another thing, his father died, and he ing us. How do you bridge all that together?” began to recognize that “tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.”

You might start with a cup of coffee.—Scott Huler When his company merged with another, and he saw

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SCIENCE AT WARP SPEED

| Mohamed Noor is a professor of biology and the author of Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us About Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds (Princeton University Press).

Which starship captain would you like to serve under?

Katherine Janeway, who encounters dozens of civilizations as captain of the USS Voyager. She started out as a science officer, so she has great appreciation for science.

But I would not want to be stuck in the Delta Quadrant for a period of seven years.

What makes Star Trek good for showcasing science?

Star Trek has been powering along for more than 700 episodes, seven series, and thirteen movies. The mission of the USS Enterprise, the original starship, is to seek out new life. And while it occasionally depicts magical or mystical events, the series is grounded in science.

One concept you wrestle with is how to define life. Why is that so tough, even for biologists?

Think about the characteristics we generally use in defining life as they might correspond with fire. Fire converts matter to energy. And a small spark from a fire can allow a separate fire to emerge— analogous to reproduction.

No biologist argues that fire is alive, but there are gray areas elsewhere. Viruses require non-virus host cells for reproduction; they can’t reproduce independently.

They don’t generate or store energy. Instead they rely on host cells for energy. So biologists are split on the question of whether viruses are alive or merely natural replicators that capitalize on and influence other living organisms.

How different might extraterrestrial life look from life on Earth?

The universe is filled with the building blocks of life, though the idea of other life forms being recognizable and sentient is a different matter. Life

Q&A

forms on Earth are made from carbon-containing compounds and use water for their biochemical reactions. And all life on Earth evolved from common origins, over almost 4 billion years. The odds that other life forms in the universe would look a lot like us are astronomically improbable. It would require that over a long period of time, the ecosystem, including the climate, would be Earthlike, and it would also ignore chance, which plays a large role.

Several episodes are built on the premise that either life on Earth arose from an alien influence, or life elsewhere arose from Earth. Is either path for life tenable?

The idea that ancient aliens came to Earth and are the ancestors of modern humans isn’t original to Star Trek.

But the fossil record tells a different story. If humans arose independently— extraterrestrially or otherwise— then our DNA sequences would not be so similar to those of chimpanzees. Life forms on other worlds may have come from pieces of our planet spewing out, but they are far more likely to be microbial than humanoid. Not only would a life form have to arrive safely on another world; it would also have to find a friendly environment there.

The series plays with genetics and evolution quite a bit. In one episode, aliens that can turn invisible are characterized as the recipients of sophisticated genetic engineering.

The episode gets it right in suggesting that an evolutionary change may stem from a genetic manipulation.

Still, the “genetic engineering” here seems devoid of

actual genetic change. The alterations seem to have been directly added to their bodies, like giving someone an artificial heart. Changes need to be inherited to be considered evolutionary. The recipient of an artificial heart doesn’t have children who have artificial hearts.

Another episode has someone on the ship accidentally release self-replicating microscopic robots called “nanites.” They “evolve,” cause the ship to malfunction, and eventually learn to communicate with the crew.

Where you have a “genetic disorder” resulting from a mutation, that mutation becomes rarer in the population with each generation, and eventually may be lost altogether. Good mutations become abundant in the population because their bearers, on average, have more children. The process repeats, and the improvements keep building up, potentially even including some change leading to the ability to communicate— assuming such an ability provides an advantage in survival and reproduction.

But the episode has the nanites showing a “collective intelligence” and selfawareness. Natural selection doesn’t require that.

By the twentieth-fourth century, are we more likely to evolve into an action-driven Kirk or a super-rational Spock?

I think we’re meant to feel some relationship to both characters. And in the twenty-fourth century, the spectrum of human differences isn’t likely to be very different from today.

—Robert J. Bliwise, Photography by Les Todd DUKE MAGAZINE

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BookClub

WE ASKED

Kenneth Wissoker, editorial director of Duke University Press, about how the house landed the rights to reprint James Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man—and why the publisher decided to bring it back into print now.

T

KCRW, Baldwin Family Photos

he book had originally been published by ford), a Duke University Press author, to help out on Dial Press in 1976. Baldwin wrote the book the edition, and together they wrote the informative in response to the urging of his young nephintroduction. He had tracked down the artist, Cazac, ew, Tejan Karefa-Smart, who would ask, “‘Uncle just before he died, and then stayed in touch with his Jimmy, when are you going to write a book about widow. But even with all these connections, it still me?” Baldwin wrote the stotook several years to obtain the ry and had a French artist rights to reprint the book from friend, Yoran Cazac, do the the Baldwin estate and that of charming illustrations. At the the artist. Boggs contacted time, the story seemed for Baldwin’s niece and nephew nine- or ten-year-olds with and asked them to contribute its loving but frank portrayal their own stories. As sometimes happens, despite the of everyday life in the Harlem neighborhood, while the long process, Little Man, Little picture-book format seemed Man is appearing at exactly the aimed at younger children. right time. We’ve gotten glowing stories everywhere from In any case, the book went INSPIRATION: Author James Baldwin The New York Times to People quickly out of print. and his nephew magazine. After Raoul Peck’s One of the editors of our film about Baldwin, I Am Not edition, Nicholas Boggs, first Your Negro, and at a time when there is ever more discovered the book in a college course, before writing about it as part of his Columbia University Ph.D. need for a variety of children’s stories, this book feels thesis. He first wrote me about it more than a dozen like a classic, both of another time and completely years ago. Even though we don’t usually publish chilnecessary for our day. In our world of graphic novels, dren’s books, it seemed like a good idea—but one that Young Adult literature, and Black Lives Matter, Baldwin’s novel for his nephew speaks with urgency and would be pretty hard to make happen. Boggs enlisted relevance to us all. n then Duke Professor Jennifer Brody (now at Stan-

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Yoran Cazac illustration printed with permission

R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S from David Frye A.M. ’90, Ph.D. ’91

In writing Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick (Scribner), Frye faced the challenge of presenting a complex, unfamiliar topic to a broad audience. Luckily, he wasn’t the first to take up that challenge. Below, Frye lists five favorites that set a standard for bringing history to the masses with intelligence and style: The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga— The distinction between popular and academic history was less defined when Huizinga wrote his evocative account of life and culture in the fourteenth century. Huizinga’s masterful selection of evidence taught scholars and laypersons alike the value of looking at art and literature outside the canon.

The Guns of August

by Barbara Tuchman—Over the course of a highly productive career, Tuchman never surpassed her early achievement in writing this book, but, then, who has? Tuchman’s richly detailed account of the first month of World War I remains one of the most gripping historical narratives ever written.

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark— How is it that the transcribed narration of a documentary series hosted by an

aging, self-effacing, and distinctly old-fashioned art historian still transfixes us fifty years after its release? Even the BBC’s 2018 update Civilisations, with its cast of intellectual luminaries, failed to match the stream of provocative thoughts that once spilled from the mind of the sexagenarian Clark.

Accidental Empires By Robert X. Cringely—In chronicling the early years of the computer revolution, Cringely faced a particularly daunting text: having to explain technical issues to a non-technical audience. It is a testimony to Cringely’s skill that his readers, confronted with a work that is both technical and historical, are left with the impression they are reading a breezy piece of gossip.

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland—Another book on Caesar?

If Tom Holland is the author, it’s well worth a read. Holland has emerged as a master at infusing familiar stories with a fresh narrative voice.

BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness (Rodale Books) Eben Alexander M.D. ’80, H ’81, H ’87 and Karen Newell Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal (Simon & Schuster) Ken Bensinger ’97 Dreams That Can Save Your Life: Early Warning Signs of Cancer and Other Diseases (Findhorn Press) Larry Burk ’77 and Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos The Month of Their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods through the Year (UNC Press) Georgann Eubanks ’76 An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky) Edited by Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr. A.M. ’93 Ph.D. ’03 Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream (Hachette Books) Ibtihaj Muhammad ’07 The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior Using the Collaborative Problem Solving Approach (W.W. Norton & Company) J. Stuart Ablon and Alisha R. Pollastri ’98 Wealth, Actually: Intelligent DecisionMaking for the 1% (Lioncrest Publishing) Frazer Rice ’95

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It’s his call

For David Shumate, the radio voice of Duke football and men’s basketball, play-by-play success is measured in seconds.

By LUCAS HUBBARD, Photography by ALEX BOERNER

I

t’s 7 p.m., and David Shumate is missing his coffee.

He drinks it when he calls Duke games, even those with an evening kickoff, like tonight’s season opener against Army. But on the last night of August, it’s simply too stifling in the Blue Devil Tower booth; the retracted windows—essential to the ambient crowd noise on the radio broadcast—have invited in far too much of the Durham heat for anyone to enjoy a mug.

Not that Shumate, the play-by-play announcer entering his second full year as the radio voice of Duke football and men’s basketball, lacks vigor without caffeine. Even with a decade under his belt as a broadcaster for IMG, he still feels “the nervous energy of wanting to do right by the job you’ve signed up to do.”

“If I ever got there and it was ho-hum,” says Shumate, who’s also the director of broadcasting for the Blue Devil IMG Sports Network, “then it’s time to give it up.”

24 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

And so the humid air of the open booth, high above the fast-shadowing field, crackles with what Shumate terms the “organized chaos” of a live call. To Shumate’s left, Jon Jackson (senior associate athletics director for external affairs) handles spotter duties—tracking the ancillary details of the play that Shumate, focused on the ball, might miss. On the right is color commentator Dave Harding ’13, A.M. ’14, the former offensive lineman and current director of Blue Devil Network (the live video component of Duke Athletics). The voices of Harding and Shumate fill most of the broadcast, each play and its aftermath, forcing a tightrope transition from one announcer to the other and back again, the duo conveying all the necessary information and analysis without either talking over one another or creating pockets of dead air, spanning a fluid timeframe of fifteen to forty seconds.

Harding talks like a TV analyst, emoting with his face and hands; when he stumbles over a call, he swats at the air in front of him as if trying to shed a defender.

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But Shumate is restrained, in part because he’s the playby-play guy, in part because his hands hold the spotting board that lists stats, biographical information, and trivia for every offensive player on each team who could conceivably enter the game. Each week, he spends twenty hours crafting these boards; his goal is to couch every statement in certainty, to never say “I think” on the air.

From kickoff to the final whistle, Shumate doesn’t sit down, methodically shifting his weight from foot to foot as he stays tethered to the action. It’s a three-hour marathon. Staff cycle through, dropping off end-of-quarter stats, interview subjects, and concessions to review on air.

The shorter breaks of radio—a minute versus the twoand-a-half minute stoppages of TV—mean pretty much each instant is spent filling air or planning how to fill it.

Very quickly, some coffee seems appropriate.

I

t seems silly to ask why someone would want to be the voice of the Blue Devils. Like any sports or sports-adjacent position, it’s the kind of job that people would say, only half-kidding, that they’d pay to have.

tic. Even when things go great for the Blue Devils, he’s rarely swimming in praise. Few fans hear the call live, he explains, and those tuning in on an afternoon drive are antsy, mostly hoping for the broadcaster to provide a bare-bones summary before celebrating or sobbing.

To attract attention is often, um, not great. “If they become too focused on me,” Shumate says, “it’s probably because I’m not giving them the information they need.

“The fans—to me, they’re like truth tellers,” he says, noting that listeners are attuned to the slightest inauthenticity over the airwaves, any hint of egotism where the announcer puts himself before the broadcast.

The task is to deliver someone else’s story—Duke’s story—and imbue each part, from the opening kick to the final whistle, with warmth and health and context.

Shumate does so with the slightest Southern tinge, a there-if-you-listen-for-it accent that underscores his earnestness. His most joyous calls land in the lower register, the lead consonants popping with any sign of physicality—a barreling Duke player is like a “bowling ball”; a stuffed opponent is “going nowhere”—his voice flipping from measured to husky in an instant.

“He understands pace and tempo and how that fits into radio,” says John Roth ’80, a senior editor and pro-

“The fans—to me, they’re like truth tellers.” ducer for Blue Devil IMG Sports Network who’s the sideline reporter for football games and color commentator for basketball. “You can tell from his voice that he’s excited to be doing the game: He brings an energy to his call. But he still leaves room to take it to another level when something spectacular happens.”

Maybe the worst thing for an announcer is to sound insecure, or derivative. Shumate notes, without hesitation, that Harris “is and always will be the voice of the Blue Devils, and he should be,” and certainly, he’s not trying to imitate Harris’ signature drawl. If Harris sounded like he was hosting the listener on his porch each weekend, sweet tea in hand, Shumate talks like the most informed and invested guy in the sports bar.

“Bob was the first person when I first got the job to say, ‘Don’t be me, be you,’ ” says Shumate. He describes the process of announcing as trying to put forth “the best version of yourself.” He’s surprisingly quiet off-air, he notes, and ever-wary of slipping into a monotone, two bad habits for radio. But mostly, it’s crucial for the announcer to not think too much about what, or who, he sounds like.

“You are who you are. You can’t fake FUN TIMES: Top, Shumate, center, listens as color commentator Dave that, and the fans can tell if you’re faking Harding, right, makes his point while spotter Jon Jackson, left, focuses that,” Shumate says, “So just go and call on the field. Bottom left, close-up of Shumate’s spotting board. the game.”

And yes, announcers can become legends over time.

Take Bob Harris, Duke’s announcer for forty-one years, who retired in 2017 and was inducted into the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame this fall. As long as he walks around Durham, fans will beg him to recount “Laettner catches—comes down—dribbles—Shoots— SCORES” and the ebullient shouts that followed in ’92—which he can recite from memory. That’s what gets remembered: the cresting, triumphant call; the phrasings, like Harris’ proclamations of “How sweet it is,” that fans invariably glaze in nostalgia.

But the job isn’t just catchphrases and dramatic buzzer-beaters; most games are more mundane, far less dramatic. After all, it is work, requiring excessive preparation, featuring thousands of seconds—and opportunities to misspeak each broadcast.

Moreover, when the medium is audio, there’s no hiding. Shumate’s voice can’t betray the job’s rigors, the fact that except for the summer, he works sixty hours a week, occasionally traveling so much he’ll lose track of holidays.

And Shumate can’t seem anything less than enthusias-

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W

hatever makes an announcer forms early. “Some kids envision hitting the home run to win the game,” he says, but growing up in a military family, bouncing around Hawaii, Virginia, and Panama before going to high school in Fayetteville, he dreamed of “being at the big sporting event and having a chance to call the game.” During his undergrad days at Appalachian State, he fell in with the student radio station; by his junior and senior years, he was the women’s basketball announcer.

In announcing, though, there’s no clear-cut path to success: You can’t take a GRE to prove you’re an enjoyable listen, and there’s a limited supply of broadcasting positions. It’s the kind of industry where you might need to call football games as Shumate did: on his own from a stadium’s photo deck (the slab of concrete in front of the press deck), for no listeners, just to get practice.

After graduating in 2006, Shumate took on odd jobs before starting law school at Hofstra the following fall.

“I knew I could do it, but I knew I wasn’t as passionate as some of the people who were enrolled,” he says. He didn't indulge his true interests until the first of September, when he tuned in to watch his Division-I-AA alma mater beat fifth-ranked Michigan, the kind of colossal upset that can only happen in college sports. He’d

The following spring, Harris retired, having called 471 Duke football games in a row. A decade and a day after watching the Mountaineers pull off the historic upset in Ann Arbor, Shumate stepped into the booth to call his first as Harris’ full-time heir. He had initially given himself a five-year cutoff to chase this dream, but in the intervening years, he says, “I always felt like I was progressing.”

“I think he’s a very mature announcer. Even though he’s only in his second year with us, he’s been doing this for a while,” says Roth. He highlights little things Shumate does—the pauses during big calls where Shumate “lets the broadcast breathe a little bit”—and the best practices Shumate has accrued working with radio teams across the country, which has led to steady tweaks in the past couple years. And Roth credits Shumate, in his role as director of broadcasting, with jumpstarting the Blue Devil Network’s podcasting arm and building out its social-media content, not to mention listening back to all of last year’s games to identify other chances for improvement.

It’s that focus, that need to always refine his skills, that has paid off for Shumate so far, and, he hopes, will continue for years to come. “If you get to the end goal, and you haven’t mastered the craft,” Shumate says, “generally speaking you’re not gonna be there very long.”

“You come up with a lot of information before you do a game, and you probably don’t use half of it. But he’s got the preparation part down.” be missing out, he thought, if he didn’t at least try to chase this career.

So Shumate left school, moving back to his parents’ home in Lynchburg. He started freelancing with ISP Sports—earning $30 to call a coaches’ show, maybe $100 for a football game—where he’d drive two hours each way and barely break even. He became an administrator in the Greensboro school system, which brought him closer to ISP in Winston-Salem and left him time in the evenings for announcer gigs. The following year, Shumate moved to Auburn as a temporary fill-in. But when the team’s longtime announcer died from cancer, he stayed on for two years there before moving back to Winston-Salem, where he steadily progressed at IMG College (the multimedia rightsholder for sports at more than ninety schools, including Duke; IMG acquired ISP in 2010). By 2016, when Bob Harris had a few conflicts with basketball games, Shumate was able to step in and show he was capable.

28 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

P

erfection isn’t exactly the goal: Shumate talks about how it was refreshing, when he was starting out, to watch SportsCenter anchors crack jokes when they flubbed lines. But so many things can go awry during a radio broadcast that to avoid the slightest setbacks requires constant awareness—Roth likens it to a coaching staff developing “contingencies” in their weekly game plans.

In Shumate’s case, these schemes are robust. “He’s got a plan for what he’s doing—he knows how to do the whole game,” says Roth. “You come up with a lot of information before you do a game, and you probably don’t use half of it. But he’s got the preparation part down.”

Shumate watches nearly every Duke practice, noting formations that could surprise the opponent on game day that he must explain with poise. He learns the stories of the team's hundred-plus players, listening in at head coach David Cutcliffe’s press conferences, trying to lace every call with “the context that the specific moment meant in the arc of the season, in the arc of how the fan would view it, in the arc of the program,” like Bob Harris would. And he builds out the spotting boards each week, adding in relevant background by hand.

He celebrates the small successes, the ones that listeners might not recognize as successes because they’re handled seamlessly. Like in the first quarter of the season, when Army unexpectedly lines up with the fullback under center and the broadcast doesn’t miss a beat. Or in the third, when Duke quarterback Daniel Jones completes a big pass to Jonathan Lloyd, putting the Blue Devils inside the ten-yard line. Shumate makes his call and hands it off to Harding, who launches into praise for Lloyd and his impressive training camp.

Which would normally be fine, except that Jones has hurried the team to the line and might snap the ball suddenly, and Harding is just starting his thought. A touchdown call might get mistimed—the ambient roar of the crowd spoiling the surprise.

But Shumate has spotted Duke’s heightened tempo, and he reaches out and merely touches Harding’s elbow. He says later that Harding is someBUSY MAN: one he knows he could do that Shumate records a to—his partner doesn’t cut off his halftime recap for thought mid-sentence like some social media. announcers might but instead ac-

celerates it slightly, giving the reins back to Shumate just in time for the snap, and the handoff to Leon Jackson.

“First and goal off the six, they go quickly—Jackson running right—FIGHTing through tacklers—INTO the end zone for a touchdown!”

The stakes aren’t Hill to Laettner; it’s an insurance touchdown in an opener that Duke will win handily.

But the salvaging of the moment reflects the announcer’s greater goal: to do justice to every second of airtime, to make every call as authentic and felt as can be.

It’s this pursuit that helps him work for three hours in a sweltering booth, plus sit around for a nearly hourlong recap, and never doubt what he’s doing. Plus, it turns out that the assumption is kinda true: With this job, even the mundane is worth appreciating.

“I always want to have that perspective of—you want to do a good job, you want to do right by the kids, you want to do right by the fans—but have the perspective that what we have the chance to do is pretty awesome,” Shumate says.

“I’m not sitting up there thinking, ‘Boy, I’d like to get home.’ No—where else would you want to be?” n DUKE MAGAZINE

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AIR

ORGANISMS

SOIL

WA T E R

ROCK

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TO THE DEEPEST ROOTS Critical zone science, a new cross-disciplinary field of study, unearths secrets held in the organisms that sustain us.

D

TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY BY

SCOTT HULER

an Richter Ph.D. ’80 and Will Cook ’88 are poking around the basin of a tiny tributary of the Tyger River in South Carolina, looking for a buried tree stump. It is overcast, and a steady rain falls, and they are not having much luck. The scientist who discovered the buried stump on a previous expedition actually stumbled across it while she was lost; her directions have been good but somewhat open to interpretation. So Richter and Cook slog up one drainage after another in the chilly December rain, boots sinking into sandy riverbottom.

Pines and bare, gray deciduous trees provide little shelter from the pelting rain; last fall’s leaves stick to raingear that itself sticks to skin.

It’s not a particularly pleasant morning, but nobody is in a hurry.

This is science. Science involves a lot of trying to find stuff, and if standing in the rain in a silty riverbottom in December is what it takes, that’s what you do.

Plus, nobody wants to give up easily. A buried stump is something of a holy grail if you’re trying to understand the history of a piece of land.

You can core the stump, which, when you count the rings, tells you how old it was when it died; then you can carbon-date that core, telling you about when that death occurred. Suddenly you have a moment: a very particular time when that stump stood, and that was ground level, and its surrounding sediments tell you what the ground looked like.

Then you can examine the sediments that have buried it, which tell you what kind of processes have gone on since then, in what order those progressed, and what’s been going on since that tree stump first grew, far beneath the surface on which people now walk around. You have what the new discipline of critical zone science seeks above all things.

You have a story.

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Story is central to critical zone science, a new cross-disciplinary field of scientific study born in the beginning of the twenty-first century yet containing a nineteenth-century soul.

Engaging scientists who practice biology, pedology (the science of soil), ecology, hydrology, geology, geochemistry, geophysics, biogeochemistry, geomorphology, climatology, and even—in some ways, especially—anthropology, critical zone science describes its area of study as “treetops to bedrock.”

That is, it concerns itself with the living skin of the Earth.

Start tens of meters deep, where bedrock minerals begin to crumble into regolith (what scientists call the bottommost layer of soil, constituted mostly of broken pieces of bedrock), where only the deepest roots may penetrate. From there, reach to the tops of the tallest of the trees stretching down those roots, and you’ve found your critical zone—the zone critical to all the life on Earth.

Richter, professor of soils and forest ecology in the Nicholas School of the Environment, is right in the middle of this burgeoning new discipline, and Cook is his field lab manager. Richter talked about the critical zone a day and a half before the hunt for the stump, as Cook drove their car four hours through the dark early morning from Durham to the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory, a 2,078-acre patch of piedmont upland that is one of only nine CZOs in the country. Richter is one of about a dozen principal investigators at the CZO, which he slyly calls the “Calzone,” but he coordinates the research there and was largely responsible for its creation in 2013.

The National Science Foundation started its first critical zone observatories in 2007, though Richter notes that the science fully emerged in a paper published in 2001: “There is a founding document, if you will,” Richter says, which calls the critical zone “the heterogeneous, near-surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living 32 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources.” A mouthful—you can see how “treetops to bedrock” has taken its place.

Richter, meanwhile, has been doing work on soil for decades, probing its depth, its makeup, its processes, doing some of his work from his earliest days at Duke in the Calhoun. “Some of his dissertation work was on USFS experimental forests,” says U.S. Forest Service scientist Mac Callaham, director of the Calhoun Experimental Forest, in which the Calzone is located. “And he has always known or somehow intuited the potential of a critical zone research station. We used to do a lot of camping down there whenever we were doing fieldwork. A lot of time around the campfire talking about the potential here.” The Calhoun wasn’t one of the initial six CZOs when the NSF started the program in 2007, but Richter kept up the pressure, and it was in the second wave, officially opening in 2014. “He wanted long-term, networked, highly collaborative NSF-funded research at the Calhoun. And he’s worked toward that goal for twenty-five or thirty years.

“So he’s it. He is the heart and soul of this.”

After Chorover et al, 2007. Catalina-Jemez CZO. Based on an image by Ralph Kindlimann. Courtesy of Jon Chorover and colleagues, Catalina-Jemez Critical Zone Observatory

ON THE HUNT: Clockwise from left: Dan Richter (left) and Will Cook address a GPS unit as they duck out of the rain while seeking a buried tree stump; Richter and Cook in the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory; critical zone scientists say their area of interest stretches from “treetops to bedrock.”

cus on the soil, the land—the critical zone of the critical zone, where everything jumbles up, the connective space. Raw materials and the life that needs them mixing together in the great blender of the soil.

Many experiments are going on at any time at the Calhoun CZO, but Richter and Cook make the car ride down every three weeks to gather three things: soil moisture readings, soil gas measurements, and baskets of leaf litter. They visit sites divided into three types—some agricultural, some covered by the pine succession forests that have taken over abandoned crop fields, and some still covered by legacy hardwoods, soil barely changed since before Europeans arrived. Together those sites tell the story of the Calhoun Experimental Forest and of the piedmont itself.

The forest was created in 1947, its land chosen specifically because it represented “poorest Piedmont conditions,” in the words of Louis Metz M.F. ’47, Ph.D. ’50, the U.S. Forest Service scientist who wrote an early history of the forest and was part of the original group of scientists who created the Calhoun on land in the Sumter National Forest. Its charge from its creation was to try to understand the story of piedmont farmland, overfarmed by settlers using poor agricultural techniques and then abandoned.

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“It’s really a beautiful pattern. CO2 builds up and O2 is depleted because of respiration. The land is literally breathing.”

he best way Richter can explain the critical zone approach is by bringing up the models of past centuries. The twentieth century was a time of enormous growth in scientific disciplines, but also a time in which those disciplines became siloed, he says. Geologists had their concerns, soil scientists had theirs, biologists had theirs. Even ecologists, working to connect things into a system, seemed to leave out much that happened when you got below the surface of the soil. Before that, though, scientists took wider views. “That’s what Darwin did,” Richter says. “Darwin got three geological awards even as he worked on biology.” The twentieth-century embrace of specialization resulted in a great depth of knowledge and marvelous tools and techniques, but it separated scientists, limiting collaboration and understanding.

“Biologists and geologists haven’t mixed for so long that there’s a lot of work we can do together. Now it’s time to share and react and interact. There’s a lot pent-up and discoverable because we’ve been so stuck in our stove pipes and our silos.”

So welcome to the critical zone. And though the critical zone spans, as they say, from treetops to bedrock, it has a special fo-

“Some thought that the more farms a man could wear out the better farmer he was,” Metz wrote. In many places in the piedmont—and throughout the Calhoun—scientists estimate more than a foot of topsoil has washed away, leaving what writer Robert Montgomery in 1929 called “a miserable panorama of unpainted shacks, rain-gullied fields, straggling fences, rattletrap Fords, dirt, poverty, disease, drudgery, and monotony that stretches for a thousand miles across the cotton belt.” The Calhoun scientists have had the job from the very start of looking for ways to help the piedmont regenerate from that catastrophic human misuse.

Many people look at the successional forests of loblolly pines that have grown up in those abandoned fields and declare the land to be healed of its centuries of abuse. Not Richter.

“This is a green blanket,” he says of the pine forest. “Lift up a corner of the blanket...” and profound questions arise. How well are those loblollies taking carbon from the air and storing it in the soil?—a question now of profound importance. Critical zone scientists are on that. When you clear-cut land, the traditional story says the land dries out; but some studies seem to show that in clear-cut land, rivers not only flood faster during DUKE MAGAZINE

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major rains but maintain higher base flows as well. As the Carolinas work to dry out from only the most recent catastrophic flood, how hydrology mixes with not just geology and climate but also land-use history could not be more important. Critical zone scientists explore not just carbon and water cycles but also energy budgets through systems—vital in a warming world.

And critical zone scientists are looking ever more closely at the soil itself. The soil has centuries of land-use habits in its very composition. Critical zone scientists help it tell its story, when that story may help save our planet.

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“The other day I was driving down the road and I broke out in utter laughter. I just realized how lucky I am. I found what I wanted to find, what I needed to find. And it’s the lowly soil.

It’s the earth.”

ichter comes to that storytelling, collaborative, boundary-crossing nature of critical zone science rightfully. He majored as an undergrad in philosophy, only ending up as a scientist after a few unscripted post-college years made him decide to go back to school. A little time in New York trying to become a photographer, a hike of about half of the Appalachian Trail, and when Richter was trying to figure out what was next, his girlfriend—now his wife, Susan—suggested forestry.

“I had never heard of forestry,” he laughs.

“I had never heard of natural resources, I had practically never heard of ecology. I was so deeply involved in the liberal arts; that made me sit up.” Forestry schools had loads of prerequisites, but when he reached out to Mississippi State, where Susan was returning home for an M.B.A., they asked him to prepare only by taking a summer-school course. So he went along and took a class taught by G.L. Switzer and L.E. Nelson. The class changed his life.

“It was two months of hot, hot, hot midsummer in the swamps of Mississippi, in the uplands,” he says. “And I remember exactly the day where Switzer got us on this bus, no air-conditioning,” and took them to a stand of pines to discuss soil.

“The guy’s on his knees,” Richter recalls. “He’s in this reverent position. He’s scraping off the pine needles, and he’s digging his hand into the earth, and all of sudden he’s recounting basically the environmental history of the land, with the slaves and the Faulkners and the people.” It wasn’t just minerals and earthworms and beetles and decaying plants; it was history, the history of everything.

“And I’m saying, ‘Nobody in this damn world is doing this!’

It’s like philosophy—or good writing. There’s something underneath that’s so powerful. I saw that in soil.” Richter knew what he was doing for the rest of his life.

A couple of semesters at Mississippi State led him to Duke, where he got his Ph.D. in soil science, and in his work now he brings that same enthusiasm and reverence to the soil and to the story it carries. “The other day I was driving down the road, and 34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

I broke out in utter laughter. I just realized how lucky I am. I found what I wanted to find, what I needed to find. And it’s the lowly soil. It’s the earth.” He also brings that liberal-arts background. He has started a textbook chapter he wrote by quoting Faulkner on the past not being past, and in conversation he recommends reading not just Lyell and Darwin but also T.H. Huxley’s lecture on chalk, in which Huxley notes “a great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk.”

Richter sees the history of the piedmont in the Calhoun CZO soil.

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ichter and Cook park by the side of an asphalt two-lane. They have spent all morning making such stops. From their car they take a suitcase filled with instruments they call the black box, and they carry it to a spot in a pine or hardwood grove. They uncap plastic pipes that stick out of the ground, dangle sensors to varying depths to measure oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases flowing through the soil.

Beyond merely measuring gases, they take samples, filling tiny balloonlike bags to take back to labs for further analysis. When they’re on sites that include trees, they also put in paper bags the leaf litter that’s fallen since their last visit, emptying laundry baskets lined with screens that let rain out but capture every pine needle, leaf, and nut that’s dropped from above to interact with the soil. They’ll grind up the litter and test it for nutrients; they’ll test the soil for how well those nutrients seem to be integrating.

At other times they’ll core the trees to see how well they grow in soil with those nutrients.

They’ll measure the trees, count them, do some multiplication, and figure out how much tree biomass different types of soil like to support. Cook uses a credit card to scrape out the tiny pieces of grit that gloved hands miss when gathering leaves from the screened laundry baskets. A few measurements, a few samples, and they close the black box and head to another site. They have a lot of ground to cover and only so much time. They want to finish in a single day so they can sleep overnight in the tiny spartan house they use as a headquarters and spend the next day looking for that stump.

This time they walk up a double-track to a spot along a wire fence between two green-gold harvested cornfields. This is an agricultural plot, but they take the same measurements. “Oxygen is stable at 20.1,” Cook says, and Richter makes a notation as crows call, the wind whispers through nearby pines, and the sun angles its way through the sky; a gentle breeze lifts spider silk from goldenrod, and it floats away. They start their work around 9 a.m. and continue until it gets dark, taking readings from more than a dozen different spots. They don’t break for lunch.

It’s a long day. For a while they’re joined by colleagues from

Georgia, who are using larger and more cumbersome machinery to take soil moisture readings. The various readings the group is taking are the basic science, the creation of data that yield an understanding of how the critical zone goes about its business.

“The amazing thing,” Richter says, “is the beauty of the data set that has emerged” from the various projects that have been going on in the Calhoun CZO. “It just emphasizes how dynamic the ecosystem is.” At one point the group takes readings alongside a metal structure called a land atmosphere flux tower, which looks a little like a utility pylon. “Its instruments are above the canopy,” Richter says, and it measures fluctuations of carbon dioxide and water, the exchange between the land and the atmosphere: “It’s the integrated signal of the whole critical zone.”

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hat signal, in a way, is the story.

Sharon Billings Ph.D. ’98, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Kansas University and one of Richter’s Calhoun collaborators (and his one-time grad student), explains. Richter and Cook send their little balloons of gas to Billings’ lab, where apart from just amounts of, say, carbon dioxide, she determines the original source of that

carbon. Soil microbes, like all living INSTRUMENTAL: The briefcases full of things, breathe; the soil gas the team equipment Richter samples contains the carbon they exand Cook use to hale. Different sources of carbon have gather soil gas samdifferent isotopic signatures, and so ples in the field were by checking isotopes, “we can make designed by Zach inferences about the kind of carbon Brecheisen Ph.D. ’18. [soil microbes] are using to make that CO2,” Billings says. “You don’t have to go too deep before you hit a region in the soil where the microbes are still telling the story of their past that the layperson walking through the forest might not know.”

For example, one isotopic signature comes from what soil scientists call bomb carbon. Nuclear-bomb tests taking place from 1945 through the early 1960s released radioactive isotopes of carbon.

All over the world, plants photosynthesized that carbon, moving it deep into the soil through roots, building it up in leaf litter. Within the soil, microbes release that bomb carbon in their respiration.

That specifically dated carbon enables Billings to figure out which carbon is going where in the Calhoun. In the samples from reference hardwood plots, she says, roots of trees hundreds of years old go very deep, pumping fresh carbon meters deep in the soil. In the agricultural plots, deep soil gas is “much more reflective of bomb carbon,” which hasn’t moved for decades. The successional pine forests are moving more fresh carbon more DUKE MAGAZINE

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Megan Mendenhall

deeply, but nothing like the hardCOLLECTIONS: Only the tiniest fragment wood forests. That tells a story not of the soil samples just about soil but also about carbon gathered in the sequestration, of vital importance on Calhoun Long-Term a warming planet.

Soil Experiment over These studies have been going on more than fifty years since 1947, when Metz and his cohort started the experimental forest. Metz’s colleague Carol Wells in 1962 started gathering soil samples about every five years, allowing scientists to see what was going on at particular depths as time went on. When Richter returned to Duke and joined the faculty in 1987, Wells was nearing retirement, “and he was literally giving away his old experiments.”

Richter took on the soil samples, and he now manages that longterm soil experiment, not only gathering new samples every few years but also working on new ways to better examine what remains of the original samples. With every new experiment or measurement, the remaining sample grows smaller, so Richter’s team finds ways to gather more information using less material. “He took me to the Calhoun, and I could see the potential,” Richter says of Wells.

“Then it basically took over my life.”

“The whole weathering process is mediated by respiration,” Richter says—by plants taking in water and carbon dioxide and sunshine, breathing out oxygen into the air and, underground, breathing out carbon dioxide into the soil. “Roots, fungi, earthworms, bacteria. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water, creating carbonic acid, and that attacks minerals, interacts with fracture systems and groundwater.” A liberal-arts major to the core, Richter turns quickly to metaphor: “It’s really a beautiful pattern. CO2 builds up, and O2 is depleted because of respiration. The land is literally breathing.”

A professor in his master’s program likened soil to skin, the largest organ in the human body, but Richter likens soil to a treadmill—as the top layer erodes, the bottom layer is always building, and so minerals freed by weathering move their way up through the soil toward the surface. It can take a million years for it to move a meter or ten, but that’s the process. “It’s the bio-geo connection I’m interested in documenting,” Richter says. “It’s a very simple point, but I don’t think it’s very well appreciated at all.”

And the interdisciplinary nature of critical zone science helps make those connections. “I wouldn’t feel confident in a biology

“There’s a lot pent-up and discoverable because we’ve been so stuck in our stove pipes and our silos.”

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department,” he says, “but when you get a small group of people, and they’re motivated, they do stuff.” Soil people, biologists, geologists, chemists, physicists, modelers—whatever they take a notion to study, someone in the group will have a needed skill.

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nd anthropologists. Don’t forget anthropologists. Apart from all the bugs and the animals and the plants and the water, the energy budget and the carbon cycle, the critical zone includes the study of people. Nowhere are the people who play a role in the living history of the land itself more central than in the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory, where the Tyger River flows and Richter looks for its stories.

“You have the people right in the middle of it,” says Richter.

He tells a story of connecting with people at one of the tiny Baptist churches in the Calhoun. Walking near one of those churches, he met two men collecting trash, got to talking, and began getting information about the people in the area, the people in the cemetery, and even slaves buried in unmarked graves nearby. “You ask about the history of the church, and you’ve got a friend on your hands—and a repository of information.” He’s walked the terrain with people using dowsing rods to show him where they believed people were buried.

That kind of connection is fundamental to critical zone science. “We’re trying to capture that lived experience,” says Calhoun anthropologist Don Nelson, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia. “The way people think about their environment now. Get them to walk the landscape with us and talk about what they see.”

That personal information helps tie things together. Cook has mosaicked a series of aerial photographs from 1933, from when the U.S. government was buying the land to create the Sumter National Forest, from which the Calhoun was created. Grad student Zach Brecheisen Ph.D. ’18 georectified those joined photographs, and the resulting image can now be connected with data gathered in the field as well as LIDAR images of the soil. (LIDAR works like radar but uses light from a laser instead of radio waves.) Deed chains and census data can provide a lot of information about land-use history, but often that person walking along the road has information worth a month of calculation and research.

“It’s a time machine,” Richter says of the Calhoun and its riches. “We love that aspect.” And again, the people are at the center of that study. “They can help us interpret the landscape in ways the census alone won’t do,” Nelson says.

“Dan talks about the underlying hypothesis that drives the science,” Nelson goes on. “While everything looks pristine and love-

ly at the surface, the past land-use history has fundamentally changed the way the biogeochemistry and hydrology actually function.” With investigator Michael Coughlan, now a research associate at the University of Oregon, Nelson has published papers beyond biogeochemistry and how the Calhoun came to represent the “poorest piedmont conditions.” Their most recent paper addresses land-use history going back not just to those ruinous post-Civil War farmers but all the way back to Native Americans. “We have this general narrative that people ruined the environment: namely, sharecroppers,” Coughlan says. “But maybe European colonists did their slash and burn farming, and they started ruining the environment.”

Native Americans of the late-Mississippian era practiced bottomland agriculture that didn’t degrade the environment, says Coughlan. The first Europeans settled where the Native Americans had lived, but even then, things didn’t immediately go downhill. “It didn’t happen until plantation economy.

Slavery allowed the key European-American players to amass a great amount of wealth and clear a lot of land. That’s when the degradation starts occurring.” Their results begin to give a sense of the human story of the Calhoun lands from their earliest days. “This is not land use in the abstract,” he says.

“But we’re actually able to say this particular area was part of a plantation, one of the first to expand and become the idea of the pre-Civil War slave cotton plantation, so we can look at those things and how they have differentially affected the landscape. The goal will be to start connecting these findings directly with the stuff that Dan Richter is finding with the soils, because we can actually account for the histories and why different things occurred in different places.”

Add in the mosaicked maps and deed trails, and you end up with that critical zone ideal: information about the soil, the trees, the hydrology, the geology, the history, the people. Oh, and speaking of history, what about that stump? “We went back down there,” Richter says, “and found three of them!”

Right where he and Cook had been looking. “With those three stumps, there’s six feet of legacy sediment.”

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he stories don’t live only in the Calhoun CZO, of course.

For one thing, in Richter’s lab the entire history of the long-term soil experiment started by Wells lives in a beautiful wooden cabinet, with brass drawer pulls, filled with jars of soil. A sign on the cabinet calls it “the gold mine,” which Richter regularly says it is. Walk through the lab, and you’ll find rows of carefully labeled tree cores, like boxes of pencils, and even 3D-printed representations of some of the topography. For another thing, another researcher doing work near the Calhoun is currently suggesting that the piedmont soil, long perceived as almost purely created by that treadmill up from bedrock, in some places includes colluvium—stuff from landslides, which aren’t usually included in piedmont models.

“The best thing of all,” he says, “at the base, there’s peat!”

That indicates a buried wetland, and significant Earth move-

ments a hundred thousand years ago, but what thrills him is the unexpectedness: “We need to overhaul how we look at Piedmont bedrock contributing to the soil. It’s right at the heart of why I find humanities so important to the sciences.”

That is, scientists had similar theories in the 1930s, but their research was sidelined by World War II and mostly forgotten.

Knowing not just the science but the history of the science? That’s critical zone thinking.

Once you’re thinking in a critical zone way, you never stop crossing boundaries, and no experimental forest can contain you; the ideas just roll forward. Richter recently got to thinking about “the irony about changing soil so much yet knowing so little about it.”

Humankind has had enormous effects on soil, yet soil remains understudied. Which to Richter has brought up cities.

“The whole United States, its soils have been mapped. Each county has a fairly detailed soil map. But the funny thing is, the cities are unmapped. Where we live is the frontier. The places we’ve modified the most are the places we don’t have a map of. That leaves us with, for example, urban soil lead problems that are incredible.”

Scientists have gotten to work on that, and “now there’s enough blood data on kids, especially young kids, so you can map where kids or families live.” Lead turns out to travel in the top one inch of soil. “It’s not a water problem,” Richter says. “It’s a soil problem.” Lead from the auto fuels in use in the 1950s through the 1970s, from lead paint that has flaked off houses and been ground into the soil. Older and poorer neighborhoods—of houses with lead paint and yards nearer big roads, where gasoline products settled for decades—are most affected. And again: The lead isn’t in the pipes, it’s not in the air. It’s in the soil.

“For me, this was a discovery, like last year,” Richter says. “I was appalled at myself ” for not seeing the issue sooner. “But it goes to the heart of what a soil is. It’s a memory. It’s a legacy of everything that has gone on there in the past. It so well represents everything that has gone on in our cities. Lead has been removed from the gas and the paint thirty years ago, but it’s still in the soil.” Kids track it in and out of the house, then the house gets contaminated.

“You can predict lead concentration in the blood by merely soil variables.” Richter has already written an op-ed with a graduate student urging cities to test and map city soils like counties and states have done for their more natural soils.

“It just reminds me how little we know even about the soil that’s most directly connected with us,” he says. “Maybe that’s my niche. I mean, it goes right to the heart of what the soil is.” It goes right to the heart of the critical zone.

It goes to the heart of the story. n

“While everything looks pristine and lovely at the surface, the past land-use history has fundamentally changed the way the biogeochemistry and hydrology actually function.”

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The EMPATHY PIECE The quest for “hard skills” exerts its pull. But Duke’s schools also respond to a different imperative: Future professionals should serve interests larger than themselves.

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BY ROBERT J. BLIWISE

t’s a lecture hall without fancy features, exenduring and sacred.” He’s no fan of PowerPoint slides with cept for the model of a human skeleton occupying words like “autonomy,” “beneficence,” “non-maleficence,” one corner. Typically outfitted first-year students and “justice.” He celebrates, rather, “friendship,” “practical file in—backpacks, laptops, water bottles. They’re mentorship,” and “community” as helping to nourish “living wearing white coats, which prove useful for accomtraditions, authentic habits, and robust practices.” modating the accessory of a clipped-on DukeCard.

The question driving Eberly’s musings is: Can professionalism, broadly conceived as a humane pursuit, be taught? The The white coats mark the start of the journey to become a answer from Duke’s professional schools is: Yes, right from physician; they were awarded in a formal ceremony a couple the beginning. of days earlier.

The Eberly essay invites a deeper exploration, so we arrange Anthony Galanos, a professor at the School of Medicine, to meet on campus, right after he takes in a lecture on faith introduces a woman in her mid-twenties whom he identifies and science. We sit down in the library’s von der Heyden just as Jessica, an intimate witness to the human dimensions Pavilion, a glass cube that offers a ready-made metaphor for of health care; he’ll be “gently interviewing” her. The lecture-hall conversation is one element of “LEAD,” an acronym looking out and looking within. He’s a recent fellow of the (creative wordplay being an emblem of the academy) standTheology, Medicine, and Culture program at Duke Divinity, ing for “Leadership Education And Development.” LEAD is through which, in 2017, he earned a master of arts in Christian studies. He took largely about “being courses on medicine able to effectively listen, communicate, “I wish every single patient we cared for and storytelling; theological bioethics; and and conduct oneself got better and went home. But that’s not the theology of illness, with an understandreality. Some never make it home.” ing of one’s own and suffering, and death. others’ motivations He also volunteered and feelings in a meaningful way.” And Galanos is modeling with Reality Ministries in Durham, which applies the power patient-centeredness. of friendship in working with adolescents and young adults When I’ve thought of professional-school education, I’ve who have profound disabilities. imagined mastery of a standard toolkit. Hey, medical stuWhat a humbling thing it is, he says, to be sitting with a dents, welcome to gross anatomy. Nursing students, here’s young woman with cerebral palsy who tells you she wants to your dose of pharmacology. Business students, you’re ready to pray for your success as a physician. figure out financial accounting, right? Law students, it’s time In our conversation, Eberly veers effortlessly from Aristotle to amend your understanding of constitutional principles. to Aquinas to the divinity school’s Stanley Hauerwas. Aristotle would say we do our work as professionals because it Watching Galanos, I see a more expansive vision. Then I matters for large purposes. Eberly would add that formation run into a commentary by Brewer Eberly, a newly minted and habituation begin at moments of transition—like the doctor whose Duke connection is with the divinity school. transition to professional school.

Writing for STAT, a life-sciences website, Eberly wrestles with At the medical school, the large purpose of medicine drives professionalism in medicine, which he defines as “something Mieris, Frans van the Elder (1635-1681). The Doctor’s Visit. Scala / Art Resource, N.Y.

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Talking with Hughes, the lecture-hall dialogue: I think back to the medGalanos ’75, the doctor; and Jessica, now ical and divinity student-turned-essayist, seasoned in the patterns Brewer Eberly; in his reciof physician communication. “We wish we pe for professionalism, he could dictate how the refers to “practical mentorship.” That’s exactly story ends,” he says to what Hughes finds with the students. “But nature Galanos, a palliative-care always wins.” It was just specialist whom he calls over a year ago that Jessica lost Oz, her new hus“an inspiration.” band, to a raging cancer.

Jessica is—and Oz was— about the same age as the “It’s no longer the case that you can be a few buildings students. “I wish every brilliant numbers cruncher or IT person, away on the single patient we cared medical camfor got better and went and that’s your only contribution.” pus, students assemble home. But that’s not reality. Some never make for the first meeting it home.” of the formidably titled “Health Assessment and Foundations for Nursing PracOne day at home in South Carolina, Jessica’s then-boyfriend, tice Across the Lifespan.” These are students in the Accelerated Oz, got down on the floor to fix a TV and complained that Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, a second degree prohis back was hurting. From that discomfort, as Jessica recounts gram for undergraduate degree-holders. with remarkable poise, followed multiple medical consultations Their course is coordinated by Kathleen Ashton M.S.N. ’09, and a series of diagnoses—muscle strain, a slipped disk, a lesion an assistant clinical professor. On the big screen of the lecture on the spine, lymphoma, and finally sarcoma. A local doctor hall, Ashton is showing an image from her personal scrapbook, said if this was indeed sarcoma, Oz would want someone else to a lake scene along the Blue Ridge Parkway. She soon wades into be treating it. That was after ten days of testing. “You’re hoping the school’s statement of philosophy; among other things, it for solid information,” Galanos says. “But it comes out in drips, celebrates relationships with patients that “reflect respect for not gushes.” dignity, diversity, integrity, self-determination, empathy, and a Jessica did a lot of Web-based searching and ended up at capacity for grace and empowerment.”

Duke, close to where both had gone to school and close, as As nurses, Ashton says, we take care of human beings. Kind well, to family members. of obvious. But what comes to mind when we think of human The students listen intently; they’re remarkably resistant to beings? Lots of ideas come up in the lecture hall. A moral comthe lure of their electronic devices. Galanos asks Jessica about pass. Growth and change through different stages of life. The interactions with doctors: What was helpful? What was not desire for a meaningful life. Relationships. Biases. Advocacy, helpful? He tells the students that patients and families remember everything that was said, and everything that was not said, someone mentions, and Ashton rides with that: Advocacy is a in the course of treatment. “cherished value” in nursing. Well, as human beings, we look I have a chat with Cecily Peterson, assistant professor of medto growth and change through different stages of life, another icine and associate director of LEAD. She tells me medical stustudent suggests. Ashton’s co-instructor for the course, associate dents have long argued that it’s not enough to be steeped in a clinical professor Beth Phillips, takes an opportunity to make a science-heavy curriculum. Being a good doctor means not just point: You will be changed in this profession. Caring for others familiarity with the traditional medical toolkit, she says. She’s in such an intimate way will force you to think about your own big on “emotional intelligence”; and she sees medical education, life choices. in part, as “a process of self-awareness and self-management.”

The next day, Ashton offers another picture. It’s taken from It’s advice that’s stuck with Dalton Hughes, now in his fifth the American Journal of Nursing, and it shows a patient being year in Duke’s joint M.D./Ph.D. program. His aim is to specialsupported by a nurse as they navigate a hospital hallway. That ize in neurobiology, go on to a psychiatry residency, and comsparks another class discussion. How do patient-nurse relationplete a fellowship in palliative care. As he was starting out, he ships compare to other relationships? Students talk about the listened to an exchange similar to the one I witnessed. “You’re complications that arise from the nurse knowing a lot about reminded of the fact that you’re not only walking into an interthe patient’s health status, even as the patient knows little about esting medical case. You’re walking into a whole life. How do I the nurse. It’s a power differential worth pondering. They talk make sure the care I provide is in line with that?” about conveying respect through body language, tone of voice,

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Rembrandt, van Rijn (1606-1669). The Wardens of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, Known as ‘The Syndics’. Art Resource, N.Y.

and gentle physical touch. And they talk about trust.

Rather, she wants students to be finding good avenues for inA colleague in an adjoining office teaches another course for teraction—looking that patient in the eye, catching that smile the newest nursing students, “Wellness and Health Promotions when he mentions a spouse, affirming that he is already making Across the Lifespan.” That’s Jacqui McMillian-Bohler, an assissmart decisions, having a conversation rather than operating off tant professor. At the beginning of the semester, the course ina check-list. volves students in a “motivational interview” simulation with a Nurses, in Ashton’s view, have to be operating with empathy “standardized patient.” The standardized patient is, in essence, along with knowledge. “There is an expectation that a nurse will an actor playing the role of a patient—in this case, someone admit a mistake, like a medication error,” she tells me. “That who was told by his main health-care provider that he’s overtakes maturity, honesty, integrity, courage, and a commitment weight and his blood pressure is too high. to put someone else’s well-being ahead of a need to preserve In the simulated encounter that I observe, the student nurse oneself. I think it would be hard to be a nurse if one wasn’t introduces herself to “Wyatt.” He explains that he’s a long-haul willing to get into messy, unpleasant, and hard stuff—assisting trucker; typically he’s on the road for eleven hours every day. someone with basic bodily needs or dealing with messy societal The truck-stop offerings pretty much consist of burgers, hot stuff such as the consequences of racism or poverty.” dogs, and pizza. He regularly walks all around the truck for a Imagine speaking for someone who doesn’t know how to safety inspection, and at home there’s always yardwork. That’s advocate for himself or herself—maybe even someone who, about it for exercise: “I can’t be a gym rat two hours every day.” because of a stroke, has no voice at all. “All of that requires a Wyatt mentions that his wife occasionally prepares trail mix, selfless willingness to take on another’s experience.” chicken wraps, and salads as on-the-road supplements.

The student encourages Wyatt to look on that as a good start. She asks if he’s here’s plenty of willing noiseinterested in a suggestion or two. What “Many first-year making among the newest about combining exercise with family students arrive students at the Fuqua School time—say, going together for a walk? of Business. I watch them get down to And yes, even a ten- or fifteen-minute with only a passing business at the Triangle Training Cenwalk counts. understanding of the ter, a wooded enclave about twenty-five Eberly, in the STAT essay, calls out miles west of campus in Pittsboro. On authentic habits and robust practicpower of the law and es among the markers of professionthis hot August afternoon, they’re neimagine that fact and alism. And McMillian-Bohler echoes gotiating a forty-foot climbing wall and truth will win out in that thinking. The point of the exercise a high-ropes course. One challenge has isn’t to show off early expertise in givthem walking in pairs along two divernearly every case.” ing medical advice, she explains to me. gent wires. Another has them spinning a metal ring until it buzzes; they then pass that still-buzzing ring to their colleagues without interrupting its spin.

They shout advice as their (sometimes roped-together) peers struggle to scale up the wall or to keep their balance: “Kick off!” “Lean back a little bit!”

“Watch the purple line!” “Go right, then left!” “Do like Michael Jackson!”

And along with advice, encouragement: “You can do it!” “Just five more steps!”

“You’re a natural up there!”

Staffers later have them reflect on what, in business lingo, might be called the takeaways: The individual perhaps looks on a particular task as impossible, but it becomes doable from a team perspective. And as collective energy goes into making it happen, the team becomes, in essence, more of a team.

All of that suggests a focus on the process—not so much on the task alone.

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Daumier, Honoré (1808-1879). The Defense Lawyer. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, N.Y.

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It’s a different set of tasks a few days later. The neighborhood is pretty much a baseball’s throw from the downtown Durham Bulls stadium, and the student teams are at work on several Habitat for Humanity sites. They’re wearing “Duke Fuqua” work gloves and somewhat wordier T-shirts—“Building Community/Habitat for Humanity Durham-Duke.”

There are quick lessons in how to use a circular saw. Soon the students are measuring and cutting planks, making connection points for drywall, framing doors and windows, applying insulation, sheathing exteriors. It’s another (noisy) exercise in collaboration.

This is all part of what Fuqua—which, of course, also likes references to leadership—calls its “Consequential Leadership,” or C-LEAD 1 program. The faculty lead for these experience-based activities is Gráinne Fitzsimons, a Fuqua professor of management and organizations. She says the modern organization is a collaborative environment. Sure, business students need a lot of hard skills, a lot of quantitative exposure.

But Fuqua’s students, from the start, will be assigned to teams.

Their first-year courses—accounting, economics, strategy—all have at least one team-oriented assignment or project.

Their cohort, in a larger sense, is meant to function as a support network. “It’s no longer the case that you can be a brilliant numbers cruncher or IT person, and that’s your only contribution,” Fitzsimons tells me. “You really need to know how to work with people.”

As their formative years at Fuqua kick off with such active endeavors, the students slip easily into “team” talk; they’re quick to pick up on Fuqua’s well-established credo around collaboration. But all that team-spiritedness can sound purely instrumental. Can a focus on working collaboratively help create a better person, and not just a better executive? To answer that, I engage, naturally, with Duke’s own Empathy Development Lab, whose principal investigator is Rita Svetlova. “Working in teams is a great way to increase all kinds of cooperative behaviors,” she tells me.

Beginning around age three, children behave with others in ways that reflect whether or not they collaborate with them.

Svetlova points to studies that have looked at what happens when children work together to get common resources—say, if they collaborate on grabbing four toys. What happens, then, when the resources are “accidentally” distributed unequally— 42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

three toys for one, one toy for the others? If they’re seasoned collaborators, the three-toy child happily shares her extra toy with her somewhat deprived peer. But if children don’t have the experience of working together, they’re much less likely to share.

“Collaboration promotes a sense of fairness and also a sense of care for the others,” Svetlova says.

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nother Duke school, another bit of wordplay around “leading,” and for these students, a series of early encounters meant to impress them with—to borrow a phrase from the Eberly essay—“living traditions.” Students start out as first-year law students, or Duke 1Ls, with “LEAD Week”; here the acronym points to “Lawyer Education And Development.”

The 1Ls meet Kerry Abrams, the dean of the law school; she’s new to Duke, just like them. Abrams talks about the social-justice aspects of the law and her own specialties, immigration law and family law. And she brings up her early pro bono work: It had her handling eviction cases on behalf of low-income residents in New York’s Chinatown and standing up for mentally disabled men who, in a Medicaid kickback scheme, had been forced to endure unnecessary surgeries.

One of the lead-in events to LEAD Week is a “Professionalism Luncheon” at the Washington Duke Inn—complete with guidance for professional-luncheon etiquette. Caryn Coppedge McNeill J.D. ’91, president of the North Carolina Bar Association, talks about legal practice as a grand calling, including the grand ambition—so basic to justice, and so often unrealized— of providing access to legal services.

The students stand and recite the Duke Law School Pledge, which commits them to the Duke Law Blueprint. Basic to the blueprint: the assertion that “the student experience at Duke Law will be transformative of the whole person, and not merely a means to obtain a formal credential.”

Other LEAD Week activities build on that blueprint. One is a screening of the documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt. In 1984, Hunt, an African American, was convicted of the rape and murder of a white newspaper editor near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. DNA results proved his innocence in 1994; it took another ten years of legal appeals to exonerate him. Some tears flow in the audience, and there are sounds of sniffling, and World War I (1914-1918). Clinic in Poitiers Station (1915). Colored Engraving. Album / Art Resource, N.Y.

then some questions for the lawyer for Hunt, who’s attending the clinics involve a teaching component and closely supervised the screening. legal work.) Other 1Ls work with the Duke Cancer Center; Duke’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic worked on the case. among other tasks, they help with the preparation of power-of-attorney forms and advance directives.

The co-director of the clinic, Theresa Newman, tells me: “Many Butler, for his part, will follow Duke Law with a two-year jufirst-year law students arrive at Duke with only a passing understanding of the power of the law, especially in the criminal-jusdicial clerkship. Then he’ll return to the Washington law firm tice system. And many imagine that, in the end, fact and truth where he interned this past summer. While there, he sought a will win out in nearly every case.” The documentary demonpro bono project involving Social Security benefits for a young strates how fragile that boy. His embrace of that project was, he says, “inspired by promise is, she adds, and my experience at the youth how “heartbreakingly slow “It would be hard to be a nurse if home”; he likes to think his lethe path to justice” can be. one wasn’t willing to get into messy, gal path will always have him As for the enduring unpleasant, and hard stuff.” “serving the common good.” impact of that story, for lawyers-to-be—well, I go back to Rita Svetlova at the Empathy Development Lab. She talks about the “identifiable victim effect.” It’s well known that people are more likely vivid cancer story continues to unfold back in the to donate disaster-relief money if they see a picture of one hurt medical school’s lecture hall. For Oz, the patient at the child than if they are told about thousands of victims, she says. center of the story, there would be periods of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, none of which, it turned out, sty“Part of the reaction to that child’s picture—or to a powerful mied the spread of aggressive tumors. Galanos, the doctor, takes story—is the thought that it could have been me, or my child, these doctors-in-training back to Oz’s final night. Oz, sedated, or someone I care about.” appeared comfortable. That changed, with increasingly severe So any kind of a personal connection is important for eliciting empathy—which is a big part of the law-school journey brain swelling. When he took his last breath, it was almost a for Patrick Butler. Last year’s president of the Duke Federalist relief, says Jessica, Oz’s widow. After his death, friends would Society and now a 3L, he tells me he “vividly” remembers learnask her about adjusting to “the new normal” in her life. “The ing over LEAD Week about Darryl Hunt, and learning more new normal. I’m not sure I like that phrase.” broadly that the law has a real impact on people’s lives.

The students have lots of questions: How do you distinguish Butler seems to have remained faithful to that lesson: His between delivering bad news to the patient and to the patient’s favorite activity at Duke Law has been volunteering with the family? At what point should you bring up the possibility of Durham County Youth Home. The children are in juvenile counseling? How do you improve conversations around hospice detention, either transitioning out of serious incarceration or care—the sort of topic most doctors shy away from? awaiting a formal hearing. Among his projects there: a class on In the lecture hall, Galanos’ repeated message is that these “How to Talk to the Police,” teaching the children about their doctors-in-the-making would need to step outside themselves: constitutional rights and about the importance of treating offiTheir command of science, all the tech they have at their discers with respect. Volunteering has reminded him of “the reason posal, is great. But it’s about the patients and their families. that I attended law school in the first place: to help serve the Avoid the sort of “doctor prose” that just blurts out medical public good,” Butler says. facts. Ask something like, “Is there anything else we can do to As he talks about the profession, he embeds the greater purmake it better for you?” And ask the family member, “How are pose of legal work in justice, and even in empathy: “I put aside you doing today?” my worries over readings or assignments, and focus on putting Above all, be respectful. “It’s their moment, not yours,” he myself in the shoes of those children.” says.

Most states have either an “aspirational” or an ironclad ex“Everything you do is measured, quantified, codified. It’s up pectation that lawyers will do pro bono work, explains Stella to you to retain what is the soul of medicine. You don’t want Boswell ’90, assistant dean of public interest and pro bono. Aca twenty-six-year-old widow to say no doctor spent more than cording to Boswell, the most recent graduating class contributfive minutes with her.” Sometimes you won’t know what to do, ed 45,326 hours of public service over their three years, includhe adds. Crying along with the patient or the family member is ing clinics, externships, and pro bono work. From Day One, okay. Or maybe just sitting silently with them. she says, the school tries to impress on students that they’re now Just a few hours later, a first-year medical student, Monica members of the profession.

Bodd, e-mails Galanos. “Thank you,” she writes, “for reminding us of the limited power of biomedicine in favor of honesty, Early in their path through law school, some beginning students research cases for the Innocence Project. They work closehumility, and a listening ear with patients—especially at the ly with the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, among the oldest of end of life.” She expresses hope that she can cling to the idea of the school’s eleven clinics. (Geared to more advanced students, common humanity “throughout my own journey as healer.” n

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ForeverDuke

Within the space of Ryo Ragland is building community with his anti-café, yet he hopes to build vehicles for change in Serbia.

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By DREW ADAMEK, Photography by SAŠA ČOLIĆ

n a former ping pong table showroom on a busy to make udon noodles, why not go to an inexpensive street near Belgrade’s bustling central train and class and meet other people with an interest in Japanese comfort food? bus stations is Ryo Ragland’s coworking space And once he has those people together, he can leverand “anti-café,” Share Square. age them and their shared interests for social activism By day, customers pay by the hour for unlimited through partnerships with NGOs (non-government coffee and make-your-own waffles as they work. At organizations) and socially responsible companies, night, residents of the Serbian city have a community much in the same way that social-media companies center that offers dozens of classes in eclectic topics use our “likes” and connections for marketing purlike Japanese cooking, tarot card reading, calligraphy, poses. He’s creating a “physical social network” that and nature photography. gathers people. Rather than market to them, Ragland While at first glance Share Square seems like the kind aims to motivate them to tackle the myriad challenges of space that could be found almost anywhere—young facing Serbia. people sitting in hip furniture at long tables intently “People can participate in development if you can hunched over laptops with the obligatory hip-hop jazz multiply collaboration opportunities,” he says. “It beplaying in the background—it is, in reality, a daring comes a truly scaled development effort.” and innovative project. For Ragland ’07, it is the culmination of a lifetime spent community-building in Getting people together for the community good is some of the world’s most chala lot easier said than done in lenging environments. And he’s Serbia. The country’s sluggish using his grit, focus, and diverse economy, high unemployment, experience to do it in the most slide toward autocracy, and failing infrastructure all contribute unlikely of places. to the persistent “brain drain” of “People want to contribute educated youth, the very people to the community, but it can who can drive the type of social be prohibitive to discover ways engagement Ragland is seeking how,” says Ragland. “I’ve always to create. Add to that a culturwanted to do development al malaise, a history of socialist work in a more modern way, state dependency, and a bureauand bringing them together in cratic morass, and his ambition a self-interested way through seems almost impossible. classes gives active citizens a way “It will be a challenge, for to congregate and mobilize.” sure,” says Stephen Donegan, Ragland envisions Share CHANGE AGENT: Above, Ryo Ragland Ragland’s friend and a former Square classes as a real-world at the Share Square gallery; right, Ragowner of a shuttered yoga stuYouTube that brings together land with his dog, Mina, at the Belgrade dio in Belgrade who now lives like-minded people: Instead Waterfront in Geneva. “As Belgrade is pretof watching a video on how

44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

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ForeverDuke

ty much a mono-culture, he stands out as a rare foreigner tryand build communities ing his hand at business there. But the magic recipe with Ryo that nurture the well-being of all.” Those are is his naturally easygoing nature, his inventive mind, and his lessons he took to heart, work ethic.” even though he is not an active member of the faith now.

Still, Ragland certainly has the wind in his face when it “I spent a lot of time talking about spiritual topics,” he says. comes to building an activist community in Belgrade. Take “I’m very cognizant of how the Baha’i faith helped form my Jelena Petrovic, twenty-two, an external-relations intern at worldview. My identity is inseparable from that.”

Share Square. She’s young, well-educated, energetic, and deeply Perhaps even more formative was seeing the power of comconcerned about the direction of the country. But a lack of serious job opportunities has her now weighing whether to leave munity in action. His family moved to South Africa just as Serbia, even though she doesn’t want to. It’s apartheid was ending and Nelson Mandela was telling that to her an outsider coming to help released from prison. All around him, South tackle her country’s problems—without being African society was rapidly changing, and community groups were a key part of that transforpart of a major institution—borders on the un“I wanted to believable. mation. He saw, during those tumultuous times, “The first question that popped into my how collective action could bring about comget back to mon good. head when I first met him was, what are you doing here?” she says. “You’ve had so much the street level, Although he had a deep affinity for South Africa, he didn’t stay. He went to a Baha’i-inspired great experience in so many different countries where the high school in the Czech Republic, a much and so many things that you can do with your different environment from South Africa. At life and you can go anywhere in the world, yet most change home, his father was strict and, although Ryo you came here to start this.” can take was a high-achieving student, demanded a lot Ragland has long been steeped in community-building and service. Three months after he from him. He felt stifled. When he arrived in the place.” was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Czech Republic, he began to come into his own. to a Lebanese father and a Japanese mother, the “It was there that I learned how to socialize,” family moved to a small village in Swaziland in far southern he says. “I learned to appreciate the European café lifestyle.”

Africa. They were members of the Baha’i faith, a religion that After finishing high school, he was determined to attend emphasizes and practices equality and community through college in North Carolina to be near relatives still living in service and connection to others. As part of a Baha’i practice the area. Although he hadn’t followed the usual educational known as “pioneering,” his parents were the caretakers of a path—he was largely homeschooled in Africa, and he didn’t primary school and took part in other community-support acreceive a traditional high-school diploma—he was accepted to tivities throughout Swaziland.

Duke. Although he drifted away from the church, its core tenets of service and community remained with him.

Ragland spent his early years immersed in the Baha’i spiritual “I was having a lot of spiritual discussions then,” he says of his teachings “that inspire us to form deep and diverse relationships 46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

CITY LIFE: Ragland brought his community-building ethos to his adopted home, and his coworking space is doing well.

time at Duke. “I was struggling with what I ought to be doing, what I should be aspiring to, and what I could do to actually create change in the world with what I had available to me.”

That came to mean a career in international development work. After graduating from Duke, he became a program associate in an election-support organization based in Washington, D.C. He quickly moved into the field in 2008 as a caseworker for the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration in Iraq. He interviewed refugees seeking resettlement for nearly two years before moving to an agricultural-development program in Afghanistan.

After several years on the ground in war-torn countries, he needed a break and entered a graduate program in France and the London School of Economics. After graduating with master’s degrees in public affairs and public policy, he returned to Iraq as a project manager with a UNESCO literacy program. From there, he began working for the UN’s World Food Program in Rome. Yet despite the prestige and relative comfort of that job, he began to question the effectiveness of large-scale international development work.

“When you are at the UN, you are the system, and it becomes much harder to reach the people that can really create change,” he says. “I wanted to get back to the street level, where the most change can take place.”

That’s when he decided to return to Belgrade, a city he had first visited as a study-abroad student. Serbia has long been

off the international development community’s funding map, especially as more urgent strife racked the Middle East. Finding financing for projects was prohibitive. Ragland needed a way to support himself and his vision of more grassroots, community-based development, so he made another circuitous choice: He opened Marukoshi, a Japanese comfort-food restaurant, a seemingly curious choice because he had no real restaurant experience and Belgrade is a conservative culinary town that hews closely to tradition. The restaurant was a surprise hit with Belgrade’s fickle diners. But the venture became all-consuming.

“I thought I could operate the restaurant and use the profits to fund my development work,” he says. “But that turned into a full-time job, and I wasn’t getting to work on anything else.”

So, in 2017, he sold Marukoshi and opened Share Square with the proceeds. After six months of prep work, he opened the doors, to a mixed reception. The coworking space is going well, but the classes haven’t been as robust as he had hoped.

But things happen slowly in Belgrade; new concepts take time to settle in. Petrovic, the intern, acknowledges that. “Before I met Ryo and started working at Share Square, I wasn’t sure that people could make a difference in Belgrade,” she says. “Seeing what’s happening here is showing me that it is possible.” n Adamek is a writer who lives and works in Durham.

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ForeverDuke Newsmakers

Patrick Grady B.S.E. ’18 led a hydrogen fuel-cell car team, including Anna Li B.S.E. ’18, above, as the driver, to a Guinness World Record for the most fuel-efficient vehicle. (See story on page 12.)

Diego Palmieri M.B.A. ’98 was named vice president and chief marketing officer of Campbell Soup Company’s U.S. Meals & Beverages.

48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Hania Pool ’96 was named by Turner Sports to be the new senior vice president of NCAA Digital and general manager of Bleacher Report Live.

2018 Getty Images

Abhi Sanka ’17 was named a Science Policy Fellow in the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Damask Love Inmatestoentrepreneurs.org

Brian Hamilton M.B.A. ’90 is the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, which is helping former prisoners kickstart their own ventures.

Cameron Sholly M.E.M. ’10, left, landed a “park ranger’s dream job” as the new superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

Sarah Hirshland ’97 was named the twelfth chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Betsy Cook M.E.M. ’14, M.F. ’14 is the project manager for the Trust for Public Land and helped save 10,000 acres of land adjacent to the Appalachian Trail.

Amber Kemp-Gerstel ’02 is the crafter behind the popular D.I.Y. blog Damask Love and was selected to compete on NBC’s new primetime crafting competition program Making It; she finished in the top three.

Photo by Interior

Noël Bakhtian ’05 and Melinda Gates ’86, M.B.A. ’87 are named to Business Insider’s list of the “Most Powerful Female Engineers of 2018.”

Monica Schipper/Getty Images

Duke Electric Vehicles

After doing the stage musical of Disney’s Freaky Friday, Heidi Blickenstaff ’94 reprised her role in the made-for-TV movie, which premiered in August.

Former Duke swimmer Ashley Twichell ’11, center, became a repeat national champion in the women’s 10-kilometer at the USA Swimming Open Water National Championships.

Actor Ken Jeong ’90 stars in the box office hit Crazy Rich Asians, the first studio film featuring Asian-Americans in lead roles in twenty-five years.

7Have news to share

about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, traveled to Springfield, Massachusetts, and remembers .....

I met Grant Hill ’94 the first day of classes in 1990.

He was randomly assigned as one of twelve first-year advisees of mine—a role that would have us meet a few times throughout the semester to talk about his classes and future goals. We also got to talk about real-life issues that mattered to him. He was a basketball star back then, no doubt, but he also was a normal Duke student—trying to figure out whether he should major in history, which faculty member he should ask to do independent studies with him, what he wanted to get out of Duke. I remember those meetings fondly because as then-director of Duke’s Annual Fund, I might have asked him to sign a stack or ten of posters and T-shirts for donors. I also remember how kind he was, how he made friends everywhere he went. Those friendships have always been important to Grant, and I feel lucky he thought of me as one, too. When I got Grant’s invitation to attend his Hall of Fame induction in September, I admit, I had to open it twice. I was so honored. Grant and I have stayed in touch over the years, and I count him as one of the best examples of what it means to be “Forever Duke”—the way he has been involved in the life of the university and Duke students and alumni over the years is really remarkable.

But what really struck me was how many of his friends from all seasons of his life were there. He made us all feel so special even though he was the one being honored. And we were so proud! I’m still not above asking Grant for his autograph, but what is most special is knowing that we’re Duke family. n

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Awards

Beyond Duke Awards Recognizing alumni who have distinguished themselves through service to their community, their country, or society at large. Awards are given in three categories: Young Alumni, Local Community, and Global Community Young Alumni:

Katelyn Donnelly ’08, former Duke Student Government president who cofounded the Affordable Learning Fund at Pearson Venture Capital. The fund focuses on lowcost educational access in the developing world.

Local Community:

Akil Ross ’02, for

transforming his community as principal of Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., where he dramatically improved graduation rates by raising money for additional instruction for students who were struggling. Ross was named the 2018 National Principal of the Year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Global Community: Matt Oliva ’94, for efforts directing The Himalayan Cataract Project in Ethiopia.

The nonprofit works alongside local providers to eradicate preventable blindness in the developing world.

Did you know?

The C.A. Dukes Award was established in honor of Charles A. Dukes, Class of 1929 and Duke’s first director of alumni affairs.

Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service Honoring alumni and Duke parent volunteers who serve in Duke leadership roles and have devoted themselves to extraordinary, long-term efforts that help Duke further its mission.

Banny Lesesne ’68, M.D. ’76 | Shep Moyle ’84 | David and Marion Mussafer, Duke parents | Ruth Calvin Scharf ’80 | Ron Temple ’90

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...and This year’s class of awardees hail from three countries and twentyeight cities.

“A Duke education has transformed many lives, including mine. My goals are to help open doors for more people to experience a Duke education regardless of their economic means and to augment the benefits to society from the research conducted at Duke.” -Ron Temple ’90 50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

2018 DAA Awards

Forever Duke Awards

Celebrating our 2018 Class of Alumni All-Stars

Every year, hundreds of alumni give back to Duke through their service to the university and to their communities—and the Duke Alumni Association honors them with annual awards.

This year, these thirty-five alumni show what it looks like to take Duke into the world as leaders, teachers, mentors, and agents of change.

Distinguished Alumni Award

12,894

Higher Education Trailblazer: As the president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Sorrell has overturned the traditional college model with the launch of the first urban “work college.” He transformed the football field into a campus farm and began bridging gaps in financial inequity by requiring students to take jobs (which Paul Quinn secures) to offset their tuition and student debt. Everyone from Fortune—which earlier this year named Michael as one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”—to Duke alumni in Dallas, who recently co-launched a mentoring program with Paul Quinn students, are taking note.

More than 12,000 alumni volunteer for Duke every year.

Nichole Hines J.D. ’07 serves on the Duke Law Alumni Association board of directors and has led the South Florida board as co-chair from 2015 to 2017. Hines also has played an important leadership role in the increasingly popular Art Basel event, one of the most significant global alumni events, held each year in South Florida.

Every year, the DAA also awards several Forever Duke Group awards honoring alumni who have worked as teams on a specific initiative that furthers the mission of the university.

This year, there are three Forever Duke Group awards.

Mami Hidaka ’99 and Gabriel Tsuboyama B.S.E. ’00, for organizing an Alumni Career Night for Duke students

8,785

Michael Sorrell A.M. ’90, J.D. ’94

Did you know?

Patricia Baker Simon ’86 | Caroline Stouffer Brown ’04 | Ted Ebel ’92 | Whitney Evans ’04 | Robert Freedman ’88 | Andy Halpern ’80 | Bryant Harris ’05 | Nathaniel Hill ’12 | Nichole Hines J.D. ’07 | Scot Krieger ’83 | Kai Yu Lee B.S.E. ’17 | Courtney Lorenz M.E.M. ’06 | Michael Macari ’92 | Bernard Marglin M.P.P. ’99 | Ethan Marks ’11 | Louise Ward Meyer ’87 | Brandon Neal J.D. ’08 | Friedrich Schulte Hillen ’99

6,170

The DAA’s highest honor, given exclusively to alumni who have made outstanding contributions through their field of work, in service to Duke, and toward the betterment of humanity.

Recognizing alumni for excellent recent service to Duke, to the DAA, and to other alumni groups.

Round of applause for: Lauren Miller Apple ’10, Terri Farner Burke ’95, Amy Reydel Fuchs ’91, Donna Zavada Wilkinson ’89 These alumnae members of the Duke Field Hockey team volun-

teered their time over the past year to help the program accomplish something that is unprecedented for a group of student-athlete alumnae: Together, they raised $1 million for the Field Hockey program—calling former teammates and advocating for women in sports. Because of their efforts, the existing Field Hockey facility will get a much-needed upgrade in 2019.

Katherine Brogan M.E.M. ’13 and Vijeth Iyengar A.M. ’13, Ph.D. ’16, for efforts to create 2018

2016

2014

programming that incorporates more Duke graduate and professional school alumni into the larger Duke community

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Indonesia Number of alumni:

69

Instagram: @johndavis493

I

n the months ahead of a devastating series of weather events in Asia, including a tsunami and an earthquake, John Davis ’15 took a month-long trip through Asia—stopping in China, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia, where he took this photo at the Lempuyang Temple in Bali. “Truly a temple in the sky,” Davis wrote on his Instagram about his visit to the temple, one of Bali’s oldest and most celebrated.

BlueDevilLove

“It was love at first sight.”

n the romantic-comedy movie version, the love story between Megan Forlines M.M.S. ’12 and Devon Bostock ’11, M.M.S. ’12 would unspool something like this: Young members of rival families meet and, like their family members before them, instantly dislike each other. They date more “suitable” choices, bumping into one another only to trade insults. Then, one day, circumstances force them together. The ice starts to crack. She notices he’s not that bad after all. He discovers how funny she is.

A wedding unites their warring families. Their love is sealed with a kiss.

Of course, the real-life version didn’t follow a neat script. Forlines and Bostock met in April 2011 at Fuqua’s admitted-students day luncheon. She had come to Duke in pursuit of an M.M.S., after earning an undergraduate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. He was continuing his Duke education by earning the same degree. In the group of twenty gathered that day, she was the only woman. I’m not in fashion school anymore, she thought.

They sat directly across from each other; she thought he was cute. He had thoughts, too: “It was love at first sight,” Bostock says. He even remembers what she was wearing (“a white blazer”). But there wasn’t much conversation. “We might have talked for two seconds,” she says.

“I might have said hello,” he says. Bostock is the shy one, they agree. “She’s extremely smart and fierce,” he says now. “I love her and am in awe of her at times.”

When classes began in July, they continued their silence. In fact, they didn’t really talk for the first term. Bostock didn’t think she liked him. But Forlines was interested. “I would try to sit next to him in classes,” she says. “I would ask him if he wanted gum, or I would ask to borrow a pencil.” She told her sister, Molly, who was in her junior year at Duke, about the quiet guy. “She’d say, ‘Oh

my gosh, guess what? He talked to me today,’ ” Molly says.

They finally had their first date during their second semester at Fuqua. “I remember thinking he was a good yin to her yang,” says Molly. “He was a sturdy guy, way more than anyone she’d been with before. He was confident. When he spoke to you, you knew exactly who he was.”

Oddly, what neither Forlines nor Bostock noticed for a while was the weight of their familial names on campus. It was Molly who raised the issue with Forlines. “She told me his name, and I said, ‘You mean Bostock, like the library?’ ” Bostock remembers being on campus when Forlines House, the Alumni Affairs office, was named. Yet, he didn’t learn about the connection until six months after they first met. “I didn’t realize or really care,” he says.

Duke, he says, is “a very special place for us, and to be able to share that is special. But it could have been something else. This just happened to be ours.”

Still, at their rehearsal dinner, Bostock’s father, Jay ’74, presented a PowerPoint charting the ways their legacies have crisscrossed at Duke. In all, twenty-nine individuals in both families have attended Duke, earning twenty-seven undergraduate and seven graduate degrees over 118 years and through four generations.

The wedding was November 11, 2017, the anniversary of their first date, six years earlier. They married at a country club near Forlines’ childhood home. Ever the fashionista, Forlines’ “something blue” was a pair of Duke blue Jimmy Choo pumps.

“It felt intimate, like an old shoe,” said attendee and associate vice president for alumni affairs Sterly L. Wilder ’83, who worked with Forlines at the DAA and knew Bostock as an undergraduate.

“Everyone felt a part of it. It was warm and inviting, an incredibly happy celebration.”

And of course, there was a kiss.—Adrienne Johnson Martin Karen Hill Photography

I

Megan ♥ Devon

DUKE MAGAZINE

FALL 2018

53

ForeverDuke

THENNOW

Retro

“I saw the difference between those who had access to education—not just education, but a lot of things—and those who didn’t.”—Luis von Ahn ’00, cofounder of Duolingo, on how seeing injustices affected him for life

“I know it’s not popular these days, but the world’s energy dependence supersedes trends, politics, and individual/corporate agendas. There is no room for absolutes.”—Ericka Wilcher ’94, on why a future energy plan discussion requires compromise

POWs in the kitchen

In 1945, Duke hired some unusual employees. | By Valerie Gillispie

“We are fighting for New Yorkers’ financial security on all fronts, from classic abuses like Ponzi schemes and fee overcharges to the evolving risks to the public in trading cryptocurrency.”— Cynthia Hanawalt ’99, on her responsibilities after being appointed chief of the Investor Protection Bureau for the Office of the New York Attorney General

54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

W

orld War II had an enormous impact on Duke, from the curriculum to the student body, from research to athletics. The campus hosted the Navy V-12 program, training thousands of servicemen. With so many students and local Durham citizens occupied with the war, the campus struggled to manage.

As early as 1942, the lines were long in the West and East Campus unions and there was no one to clean up after basketball games.

A Chronicle article from April of that year lamented that “Spring picnickers have become the unsuspecting victims of the labor shortage, since the remaining employees are too busy to do the extra work involved when

the Union is asked to sup- HELPING OUT: ply food for such outings.” Students at To make up for the lack of the Woman’s workers, non-enlisted stu- College collect dents helped out in a vari- scrap during a ety of ways. By 1944, the World War II Woman’s College adopted drive. a plan that had twenty-two “coeds” taking shifts in the East Campus Union. The students pledged to donate their wages to the Red Cross or other charities.

Off campus, similar labor shortages were challenging farmers in harvesting their crops.

Some Woman’s College students helped pick cotton, although it may have been more of a lark than serious labor.

Duke University Archives

MANPOWER: Copy of a letter requesting POW labor

By the end of 1944, despite some student help, the university was desperate to hire additional staff for the West Campus dining hall and Duke Hospital. So they turned to a very unusual option, at least from today’s perspective: employment of prisoners of war. They were hardly alone in the practice—other universities and businesses also used

employment at the establishment.” They also had to certify that the wages paid to the POWs was the same that would be paid to regular employees in the same position.

The university arranged to transport the POWs to and from Camp Butner each day. A January 1945 Chronicle article reported that fifteen of these new university laborers worked doing laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning in the hospital, and ten more were tasked with cleaning in the West Campus Union. Their supervisors reported that “the prisoners are excellent workers, very industrious and cheerful and quick to catch on to the work.”

In March 1945, representatives of the university wrote to the state director of Manpower Commission, J.S. Dorton, to advocate that the POW program be sustained. H.C. Mickey of Duke Hospital wrote, “At present the Prisoners of War are doing all of our dish washing, all of our soiled linen sorting, and a large part of our housekeeping. Frankly, without this group of men we would be unable to operate.” Charlie Paul McFeaters, a captain in the V-12 program, also wrote to Dorton: “By personal inspection, I have particularly noted a great definite improvement in the cleanliness and upkeep of this mess [cafeteria] since the crop of German prisoners have been permitted to assist in this mess. If at all possible it is most desirable that

At one point, Camp Butner had over 2,500 German POWs housed at its facility. this labor source. In Duke’s case, the school took advantage of proximity to Camp Butner, northeast of Durham, which not only trained service members but also held a number of German prisoners of war. At one point, Camp Butner had over 2,500 German POWs housed at its facility. Many of them helped with the tobacco and peanut harvests and in the paper industry. A smaller number worked elsewhere.

Beginning in November 1944, Duke requested POWs to work in the West Campus Union (now the Brodhead Center) and the hospital.

Camp Butner took seriously the provisions of the Geneva Convention, which regulated treatment of POWs. Duke administrators had to pledge that “conditions of employment offered by this employer are not less favorable than those for other workers in the same or similar

the German prisoners be allowed to assist and thus greatly contribute to the success of the Officers’ program here . . ..”

By March 1946, the POW program was winding down, and the Germans were being repatriated to Europe. Treasurer A.S. Brower wrote to Colonel Thomas L. Alexander, who oversaw the Camp Butner POW camp: “The prisoners were available at a time when we were in great distress for employees necessary to operate the dining halls and hospital and were of immeasurable help in bridging this trying period.”

For more information on Camp Butner’s Prisoner of War program, see Robert D. Billinger Jr.’s Nazi POWs in the Tar Heel State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).

Gillispie is the university archivist.

n

DUKE MAGAZINE

FALL 2018

55

ForeverDuke In Memoriam

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

alumni.duke.edu

Retire to a Village full of bluebirds, hollyhocks, and people of all ages near Chapel Hill.

919-542-4000 | www.fearrington.com

1940s

William L. Keller ’41 of Austin, Texas, on June 9, 2018.

Elizabeth M. Smith Wagner ’41 of Monroe Township, N.J., on May 22, 2018.

John Armour B.S.C.E. ’43 of Ocala, Fla., on July 24, 2017.

Elizabeth B. Reinhardt Mabry B.S.N. ’43 of Atlanta, on June 6, 2018.

Vance B. Martin B.S.E.E. ’43 of Burlington, N.C., on May 21, 2018.

James R. Buckle ’44 of Richmond, Va., on July 8, 2018.

Anne E. Bennett Dodd Powell B.S.N. ’44 of Morganton, N.C., on June 7, 2018.

J. Powell Anderson ’45, M.D. ’49 of Waynesboro, Va., on June 1, 2018.

Rodman B. Funston ’45 of New Preston, Conn., on Aug. 1, 2017.

Gene Harlow Lewis R.N. ’45 of Atlantic Beach, Fla., on May 4, 2018.

Nancy M. Upshaw Egerton ’46 of Asheville, N.C., on April 4, 2018.

Corinne Puett Giannitrapani ’46 of West Chester, Pa., on May 23, 2018.

Lewis E. Keller ’46 of Lynchburg, Va., on May 25, 2018.

George B. Miller Jr. E ’46 of Ada, Ohio, on March 1, 2015.

Glenn W. Sunderland ’46 of Urbana, Ill., on June 7, 2018.

Paul W. Boyles ’47 of Fayetteville, N.C., on May 4, 2018.

Ludwick M. Clymer ’47 of Greensboro, N.C., on May 20, 2018.

Kirk I. Kea Jr. B.S.M.E. ’47 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on July 14, 2015.

Nina M. Braddock Keeley R.N. ’47 of Roanoke, Va., on March 7, 2017.

Richard B. Gochnauer Sr. B.S.M.E. ’48 of Baltimore, on Jan. 28, 2018.

F. Gregg Horne ’48, M.D. ’51, H ’54 of Ronceverte, W.V., on April 2, 2018.

Joel E. Martin Sr. B.S.M.E. ’48 of Charlotte, on June 29, 2018.

McLaurin M. Meredith B.Div. ’48 of New Braunfels, Texas, on Oct. 20, 2015.

Helen F. High Smith Cert. P.T. ’48 of Macon, Ga., on May 30, 2018.

Joan A. Angevine Swift ’48 of Edmonds, Wash., on March 13, 2017.

Norman H. Blatt H ’49 of Cincinnati, on May 14, 2018.

James M. Coffee ’49 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 5, 2015.

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Are you one for the books?

library.duke.edu/annualfund

ForeverDuke Dorothy L. Tinnin Gochnauer ’49 of Carmel, Ind., on Feb. 19, 2017.

Lewis Hodgkins ’49 of The Dalles, Ore., on Feb. 19, 2018.

Continued from the inside cover.

1950s

Jack W. Bergstrom ’50 of Durham, on June 4, 2018.

Marilyn Myers Bottin ’50 of Pekin, Ill., on May 5, 2018.

John C. Ellsworth ’50 of Charlotte, N.C., on May 16, 2018.

Jane Seaver Kirk ’50 of Munsonville, N.H., on May 22, 2018.

William C. Myers ’50 of Tyler, Texas, on May 25, 2018.

Hilda M. Olive Nelson R.N. ’50, B.S.N. ’80 of Rochester, Minn., on May 3, 2018.

Frank C. Patton Jr. ’50 of Morganton, N.C. on April 1, 2018.

Robert V. Rider Jr. ’50 of Salisbury, Conn., on May 26, 2018.

Elizabeth Allen Sterchi ’50 of Orlando, Fla., on May 13, 2018.

Charles C. Boone ’51, H.A. Cert. ’53 of Spartanburg, S.C., on April 21, 2018.

Richard L. Combs B.S.E.E. ’51 of El Paso, Texas, on Nov. 8, 2016.

H. Elaine Long Goolsby ’51 of Durham, on Dec. 19, 2017.

Kendall P. Hayes ’51 of Oro Valley, Ariz., on April 29, 2018.

Joan M. Clemence Lettas ’51 of Pittsboro, N.C., on June 4, 2018.

Nichols J. Melton B.S.E.E. ’51 of Charlotte, on April 16, 2018.

Thomas A. Dalgleish ’52 of Grand Rapids, Mich., on May 21, 2018.

John P. Engberg ’52 of Phoenix, on April 30, 2018.

James F. Schieve H ’52 of Red Bluff, Calif., on July 31, 2017.

Frank H. Alexander Jr. ’53 of Colorado Springs, Colo., on Jan. 31, 2018.

James M. Bacos M.D. ’53 of Bethesda, Md., on June 6, 2018.

Stuart O. Bondurant Jr. M.D. ’53, H ’56 of Chapel Hill, on May 26, 2018.

Elizabeth A. Brooks Reid ’53 of New York, on June 1, 2018.

Robert Friedlander ’54 of Sarasota, Fla., on June 4, 2018.

Ann Kelly Leake R.N. ’54 of Charlottesville, Va., on April 25, 2018.

B. Wesley Lefler Jr. ’54 of Concord, N.C., on June 16, 2018.

Virginia Flowers Baker Professor and Chief Emeritus of Orthopaedic Surgery James R. Urbaniak M.D.’62 and his wife Martha “Muff” Shawger Urbaniak B.S.N.’67, a former Duke University Hospital nurse and School of Nursing instructor, have dedicated their lives to the health and wellness of the Duke community. For Jim and Muff, designating a charitable IRA rollover to benefit student-athletes was the perfect way to carry on the legacy of Duke Athletics.

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

“We feel very strongly about Duke Football,” said Dr. Urbaniak. “It’s an investment in making this great university even greater.”

successes of our su world class student-athletes.

Now is the time to make investments that will build champions. @theirondukes The Iron Dukes The Iron Dukes theirondukes Daniel Jones ´20, Football, Redshirt Sophomore

Mia Gyau´21, Women’s Soccer, Sophomore

giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | #MadePossibleBy (919) 681-0464 | giftplanning@duke.edu

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

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DUKE MAGAZINE

FALL 2018 7/19/18 59 9:37 AM

Travel with Duke Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

Where do you want to go in 2019? #DukeIsEverywhere www.dukealumnitravels.com Photos courtesy of iStock unless noted

Alpine Splendor: Switzerland and Austria: July 25-August 7 Waterways of Russia Aug 2-13

Š Cindy Manning

GalĂĄpagos - also great for families!

August 2-11

Edinburgh & the Royal Military Tatoo Aug 5-13

ForeverDuke William P. Semon Jr. ’54 of Harpers Ferry, W.V., on May 8, 2015.

B. Rhett Chamberlain Jr. ’55 of Weaverville, N.C., on April 17, 2015.

Walter Dickinson B.S.M.E. ’55 of Sanibel, Fla., on May 11, 2018.

James D. Eagle ’55 of Newport News, Va., on May 29, 2018.

David Schimmel ’55 of Amherst, Mass., on May 4, 2018.

Theodore A. Snyder Jr. LL.B. ’55 of Walhalla, S.C., on June 29, 2018.

Martha Erwin Uzzle ’55 of Durham, on May 26, 2018.

J. Philip Bourne ’56 of Grandview, Tenn., on June 12, 2018.

C. Franklin Grill B.Div. ’56 of Southern Pines, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2016.

Virginia L. Crandall Horan ’56 of Marstons Mills, Mass., on June 4, 2018.

Nancy G. Mason Jones ’56 of Shelburne, Vt., on July 3, 2018.

Harold A. O’Callaghan Jr. ’56 of Rye, N.Y., on July 4, 2018.

James M. Sloan III M.D. ’56 of Asheville, N.C., on May 23, 2018.

W. Franklin Steele ’56 of Valdese, N.C., on May 15, 2018.

John H. Watson ’56 of Lutz, Fla., on Sept. 13, 2016.

Ferdinand D. Dawson III ’58 of Jasper, Texas, on April 17, 2017.

William B. Mewborne Jr. ’58 of High Point, N.C., on April 20, 2018.

Robert J. Shofer M.D. ’58, H ’59 of Palm Desert, Calif., on Oct. 19, 2016.

Lou Ann Brown Brower ’59 of Chapel Hill, on June 18, 2018.

Ann Aiken Koonce ’59 of Raleigh, on June 2, 2018.

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1960s

Catherine B. Clark Decker ’60 of Denver, on May 16, 2018.

Stuart E. Dow ’60 of Lake Forest, Calif., on March 29, 2018.

Edward A. Grimm ’60 of Washington, D.C., on May 30, 2018.

Patricia A. Futrell Trevarthen ’60 of Boca Raton, Fla., on May 28, 2015.

Robert A. Cruikshank ’61 of Atlanta, on April 14, 2018.

Theodore J. Humphrey II B.S.M.E. ’61 of Wilmington, N.C., on June 22, 2018.

Davis S. Margold ’61 of Rowayton, Conn., on May 7, 2018.

Carol E. Ellis Whitsett ’61 of Aiken, S.C., on June 16, 2018.

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FALL 2018

61

ForeverDuke ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS CHAMBER ENSEMBLE AIDA CUEVAS ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO AMIR ELSAFFAR BEATRICE RANA BRANFORD MARSALIS BRIAN HARNETTY BUIKA CALIDORE STRING QUARTET CAMILLE A. BROWN & DANCERS CATHERINE RUSSELL CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT CHARLES LLOYD & THE MARVELS CHITRASENA DANCE COMPANY CIOMPI QUARTET DANISH STRING QUARTET EMANUEL AX HAMID AL-SAADI JACK QUARTET JASON MORAN JAZZMEIA HORN JEREMY DENK KATE MCGARRY LATVIAN RADIO CHOIR LES VIOLONS DU ROY LIZZ WRIGHT LUCINDA WILLIAMS MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN MARIACHI JUVENTIL TECALITLÁN NELLIE MCKAY NEW YORK POLYPHONY NNENNA FREELON NRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE ODDISEE PRAGUE PHILHARMONIC CHILDREN’S CHOIR RENÉ MARIE STEVE DUKE UNIVERSITY’ S WORLD-CLASS COLEMAN WILL OLDHAM AKA BONNIE PERFORMING ARTS PRESENTER “PRINCE” BILLY ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS CHAMBER ENSEMBLE AIDA CUEVAS ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO AMIR ELSAFFAR BEATRICE RANA BRANFORD MARSALIS BRIAN HARNETTY BUIKA CALIDORE STRING QUARTET CAMILLE A. BROWN & DANCERS CATHERINE RUSSELL CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT CHARLES LLOYD & THE MARVELS CHITRASENA DANCE COMPANY CIOMPI QUARTET DANISH STRING QUARTET EMANUEL AX HAMID AL-SAADI JACK QUARTET JASON MORAN JAZZMEIA DUKEPERFORMANCES.ORG HORN

DUKE PERFORMANCES

Yolande J. Jenny A.M. ’62, Ph.D. ’68 of Duluth, Minn., on May 14, 2018.

Dilys W. Schuettler M.A.T. ’62 of Carlisle, Pa., on July 19, 2017.

Susan E. Dent Aronson ’63 of Portland, Maine, on March 24, 2016.

George M. Grills B.S.M.E. ’63 of North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on April 25, 2018.

Margaret S. House Rush Hankins M.R.E. ’63 of Greenwood Village, Colo., on April 12, 2018.

Donald E. Kreps ’63 of Wilmington, N.C., on March 29, 2017.

James P. Sherer A.M. ’63, Ph.D. ’66 of Charlotte, on Feb. 1, 2018.

David W. Trott B.S.M.E. ’64 of New Bern, N.C., on June 11, 2018.

Jesse L. Allen M.Ed. ’65, Ed.D. ’69 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Jul. 15, 2018.

Roger L. Morehouse Ph.D. ’65 of Pomona, Calif., on April 14, 2015.

William C. Rhangos H ’65 of Savannah, Ga., on May 31, 2018.

Sarah Mulder Thompson Anapol ’66 of Portland, Maine, on March 31, 2018.

Ronald L. Lamb ’66 of Pensacola, Fla., on Sept. 26, 2017.

Aaron R. Levin H ’66 of Mamaroneck, N.Y., on May 17, 2018.

William J. Casey ’67 of Tucson, Ariz., on June 9, 2018.

Chad B. Sandusky ’67 of Washington, on June 11, 2018.

C. Earl Davis M.Div. ’68 of Myrtle Beach, S.C., on June 17, 2018.

Clarence L. Ledbetter J.D. ’69 of Durham, on June 29, 2018.

1970s

Robert P. Behringer ’70, Ph.D. ’75 of Durham, on July 10, 2018.

Brian D. Bornhold A.M. ’70 of Ladysmith, B.C., Canada, on June 3, 2018.

Stephen E. Cheuvront A.M. ’70 of Chestertown, Md., on May 22, 2018.

Jesse W. Hill ’70 of Johns Creek, Ga., on May 13, 2018.

Paul H. Jewett H ’70 of Alamo, Calif., on June 13, 2017.

David C. Swarts B.S.E. ’71 of Fort Wayne, Ind., on June 23, 2018.

Nick G. Anas ’72 of Orange, Calif., on April 3, 2018.

J. Reagan Ransom Coker ’72 of Santa Fe, N.M., on June 23, 2018.

Charles E. Farrell ’72 of Chapel Hill, on June 5, 2018.

Gladys Ellis Bredenberg M.Ed. ’74 of Raleigh, on May 19, 2018.

Carol L. Vanatta Cromwell Ph.D. ’74 of Montpelier, Vt., on May 25, 2018.

Michael L. Manco-Johnson H ’76 of Greenwood Village, Colo. on June 18, 2018.

Eugene A. Holland B.H.S. ’77 of Washington, Mo., on April 10, 2018.

Christopher P. Ross ’77 of Durham, on May 14, 2018.

Paul H. Taylor Ed.D. ’77 of Cary, N.C., on May 16, 2018.

James T.R. Jones J.D. ’78 of Clarksville, Ind., on May 3, 2018.

Clare Frances Jupiter J.D. ’78 of New Orleans, on May 18, 2018.

Donald A. Mundy H ’78 of Burlington, N.C., on May 30, 2018.

Stephen E. Robinson Ph.D. ’78 of Provo, Utah, on June 17, 2018.

1980s

Gregory A. Raines M.Div. ’81 of Knoxville, Tenn., on May 27, 2018.

Timothy S. Owens A.M. ’82 of Loveland, Ohio, on June 11, 2016.

Paul M. Cheezem M.Div. ’84 of Leesville, S.C., on July 1, 2017.

1990s

Victoria J. Franklin-Sisson A.M. ’90, J.D. ’90 of Birmingham, Ala., on June 12, 2018.

Eugene J. Tom ’91 of Charlotte, on June 28, 2018.

Nora E. Carlton M.B.A. ’95 of Chapel Hill, on June 27, 2017.

Mary L. Lowrey Peacock M.T.S. ’95 of Chapel Hill, on July 19, 2017.

Katherine I. Clark M.S.N. ’98 of Bridgewater, Mass., on May 19, 2018.

Nathan B. Elliott ’98 of Hays, Kan., on June 3, 2018.

2010s

Jamie D. White ’10 of Whiteville, N.C., on June 3, 2018.

Rachel H. Silver ’15 of Asheville, N.C., on July 2, 2018.

2020s

Madison C. Pedrotty ’24 of Owings Mill, Md., on May 31, 2018.

62 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

WORKINPROGRESS

A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP

Ashleigh Smith JUNIOR

T

HESE IMAGES are from the beginning stages of my final project for my Duke in New York program. The goal of the final project is to both academically and creatively engage with the city of New York. My project focuses on memory, history, and contextualizing images as they relate to my familial ties to Harlem.

My project specifically pertains to my relationship with my grandmother, who passed away in September of last year. She was a Harlem native, and this part of the city shaped who she was and her outlook on the world. Growing up in the midst of the prolific cultural production during the Harlem Renaissance and surrounded by the influential political leadership of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Marcus Garvey influenced her sense of self, the way she looked at the world, and the values she instilled in me.

My goal is to re-contextualize images through collage and visual reinterpretation (as illustrated through these sketches) to tap into the nostalgia and memory so intrinsic to Harlem. This nostalgia is used as a link between my grandmother and me and our differing experiences with Harlem—given our different historical/sociopolitical contexts and engagements with the neighborhood. These sketches are only the beginning of a larger project that will work to bring both the Harlem of then and the Harlem of now into one place (and as an extension of that, my grandmother and me as well). n

64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Competing at the highest level Scholars on the field. Champions in the classroom. Elite performers in athletics, orthopaedics and sports medicine. Thanks to planned gifts supporting athletic scholarships, Duke students are transforming sports aspirations into world-class learning experiences.

Made possible by you.

April 12-14, 2019

During his outstanding Duke Football career, offensive tackle Gabe Brandner ’17 discovered his passion for health care. Here, Gabe conducts research in the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory to help prevent injuries in fellow athletes.

Read about Duke alumni and legends Jim and Muff Urbaniak’s planned gift to support Duke studentathletes on page 59.

Celebrate. Reminisce. Reconnect.

Come back to Duke Reunions and remember what it means to be Forever Duke.

CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994,

1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and the Half Century Club

Learn more about the weekend, see who's coming, and add your name to the list:

www.DukeReunions.com Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

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Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

What if

Weathering the rankings storm

there was a way for everyone in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

M AG A Z I N E

SPRING 2015

Travel with Duke

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

p.24

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30

Where do you want to go in 2015?

www.dukealumnitravel.com

nions 2016 evilishly Good Time.

It never gets old Five views of a fifth title p.20

15-17, 2016.

The chapel’s many roles p.24

The new DukeAlumni.com

All for One First-generation students—10 percent of

A student works for justice p.36

undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus.

p.28

| The meaning of eating

p.38

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

SPECIAL ISSUE

Coming Fall 2014

POWER

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

STORIES OF STRUGGLE, HUMILITY, AND TRIUMPH

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

Paris Immersion, Oct. 11-22

24

C. Ray Walker

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Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

SUMMER 2016

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+ At the Marine Lab, and other labs across campus, are taking research to new heights.

by you.

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Veteran Workers

32

38

Diagnosis & Discussion

If your class year ends in a 1 or 6, start planning now for your Duke Reunion: Go to DukeReunions.com for more information.

It never gets old

The chapel’s many roles p.24

Five views of a fifth title p.20

April 15-17, 2016.

The new DukeAlumni.com Coming Fall 2014

All for One

First-generation students—10 percent of undergraduates—are finding their voice on campus. p.28

A student works for justice p.36

An alumnus rejects his fear

p.34

| The meaning of eating

Learn more: www.dukealumni.com/connect/

Exploring the opportunities (and limits) of MOOCs

M AG A Z I N E

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p.38

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Now can he get back to the lab? p.24

p.24

Every Annual Fund gift adds up to the collective experience our students and faculty enjoy today.

And it’s all

REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R

made

Full Strength

Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

by you.

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31 T H E LA N G UAG E ISS U E

For students, missing out isn’t an option. p. 28

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THESECRETSISSU

At the Marine Lab,

E

and other labs

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SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

WINTER 2017

Go out there and learn

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

“We just love it there!”

Made possible by you.

across campus,

DRONES and ROBOTS are taking research to new heights.

With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary?

We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short video on drones at the Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C. Photo by Chris Hildreth

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

BEHINDTHESCENES What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

Whose home is this?

Vince Price

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

Epworth Forever

A New President Takes Center Stage

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

Jared Lazarus

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

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Issue after issue, Duke Magazine brings you insight into cutting-edge research, illuminating profiles of alumni, smiles drawn from campus memories, wonderment inspired by campus change,

Please support Duke Magazine. Checks payable to Duke Magazine (in the amount of your choice)

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm p.24

can be sent to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, N.C. 27701.

an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

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Game on!

To those just-as-wise-loyal-and-nice-looking readers who have meaning say, go tovarsity gifts.duke.edu, Inside thebeen making of theto, firstwewomen’s softball teamandp.24 type Duke Magazine in the search box or send your checks payable to Duke Magazine to 312 Blackwell Street, Suite 101, Durham, NC 27701.

Or donate online.

Go to gifts.duke.edu, type Duke Magazine in the search box, and select it in the drop-down menu

10/9/17 2:54 PM

ISSUE FEAR—along with its close neighbor, anxiety— is everywhere. Fear of immigrants. Fear within immigrants. Fear around the future of democratic institutions. Fear that artificial intelligence will overwhelm human endeavor. Fear that hotter temperatures and elevated sea levels will overwhelm nature’s balancing act.

I F YO U DA R E

And consider this item from the latest Harper’s Index: Among Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, twice as many are fearful

Edgardo Colón-Emeric M.Div’97, Ph.D.’07, assistant professor of Christian theology, is the new director of Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation.

Here, he teaches lessons of healing and harmony to Duke Divinity students and graduate students visiting from Central America.

and the chance to engage with your alumni community.

Epworth Forever

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Made possible by you.

_

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To those wise, loyal, and beautiful readers who sent generous donations in support of Duke Magazine, we say,

“thank you, oh, ones most blue!

We live only to serve thee!”

possible

How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

Pride. Nostalgia. Storytelling.

s this?

M AG A Z I N E

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

Weathering the rankings storm

How Duke learned to be a better neighbor p.30

Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18 Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

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YOU CONQUERED THE QUAD. NOW, THE UNIVERSE .

F I N D A LU M N I A N D S TA R T YO U R N E X T A DVEN T U R E .

Where do you want to go in 2015?

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Travel with Duke

Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

www.dukealumnitravel.com

NO. 3, VOLUME 104

THE

24

C. Ray Walker

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Paris Immersion, Oct. 11-22

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Crossing ethnic and denominational boundaries. Challenging poverty and inequity.

Reconciling differences. Gifts to Duke support the people, places and programs that empower us to complete our enduring mission of knowledge in the service of society.

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Justice and transformation

there was a way for everyone in the Duke community to stay connected to each other and to Duke?

DON’T MISS IT!

Reunions 2016 Always a Devilishly Good Time.

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

Jared Lazarus

M AG A Z I N E

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What if

10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

DUKE

A New President Takes Center Stage

48

MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2014

Renewal time for the chapel—along with a lot more of the historic campus

Familiar but now more audience-friendly—the renovated Page Auditorium

Made possible by you.

e, it was a place inspiration and s, as revelation. ng on page 38. s by Alex Harris

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Go out there and learn

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2015

MAGAZINE

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, “We just love it there!” and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

Vince Price

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2018

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A student experience like no other

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TH ES EC

DUKE

FALL 2017

SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

What’s going on up there?

Our cover story shoot came at the end of a long day for Vince Price, and yet, accompanied by associate university secretary Maggie Epps, right, he came in game for all Duke Photography director Chris Hildreth and Duke Magazine art director Lacey Chylack, left, asked of him. He agreed to a wardrobe change without a blink, and even jokingly offered a few theatrical poses. Photo by Bill Snead

video on drones at the Marine Beaufort,p.N.C. For students, missing out isn’tLab an inoption.

28 Photo by Chris Hildreth

DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2017

M AG A Z I N E

SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

DUKE MAGAZINE • FALL 2017

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

BEHINDTHESCENES

With the advances made in drones and robots, are people still necessary?

We explore that issue and more in our cover story. Here, graduate student Rett Newton, far right, launches a copter-style drone while fellow student researchers John Wilson, Elizabeth Mason, Julian Dale, and Nick Alcaraz look on. Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu to watch senior writer Scott Huler’s short

Always Be Choosing

Make your tax-deductible Annual Fund gift before December 31 and have an immediate impact on the Duke way of life. dukeforward.duke.edu/dec31

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possible

Shaped by the Duke Coffeehouse: Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson ’93 p. 42

DUKE

SUMMER 2017

DRONES and ROBOTS

How Coach John Danowski led his team toward a new tradition. p.22

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G E T H ELP W IT H YO U R N E X T C A R EER M OV E .

made

Full Strength

MAGAZINE

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REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER WORK A 9 —5?

Now can he get back to the lab? p.24 It’s the little things and the big things, the day-to-day and the momentous. It’s the individual moments that all add up to an experience like no other. As lifelong members of the Duke community, these are the things we remember that make Duke so special. And you can help them endure.

DVEN T U R E .

DUKE

COVERSTORY

M AG A Z I N E

WINTER 2015

Paul Modrich thinks winning a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is great.

D THE QUAD. RSE .

Oh, the places research can go! p. 40

Coastal Iberia Oct. 23-31

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Columbia & Snake Rivers Journey Oct. 27-Nov. 2

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Chasing the next autism breakthroughs p.42

Wai-O-Tapu geothermal pool, NZ Australia & New Zealand Oct. 28-Nov. 18

ON’T MISS IT!

rt planning now for your Duke Reunion: April Reunions.com for more information.

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rather than hopeful about the future of the country.

This issue explores some of the ways that fear factors into our lives. READ ON. And find some

Whether debating rat clauses or Robin Hood, the Honor Council fights for campus integrity.

fearless explorations into the theme of fear.

p.26

Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #MadePossibleBy

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