Duke Magazine Fall 2019 by DukeMagazine

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DUKE MAGAZINE • FALL 2019

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M AG A Z I N E

FALL 2019

The human factor

A researcher’s groundbreaking work explains what separates us from other primates XX

WELCOME! A special place just for you.

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April 17-19, 2020 Celebrate. Reminisce. Reconnect. Come back to Duke Reunions and remember what it means to be Forever Duke. CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995,

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Financial aid enables deserving students to attend Duke regardless of their ability to pay. With a planned gift for an endowed scholarship, Gerald Lee B.D.’61, A.M.’68 and Virginia S. “Ginger” ’62, M.A.T.’63, Ph.D.’75 Wilson are building an academic bridge for North Carolinians.

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Finish the story at: giving.duke.edu/bull-city-proud Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are forging an ever better world. What will you make possible?

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INSIDE

Fall 2019 | Vol. 105 | No. 2

SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT

The Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center stands like a beacon guiding you back home.XX. By XX Jared Lazarus

FEATURES:

COVER

The Cooperation Imperative

FORUM

THE QUAD

Michael Tomasello combines experimental psychology and a wide-ranging curiosity to explore what makes us human. By Robert J. Bliwise

A tiny fossil, a “genius” speaks, a campus kitty

FOREVERDUKE

Beppe Giocobbe

As the new director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Valerie Hillings ’93 is going places.

Something for the people Frank Konhaus ’80 and his wife, Ellen Cassilly, have turned their home into space for creativity and community. By Scott Huler

Alex Boerner

WORKINPROGRESS

Junior Thomas Barlow’s macro photography

COVER: Illustration by Beppe Giacobbe

Chris Hildreth

FULLFRAME SPLASH: Girl With a Dolphin, a gift from The Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation, adds a bit of public art to the grounds of the new Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center. Photo by Bill Snead

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

ometimes, through the force of unrelated events, a certain through-line helps shape an issue of the magazine. As this issue evolved, it became populated by non-human primates. The long-planned cover story concerns Michael Tomasello ’72, who is big on cooperation. That is, his work draws strong connections between cooperation and human experience. Rooted in psychology and neuroscience, he has earned acclaim for bold theorizing and imaginative experimenting: He looks at the sometimes parallel, sometimes diverging cognitive paths of humans and our closest primate relatives. Tomasello’s latest book, Becoming Human, appeared earlier this year. A review in The Wall Street Journal called the book “magisterial” for its merging of “primatology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and evolution.” Over the summer, word came of an evolutionary breakthrough that demanded mention in the Quad section of this issue. A team of scientists working in the Peruvian Amazon, led by Richard Kay, professor of evolutionary anthropology, had discovered the smallest monkey in the fossil record. The new species weighed about as much as a hamster. Or a cottontail rabbit. Or, depending on your preferred media source, a pineapple. No matter the analogy, it was a weighty find: It pointed to “a wholly original and hitherto unknown Amazonian fauna,” according to the published study. Late in the production of the issue, word came that Jenny Tung ’03, Ph.D. ’10 had received a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship—the so-called “genius award.” Tung is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and biology. The foundation cited her work in investigating the interplay among social experiences, genomics, and health.

That work toggles between a population of Kenyan baboons living in the wild and captive rhesus monkeys. “Tung’s research has important implications” in the human arena, the foundation said in a statement, with findings that suggest “a causal link between social and environmental adversity and poor health.” Primates of the non-human variety have a long history of being featured in the magazine. That particular evolutionary line traces back at least to the January-February 1985 issue, in a story carrying a title that still leaps from the page: “Leaping Lemurs! A Living Library.” Focusing on what was then the Duke Primate Center (now the Lemur Center), the story observed how lemurs, normally concentrated in Madagascar—where they were and remain threatened—had adapted nimbly to their Duke Forest surroundings. “They’re extremely good at loafing around in trees,” observed Elwyn Simons, then director of the center. A group of brown lemurs seemed pretty indifferent to all the attention: They were overhead in the pines, just doing their thing, hanging by one or two hands. But they were not silent on the scene. According to the story, they were joyous noisemakers, their particular noises best translated as “Merk! Merk!” Lemurs have human-like opposable thumbs and five digits. Or so declared that 1985 Duke Magazine story. But earlier this fall, Smithsonian, along with other media, reported on new research out of the Primate Center. Apparently aye-aye lemurs, which “look a bit like gremlins, with pronounced, clawed middle fingers,” sport “an extra tiny thumb, complete with fingerprints, giving these animals six fingers.” Our primate-related understanding, it turns out, is something else that keeps evolving. —Robert J. Bliwise, editor

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019 | Vol. 105 | No. 2 | www.DUKEMAGAZINE.duke.edu EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler STAFF WRITER: Corbie Hill CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Laura Meyer Wellman ’73, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2019 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

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DUKE MAGAZINE • SPRING 2019

Letters&Comments

DUKE

M AG A Z I N E

SPRING 2019

A worthy successor I was moved by the profile piece on Sandy Darity [“Sandy Darity Has Some Thoughts About Inequality,” Spring 2019]. First, congratulations to the magazine’s editors for the courage to take on the topic of racism as a cover story, not shying from its reality, and in fact, educating readers about the evidence for arguments about what some would call “radical” solutions to address our horrific national scourge. The article rightfully points out that Darity’s ideas and solutions aren’t so much radical as they are sensible, and they have antecedents in other national policies that have addressed injustice against specific populations in the past. Second, it just needs to be said that Darity is a most worthy holder of the Samuel DuBois Cook professorship. Professor Cook, my most influential teacher at Duke and a model of wisdom, grace, and character for the entire university community and beyond, was Martin Luther King Jr.’s deep personal friend and intellectual soulmate. He was also a fierce advocate for the “beloved community” about which King regularly preached—a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings. Professor Cook could not have envisioned a more bold, scholarly, and visionary person to honor his name and life’s work than Sandy Darity. Andy Burness ’74 Chevy Chase, Maryland Who will pay? The “Inequality” article amply covered Sandy Darity’s plans for reparations and a guaranteed job/income, but there was little discussion of how to fund his wish list. With the federal government currently running a deficit nearing a trillion dollars annually, due largely to ever-increasing “entitlement” payments, the reparations to blacks and guaranteed jobs that Darity seeks are probably going to have to come from another source. How about, instead, if the top twenty-five or so national universities

INVEST IN YOUR CLASSMATES. WE DO.

agreed to admit only African-American students for the next ten years or so, with all expenses paid? That would amount to reparations of a sort, likely job offers upon graduation, and would help to level the playing field academically for the foreseeable future. There would be an added benefit: This program would help reduce the large endowments, largely donated by privileged old white men, which burden the consciences of so many college faculty, administrators, and students. In fact, any remaining endowments at the end of the period could be contributed to a fund that would be disbursed equally to all descendants of slaves who did not participate in the college program. Perhaps Duke could lead the charge to go all in on Darity’s mission! Joe Wise ’66 Timnath, Colorado

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

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Handouts don’t help Nathan Glazer assisted L.B.J. in constructing the Great Society, a social program (1965) intended to eradicate poverty in America. Glazer, Charles Murray, and Daniel Moynihan soon saw the adverse effects of prolonged charity on black Americans, here described by Jason Riley: “Disadvantaged groups have been hit hardest by the disintegration of middle-class mores... and the expansion of the welfare state... the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, and crime.” Now comes Professor Darity proposing an Even Greater Society to close the much-advertised income gap. Baby bonds, guaranteed basic income, and a job for everyone are promised. Reparations for slavery, bound to further divide America’s races, seem to be the whipped cream on the cake. The enormous cost of such largesse is ignored, as are the adverse effects of more charity on family and work ethic. Please, professor, rethink your program, and try to see that more handouts will benefit

mainly vote-buying politicians, and will further weaken black Americans, who can achieve parity with whites only by their own efforts. Riley’s book, Please Stop Helping Us, says it best. Richard Merlo M.D. ’61 Elkin, North Carolina Not critical enough A comparison of the Wikipedia articles for Sandy Darity and Thomas Sowell is sufficient to show just how blinkered was your worshipful article on Darity. Absent from your article was critical thinking about human nature, the historical influence on Europe and America of various world views such as that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the universality (not rightness) of slavery in history, and Darity’s lack of concern about current slavery in the world (which is widespread, as Sowell observes), Darity’s questionable Marxist and current black American victimhood assumptions, his arbitrary rejection of Adam Smith (and any other economic writings older than a few decades—except Marx’s), and his ignoring of supply-side economics and the destructive impact of our welfare system and abortion-on-demand on the inner-city black family. Howard Killion Ph.D. ’72 Oceanside, California Worthy praise Just a quick note to tell you how much I enjoyed and admired Lucas Hubbard’s superbly written article about Sandy Darity. Sandy’s a Duke (and American) treasure, and Hubbard did a great job of telling us why in an engaging and insightful piece. Sentences like the folDUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

Letters&Comments... continued lowing are a joy to read: “It’s occupied his thoughts and research for at least a decade. And so, when pushed to justify its merits, Darity speaks with the terse, deliberate nature of a man on the phone with tech support, who knows how badly his computer is broken and is tired of hearing that he try unplugging it.” Osha Gray Davidson Durham

A senior in 1978, I was headed for medical school at UNC. I had decided to cease being the family outcast and simplify things by becoming a Tar Heel fan. But the Mad March victories that spring were so riveting, my blood turned True Blue. That was the beginning of it for me, and for the program. Betsy Coward Phillips ’78 Asheville, North Carolina

More winning, please I have been a Duke basketball fan since graduating in 1969 and have been disappointed that the recent freshman-led teams, other than in 2015, have failed to live up to expectations [“Just Can’t Win for Losing,” Spring 2019]. It is impressive to have the top-rated recruiting class for the past few years, but what has that accomplished? The last four national championship teams have been dominated not by freshmen, but by players who are sophomores and above, many of whom were not highly

Even the losses are exciting Those of us who attended Duke in the early 1960s can relate to the article “Just Can’t Win for Losing.” I entered Duke in the fall of 1961 as a fan of Duke football. The basketball team was a pleasant surprise. I had heard of Art Heyman being Vic Bubas’ first big recruit, but I did not know much about the rest of the team. My first year, Jeff Mullins joined the team after being ineligible to play the previous year as a freshman, but Duke lost in the ACC tournament.

As disappointing as it is to lose, having Duke to cheer for almost every year for the last oh-somany years has given me much pleasure. rated recruits. They were well-coached and developed into strong teams, which is what wins championships. Maybe Coach K should change his approach and recruit good high-school players who will stay around for a few years, coach them well as we know he can, and then maybe that next championship will become a reality. Coach Calipari at Kentucky has the same problem, but I am not going to encourage him to change! Mark J. Reasor ’69 Morgantown, West Virginia We got it wrong As always, I enjoyed my copy of Duke Magazine. But please be clear—it was the 1977-78 men’s basketball team, led by Spanarkel and Gminski, that went to the NCAA Final Four, defeating Notre Dame in the semis and losing to Kentucky in the final. Not the 1978-79 team. 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

The next year expectations were increased and then realized during the regular season with Duke losing only two games. At that time, the ACC tournament champion was directly placed in the regional tournament, which Duke easily won. It was then on to the Final Four, where Duke proceeded to lose its first game, to Loyola of Chicago, in an upset. The following year, Duke again tore through the regular season and the ACC Tournament and the NCAA regional tournament, losing only four games. Everyone thought that the championship would be decided in the firstround game. Duke, however, turned the tables on Michigan and moved on to play UCLA in John Wooden’s first appearance in the tournament. UCLA did not have a player over six foot, five inches and Duke was made the favorite. However, Duke could not contain Walt Hazzard and the rest of the team,

and we were again disappointed. In 1965, Duke lost to N.C. State in the championship game of the ACC Tournament and was denied a trip to the NCAA tournament, despite winning the ACC regular season. All Duke fans looked forward to the 1965-66 season; Bob Verga had the prettiest jump shot I have ever seen. ... Duke again tore through the regular season, the ACC tournament, and the NCAA regional tournament. The only close game was in the ACC tournament, when Dean Smith unveiled his four-corners “offense,” and Duke won 21 to 20. Duke’s opening game in the NCAA tournament was against Adolf Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats. Unfortunately, Bob Verga got sick after the regional game and played very little. Partly as a result, Kentucky won and again disappointed the Duke fans. The next night Kentucky, an all-white team like Duke, lost to Texas Western, an all-black team, in the championship game. For over ten years, that was the high point for Duke basketball until Bill Foster led the team back to the NCAA championship game and again lost to Kentucky. Over the years it has certainly been exciting to be a Duke fan. Marlin M. Volz Jr. ’65, J.D. ’68 Bettendorf, Iowa The pain goes even deeper Having just seen in person Duke’s last loss, to Michigan State, in the Elite Eight, this year, I share Shane Ryan’s agony of defeat feelings. However, he did not go back far enough in his discussion of Duke basketball. Duke went to the Final Four under Vic Bubas in 1963, 1964, and 1966. I watched the televised loses as an undergraduate in ’63 and ’64, and attended the ’66 tournament in College Park after graduating. It was glorious when we finally, finally won it all. As disappointing as it is to lose, having Duke to cheer for almost every year for the last oh-so-many years has given me much pleasure. And my family knows to stay out of my way whenever a Duke game is on. Elizabeth Morris Schwartz ’64 Laurel, Maryland

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DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2019

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Maybe a little more detail? I appreciate the value of brevity on The Quad’s DR/TL page, but the Spring 2019 issue squib about Duke paying $112.5 million to the federal government “to settle a lawsuit over faked research data” was misleadingly brief. I was horrified to think that my alma mater was involved in a UNC-level scandal, but as I understood it after a little Googling, the fraud was in the failure by those in the know to report that one individual used fraudulent data to obtain grants from the NIH, the EPA, and other agencies. That’s bad, of course, but my impression on reading the DR/TL report was that knowingly bad research data had been submitted with who-knows-what catastrophic consequences. I think it would have been better to omit that entry altogether and “come clean” in some detail elsewhere. Charles Philip (Phil) Clutts ’61 Harrisburg, North Carolina Classics rock! Thank you for the recent timely article on classical studies [“Timely and Timeless,” Spring 2019]. When I was an undergraduate, I was pleased to be with Professor Robert Rodgers for Latin 51-52. We met one day on a sidewalk of East Campus. He smiled as much as he ever did and said, “Mike, I was pleased to report to the dean recently that the Latin department has doubled its number of majors. Last year we had one; this year we have two.” Michael Malone ’59, Ph.D. ’70

In spite of the administration’s written support for the project in 2015 and the fact that Duke expressed no concerns about it during federal hearings in 2016, the incoming Price administration subsequently failed to work in good faith with Durham’s leaders to address concerns and move the project forward. North Carolina’s governor backed the light-rail project. So did both U.S. senators and our members of Congress. For the last two years, Durham’s mayor made clear to President Price that this was the community’s number-one civic priority. Light rail was a critical component of the area’s plan to deal with exploding highway congestion and provide affordable, reliable, sustainable transportation to Durham residents. Importantly, two-thirds of Durham Housing Authority residents lived within half a mile of one of the planned rail stations. Light rail would have provided convenient access for workers, customers, patients, and staff to three of the region’s largest employers, including Duke and Duke Hospital. It would have connected to a planned commuter rail line between Durham, the Research Triangle Park, and Raleigh, with a shuttle to the airport. Perhaps most important, it would have been a concrete action to reduce Durham and Duke’s carbon pollution and fight global climate change. Duke’s last voiced objections centered on potential vibration and electro-magnetic interference that the university said might impact Duke Hospital’s operation. In response, the agency managing the project had agreed to mitigate EMI at no expense to Duke for the life of the project and to abide by the same vibration standards that Duke requires of other major construction projects anywhere near the hospital. Still the Price administration refused its support. Duke Magazine may obfuscate Duke’s responsibility, but The News & Observer noted that: “Many of the nation’s leading medical centers are located in in-

Stamp of approval

From this Durham-issued construction permit, a future campus would take shape.

The other side of the story Duke Magazine’s Spring edition severely mischaracterized Duke’s role in the termination of Durham’s light-rail project [Update, Spring 2019]. The truth is that the Duke administration under President Price broke faith with the people of Durham and with Duke’s history of public service. As a Duke alum, former mayor of Durham, and volunteer advocate for this critically needed project, I can testify that Duke’s last-minute failure to support the project was the key reason for the project’s termination.

M A G A Z I N E

tense urban areas such as Chicago, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. These hospitals function safely and well despite rumbling trains and subways and major construction projects—sometimes their own—nearby. This isn’t about patient safety. It’s about a rich private university that doesn’t want its harvest of healthcare dollars inconvenienced by a major improvement in the region’s infrastructure.” Past Duke presidents Keohane, Brodie, and Brodhead did much to build a mutually supportive partnership between Duke and the Durham community. Unfortunately, the damage from Price’s decision and the bad faith shown will visibly linger for years, from increased traffic congestion to Duke’s failure to take a significant step against climate warming. As an active participant in civic affairs, I regret to report that this administration has squandered much of Duke’s credibility as a true and trustworthy partner for Durham. Wib Gulley ’70 Durham It’s very special I am thoroughly enjoying my hard copy version of “The Future” [Special Issue 2019]. I am only partway through it and am looking forward to reading the additional essays in the digital version. The profiles spaced throughout are a wonderful addition as well. Congratulations on assembling such an insightful and thought-provoking collection! Kris Klein ’82 San Rafael, California the future...issue

Undeserving honor You chose to feature Andrew McCabe [“The Discipline of Analysis, The Necessity of Faith”]? A man discredited by the FBI, fired for his lies? His future may well include some jail time. There are so many more honorable alumni you might have selected. Jim Liccardo ’67 Pawleys Island, South Carolina DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

Letters & Comments... continued A win for free speech? It was with a degree of sadness that I read the article in the Special Issue written by Andrew McCabe. Yes, Duke owes its graduates a platform; the tragedy is that time is unlikely to burnish his reputation with the esteemed glow that characterizes Coach Krzyzewski’s reputation. McCabe’s

stitution, the Electoral College, and the American voter, led him to contribute mightily to an atmosphere where “tougher challenges and darker times” slipped the blindfold off Lady Justice with the expectation that her eyes would see the world through his eyes, and more ominously, through the eyes of any one

Ironically, he failed to see the spirits of men and women rising ghost-like from the Pandora’s box that he opened, politicians yet to be elected who will author the very fate he fears: a tenuous and fearful nation where justice is no longer blindfolded. own words—the frequency with which he uses the pronoun I—proves that the person most impacted by his image of reality, the person most deceived by his “faith,” most tarnished by his belief in America will be none other than himself. Given the now-public and increasingly large legal record—including official e-mails sent by McCabe while employed by the FBI—McCabe imagines a nation I do not wish to live in. His words are not benign: “My former colleagues might be disappointed with my forsaking the discipline of analysis for optimism and faith in the American spirit.” His statement is a confession that he knowingly and willfully relinquished objectivity and tilted the scales of justice to satisfy his subjective opinion of a duly-elected politician and his (McCabe’s) subsequent willingness to negate the will of the very public that he claims to champion by removing, without due process, a legally elected president that he doesn’t like. If you recall, in 1860, the same Electoral College system that put presidents Trump and Clinton in office also put President Abraham Lincoln in the White House despite winning only 40 percent of the popular vote. That small portion of the American electorate opposed slavery and willfully triggered the Civil War in defiance of the 1857 Supreme Court majority decision (and appalling opinion) in the Sanford v. Dred Scott case. Mr. McCabe’s disdain, not only for Trump but by extension the Con8 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

person with the power to silence opposing voices—you know, that free speech bugaboo that yanked President Clinton from the jaws of shame. Who cared what he did in private, certainly not the American electorate. As many moderate Democrats know too well—including many of the people McCabe purports to protect—subjective justice is the foundation of tyranny. As he suggested, “This analysis paints a dark picture of our future, one in which division and politics tear the country into warring tribes, unable to unite around issues necessary to protect our nation and advance the lives of all Americans,” and he is right. Ironically, he failed to see the spirits of men and women rising ghost-like from the Pandora’s box that he opened, politicians yet to be elected who will author the very fate he fears: a tenuous and fearful nation where justice is no longer blindfolded. In the end, McCabe’s argument clarifies one point. He cares deeply about one person: himself. Not surprisingly, he failed to point out that free speech has become an endangered species in the United States. The issue has bipartisan defenders including Whoopi Goldberg, who recently rose in strong vocal defense of free speech and privacy within the voting booth. By printing McCabe’s article, you proved that free speech is not endangered in Duke Magazine. Kudos! Karen Humeniuk, P ’07 Greenville, South Carolina

Let’s be more inclusive I just enjoyed reading the latest issue of Duke Magazine over a cup of coffee. I appreciated the insight and creativity of the contributors in thinking about the future. I am, however, truly disappointed that women were not included in the roster of faculty contributors. It’s very much an artifact of the past to exclude—even unintentionally—women from our conversations. And we have incredible women on our faculty here at Duke. Their omission was striking, especially given the theme of the issue. Joyce Gordon Director, Jewish Life at Duke Not the Marxism he knows I just read “Seeing Beyond the Now” by Sydney Roberts of the Class of 2019. Given the hysterically retro and historically ignorant analysis of economics that she parrots, I assume she is a member of the Class of 1919. Certainly no one in 2019 could mindlessly recite Marxist dogma with no recognition of Marxism’s disastrous century of death, destruction, failure, and evil. Placing this foolish propaganda piece about the failed Marxist belief system in “The Future Issue” is the height of irony. Thanks for the laugh. Daniel Blonsky ’87 South Miami, Florida CORRECTION: In the Spring 2019 issue, a caption accompanying “A little help from civilians,” about an interdisciplinary course that connects students and alumni with military groups to help solve problems, included a misspelling of a student participant’s name. Her name is Akanksha Ray.

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.

Quad

THE Megan Mendenhall

LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

Center court: Trustee William G. Kaelin Jr.’79, M.D.’83, Hon.’18 awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine

Bil Snead

Small things: BioSciences greenhouse

Reagan Lunn

Megan Mendenhall

Skill building: Habitat for Humanity

Cool: Construction work on the Anderson Street Chiller Plant #3

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

THEQuad

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

ANIMALS AND MICROBES Tiny fossilized wrist bones indicate that early apes, living 20 million years ago, swung and climbed in trees millions of years earlier than was previously thought. / Look! A giant squid! / Also it turns out there once was a giant sort of tiger-y thing that weighed 3,000 pounds and had a head as big as a rhino’s and banana-sized canine teeth. Nice kitty. / High-status male baboons, who have to fight their way to that status, seem to have higher genetic activity in immune cells, perhaps because the strong immune function helped them achieve status; female baboons “inherit” status from their mothers, and their immune-cell genetic activity does not seem to vary with status. / The legless larvae of gall midges can jump high—right out of their petri dishes. They do it by bending to connect sort of Velcro-like hair on their heads and butts, and then increasing the tension until they suddenly unsnap. Boing.

PEOPLE You can only go so fast—about 2.5 times your resting metabolic rate, as it happens. Seems to have to do with how fast your digestive system can process food. Researchers figured this out by studying people who ran six marathons a week for five months, which is a thing that actually happened. / Reviewers selecting medical-school graduates for residencies in radiology discriminated against applicants who were obese or facially unattractive. / Prostate cancer cells become lethal and spread to bones by imitating bone-forming cells. Understanding this may lead to improved ability to target them in therapy. / Cell surface receptors may work much more like dials, with multiple states, than like binary switches with only two. This understanding may vastly improve drug design. • MMP inhibitors, a class of cancer drug that prevented cancer cells from dissolving cell membranes, failed to help prevent cancer spread in human tests. It now seems they failed because in the absence of the capacity to dissolve membranes, cancer cells just build battering rams and bash their way around. / It turns out MRI can not only diagnose heart disease but can also predict which cases are potentially fatal, making MRI, underutilized in cardiac applications, a possible alternative to more-invasive, sometimes toxic tests like catheterization and stress echocardiograms or nuclear tests. / Media accounts of mass shootings by disturbed people reinforce the belief that disturbed people are dangerous, despite the fact that most disturbed people are not violent.

Mental illness does, though, correlate with increased risk of suicide, which accounts for most U.S. firearms-related deaths. / Antihistamines block only one of the pathways that bring the itch of poison ivy to you. Proteins and a neurotransmitter seem to carry the signal of itchiness to mice who’ve contacted poison ivy, and blocking them seems to have helped the mice feel better. With climate change seemingly designing an environment specifically to improve things for poison ivy, here’s hoping.

MISCELLANY Scientists looking at the sky from Chile for six years, and combining multiple measurement techniques, have determined that the mysterious dark energy, which evidently makes up 70 percent of everything even though we can’t see it, still seems really complex. / Conservation efforts do not seem to be slowing deforestation in Cameroon. / Scientists have figured out the structure of the protein that senses cold in people and animals, and now they’ve figured out what that protein looks like when it binds to menthol and another cooling agent. They hope this understanding might lead to improvements in soothing remedies like topical painkillers and migraine medications.

DUKE Duke scored twice among 2019 MacArthur Fellows: Danielle (Morris) Citron ’90, now a law professor at Boston University, received a “genius grant” for her work studying online privacy issues. Jenny Tung ’03, Ph.D. ’10, and now associate professor of evolutionary anthropology and biology, received one of the ten-year, $625,000 stipends for her work on the social determinants of health. / Duke received a $50 million grant from The Duke Endowment to accelerate and expand the recruitment of research scientists in the basic and applied sciences. / Health policy scholar Don Taylor, a longtime professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, has been named the new director of Duke’s Social Science Research Institute. / For the eleventh straight year, the Arbor Day Foundation named Duke a 2018 Tree Campus USA. / Ana Baros and Vahid Tarokh of the Pratt School of Engineering have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. / Joseph S. Ramus, professor emeritus at the Nicholas School of the Environment, was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, one of the highest civilian honors bestowed by the State of North Carolina.

$50M

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. 10

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insets:istock

ROOMMATES

Last year,

Jaedyn Francovich HOMETOWN: Reno, Nevada MAJOR: Mechanical engineering

the seniors and Kappa Alpha Theta members lived on the now-demolished Central Campus, with different roommates, in different rooms but sharing a wall. “We were the last people there, and the first people in this one, so it’s kind of cool,” Allie says of moving into the brandnew residence hall. Allie is a foodie—while in New York over the summer, she made a spreadsheet of all the restaurants she ate at, with a rating system. “It’s a bit much but sums up how I feel about food,” she says. “It’s cool

WHERE'S HOME? THE HOLLOWS Allie Rauch HOMETOWN: Philadelphia MAJOR: Environmental science and policy/earth and ocean sciences

going to grocery stores with her,” says Jaedyn. Or an outing to Durham’s farmers market. As a freshman, Jaedyn had a food moment at Dame’s Chicken & Waffles. “That meal changed my life! I never had that combo before.” —Adrienne Johnson Martin, photography by Chris Hildreth

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FROM THE PRESIDENT

Toward Duke’s Second Century

century ago, in the fall of 1919, America’s It was for that reason he turned for help to James B. colleges and universities were on the cusp Duke, the youngest and wealthiest member of the of their first great expansion. Prior to Duke family, whose brother, Benjamin, had diligently nursed Trinity College through its developmental the First World War, fewer than 50,000 years and whose father, Washington, had helped move bachelor’s degrees and 1,000 doctorates it from nearby Randolph County to were awarded annually in the U.S.; by Durham. 1930, those numbers would more than Over the next five years, through double. In 1919, the first postdoctoral countless discussions, with imagination fellowships in the sciences were established by the National Research Counand planning, the attempt to rescue cil with funding from the Rockefeller Trinity College evolved into a bold plan Foundation; these new programs would to transform it—and with it, the region. revolutionize research. The 1920s would James B. Duke’s 1924 Indenture of Trust also see the consolidation of the modern simultaneously launched both The Duke research university model, laying the Endowment, which would help develop groundwork for the the Carolinas by even more explosive investing in higher expansion of advanced education, health research and education care, the rural church, following the Second and child welfare; World War. and Duke University, Few people would which would assemble around Trinity have imagined then, College an enviable as American universities began their rise to collection of graduate and professional global prominence over schools. the following hundred In the nine ensuing years, that Duke would decades, our amemerge among its bitious university leaders. Indeed, in that undertook bold fall of 1919, Duke as initiatives to establish we know it today did a world-renowned academic medical not even exist. What is now Duke’s West HISTORY: President Few, top, and the entrance to center and be among the first interdisCampus was rolling, open farmland surrounded by forest, and East Campus was East Campus in 1925 ciplinary schools dedicated to public Trinity College. With just 664 students policy and the environment. Although and sixty-seven full-time faculty members, Trinity had regrettably slow to admit African-American students, been for several years teetering on the edge of finanafter doing so in the 1960s, Duke redoubled its efforts cial ruin, and President William Preston Few was still to make the university an ever more inclusive academic community. working to stabilize the college’s budget. The pace of In the 1970s and 1980s, the strategic recruitment of inflation, nearly 60 percent over just three years, had leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences— placed enormous pressures on faculty salaries. sparked by Terry Sanford and advanced by his succesPresident Few knew that without new resources, he sor, Keith Brodie—elevated Duke into a nationally risked losing what had become, thanks to generations recognized center of excellence in areas including literaof hard work, “a great college of arts and sciences.”

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Insets: Duke University Archives

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ture, cultural studies, and political science. Investments in local partnerships, beginning in the 1990s under the leadership of President Nan Keohane and extended by President Richard Brodhead, contributed to a resurgent and increasingly vibrant Durham. The upshot is that Duke students, faculty, and staff today do their pathbreaking work at a university that has ranked among the top ten in America for the past several decades and is widely regarded as among the world’s finest. The decisions made by James B. Duke, William Preston Few, and their colleagues in the five years between 1919 and 1924 enabled everything that has come since. Notwithstanding our remarkable century of success in higher education, both as a nation and as a university, we face today a confluence of powerful currents— technological, cultural, and economic—that will again require creative and thoughtful decisions and actions, many of which are likely to have far-reaching consequences. Digital technologies have thoroughly reshaped contemporary life, spawning entirely new social practices, consumer markets, and companies, even as they have induced destabilizing tremors in many industries. Markets for labor, consumption, and capital are now thoroughly global in character, enabled by unprecedented mobility and interconnectivity, producing rapid social change and transforming the workplace. We face generational changes as well, with students arriving on campuses in some ways better prepared than ever for research and higher learning but also demonstrating unprecedented levels of anxiety and demanding more extensive support services year over year. There are also, of course, deepening economic pressures. The delicate financial fabric of cross-subsidies that so successfully supported research universities since World War II is fraying. Global competition for the finest talent is ever more costly, even as the public’s tolerance of increases in tuition and the government’s willingness to subsidize research have ebbed. Perhaps ironically, at the very moment when long-coming academic breakthroughs in so many fields stand to improve our lives in dramatic ways, public support of higher education, the arts, and basic research has been trending downward. Taken together, these trends suggest that the models that brought American higher education and Duke so much success over the past hundred years are unlikely to carry us through the next. We again find ourselves on the cusp of transformation potentially as profound as that which awaited our Trinity College forebears in 1919. In five short years, we will enter the university’s second century, and the decisions we make now will

determine the course of the coming decades. I invite all of us—faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends of the university—to think together about our turn to the future, about how we can remain true to the Duke we have always been while charting our course toward the Duke we are destined to become. Let’s consider the ways Duke can not only ensure its future, but help define the new twenty-first-century model of the research university. As we do so, I suggest five areas of focus. A FO CUS O N

Empowering our people Duke has only ever been as great as the people who study, research, work, and visit our campus. Our campus is extraordinary, but while our physical infrastructure may garner the attention, it’s our human infrastructure that demonstrates our true worth: two Nobel laureates on the faculty, forty-nine Rhodes Scholars, tens of thousands of inspiring and committed staff members, and the world’s most talented teachers and researchers. Duke’s success in its second century—as in its first—will rely on recruiting and supporting an increasingly diverse and truly exceptional community of scholars who will grapple successfully with the world’s most pressing challenges. If we want to be the university that discovers a cure for cancer, defines the ethics of machine learning, or develops materials that underpin new technologies, we’ll need to attract the very best minds and give them the resources to execute. This will require redoubling our efforts to build endowments to support faculty chairs and provide improved financial aid for our students. A critical first step is our new initiative in science and technology, a collaborative effort uniting Duke Health, Trinity College, the Pratt School, and the Nicholas School in building faculty excellence in select areas where Duke can be distinctively impactful: artificial intelligence and health, the creation of new materials, and cultivating resilience to advance human health and the environment. The great university of the next century will put people first, and Duke can show the way. A FO CUS O N

Transformative teaching Solutions to the complex problems of the next century are unlikely to be uncovered through

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

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narrow disciplinary logics. Universities are only now beginning to realize the promise of new instructional technologies, the power of interdisciplinary, team-based and problem-focused teaching, and ways to leverage

THE FUTURE: From West Union to the Brodhead Center

faculty research in the curriculum. We have much more exciting work to do on these fronts, but Duke is already leading the pack. Bass Connections, our first-in-class interdisciplinary research initiative, pairs undergraduate and graduate students with distinguished faculty to collaborate on solving pressing problems: from curbing predatory lending to tracking ocean health. Our Data Plus initiative assembles teams of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students to tackle data-analytic problems posed by partner organizations. The Pratt School has launched dynamic new first-year student design laboratories and is working actively with Trinity College to reformulate our offerings in computing. With the opening of the Rubenstein Arts Center, we are infusing the arts and creativity across the curriculum. As always, we remain committed to a liberal-arts education—classically defined as a grounding in those skills necessary for a free individual active in civic life— and we are perhaps better poised than any of our peer institutions to successfully redefine the liberal arts for the twenty-first century. A FOCUS ON

Building community At a time when social divisions seem to be widening around the globe, when the social fabric is wearing thin and tearing across our nation, our future success

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will hinge on our ability to summon a whole greater than the sum of our parts—our ability to cultivate a strong, healthy, inclusive, and respectful community of learners and doers. To that end, we are engaged in rethinking our residential living and learning model, focusing on giving our students the opportunity to explore a wide range of ideas and develop healthy lifestyles throughout their time on campus. We’re incorporating vibrant arts performances into university life and helping to put Durham on the international cultural map. We’re offering students the resources and support they need to truly Bill Snead thrive here, including a comprehensive wellness and student-health program and the finest athletics and recreation program in the country. And most important, we’re seeking more opportunities for deeper and more meaningful engagement between students and faculty. Duke Conversations, for instance, is a student-led program that invites professors to host small groups of undergraduates for dinner in their homes. We also have to seek ways of making a Duke education more relevant to the challenges of the world outside our gates. DukeEngage, our immersive service program, this past summer celebrated its twelth anniversary by reaching 1.6 million hours spent by students in service to communities in eighty-one countries on six continents. The great university of the next century will recognize that without robust community, our individual talents will never be fully realized. A FO CUS O N

Strong partnerships Public support of higher education is unlikely to rebound unless institutions like Duke demonstrate our commitment to our surrounding communities and our role in improving the quality of life for our regions. It’s the right thing to do: Duke wouldn’t be Duke without Durham, and Durham wouldn’t be Durham without Duke. If you were to look at a map of our city, you would

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see that has never been more true. From the American Tobacco Campus to the Innovation District to the East Durham Children’s Initiative, we have partnered in developing new community resources and amenities, working closely alongside local elected officials and commercial partners to breathe new life into Durham. Among the best examples is the Chesterfield Building, which until last year was a long-abandoned and dilapidated cigarette factory downtown. In partnership with Wexford, a nationally recognized developer, we’ve turned it into a top-of-the-line facility for biomedical and clinical research, which is already occupied by NC BioLabs, Durham Tech, Duke Engineering, and numerous startups. Think of it: A factory that once produced cigarettes could now produce a cure for cancer. Opportunities for these sorts of partnerships will abound in our second century. We should continue to seek them out, while at the same time recognizing we must prioritize the needs of our neighbors, particularly those from marginalized and low-income communities. Duke has a responsibility to use our voice in Durham not merely for development, but also to support the well-being and health of fellow residents of the city we are proud to call home. We are actively investing in public education, nutrition and maternal health, economic empowerment and affordable housing, efforts that are designed to ensure that the benefits of Durham’s growth reach all of its residents. The great university of the next century will be viewed as a critical partner in improving public well-being through creative and cooperative problem-solving. A FOCUS ON

Lifelong engagement Duke’s greatest strength and the living, breathing embodiment of our educational success is our alumni community—a university family now hundreds of thousands strong, making innumerable differences in lives around the globe. The great university of the twenty-first century will recognize that the rapid pace of technological, cultural, and economic change not only demands a broad educational foundation in the liberal arts and sciences; it also requires a capacity for continual educational and professional development—the capacity for creative adaptation and redefinition over the life span. For Duke, this means creating new and powerful pathways for continuing engagement within and across our global network long after students complete their degree programs. It means emphasizing that our students don’t graduate from Duke, they graduate into a

supportive network of faculty, staff, students, and fellow alumni to whom they can turn to for help, mentorship, and fellowship no matter where they are in life. Moving to a new city? We want the Duke network to be the first place you turn. Need to learn a new skill or seek professional assistance? We’d like to make available our faculty expertise—and, in turn, ask you to lend your expertise to our students and researchers. Looking for a new job or planning to hire someone? Explore the options offered by fellow Dukies here on campus and around the world. Should you realize a newfound interest in art history and think you missed that boat while in Durham, we’d like to be there to support your desire to learn, at any age, and especially when nobody is requiring you to take courses. The great university of the next century will grasp that alumni, once activated and engaged in these ways, can extend by orders of magnitude the intellectual and professional capacities—not to say the collective wisdom— of the enterprise. Imagine if our global network functioned as something like our eleventh school: a Duke without walls, extended over space and time, investing continuously in developing ourselves and each other to reach our full potential, to advance humankind. So, as we think together of where we want to take Duke in the next century, I propose that our focus should begin and end with our people, and center on our community. One hundred years ago, William Preston Few and his colleagues began a journey of discovery that traversed from insecurity and anxiety over the future to embracing that future, as President Terry Sanford put it, with “outrageous ambitions.” They, and we, have since made incredible strides in realizing those ambitions. Today, as we reflect on the travails and wonders of the past century, we turn to ponder the travails and wonders of the next. I am excited by the opportunities that Duke’s second century will bring us and look forward to working with all of you to deliver on our institution’s tremendous promise. Thank you for supporting the Duke we have always been and the Duke we are destined to become.

—Vincent E. Price

Vincent Price was formally installed as the tenth president of Duke University, and the fifteenth president of the institution, in October 2017. You may find more information about his strategic framework for advancing the university at https:// president.duke.edu/duke-will/. Megan Mendenhall

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

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A bit more understanding of a big void A lot of hard work went into the recent discovery of a tiny fossil.

National University of Peru

group of Duke and other scientists have found a tiny fossilized tooth that identifies the smallest monkey in the world’s fossil record. They have named the monkey and added it to the fossil record, which is cool. But what’s really remarkable is the effort behind the finding of that tooth and the vast hole in our understanding that the little fossil begins to fill. The fossil is a tooth, and if you had a hundred of them, they would fit in a teaspoon. The monkey that used to come attached to that tooth was just a wee bit larger than today’s smallest monkey, the pygmy marmoset, which weighs in at three ounces, about the weight of a cupcake. The name of the new fossil monkey is Parvimico materdei, which means “tiny monkey from the Mother of God River,” which de-

MONKEY BUSINESS: Above, the upper molar of the micromammal; right, a sketch of what it might have looked like.

“Our fossil falls into that

scribes the monkey and the area of Peru in which it was found. Parvimico was probably a bit larger than the pygmy marmoset—so think maybe one of those giant cupcakes with all the frosting. They’ve figured all that out from one tooth?

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Yep. “What can you say about this animal?” asks lead author Richard Kay, professor of evolutionary anthropology. “Well, actually a little bit about its size, because teeth are a good indicator of that.” Hence its comparison to the pygmy marmoset, though the two are not closely related. “And a little bit about its diet, because [teeth are] the business end of what you’re eating.” In this case, given the shape of the bumps and ridges on that tooth, probably fruits, insects, and saps. Little Parvimico materdei is a big deal because it adds a little drop of information into an enormous void in the fossil record. “Although we’ve been documenting the biodiversity of vertebrates in the tropics today,” Kay says, “we just don’t have very much in the way of fossils to look at the biodiversity in deeper time.” South American monkeys appear to have arrived from Africa by raft around 30 to 40 million years ago. (Yes, raft; probably on big floating piles of organic detritus, possibly large enough to have supported trees.) There are primate fossils—again, usually nothing more than a tooth or two— from around 30 million years ago, and then some more from around 13 or 14

million years ago. That’s a gap of close to 20 million years, which is a lot of empty space. “Our fossil falls into that gap at about 17, 18 million years ago,” Kay says. Which gives a glimpse of how New World monkeys were evolving, filling ecological niches over time.

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One reason for that hole in the fossil record is the difficulty of getting to where the fossils are. The problem is the Amazon basin is flat and has been for some time, so the strata from tens of millions of years ago, where fossils would be, are deep in the ground. That has meant a lot of looking for fossils in dryer, more mountainous areas where it’s easy to look for them, rather than where they might more likely be: “It’s like the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost,” Kay says. “You go where there are fossils, and you hope for the best.” Fortunately, geological maps, often made during the search for fossil fuels, show where, as plates have collided, that Amazonian plain has bunched up like a rug, creating folds of mountains, bringing some of those old strata closer to the surface. “Then look

Don’t think people with whisk brooms and little hammers; not when you’re looking for tiny fragments and teeth among the clay strata of the jungly Amazon. “You grab a bunch of rock from your outcrop and you bring it back to a sandbar, and you put it in detergent with water, and the clay breaks down,” Kay says. “You scoop that stuff into screens and you wash it in the river. Then you’ve got your screen-washed concentrate.” That reduces what you’ve got by about 90 percent. “Then you handpick it, looking for fossils.” Not a quick job. “To find that tooth,” Kay says, “we had to go through a ton of sediment. It’s frustrating, because you could spend a whole season, and you wouldn’t find anything.” And even if you do, “you might not know you’ve recovered it until a couple years later when you finally get through picking the screen wash.” So Parvimico materdei was a win, and Kay is hopeful for more. After another summer of digging, “we just shipped more than 300 kilograms of washed sediment” to the paleontology lab of his collaborator at Universidad Nacional

gap at about 17, 18 million years ago.” for a place where there’s one of those folds, flattened down by erosion, with a river cutting right through the middle of it,” Kay says. That’s what they found along the Rio Alto Madre de Dios in southeastern Peru, and they started looking for fossils.

Illustration by Nick Czaplewsky

de Piura, Jean-Noel Martinez. Kay says Martinez has good students. Good thing. Parvimico is a tiny monkey, Kay says, “but boy, that’s a big job.” —Scott Huler

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

FOREVER

RDUKE The Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center glows like a lantern. It’s the first thing you see when you come back to Duke. An enormous glass wall, facing Duke University Road, light shining from within the enormous atrium, beckoning. Come on in; stop here, start here. Because it’s more than a place to start—it’s a place to stay. From the armchairs and couches in the main atrium to the comfy sofas inside the Duke stone walls of Forlines House, the new center offers more than an alumni center. It’s an embrace. Campus never sits still; there’s always a new dorm, a new science building, a new center. This new quad, right at the doorway to West Campus, reminds you that alumni belong here too. There’s a new green lawn to enjoy, new passageways to wander. Pine boughs stretch over the new quad, a fountain splashes, the wind whispers through leaves, some still on the trees, some dropping on to the pavers. Maybe you came to take a tour, maybe you came for a reunion, maybe you just came because Duke is still, always, Duke. Karsh stands like a beacon guiding you back.

Welcome home. Photography by SkyNav

THEQuad The center comprises an ENTIRE NEW QUADâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; lined with loggias of blond wood bent into graceful arches

You can sync the TECHNOLOGY WALL with an app or see your history with Duke

Take a look!

LEARN MORE AT alumni.duke.edu/hellokarsh

In the HOWARD FAMILY LIBRARY you can consult copies of Chanticleer before entering the WOLITZER FAMILY MEETING ROOM; in the PRESIDENTS LOUNGE, above, you can relax in armchairs surrounded by Duke memorabilia

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Begin a tour in the airy PITTS FAMILY ATRIUM, where your eyes are drawn upward to gothic arches supporting the high, peaked ceiling

Four buildings, including the renovated FORLINES HOUSE, surround a neat lawn that all but demands a game of croquet

The EVENTS PAVILION can host everything from prospective students to alumni reunions

Light a fire during your meeting in the MOYLE BOARD ROOM

Colin Huth

Photography by Jared Lazarus unless noted

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

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A different home team Duke baseball players take a summer stint on a small-town college-league team.

he Holly Springs Salamanders, losing 8-0 That didn’t bother Hoyle and Crabtree much. Playing for the Salamanders—playing for any team in any of in the bottom of the ninth on a humid the dozens of college leagues nationwide—is less about Piedmont evening, are down to their last winning than about keeping your skills up. Last year at-bat. With desperation baserunners he played for Wilmington, “and Crab was here,” Hoyle the ’Manders’ only sliver of hope, rising says. They both enjoyed their summers, but being tojunior Chris Crabtree faced a three-andgether gave them the opportunity not only to spend a one pitch well out of the strike zone. There are times full summer as teammates but also to keep each other on when you take that pitch, work the base on balls, get a task regarding workouts. runner on, and hope against hope. “We wake up, eat breakfast, go This is not one of those times. lift, go hit, then come here” to crisp, Crabtree reaches low, trying to golf After the game, new Ting Stadium, when there’s a that lousy pitch out of Ting Stadiall along the left-field home game. An away game is pretum in Holly Springs for home run ty much the same, just with two number twelve on the season. stands, a crush of long bus rides. Most of the teams Nope. Crabtree, one of two adoring fans, mostly in the Coastal Plain League are in Duke players on the Salamanders small North and South Carolina roster, swings through it, though age nine or younger, towns like Edenton and Florence, to give him credit, he does walk on in Single A-level ballparks old or the next pitch. It doesn’t help: fipress against the nal score, Fayetteville Swampdogs new. “We’re so central, we’re right fence, offering hats, 8, Salamanders 0. in the middle of everything,” Crabtree says. “We haven’t stayed overNo matter. After the game, all balls, programs for night once.” along the left-field stands, a crush The two share a rental house in of adoring fans, mostly age nine or autographs. Durham, but most playyounger, press against the ers in the league stay with fence, offering hats, balls, host families. Getting paid programs for autographs. to play baseball would inCrabtree grins wide and validate scholarships, so the signs as long as anybody league provides housing, asks. So does his teammate, though host families like to rising junior Wil Hoyle, provide food, too, for those a slick-fielding shortstop late-night returns home. who turned down a draft “Wilmington was an aweby the Oakland Athletics some place to play last year,” to instead play for Duke. Hoyle says. “Beautiful ballCrabtree plays first and park, great fans. When we hasn’t yet had to turn went back there this year down a draft, but he represented the Salamanders in people in the stands were the Coastal Plain League yelling, ‘We miss you!’ ” all-star game in Savannah, That give and take with the where he took his shots in fans is part of the casual the home-run derby. “It was fun,” he says. “I hit four out.” nature of Coastal Plain ball. Without the pressure of a His eleven home runs led the Salamanders, who ended Duke season, the players relax into taking their swings up 19-32 and out of the Coastal Plain League playoffs. and fielding their positions. The trim new stadium has a

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standard minor-league feel—a dog FIELD WORK: Crabtree, left, and children and see the ballplayers Hoyle before the game; opposite, fetches the bats after players hit, as role models; others have kids Crabtree takes time with some fans. seats and food are cheap, and there who have moved out and miss the are the between-innings races, conhubbub. tests, and mascots one would expect at the DBAP. The players love the league. Holly Springs has players Even the notification Hoyle got last year from his from dozens of colleges, as close as Duke and N.C. Wilmington host mother was casual. “Basically one Central and as far away as South Dakota State. And day last spring I just got a text from a woman, and she though the autographs, mascots, and casual atmosphere said, like, ‘You’re gonna be living with me this summake for a pleasant summer, the players are looking mer.’ That was my first interaction. She was amazing. to get better, and they know where they come from. Asked me questions about what I liked to eat, anything “You see Duke shirts in the stands,” Hoyle says. “And I need, things like that. She was a model host mothevery time you come up to hit, they say, ‘from Duke er.” They’re still friends. Many host families have young University.’ ”— Scott Huler

Photography by Scott Huler

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

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Drone images by Rory Wakemup, Oceti Sakowin Camp, 2016

Revising the nation’s origin story

By featuring contemporary works created by indigenous artists, the Nasher’s latest show suggests a broader narrative. id you see the pink boots?” It’s opening night of the Nasher Museum’s latest exhibition, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, and two Duke students are debating the meaning of colorful, thigh-high boots in the middle of a nineteenth-century landscape. In the painting, mountains rise majestically in the background, suggesting limitless land. It feels quite traditional. But something is different in this scene; there are nude men scattered about—soldiers who have tossed their weapons and uniforms—and a painter standing at his easel capturing their reverie is also nude except for those boots. The piece is Kent Monkman’s History is Painted by the Victors, a tongue-in-cheek take on Albert Bierstadt’s classic American West artwork, Mount Corcoran. “Bierstadt painted the scene unpeopled, which would support the theme of Manifest Destiny: ‘You can move out West; it’s available for the taking,’ ” says visiting curator Mindy Besaw from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, where the exhibit was originally developed. Here, Monkman puts his drag queen alter ego,

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in the foreground. “It’s that new understanding when you realize things are not as they appear. It asks you to look twice at the work, think twice about the artists, and think twice about the context and our assumptions.” And that’s the goal of the show. While Western art often puts history in a tidy package, excluding Native Americans from the narrative, the exhibition doesn’t mind showing that history is messy. It aims to disrupt the tranquil, monolithic image of a forgotten indigenous people while blasting the nation’s origin narrative. Forty-one Indigenous contemporary artists are featured; they’re addressing varied themes and using varied formats, including canvas paintings, videos, performance art, and textiles. Marie Watt’s Companion Species (Ferocious Mother and Canis Familiaris) uses a patchwork of embroidered words on reclaimed wool blankets created by sewing circles of more than two hundred participants to explore the interconnectedness of humans and animals. Artist Brian Jungen’s sculptures morph Nike Air Jordans and human hair into semblances of Pacific Northwest tribal masks, as a commentary on cultural appropriation and commodification. In Fifty Shades of White, Juane Quick-to-See

“We are still here.”

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Inset photography courtesy Nasher Museum of Art

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FINALLY SEEN: Above, Mirror Shield Project, conceived by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger

Smith created a map that renames served as an adviser of the design each U.S. state with various shades of the exhibition, determining of white paint—“White Peach” for how the works would be displayed Georgia, “Antique White” for Pennand described. He consulted with sylvania, North Carolina is “Breakmembers of North Carolina’s inwater White”—while neighboring digenous tribes and brought in a countries are brightly colored to ask member of a local Native tribe to viewers to reflect upon Euro-Amerihelp the Nasher staff in their use of can cultural and racial authority. language with visitors, when referencing Native peoples. He says the “It upends the idea of representation,” says Besaw of the exhibition’s art represents the continued presence of Native peoples whose hisbreadth. “Native American is not tory has long been silenced. “One one pan-Indian identity. There’s not of the overarching statements of one way of making art that is Native the exhibit is that Native AmerAmerican.” ican cultures are still very much Besides the art and the calendar alive, thriving and here.” of events accompanying the show, HERITAGE: Above, Jeffrey Gibson, Radiant “We are still here,” says Louise which runs through January 12, the Tushka, 2018; left, one panel of Norval Maynor, Ph.D. ’83, a member exhibition has special resonance for Morrisseau’s The Story Teller: The Artist and advocate of the Lumbee Tribe, the Class of 2023, whose summer and his Grandfather, 1978 who attended the exhibition’s reading was the acclaimed novel opening reception. “Through this There There by Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange. That book, too, challenges art exhibit, so many other people will know that we are notions of indigenous identity by featuring the voices of here, and that we are proudly producing and generating twelve urban Native American narrators as they make their these art forms as another way of telling our stories. It is a way to a California powwow. new understanding. It’s not the printed word. It’s so visual Marshall Price, the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. and engaging. That in itself should add to our understanding of indigenous people.”—Melody Hunter-Pillion A.M. ’12 Haemisegger curator of modern and contemporary art, DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

THEQuad

A purrfect arrangement

An organized effort gives love and care to stray cats on campus. he usually sits on top of her house, or she runs around in the grass,” says Jonas Meksem. On an early fall day, the junior stopped by to visit Peaches the Calico Cat on his way to Pitchfork’s, a campus eatery. Meksem peeked inside her cat home. No Peaches. “I try to make visiting Peaches a part of my daily walk,” says Meksem. “It’s great because she’s everyone’s pet, and everyone gets to take care of her.” The cat started her Duke life in 2016 as an untamed and unnamed stray. Some students and faculty created their own names for the homeless cat, and helped her when they could. “I have always had stray or feral cats and feel responsible for them,” says Choro Carla Antonaccio, professor emerita of classical studies. She was one of the first on campus to help the stray cat. “They are domesticated animals that have shown up on my doorstep because someone didn’t want them or keep them safe.” Most folks who spotted the stray referred to her simply as “the calico cat.” Anna Li ’18 did the same. In the fall of 2016, Li was walking on West Campus when she spotted the calico relaxing regally on the quad, indifferent to the semester’s deadlines. “She used to follow me around campus, waiting outside while I got food from Pitchfork’s and staring at me from the window until I brought it back out to share with her,” says Li. “We went on strolls in Duke Gardens together, and she’d just follow me.” That winter, the temperature dropped below freezing and Li worried about her new friend. She started a Facebook group, as an organized effort to assist the small cat and a larger calico, believed to be her sister or mother. A poll on Facebook provided the name “Peaches.” One caretaker, Anna Matthews ’19, named the larger calico “Mamabean.” The Facebook group, Caretakers of Peaches (The Calico Cat), also attends to more crucial matters. “I thought it was going to be a group of maybe ten nerdy cat lovers or something, but the group really exploded. It has about 1,600 members now,” says Li. Volunteers and donors—a collection of students, alumni, staff, faculty, retirees, and even some Duke parents—have provided two heated cat homes, food, water bowls, and funds for veterinary care. Although she now lives in Seattle with her cat “Kitty,” Li continues to or-

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ganize and advise the Facebook group, while group administrators in Durham, like senior Emmy Mariner, are hands on. Mariner transports Peaches and Mamabean to a veterinary clinic for vaccinations and responds to emergencies. Cat colony care groups across campus work together by sharing information. They collaborate with Independent Animal Rescue, which operates a spay and neuter program. Matthews and other caretakers also organize off-campus homes for Peaches and Mamabean when hurricanes blow through, like Dorian in early September. It’s a lot of work, but Mariner says as much as students help the cats, the cats give much more in return. “As students we spend a lot of time neglecting our own mental “I thought it and physical health and constantwas going to ly putting ourselves in very stressful situations and competitive be a group of patterns,” says Mariner. “When maybe ten nerdy you stop and slow that down and try to take care of something cat lovers or than yourself, it makes it all something, but other simpler and a lot less stressful.” the group really Peaches has become a feline cause célèbre. People magazine exploded. It wrote about her. A Duke Chronhas about 1,600 icle 2018 student poll named her members now.” one of the 18 Most Influential People at Duke. The People article led to an increase in donations when Mamabean needed emergency surgery. But funds are low again, and caretakers started a new GoFundMe campaign in September. Meksem eventually found Peaches as she napped beneath the shade of a fraternity bench, sheltered by a small tree, her heated cat house in view, just outside the doors of Keohane. He bent down and gently stroked her cheek. Peaches stretched, opened her eyes briefly in acknowledgement, and then repositioned her chin on her left paw, showing small, pink pads. She returned to napping. Unbothered. Content. —Melody Hunter-Pillion A.M. ’12, Photography by Megan Mendenhall

Jenny Tung ’03, Ph.D. ’10, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, is among the recipients of a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (popularly known as the “genius grant”). Her research involves understanding how social and environmental adversity affects health and survival over the lifespan of an individual. You were hooked on this field from your time in a freshman seminar, right? And that projected you into graduate school. One of the things I got from the seminar was the idea that you could combine evolutionary perspectives and the mechanisms of genetics to understand why the world looks the way it does. By the time I started graduate school, I wanted to study these very complex, long-term, socially differentiated relationships among animals that live a long time and form close social bonds, like we do.

And that brought you to reaching baboons in the wild, in Amboseli, Kenya. People I’m lucky enough to collaborate today with started doing very intensive, detailed, day-to-day fieldwork there back in 1971. They put together tracking systems and methods for collecting data that could be used for a lot of things they never anticipated. If you want to study a species from the standpoint of genetics, you want a decent sample size and a lot of pre-existing information.

Social scientists have wrestled with the social determinants of health, but isn’t this an unusual angle for primate researchers? Low socioeconomic status, social isolation, lack of social support—these seem to be big predictors of how humans live

Q&A

their lives. The question is, for humans and other social animals, whether social factors have any direct effects on our cells themselves. Can the impact of social stress be studied from a biological lens and not just by social scientists? We’ve shown that early-life insults are lifespan-shortening for non-human primates. They can be lifespan-threatening in their offspring, as well, independently of what the offspring have experienced directly.

What’s one striking finding from your more recent fieldwork? One of my graduate students led a study a few years ago that showed the impact of being born into a drought environment: Female baboons would grow up with lower fertility levels. But there’s a twist: If you came from a high-status family, you were buffered from that kind of effect. On the other hand, if you lose your mom before you turn one—which is approximately the age baby baboons get weaned, so they can feed on their own—that’s basically a death sentence for almost all the animals, regardless of status.

Given climate change, are the stress factors in that setting getting worse? About ten years ago, we had the worst drought that’s ever been recorded in Amboseli. Human population growth is also causing new pressure on the baboons. On the other hand, partly because of these changes,

the number of predators, like leopards and lions, is decreasing. These are complex factors, since, as the population of baboons increases, competition among baboons also increases.

Another strand of your research has you studying macaque monkeys in captivity at Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Here we’re looking at gene activity through controlled experiments, as opposed to the observations we do in the wild. When we introduce a female macaque into a new social group, earlier introductions predict higher status. Females who go in later are lower-status. We can’t do that kind of experiment in humans. So our work with the macaques is very powerful for demonstrating the causal effects of social-status variation by itself, in the absence of factors like diet or health-care access.

What’s something surprising that you’ve learned about macaques, status, and wellbeing? Females who rise in rank don’t completely escape—in molecular and physiological terms—a previous lower status. Females who drop in rank, on the other hand, quickly lose the genomic signature of that lost high status. So our data suggest a complex interplay of social history and current social circumstances, which we’re attempting to tease apart now. —Robert J. Bliwise, Photography by Les Todd

WE ASKED

Diana Walker

BookClub

Jason DeParle ’82, a New York Times reporter and author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, about what he learned about global migration from following a family for thirty years. On why he wanted to write this book, and how the rapid news cycle affected it: I wasn’t even thinking of migration

to Galveston Island, and they couldn’t get them to stay, so they hired people from the Philippines. And rather than take an American job, Rosalie’s moving to the U.S. brought services to Americans who otherwise might not have them. I don’t want to pretend that there’s never any cost to migration or that it never takes away jobs. There are winners and losers. There are costs to migration. But the political conversation so heavily dwells on the negative conversation on whether migrants are taking jobs away from Americans that I thought it was important in this context to point out that this hospital had tried for years.

when I moved in with them. I was thinking about slum life and poverty. And I was just taken by the dignity and grace with which they responded to their difficult situation in life. In fact, when I started the project, I had the mental framework that migration had been less politically divisive in the U.S. than it had been in Europe, and that somehow the U.S. had been spared some of the rancor that had spread across the rest of the globe. And for some of the questions I was asking, “Why was that? What was it about the United States that might explain why migration hadn’t become quite as divi- The question sive here as it was elsewhere?” Then, in 2015, of whether the when Donald Trump declared his candidacy, the U.S. narrative changed, and the book had U.S. should to change to accommodate that. I wrote it be- think of itself cause I was drawn to the courage and grace of this family. And whatever thoughts, whatever as a nation of position a reader might bring on immigration immigrants to this book, I think they could appreciate the story of the grace and sacrifice of this family. is very much

On the differing views of America’s identity: The question of whether the U.S. should

think of itself as a nation of immigrants is very much up in the air. I think one of the goals of the Trump administration is to challenge that idea. So, what they’re doing is they’re looking not only to change policy, but also to confront the idea of whether that’s a meaningful part of American identity. Stephen Miller [’07], President Trump’s immigration adviser, has made the point in the White House Briefing Room up in the air. On the aspects of migration that often have that he thinks the Statue of Liberty shouldn’t gotten lost in news coverage: The light-bulb be thought of as a symbol of welcome to immoment for me in understanding how economically import- migrants. The Trump citizenship agency has removed the ant migration is to poor people around the world was when phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. I discovered that remittances, the money that migrants send And I think they have a philosophically different view that back to their families, is three times the world’s foreign-aid the U.S. shouldn’t think of itself that way. Critics of immigrabudgets combined. So, migration is the world’s largest self-help tion fear sometimes that new immigrants aren’t assimilating program, the world’s largest anti-poverty program. It’s hugely in a patriotic fashion. You hear that a lot. They’re not learning important to the people who are relying on the money they get American history, American civic history. They’re not studyfor education, for health care, for food, for shelter. One of the ing our heroes. That is not at all what I found, certainly not interesting things about Rosalie’s experience was that she came in the public schools in Texas. I mean, the second-graders and she got a very good middle-class American job, but she that I was following came home from school and taught me didn’t take it from an American. She went to an underserved about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller, hospital that hadn’t been able to attract enough nurses back on and Jane Addams, and Abraham Lincoln. The notion that to Galveston Island because it’d been hit by a natural disaster. somehow America’s civic values aren’t being conveyed is beGalveston, a kind of struggling, blue-collar town, just couldn’t lied by what I saw. n compete with the market in Houston. They offered $5,000 bonuses to try to get nurses from Nebraska and Florida to come This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Esther Hicks Photography

RECOMMENDATIONS from Karla Holloway A.M. ’05

In A Death in Harlem (Triquarterly), Holloway tells of a murder on the side streets of Jazz Age New York that will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas. Below, the James. B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and law shares the books that influenced her first novel:

Passing by Nella Larsen is my novel’s origin story. It’s the novel that most often made its way onto my Duke syllabi, and the one my classes could never finish discussing. Larsen’s simple and elegant story ends with a death that a local policeman pronounces a “death by misadventure”; but was it? Rather than continuing Larsen’s narrative, my novel insisted on its own characters. Olivia Frelon, the woman who dies, is wrapped into Harlem’s mysteries of color, class, and kinship. Instead of Passing’s enigma, Harlem’s first colored policeman, Weldon Thomas, actually solves A Death in Harlem’s mystery.

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois. Harlem’s first colored policeman is a deep reader. When tragedy strikes, he’s actually reading DuBois’ Souls. This twentiethcentury philosopher and sociologist developed a critical notion of “twoness”—being able to see within and without race—that helped me compose the inside/outside frame of my novel. In fact, DuBois’ principle helps solve the mystery.

The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Weldon Thomas prided himself on using Holmes’ method of deductive reasoning. He read Holmes voraciously, so I did as well. Although no particular book by Doyle was critical, Holmes’ method is mighty helpful in Thomas’s investigation into Olivia Frelon’s death.

Finally, Toni Morrison’s Jazz gave me narrative license; her insistence in allowing her narrative to lay claim to the whole of its imagined terrain inspired me. So, in those moments when voices in my book seem to come from something inanimate, consider the instruction from Jazz to “Look where your hands are. Now.” They grasp the book. Following AfricanAmerican literary traditions, A Death in Harlem is a “talking book.”

BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY

A Marriage of Equals: How to Achieve Balance in a Committed Relationship (She Writes Press) Catherine E. Aponte A.M. ’77 The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women (Princeton University Press) Kate Bowler Ph.D. ’10, associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America, Duke Divinity School The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific With an Ancient Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life (Little, Brown, and Company) Doug Bock Clark ’09 Life and the Fields (Turning Point Books) George Keithley ’57 The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (Duke University Press) Charles Piot, professor of cultural anthropology, with Kodjo Nicolas Batema All the Water in the World (Scribner) Karen Raney B.S.N. ’78 Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire (University Press of Colorado) Mina García Soormally A.M. ’03, Ph.D. ’07 Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press) Amy Murrell Taylor ’93 Circa 1903: North Carolina’s Outer Banks at the Dawn of Flight (UNC Press) Larry E. Tise ’65, M.Div. ’68 Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) Jacob Tobia ’14

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

C O O P THE R A T M P E R AT V E O N Michael Tomasello combines experimental psychology and a wide-ranging curiosity to explore what makes us human.

Illustration by Beppe Giacobbe

Duke Photo

By Robert J. Bliwise

ummy bears. They reveal a sweet reality. Watch the video: A couple of three-year-olds are noisily negotiating a challenge cleverly arranged for them. They pull together on some ropes, thereby unsealing a big-box container and unleashing a flood of the candy treats. It doesn’t take much prodding by either partner to arrive at an equitable distribution; if one points out she’s gummy-deprived, the other will quickly correct the gummy imbalance. There all lots of similar studies, all in support of a grand theory of human uniqueness, and all part of the ever-expanding research record of Michael Tomasello ’71, a Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience. Tomasello’s drive as a thinker and researcher has earned him a host of honors; their range highlights a career of groundbreaking work in multiple fields. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest awards a scientist can receive. Five years ago, it was the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award. According to the citation, Tomasello’s “pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition.” Before that it was the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science: “He is one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines.”

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

“More than anyone else,” Tomasello “has helped to specify what makes us unique from and what makes us similar to other animals,” says Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Many of his experiments are classics in the field, and they have opened our eyes to what it means to be human.”

OMASELLO’S most eyeopening work to date— which, in sketching out what it means to be human, gathers together some of those classic experiments—is a book published earlier this year. It’s aptly if somewhat grandly titled Becoming Human. His starting point is that we’re separated from our closest primate relatives by small differences. Small differences, but pointing to one very big and very human trait: the impulse to cooperate. What first put him on the map, in his phrase, was Tomasello’s 1999 book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. There he offers a thought experiment, imagining a child raised on a desert is-

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land. The child is removed from all human contact. How would such a child behave? Very much like an ape. “The special part of humans are the capacities we’re born with,” he says. “Those capacities have to be realized through social interactions. They have to be exercised.” The new book shifts the focus. Culture—a concept that, to Tomasello, embraces creating and using symbols, from math to written language; creating and using complex tools; and, finally, creating and participating in complex social organizations and institutions—plays a big role in making humans human. So what plays a big role in making culture possible? “As I did more research and thought about it more, I decided that cooperation is more fundamental than culture,” says Tomasello. “You can think of culture as a form of cooperation. You can’t have culture without already having in place an individual psychology that says, ‘I can cooperate with other people.’ Then that psychology of cooperation scales up to the group.” If humans are uniquely capable of forming a culture, that’s because they’re uniquely capable of cooperating. Tomasello has a broad definition of

cooperation. It includes mutualistic collaboration, through which both parties benefit. Along with sacrificing, or altruism, or helping. As he sees it, as we gain experience through our infant years, a somewhat narrow, self-interested, mutualistic collaboration shifts to the more altruistic version of cooperation. Through that process, our moral range expands. “We want to cooperate because it’s mutually beneficial to do so. But we also want to cooperate because we want to distribute the spoils of our joint effort fairly, because we ought to.” Cooperation, then, eventually deepens the sense of “we,” the notion that we’re all in this together, that we all have a share of some entitlement from our effort. It’s an idea that grows out of the six hundred or so scientific papers Tomasello has authored or coauthored. A small sampling: “Young Children Mostly Keep, and Expect Others to Keep, Their Promises”; “Toddlers Help a Peer”; “What’s in It for Me? Self-Regard Precludes Altruism and Spite in Chimpanzees”; “Three-Year-Olds’ Reactions to a Partner’s Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment”; “Thirty Years of Great Ape Gesturing.” Since returning to Duke three years ago from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Tomasello has planted his team in the Duke Child Studies labs, a wing of the Social Psychology Building. A whiteboard carries an evocative recruiting message:

“You play with colors, we give you a prize. Age range 2.5-4.5 years.” A dozen or so kids’-participation awards line the walls; each includes a photo of one super-young, super-smiling lab subject, and declares that the Tomasello lab “proudly presents the honorable title of junior scientist.” One of the adjacent spaces—nondescript except for kid-distracting features like Dino Fossil Putty, a Secret Decoder, Fish Face swimming goggles, Superman-theme comic books, and plastic characters from Frozen—is being set up for an upcoming experi-

“Of course they’re cute videos,” Tomasello says. “They’re chimps and kids.” Just over a decade ago, Tomasello was running experiments with infants of fourteen and eighteen months of age, as they were just beginning to walk and talk. He had those infants engage with an adult stranger they had met moments before. They were put in situations where they could help the adult solve some simple problem, from fetching out-of-reach objects to opening cabinet doors when the adult’s hands are full. They were, as it turned out, eager to help. According

"It is not easy to figure out how to ‘ask’ a chimp a question or how to ‘ask’ a baby what they think or feel. Many have tried. Many have failed.” ment. It will look at how one child who’s been awarded a supply of tokens will go about sharing them with another child. He has a large videotape library of his experiments. Take a look through them and you’ll see in rambunctious action three- and five-year-olds. They’re performing—say, putting a treat in a box for a treat-deprived peer—in environments manufactured to be friendly, with totscaled chairs, huggable stuffed animals, floppy puppets (frogs, bears, rabbits, dogs, cows), and wildly colored posters to dress up the otherwise coldly clinical setting. You’ll also see, with a separate set of experiments, lots of chimpanzees, shown in somewhat less elaborately constructed environments. They’re doing things like pointing to an empty plate and implicitly asking: How about loading this up with some food?

to Tomasello, that meant they could at once perceive others’ goals in a variety of situations and, then, have the altruistic drive to provide a needed boost. Would other primates, our close relatives, behave differently? Sure, those other primates might communicate in some rough form. But if they’re really cooperative creatures, they have to be good at figuring out the psychology of their fellow primates. One of Tomasello’s longtime collaborators, Brian Hare, now a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, recalls that for a long time, scientists were skeptical that other primates could, in any way, “read” the intentions or actions of others. Tomasello himself had been asserting his own skepticism in scientific papers. But Tomasello was happy to test an alternative hypothesis—an indication of the To-

masello trait of being “addicted to discovery,” as Hare describes him. Even if some discovery might prove him wrong. For his dissertation, under Tomasello’s supervision, Hare ran experiments featuring chimps. Researchers placed food on one side or the other of opaque barriers, so the food was visible or not to a subordinate chimp and a dominant chimp. It turns out that chimps, like humans, are “mind readers”; they were able to figure out who knew what about the food location and would act accordingly. Hare and Tomasello, along with Josep Call (professor in evolutionary origins of the mind at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland), wrote up the study in the journal Animal Behaviour. They observed that “some subordinates in some trials engaged in strategic maneuvering, such as waiting or hiding to obtain pieces of food, sometimes even using more proactive strategies such as distracting the dominant away from the hidden food.” In other words, chimps aren’t mind reading to share or cooperate. They’re mind reading to compete. Tomasello elaborated on the human-chimp gap in a 2011 paper in Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals. One experiment had two- or three-year-old children in a room without adults; they were faced with the task of pulling together to bring a board, basically a seesaw, toward them. On each end of the board were two small toys that could be accessed once the board had been pulled close enough. As the children pulled, the toys rolled toward them; one child ended up with three toys, while the other ended up with one. The “lucky” child, who had gained three toys, made one of the toys available to the “unlucky” partner, who had gained one—so that they ended up with the same number. A parallel experiment focused on chimps. The “lucky” chimp never tipped the reward to the “unlucky” partner; the chimp took the reward for itself. For humans, it was all about restoring equity. For chimps, it was all about grabbing what was available to be grabbed. “The most basic comparative fact is that, in situations of free choice with rewards for both partners identical, threeyear-old children mostly collaborate with DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

a partner, whereas chimpanzees mostly choose to go it alone,” Tomasello writes in a recent paper, “The Moral Psychology of Obligation.” “Children are so motivated to collaborate that they actively attempt to reengage a recalcitrant partner, whereas chimpanzees ignore a recalcitrant partner and, again, attempt to go it alone. Indeed, children are so motivated that they attempt to reengage a recalcitrant partner even when they know they could act alone and reach the same result.” Humans, he goes on, “have a species-unique motivation and preference, at least among great apes, for pursuing goals by collaborating with others.” Be-

Individuals who were uncooperative in their interactions with others—those who tried to hog all the spoils—were avoided as partners. Their evolutionary line came to a stop. The upshot was strong social selection for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals. Great apes—chimps, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos—evolved to be pretty great at some things. They climb with great agility, they’re on a fast track in their physical development, and from age three or four, they’re essentially independent. If those great apes are biologically adapted for independence, humans are biologically adapted for cooperation.

"Teaching is present in all human societies we know of, and it is clearly not a normal activity among chimpanzees or other non-human primates.” yond that, children, as they collaborate, relate to one another with an apparent “sense of obligation to treat their partner respectfully, as an equal.” Meltzoff, the University of Washington researcher in cognition, says Tomasello “has a finely tuned intuition for what are important problems to study.” He adds: “Neither group can speak. Neither understands our language. It is not easy to figure out how to ‘ask’ a chimp a question or how to ‘ask’ a baby what they think or feel. Many have tried. Many have failed.”

HE COOPERATIVE tendency revealed by those human children, in Tomasello’s view, isn’t just incidental in the realm of human experience. It’s a consequence of human evolution. Humans diverged from other great apes around 6 million years ago. They were basically bipedal apes with ape-sized brains for the next 4 million years, when the genus Homo, with larger brains and new skills in making stone tools, emerged. As other primates competed with them for resources, they began obtaining their food through more active collaboration. 34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

They’re adapted, that is, to act together as a single agent, with a shared goal, rules of behavior adjusted to coordinate with partners, and implied agreement to share the rewards of their efforts. Tomasello’s cooperation-minded research questions are, in many ways, the timeless questions of philosophy. About ten years ago, he was awarded Germany’s Hegel Prize, for which he was hailed as a “true philosopher” in the guise of a lab researcher. The new book, Becoming Human, won the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association for bringing together “diverse subfields of psychology and related disciplines.” An occasional touchstone for him is Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. Hume sketched out “natural” or humanly innate virtues, such as sympathy, and then “artificial” or socially grounded virtues, such as justice or fairness. Tomasello closely follows that line: In evolutionary terms, cooperation was a means to procure resources that individuals could never procure on their own. It’s evident, in some form, through early-childhood development. As development proceeds, the child’s cooperative tendencies harden into a group identity.

So an evolutionary imperative translates into a collective imperative—and eventually into human culture. One journal review credits Tomasello’s “impressive and foundational research” for grappling with the last of Immanuel Kant’s great philosophical questions: What is man? Channeling Kant, fellow researcher Josep Call says, “One of the most fundamental questions that humans must grapple with, and not just from a scientific standpoint but also from a philosophical one, is what it means to be human.”

S A STUDENT at Duke, Tomasello—who for a typical day in the lab, still dresses casually in jeans—faced the usual confusion around what it means to decide on a major. Until he discovered psychology. He happened upon a course with Carl Erickson, now retired, in comparative psychology. “He would talk about how turtles find the beach on which to lay their eggs, how homing pigeons find their home, how honeybees communicate. I just thought it was the most fascinating stuff I had ever heard.” Tomasello was hooked. He sought out courses in developmental psychology, and then in social psychology and personality. He was drawn especially to the writings of Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist known for his pioneering work on child development. In Duke’s Gothic Bookshop, he picked up a copy of Piaget’s The Origins of Intelligence in Children; the book still has a place in his office. Piaget was interested in how children experience and process the world, and so he became an avid questioner of children: “Where does the moon go at night?” “How do bicycles work?” “How can those big, heavy ships float?” “How do shadows work?” Inspired by his reading of Piaget, Tomasello, as a Duke junior, took a job at the Watts Street Baptist Church daycare center in Durham. (He had gotten married right after his freshman year; at the time he was commuting between campus and his residence on a farm in Hillsborough.) As he organized play time

newspapers. Then he would head to class. With a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, Tomasello landed a job at Emory University, as an assistant professor of psychology. (Initially he had been turned down, but the preferred candidate withdrew, and he negotiated successfully to be more than a “placeholder” for a future hire.) Soon after arriving, in 1980, he drove out to Emory’s Yerkes Primate Center with a colleague. As he recalls, “We were gushing enthusiastically about how incredibly similar chimpanzees were to humans—in their basic emotions, their playful social interactions, their clever use of tools—when one of them sitting atop

a climbing apparatus began urinating. Another sauntered over and opened its mouth to catch the pee. Well, okay, maybe very similar to us, but not identical.” At that moment, he says, “I could dimly see how exciting it would be to directly compare great apes and human children,” across a spectrum of behavior. Tomasello advanced through the professorial ranks and at the Yerkes affiliate. In 1998, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tapped him as a founding co-director. Based in Leipzig, Germany, and employing a couple of hundred resident and visiting scientists, the institute investigates the history of humankind from multiple perspectives. Those scientists do research in genetics, cognition, and cultures and social systems, along with studies of primates closely related to humans. Following the fashion of German universities, the institute is very hierarchical; academic responsibilities aren’t broadly distributed. As a result, Tomasello supervised the dissertations of more than fifty Ph.D. students. He also helped set up (with Josep Call) what became both a major public attraction and a major center for primate research, operated with the Leipzig Zoo. Its research focuses on the behavior and cognition of the great apes: chimps, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos. And its zoo setting allows visitors to observe the apes and observe scientific studies as well. Among Tomasello’s Leipzig proteges was Duke’s Brian Hare, who had started working with him as a sophomore at Emory. He graduated in three-anda-half years. Right away he joined Tomasello’s team full time; he kept up that association through his Ph.D.-earning and postdoctoral years. “I thought I was going to play college baseball,” he recalls. “After I met Mike, I gave up baseball and played science instead.” Hare’s initial work with Tomasello was around the simple but meaningful gaze-following question: If one primate looks up, will another primate, in response, look in the same direction? Hare quickly became invested in designing experiments, collecting data, and sorting through possible interpretations—the hard but imaginative work of science.

empath

for the preschoolers there, he applied his own version of Piaget’s questioning. “Piaget’s general idea was that children have a logic of their own. They think in their own way. They are kind of a different species. And you have to figure out how they work.” Figuring out the route to academic success was a struggle: “This was the 1960s and ’70s, and I was doing things other than studying.” He applied to a bunch of graduate schools, was turned down by every one, and eventually moved to Florida, his home state. For a year he lived by a lake and worked putting together pallets—a cooperative enterprise alongside forklift operators—for one of two pallet-manufacturing companies in the U.S. He went through another round of grad-school applications; this time, he reeled in one acceptance, from the University of Georgia, and he enrolled there. For his first semester, he had no fellowship support. To earn some money in rural Athens, Georgia, he would wake up at three o’clock in the morning to deliver

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One of their early joint papers, published in Science, established what they labeled “the Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” The researchers gave a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to 106 chimpanzees, thirty-two orangutans, and then 105 children age two-and-a-half years. This was a large-scale study; it ran its subjects through a wide range of tasks, like “solving a simple but not obvious problem by observing a demonstrated solution.” Their overall conclusion: Children and chimps show very similar cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world. But when it comes to dealing with the social world, children have more sophisticated cognitive skills than other primates. It’s not a “general intelligence.” Rather, it’s a special intelligence—a sort of cultural transmission mechanism—through which humans can bond with and learn from others. The cultural-intelligence study was “the first large-scale cognitive study that compared different species across a wide range of cognitive abilities,” says Hare. Earlier approaches would zero in on a particular ability in a particular subject—then, on to another ability and another subject. Such a drawback led to lots of definitional fuzziness. Researchers might have been studying the same ability but applying different labels. Now known for heading up the Duke Canine Cognition Center, Hare says his work on dog psychology has built on the Tomasello model: Dogs, not unlike great apes, have a set of cognitive abilities, and

36 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

their expression varies in individuals. For dogs, they include memory and inhibition. Hare’s own large-scale studies, then, point to one “real world” application of Tomasello’s research methods: They allow him and his colleagues to identify good detection dogs (good memory) or service dogs (strong inhibition).

INY HUMANS, of course, aren’t very puppy-like. Try pointing to a puppy and… good luck getting a response beyond random tail-wagging. Tails aside, the non-response is typical of non-human primates. Pointing is a cooperative activity—providing help or seeking help. If toddlers are looking for something and you point behind the couch, they identify you as a helpmate; they know you are intending to help them find the hidden thing. If you look at culture the way Tomasello does, you find cooperation everywhere. One place is wherever teaching happens. “Teaching is present in all human societies we know of, and it is clearly not a normal activity among chimpanzees or other non-human primates,” he says. When adults are determined to see children learn, they’re ratcheting up the culture. “Children, for their part, must trust adult teaching and be ready to change behavioral strategies—in a way that chimpanzees apparently are not—as

soon as they see a better one.” Cultural conformity, too, is a variation on cooperation: There’s a uniquely human tendency to follow group fads and fashions for no apparent practical reason; it’s just that everyone is doing it (or wearing it). What Tomasello calls “normativity” is closely related. Humans self-monitor and evaluate their own thinking with respect to the standards of others; to feel you’re a member of a group is to identify with how the group thinks and behaves. And those aren’t just normative standards. As a culture we’re always coming together to place a value on things. We’re attached to our dollar bills, but they’re valuable only because, collectively, we award them specific worth. They’re pieces of paper decorated with a presidential portrait. They’re more than that, though, by common consent. Although chimpanzees can learn some things from others, culture doesn’t really exist for them, he says. Chimp culture, if the term even applies, is “tentative and fragile.” Human culture, in contrast, opens itself to being modified and not just to being copied; it relies both on faithful transmission across generations and the occasional adopting of novelty. Its basis in cooperation—including its emphasis on teaching, its shifting standards, and its particular way of assigning value—awards human culture a certain dynamism. But Tomasello hardly paints a picture of everyone being everyone’s best bud-

dy. In “The Moral Psychology of Obligation” paper, he observes that children bond first and foremost to those with whom they’re in a cooperative relationship. They have strong interactions with such partners, they protest when part-

generously. They’re less sharing-minded with out-group members. They care a lot about their personal reputations among in-group members, and they work to cast a positive light not just on themselves but also on their closest cohort.

gether in this way. They hunt together in some different way. We sure are different. That suggests a strong sense of apartness from the out-group, toward which the in-group feels no special obligation. Still, Tomasello keeps returning to that

“We are talking about cooperation within ‘the group,’ which is difficult to define in modern life but for most of human history corresponded simply to the couple of hundred individuals with whom one lived and interacted on a regular basis—as opposed to all those other barbarians that might be spotted from afar.” ners treat them badly, and they rationalize their own bad treatment of partners. Tomasello says it’s “astounding” that in this age range, children’s social behavior is affected simply by their being assigned to a “minimal group,” one with just loose supports. Once they don a green T-shirt and are told they belong to the green group, they’ll build a tight identity with the green group. A bunch of chimps may zip out in various directions to pin down some prey. But to Tomasello, they’re individually driven, not in-group driven: “If the guy who captures it can get away with it, he’ll eat it all himself.” Among humans, when five-year-olds are given a chance to share within their in-group, they do so

All of which suggests an ironic strand in Tomasello’s cooperation-centered career. When he listens to political language characterizing immigrants as invaders (or worse, as some kind of vermin), Tomasello considers what he calls “the dark side” of cooperation. Speaking in 2008, as part of a Stanford distinguished-lecturer series, he observed: “We are talking about cooperation within ‘the group,’ which is difficult to define in modern life but for most of human history corresponded simply to the couple of hundred individuals with whom one lived and interacted on a regular basis— as opposed to all those other barbarians that might be spotted from afar.” From the time of the earliest humans, group bonds have been deepened by competition from outside: We hunt to-

sense of shared intentionality on a grand scale, as a deep expression of the impulse to cooperate—and, in fact, as the origin of moral conduct. In Becoming Human, he writes that children at a young age are impressed with the notion that “it is now not just about what one wants to do, but about what one ought to do.” “Cooperative thinking and moral discourse,” as he puts it, implies the ability to accept the perspective of others, to respect the social norms of the group. Those are the prerequisites of a uniquely human social life. And so in identifying cooperation as the key human quality, as the great separator between us and our fellow primates, Tomasello is more than a philosopher-scientist. He’s also an authoritative optimist about the human condition. n

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

SOMETHING FOR

THE PEOPLE

Frank Konhaus ’80 and his wife, Ellen Cassilly, have turned their home into space for creativity and community.

BY SCOTT HULER arly evening. A crowd of fifty or so Danico and Eleonora mills around two levels of galleries and are, as it happens, travelPHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS HILDRETH ers, brought along by Kitassembly space: a modernist house ty, a neighbor who earlier strode confidently into the gallery filled with visitors, the living room lined with using two hiking poles for support. Kitty is over eighty and has folding chairs, the kitchen island covered with been ferrying Danico and Eleonora around for days since she wine bottles, pimento cheese dip, ham biscuits, gathered them up for uncertain reasons after introducing herself and fruit. Framed photographs cover every wall, and people at a Chapel Hill bus stop. None of the regulars know them, but leaf through books and read gallery guides left in easy reach on they wear name tags like everyone else, and everyone seems to shelves and windowsills. Out the windows to the north are acres enjoy the music, especially Frank Konhaus ’80, standing to the and acres of peaceful green—Duke Forest is the neighbor— side of Danico and Eleanora, delightedly taking pictures. The raked by magic-hour sunlight. photographs and the books, and the neighbors and the name Then, music: accordion. Or rather an organetto—a sort of tags, and Danico and Eleanora, and the organetto and the very junior accordion, which provides a cheerful, repetitive, heaving folk melody as its player, a twenty-something man named house itself all trace their origin to Konhaus and his wife, Ellen Danico, squeezes it, accompanied on the drum tambourine by Cassilly, in whose home the evening event takes place. his partner, Eleonora. The two sit on a bench next to a wall Welcome to Cassilhaus, an almost indescribable combination dividing the library from the main gallery. of art and people and places and things. It is Konhaus and CasHOSTS: Konhaus, left, and Cassilly in the gallery within their modernist home.

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silly’s home, a 2,400-square-foot modernist jewel at the end of a dead-end road in Orange County. It is an artist’s retreat— the house includes a separate 800-squarefoot loft residence, which welcomes artists for month-long residencies that Cassilhaus funds. It is the long gallery that connects the two, displaying shows of varying photographers. The current show is a selection of seventy-five pieces from the Cassilhaus collection of some 550 pieces of artwork, about 80 percent photography, almost all by living artists. The house includes four specifically programmed gallery spaces— five, actually, since Konhaus and Cassilly program even their bedroom when the house is open for viewing. “I talk about Cassilhaus as a stool,” Konhaus says. The four legs are the house, the artist-in-residence program, the collection of artwork and images, and the exhibition program. Cassilhaus mounts four or so shows per year, and most months they have an event or two like the one that has filled the house tonight. “And the seat” of the stool, Konhaus says, “is the community.” This evening’s event brings that community in for an artists’ talk with photographers Rachel Boillot M.F.A. ’14 and Lisa McCarty M.F.A. ’13, both of whose work is included in the gallery’s current exhibit, “New Blood: Recent Discoveries From the Cassilhaus Collection.” And as 7 p.m. approaches, as the people mill from room to room, up and down stairs, Konhaus taps a table knife against a wine glass, asking people to make their way to the living room, where fifty chairs—every chair they have in the house—are set up in front of a screen for the talk. “How many first timers?” he asks, and many hands go up. “We love first timers,” he says. “Make sure you sign up for the mailing list. The mailing list is the only place we announce these things.” It’s true. Cassilhaus has no general hours. It does not advertise its events; you just have to know. But Konhaus and Cassilly hang the exhibitions, and several times a month, whether for openings or events, they open the doors and it’s come one, come all, though after fifty respondents you can’t sit down. “Newbies have figured out that after the invitation goes out, you have about twenty-four hours before every seat is taken,” Konhaus says, to chuckles from the people filling all the seats. For the newbies he explains that they have three or four shows a year, points to Cassilly: “Cassil is over there,” he says, “and I’m -haus.” In introducing the presenters, he waxes lyrical. Cassilhaus has grown since it opened in 2009, and as it has expanded it has 40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

begun hosting an intern each year, either from the Duke M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Arts through the Center for Documentary Studies or from UNC, and these two photographers were the first two interns. “Of all the relationships we have” with artists, Konhaus says—“mentor, gallerist, editor, collector—the relationship I most cherish is that of friendship.” Rachel Boillot is first to present, and she agrees. “Every time I think I know what Cassilhaus is doing or all about,” she says, “they do something new and challenge that.”

SO YOU HAVE QUESTIONS. An art gallery without

hours? An artist residency in someone’s house? A community resource that invites in the community when it feels like it—and is celebrated for that? And we haven’t even discussed trapezoids yet.

“I always have loved how the gallery is the literal and symbolic bridge between the house and the artist’s loft. It is a livable piece of art.”

Like everything at Cassilhaus, it’s a long story. Konhaus fills in the background one sunny afternoon as one of the two cats prowls among the art books in the airy library, a sunlit space off the main gallery: one wall of books, three large framed photographs on the walls. He starts at the bottom. “I am one of the few people who can identify the absolute low point in my life,” says Konhaus, “almost to the day.” That would be the day he found himself returned from a disastrous adventure abroad and making his living by sweeping Duke Chapel for $6.25 an hour in preparation for a music performance. He had graduated with a chemistry major, the residue of a forgotten interest in becoming a doctor that resulted from a natural facility in science and a father who was a physician. But in his time at Duke, he had actually demonstrated aptitude in something else. Working as a student in the Duke recording studio, at that

time in Biddle, he developed expertise in audio-visual equipment. “Classrooms in the 1980s had chalkboards and overhead projectors,” he says. As classroom technology advanced, “I was the logical guy on campus to ask, ‘What TV should we get? What VCR? ’” He laughs. “I learned about TV brackets.” And he liked doing the work, so instead of going to medical school he continued at Duke, running the recording studio and helping with AV issues. As technology advanced, the work sped up though, and so did Konhaus. “I have two speeds: 120 percent, and off,” he says. In 1986, he needed some off time and took a leave from Duke. He calls the next months a sabbatical, consisting of a four-month trip to the South Pacific, where he fell OPEN HOUSE: In its two-story space, Cassilhaus has five different gallery spaces and lots of nooks and crannies.

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

in love with a young doctor and followed her to Switzerland. “Well, that was a no-go,” he says, laughing. He soon found himself back in Durham, “despondent and unemployed,” and he signed back on at Duke, and there he was sweeping before that show. “I almost said out loud, ‘Frank, it doesn’t get much lower than this.’ “The next week, I designed the logo for my business.” That’s Kontek, the Durham-based audio-visual system design-and-integration company that celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in September, creating things like display and communications systems for universities like Duke, Carolina, and N.C. Central, and corporations like Capstrat, Epic Games, and McKinney. For Duke, Kontek has designed everything from teleconferencing facilities to operating-room systems, including the systems for the new Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center. Which has kept him busy and happy, but, as it turned out, not quite fulfilled. That changed in 1999. Visiting New York with someone he was dating, the two decided to visit AIPAD—the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, an annual fair of photographers and dealers. “That was a complete fluke,” he says. “We saw it in a magazine and said, ‘This looks interesting, let’s go.’ ” He didn’t grow up in a family that was big into art or museums, but he was instantly hooked. Instead of the hour or so he had expected, he and his date spent the whole weekend at the show. Photographers and dealers “would individually go through these portfolio boxes with photographs and talk about their work,” Konhaus recalls. “It felt like we discovered this secret mystery where you could go and have all this fun for free and you were the focus of everybody’s attention.” He didn’t know it yet, but his life had fundamentally turned. “I didn’t get the girl, again,” he says of the date. “But I got photography.” He bought a photograph there—his first art purchase—and he’s been to AIPAD every year since. “I didn’t come back and say, ‘I’m a photography collector now,’” but he quickly noticed that he paid close attention to when his next issue of Black & White, a magazine for collectors of fine photography, was going to arrive. At first, as someone who had never been into sports or, say, woodworking, “it just felt like a victory to have a hobby.” But the deeper he dove, the more he recognized that in photography he got not just art but that personal connection. “These people were sharing,” he says of the AIPAD community. “They weren’t selling widgets. They were sharing their love and excitement.”

that Cassilly was a perfect match for Konhaus and schemed for Konhaus to be the one to go back to install her speakers. Fail; Cassilly thought Konhaus was basically the help and ignored him. Eight years later, by then something of a collector, Konhaus attended an art opening in Raleigh and saw Cassilly, each with different dates. Cassilly asked Konhaus to an outdoor movie, “and the rest,” Konhaus says, “is history.” Cassilly is an architect with a focus on landscape design and urban vitality (she had worked on the North Carolina Museum of Art amphitheater, where the

“I didn’t get the girl, again. But I got photography.”

KONHAUS AND CASSILLY MET CUTE. Konhaus’ partner at Kontek, Wes Newman ’78, had just joined Kontek when Cassilly called as a potential client, needing speakers in her barn. Though Kontek doesn’t do residential work, Konhaus needed something for Wes to do and sent him out. Wes got the idea 42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

two had their first date). She designed, for example, the Pavilion in the Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden (and several other structures in Duke Gardens) and Fullsteam Brewery in Durham. As the two married and began collecting and making a life together, they became aware of French artist Georges Rousse, whose trompe l’oeil projects involve complex, room-sized constructed installations created by teams of volunteers in old buildings ready for demolition or renovation, then photographed by Rousse from specific angles from which the odd hues and shapes resolve into colorful geometric forms, like giant circles or multicolored squares. “We couldn’t help but say, ‘Gosh, buildings about to be torn down or renovated, that’s what Durham is right now,’” Cassilly recalls. “American Tobacco was just getting renovated.” They reached out to Rousse’s agent and then Rousse himself. A little back-and-forth and soon they flew Rousse to Durham for a long weekend. “We did not want to start fundraising until we knew he wanted to do it,” she says. Once Rousse was in, “we had a small cocktail party and had a dozen people and raised like $5,000. We found an apartment for him, somebody donated a car, and you could just tell: Durham was so ripe for some activity.” They eventually raised more than $40,000 for the effort, which led to a monthlong residency for Rousse yielding elev-

ABUNDANCE: en separate installations, shared in 2006 Konhaus and as the “Warehouse Interventions.” HunCassilly show dreds of volunteers, thousands of visitors, some of the art loving reviews. “It succeeded beyond our stored in their wildest expectations,” Konhaus says. They basement. even produced a documentary film by local filmmakers Penelope Maunsell ’74 and Kenny Dalsheimer ’85. “After we recovered from that, we said, if we can make that from having an artist for a month, we probably should keep doing this.” Cassilly recalls a specific interaction with a Durham artist “who shall remain nameless,” she says. “He said to us, ‘You spent all that money to bring this guy to Durham. Why don’t you give me some money, and I’ll go to France?’” Cassilly explained how this was more than a trip; this was an artist engaging, connecting with, energizing the community of Durham.

At the end of Rousse’s residence, Cassilly says, “the same artist came up to us and said, ‘Yeah, I get it. I see the energy.’ That was so rewarding to hear him say that. So we said to ourselves, maybe the house that we’re about to design, we’ll make space for one artist to come. And part of their assignment, if you will, is they need to do one thing for the community.” The house already was going to need display and storage space for the growing photography collection. With the added residence, the Cassilhaus concept was complete.

BUT NOT THE HOUSE. In a process Konhaus calls “neighbor shopping,” they had been trying to find a spot to build the home for the rest of their lives. The property had to have space, it had to be near water, it had to be private, it had to be quiet. “Ellen finally said what we wanted was not ever going DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

to be for sale, so we started looking at tax maps,” Konhaus says. They chose properties, reached out to people and explained their goals, and finally found someone who had property they were willing to sell at the end of a road nestling next to the Korstian Division of Duke Forest. From the back porch, Konhaus points out, you can see—and hear—New Hope Creek. Cassilly is an architect, so she had skills. Konhaus was, he says, “literally a babe in the woods,” and the woods are where they started. They hiked in the forest, made tree surveys, camped on the site. With vague ideas, Konhaus started with Play-Doh, making up the three main volumes of the house: a big piece for the main house, a separate small lump for the artist’s loft, a long gallery placed atop the two like a box girder. Except not in the shape of a box. Look at every volume in the sleek, geometric modernist house, and apart from windows and doors, you’ll be hard pressed to find a rectangle. Walls diverge, angles widen, ceilings slope. “I had a really seminal architecture experience in which I stepped into a house that had a trapezoidal room,” Konhaus says. “It just felt much more alive than any architectural space I’d been in.” He had that idea long before he and Cassilly met. Cassilly literally embraced the idea; she spreads her arms in a wide angle to show how the shape of the main house emphasizes the treehouse-style view out the north windows from the living room. “I call it a megaphone of a view,” she says. Though Cassilly is the architect, the house is in every way a collaboration. Konhaus wanted a two-story space, and the living/dining room is that open area, large enough to hang enormous prints and fill with viewers without feeling overwhelmed. That hardly makes for cozy dining, though, so Cassilly designed a slatted screen that hangs above the dining room table, not only making the space more comfortable but providing a matrix for lighting—and also, she notes, focusing your view out those north windows, especially when you stand at the kitchen sink. Eight years looking for property, three years of design, and eleven months of construction. They moved in in late 2008 and hosted their first resident in 2009. More than forty artists have had residencies. As a building, it’s celebrated on tours and has been written up in the architectural press. To have in a 2,400-square-foot house not only eating and living space and the stairways and bathrooms, doors and windows that a life requires but also space for a library and five different

galleries to display art isn’t easy; everything has to do a lot of jobs, but that was the point. “There are all sorts of interesting, interstitial spaces,” Cassilly says; says Konhaus, “We intentionally made the space with lots of angles and nooks and crannies.” When he puts a show together, he thinks about those spaces; and when people view the show, the spaces encourage interaction, congregation. Community. “I was always struck by how intentionally designed it was,” said McCarty, who along with Boillot spoke at length about Cassilhaus before their gallery talks. McCarty came to visit in early 2012, in the first academic year of the Duke M.F.A., when a professor suggested Konhaus as a possible mentor. “I always have loved how the gallery is the literal and symbolic bridge between” the house and the artist’s loft, she says. “It is a livable piece of art.” McCarty’s first interview with Konhaus was portentous. “I was here for like five minutes, and he’s like, ‘Can you hold this?’ ” and that quickly she was helping frame, then helping mount shows, organically growing into the first Cassilhaus intern. “I did everything I could to assist with that vision.” It took: She has spent the years since her graduation as curator of the archive of the documentary arts at Duke’s Rubenstein Library, though she’s left to become full-time faculty at Southern Methodist University, and she says Konhaus has been invaluable in her progress. Boillot spoke as glowingly. She, too, learned from Konhaus. Above all, though, “to me it always felt like a refuge,” she says of Cassilhaus. “I could just come. Clear my mind. It’s a breath of fresh air every time you pull up.” Cassilhaus isn’t a nonprofit, there’s no board, there are no rules. Konhaus and Cassilly choose artists they like and offer them spots. No application, no process. Konhaus took another sabbatical a couple years ago, driving all over the country to visit similar institutions to glean best practices. And though he learned a lot, his conclusion was that there really are no similar institutions. Everything similar either housed multiple artists or had a complex nonprofit board. Photo artist Helen Sear, for example, ended up with a residency in 2018, when Konhaus and Cassilly, who already owned a piece of hers, met her at AIPAD. They mentioned the residency, she leaped at it, and she was on the schedule. “Every one of our artists has a story like that,” Konhaus says. “We’ve given up on trying to be too intentional about it.” This

“Of all the relationships we have—mentor, gallerist, editor, collector—the relationship I most cherish is that of friendship.”

44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

fall’s opening of the Nasher Museum sculpture garden, in fact, showcased a performance by Naama Tsabar, whose work Konhaus and Cassilly encountered when they visited the New Orleans show Prospect.4, at the time curated by Nasher curator Trevor Schoonmaker (Konhaus sits on the Collection Committee of the Nasher). Tsabar mounted a performance of female-identifying musicians, playing and standing on their amplifiers, in a New Orleans park. “I’ve never been more mesmerized by a performance in my life,” Konhaus says. Overwhelmed, he and Cassilly immediately asked to meet Tsabar, and fifteen minutes later had offered her a residency and got to work with the Nasher. One thing led to another, and on September 28 Tsabar, residing at Cassilhaus, performed as part of the opening of the new Nasher Museum sculpture garden. That’s Cassilhaus. “We’re not a community gallery, we’re not a hotel,” Konhaus says. “It’s just a lot simpler if money is kept out of the equation.” Even the gallery takes no fees. If art is sold during a show, the gallery sends every penny to the photographer. They fund the residency through renting the loft through online services. “We pay for the exhibition program out of our own pockets. There simply is no revenue stream.” When they have a connection to a charity or nonprofit they make Cassilhaus available for an event.

artists in the way that we are,” McCarty says, but their collection, their curating, the residencies, the house itself, constitute a kind of artistry, a way of pointing, of framing. “That’s what we do every day,” Konhaus says. “You gotta see this! You gotta meet these artists!”

AND PEOPLE COME TO DO JUST THAT. At an-

other evening Cassilhaus event a similar crowd gathers, this time to see the work of documentary photographer Alex Harris, one of the founders of the Center for Documentary Studies, who has spent years photographing movie sets throughout the

THE WHOLE STORY OF CASSILHAUS

follows that “we just kind of do it” model. Even the collection itself. Sitting in the library, Konhaus describes the subconscious processes involved in buying and curating. “A rule I try to follow pretty religiously is a three-day rule,” he says, which grew out of that first purchase at his first AIPAD. He COLLECTORS’ ITEMS: Above, visiting artists leave their marks inside the kept returning to an image at one gallery but, uncloset door in the artist room; left, tintypes of Cassilly and Konhaus. certain, withholding his decision to buy. He eventually bought and still loves the photograph, but by refusing to buy at first swoon he’s established a good practice. “If after the third time I go back I still get heart palpiSouth. He’s workshopping a show that will go up soon in Atlantations, I know it’s not infatuation but it’s true love.” ta, and he’s thrilled to workshop it at Cassilhaus. “There’s such a To explain what he loves about photographs—or which ones connection between a collector and a photographer,” says Harris. “What a collector does is to see, to choose, and to arrange. he buys—he harks back to a show he mounted only a few years That’s what a photographer does. I think it really helped that after he began collecting. After a curator friend promised to [Konhaus and Cassilly] came along at a time when those lines help him choose images for the show but then had to withdraw, between journalism and photography and documentary and “she said, ‘Look back at the last ten pictures you purchased and art were being blurred in a wonderful way. Their palate is that find something in common.’ ” When he looked, nine of his past broad palate of the arts that engage us with the world.” ten purchases had some photographic image within them. “A As Harris begins showing his slides, Konhaus stands to the photograph taped to a wall in a bar, or a photograph pinned to side, next to Cassilly, facing the slides as Harris works through a mirror in a bedroom,” something. them, the main room in the house he and Cassilly built packed The show he hung was called “Picture in Picture,” and it with artists and artwork, collectors and community members. functions almost as a metaphor for the relationship between curator and artist. Just as the artist captures and frames an image They stand in what is both their kitchen and their gallery— to communicate with viewers, the collector and curator choose enormous photographs on the walls, snapshots of friends and a series of images and place them together, again to communifamily caught to the refrigerator with magnets. Home and comcate, to connect. “I don’t know that Frank and Ellen claim to be munity are joined, and Konhaus and Cassilly watch together. n DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

ForeverDuke

GOING PLACES The North Carolina Museum of Art keeps growing and new director Valerie Hillings ’93 is scultping its next steps.

By Scott Huler

hen her phone rang last fall, France Family Professor of art, art history, and visual studies Kristine Stiles recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” the voice asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Valerie.” Valerie Hillings ’93: student, research assistant, protégé, then

friend and ultimately colleague, curator at the Guggenheim. A voice Stiles would never mistake. “You’re talking to the new director of the North Carolina Museum of Art!” Hillings told Stiles.

“We just screamed,” Stiles says, and a lifelong friendcal connection to its visitors and its vast campus. She’s ship entered its next stage with a return to its original at work on reorganizing the way the entire collection is status: both members in the same area code. They still hung. She’s figuring out how to answer to two separate struggle to find time to get together—“She’ll tell you, boards and one unpredictable state government. ‘And I haven’t seen her since she got here!’ because And on top of that she’s been touring the entire the job is so big,” says Hillings, laughing. And it is state, visiting museums, schools, studios, and arts and big. The NCMA has two buildings, an amphitheater, community organizations. She’s spent the last decade a 164-acre park, a staff of some 200, and an annual and a half working for the Solomon R. Guggenheim operating budget of $22 million. Museum and Foundation, ultimately as curator for So the return to the Triangle is less a homecoming the museum’s Abu Dhabi project, which will create for Hillings than a new adventure. Her in the United Arab Emirates capital a first position as the director of a munew museum displaying not just the seum. The first female director of the Guggenheim collection but artwork NCMA. And the director of a museconnected with its Middle Eastern site. “Arts happen um looking toward its next steps after Thus for decades she’s been traveling all over the decades of explosive growth, including the world, touring and organizing art the opening of a new building in 2010. shows in places like Russia and Spain, world. And just Since arriving in late 2018, Hillings Germany and Australia. Now she’s fobecause it’s not cused on learning from places like Kinhas been doing more than merely getin Artforum ting her legs beneath her. She’s also ston and Roaring Gap. begun developing plans for rethinking Which sounds great to her. How else magazine doesn’t the museum’s physical and metaphoriwould she have found her way to Else-

mean it’s not happening.”

46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Alex Boerner

ForeverDuke

where, the bizarre and miraculous museum and artist residency in Greensboro? A “living museum,” Elsewhere is a one-time thrift shop and boarding house ultimately turned into a holistic art installation, and in June one of its directors led Hillings and a few others around its cluttered rooms and chaotic hallways, filled with art created from decades’ worth of whatever was lying around. Artists visit and stay for a period, using the three stories’ worth of accumulated stuff—books, bolts of fabric, crockery, clothes—the “hoardiculture” built up over decades of the original owner’s lifetime—to create art, whether by organization, reuse, manipulation, or demolition. “To Preserve, Destroy,” says one installation, before which

it’s not happening.” Traveling the state does more than just introduce her to her fellow directors and curators. She says she’s collecting data to create frameworks for bringing into the museum community the people who come to these museums, who participate in their communities. “Some of these people may be our curators in the future.”

illings didn’t initially see curating in her own future. Like many Duke students, she started her first year looking into courses on politics, with an eye toward law school. But when a computer glitch left her with a last-minute hole in her second-term schedule, she signed on for a class on art from the Renaissance to the present, partial“The more I know, the more I can zoom ly because as a lecture course, it still had space. “I thought about it a little out and see how it’s all connecting. bit, and I had taken art history in high Being aware is the first step.” school,” she recalls, “and I grew up in a family where we went to museums.” It sounded like fun. It was taught by Hillings stood, agog, taking pictures, some of which second-year professor Kristine Stiles. she shared on her Instagram feed. The first course interested her enough to lead to a “Every surface has something happening,” she second, and for that course Stiles assigned a visit to said. “Look here”—she pointed to a shelf of kitchenany of several exhibits, one in Washington, D.C., near ware—“that looks like nothing’s happening that’s deHillings’ Alexandria home. When she and her mother liberate, but it turns out to be very intentional.” Elsewent to the exhibit, Stiles happened to be there, too. where treats art the way Hillings does. To Hillings, Hillings was shy. Her mother didn’t know Stiles, but that is, art is happening everywhere, and by everyone. that didn’t stop her. She “dragged me over to introduce me to Professor Stiles,” Hillings says. “And that “Arts happen all over the world,” she said. “And just was the beginning of our lifelong relationship.” because it’s not in Artforum magazine doesn’t mean 48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Stiles soon saw a ON THE ROAD: Left, Hillings at Elsewhere, sense of purpose in the an unusual museum shy young woman that in Greensboro; center, matched that of her at the Weatherspoon mother. “She’s very clear Museum; and right, at in her identification of the GreenHill Center for strong people, people North Carolina art that she can depend on,” Stiles says. “She chose me as a mentor, and she’s never wavered.” One class led to another, and the mentor relationship strengthened. Stiles asked her to be her research assistant, so Hillings helped on Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, an art-history text. Hillings continued to move toward art history, though her interests in politics and other topics did not fade. Eventually she recognized that art history was simply history seen through a specific lens, not an interest exclusively in art: “I didn’t have to leave [other interests] behind to be an art historian,” she says. “In fact, I could kind of shape it in a way that might be more interesting.” She was on track for a second major in political science until she replaced policy courses with the language classes she needed for graduate school. As a senior she curated a show at the old Duke University Museum of Art (predecessor to today’s Nasher Museum). Each year high-level art history upperclassmen were chosen to curate the “Soho at Duke” series, and in her senior year Hillings was chosen. With a partner (and Stiles and then-museum director Michael Mezzatesta), she traveled to New York, where they visited galleries, chose art, and created an exhibition. Stiles still recalls how powerfully she and Photography by Scott Huler

Mezzatesta “pretty much hated everything they chose for the show.” The elders pushed hard, but Hillings and her partner “told us, ‘This is our generation.’ Valerie was the one who was really forthright about that.”

aking hard choices and being forthright about them is Hillings’ job now, and she’s prepared. Sarah Schroth, director of the Nasher, knows Hillings as a board member and as an expert brought in several years ago to help the Nasher manage its collection of Russian art, and like Stiles, Schroth is taken by Hillings’ cheerful fierceness. “She’s not afraid of anything,” Schroth says. “She’s very brave, and intellectually courageous.” Schroth does suggest that as the director of a large enterprise, Hillings prepare herself for something not particularly artistic: “One thing museum directors don’t understand until they sit in the chair is the amount of time you have to use for staff,” Schroth says. She also noted that, among museum directors, women are historically underrepresented. As both director and CEO of the museum, Hillings seemingly serves two masters: the NCMA board of trustees, a group appointed largely by the government, and the NCMA Foundation board of directors, which is a private foundation that raises money for the museum (and also chooses some members of the first board). The Foundation raises about 60 percent of the museum’s annual budget. And if all that isn’t complicated enough, the government-appointed board is of course powerfully affected by vagaries in state lawmaking and funding; the museum is itself a DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

ForeverDuke Park, but Hillings says in day-to-day life a New Yorker won’t think much about it. In North Carolina, whether it’s the new Dix Park being planned in Raleigh, the greenway systems throughout the state, or perhaps the Blue Ridge Parkway Folk Art Center, “here they’re highly valued,” she says. “Admired, important in the social fabric.”

H part of the state’s Department of Cultural and Natural Resources. That doesn’t worry Hillings; her Guggenheim project was effectively funded by the government in Abu Dhabi. Having everything from high-level donors to ticket sales in her background gives her confidence. “The more I know, the more I can zoom out and see how it’s all connecting. Being aware is the first step,” she says. And though she went to Duke and says she loves North Carolina—she eventually married Duke classmate B.J. Scheessele “Everybody’s ’93, M.B.A. ’98, and his family lives touched each in Charlotte—she understands that she needs to treat North Carolina as a other at some place mostly new to her. “That’s why I’m point. I think learning by going out into the state,” she says. “Going to schools and meetthrough culture ing community college leaders, because you can show I need to understand how the museum those shared can be a partner with them. And equally, how we can be a platform,” sharing moments and their artists and educators through the sensibilities.” museum. That collaboration is something she plans to focus on as she begins to make a mark on the museum; another priority is education. But above all, especially at first, she is trying to open herself up to North Carolina and how it responds to art. “What’s been interesting to me, coming here after living in New York for twenty-five years, is how important parks and nature are here,” she says. Not that New Yorkers don’t love Central 50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

illings discusses these topics in front of the enormous windows in her office at the corner of the top floor of the museum’s east building—the old building. She joked once when visiting the private collection in the apartment of Peter Norton in New York—the Norton Antivirus software guy—that the window looking out onto Central Park was the best part of his collection. Now she has a similar view, looking out over the emerald museum park, and doesn’t take it for granted. “We’re here in the middle of nature,” she says; she sees hawks and swallows among the trees and sculptures. She also sees parents and school groups, joggers and bicyclists. The Museum of Art is in that vast park as the result of a long-ago decision by the legislature to move the museum away from downtown and nearer the highway—and the Polk Youth Detention Center that remained in operation next to it until 1997. “When I first started coming,” she says of her visits to the museum as a Duke student, “it was still a prison here.” The museum ended up with that land, and a new addition to the sculptures and landscape installations opened in 2016. Now her office windows open onto a spectacular expanse of park and nature. “I keep doing this hug thing,” she says, describing how the amphitheater, the park, and the museum building itself create a sort of embrace. She sees the complexity of those various enterprises as an opportunity to help them embrace the people who come to see them. Past director Larry Wheeler shepherded in the additions to the park and the new building. She sees her job as tying together those new elements—the park, the amphitheater, the new building—into that hug. She imagines doors on the bottom floor enabling visitors to come into and out of the museum, bringing the park experience closer to the museum. And though the new building removed some of the lifeblood from the museum’s original building, she sees the now underused space on the bottom floor of the old building as another way to expand what she sees as the museum’s “education and service mission.” For one thing, she can use space for educational opportunities.

She also envisions what she calls “a collection stewardship floor.” As she works on rehanging the permanent collection, she plans to work less along the standard placeand-time model (here is seventeenth-century European art; next comes eighteenth-century European art) and more thematically. The museum is currently, for example, conserving a newly acquired statue of Saul—and performing that conservation in front of visitors. Taking patrons into the back room, as it were. She imagines that statue eventually being displayed not with other sculptures or with representations of biblical art or sculpture made in nineteenth-century England, but rather with the museum’s collection of portraits. She talks about her work on the Abu Dhabi project and how that inspired her to think beyond the conventions of exhibition. “Like we would buy a painting from a Sudanese artist, who had painted it in 1964 in New York because he was there on a Rockefeller grant. And then it became really interesting because on the one hand he was looking at Sudanese modernism, the European modernism he learned as a student, and then spray paint that he got from Skunder Boghossian, an Ethiopian painter who was based in Washington.” With what other works of art would you display that painting? “These are the kinds of things I find incredibly fascinating.” Is that New York art? African art? Modernist art? “Everybody’s touched each other at some point. I think through culture you can show those shared moments and sensibilities.”

“

s a curator,” she says, “every exhibition is a story. It’s a point of view. It’s not presumed that what you’re telling is a gospel of fact story.” She loves how positive the response has been to that visible conservation and envisions telling more stories. “It’s not just about the cleaning,” she says. “So many stories are accessible for people but unknown.” She envisions at least one gallery making clear that process of curation and encouraging visitors to be aware. This is how the curator organized this work. How else might it be organized? Her onetime coworker at the Guggenheim, Sasha Photography by Alex Boerner

Kalter-Wasserman, isn’t surprised by REIMAGINING: Far left, Hillings this. “She has a remarkable sense of promotes an image from a how to engage viewers in the creative current show on Instagram; act by shedding light on the impetus, above, Hillings moved this process, and artist’s voice,” she says of sculpture by Jaume Plensa to the Hillings. “And she’s always asking us back of the East Building to help to consider the artworks as curators draw visitors inside. and as viewers.” Hillings says she’s not artistic herself, at least not as a painter. “I made one good pen-and-ink drawing when I was nine,” she says, which she brought back to Raleigh as a reminder. “But for me, writing and creating stories through the exhibits has been my artistic talent.” n DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

ForeverDuke

2019 AWARDS

Doing Their Part

INVENTOR OF THE MODERN COCHLEAR IMPLANT

Every year, the Duke Alumni Association celebrates Blue Devils who go above and beyond for the university through service to their Duke communities, their cities, and the world. A round of applause for these 72 Duke alumni who are leading the way. Distinguished Alumni Award Blake Wilson B.S.E. ’74, Ph.D. ’15

Blake S. Wilson B.S.E. ’74, Ph.D. ’15

Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service William Andrews ’76, M.D. ’80, H.S. ’82-’86 • Stacy Stansell Gardner B.S.E. ’91 • Kris Klein ’82 Joe Swedish M.H.A. ’79 • Katherine Upchurch M.D. ’76 • Nicholas Stevens ’86 (Posthumous) Beyond Duke Service and Leadership Award Stephen Cochi M.D. ’77, H.S. ’77 • Ellie Cohen ’78 • Maab Ibrahim ’12 • Suhani Jalota ’16 Krithi Karanth Ph.D. ’08 • Todd Sears ’98

Forever Duke Award Margaret Abernathy B.S.E.’08 Anne Arwood ’05 Hans Brasseler LL.M.’92 Yujin Chun ’11 Nick DiLuzio M.F.’10 Tayo Famakinwa ’05 Sam Ghazaleh B.S.E.’86 Arielle Grill ’93 Harry Jones ’08, A.M.’10 Nyssa Kourakos ’90 Lisa Lawson ’89 Chin Jie Lim B.S.E.’18 Melanie McMinn ’02 Oren Mushin M.D.’11 Joshua Nelson ’05 Stevan Pardo ’81, J.D.’84 Tonia Sackett ’06 Tadena Simpson ’05 Mathavi Strasburger B.S.E.’10 Benjamin van der Horst M.B.A.’13 Kyle White ’07, ’07 Julia Whitehurst Roy ’85 Camille Wingo M.B.A.’15 Alexandra Young ’14

52 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Forever Duke Group Awards Group 1

Class of 2003 15th Reunion Chairs Logan Allin ’03 Banu Asik Elizondo ’03 Virginia Badanes ’03 Hilary Bayer ’03 Luke Bayer ’03 Joshua Bissu ’03 Erika Boden ’03 William Brown ’03 Max Cohen B.S.E.’03 Andrea Douglas ’03 Christopher Douglas ’03 William Fagan ’03 Emily Glassman ’03 Brian Goldfarb ’03 Kristina Hunt ’03 Erica Jackson ’03 Paul Lagunes ’03 Thomas Larkin ’03 Suzanne Lieb ’03 Spencer Reich ’03 Russell Richards ’03 Sara Richards ’03

Lily-Hayes Salzberg ’03 Erik Simpson ’03 Andrew Skelton ’03 Kimberly Skelton ’03 Elena Steiger Reich ’03 Nick Superina ’03 Michael Vrana ’03 Michael Weiner ’03 Daniel Wrublin ’03 Group 2 James Fleming ’09 Vijay Shah M.B.A.’85 Group 3 Dennis Gilmore Ph.D.’78 Jane Gilmore Ph.D.’80

Distinguished Alumni Awardee As an electrical engineer, scientist, and adjunct professor in Duke’s departments of engineering and surgery, Blake S. Wilson is credited with inventing many of the sound-processing capabilities of the modern cochlear implant, which has resulted in thousands of individuals with profound deafness hearing again. The cochlear implant uses electrical signals that circumvent damaged hair cells of the inner ear and instead are sent directly to the auditory nerve. Wilson is, as one colleague has said, an impressive example of “the good engineering can do for society.” I’ve been volunteering since…“1984, including as adjunct professor in the departments of surgery and electrical and computer engineering; as a consulting professor in the department of biomedical engineering; and as the inaugural scholar in residence for the Pratt School of Engineering. These are all unpaid positions that I have had the privilege to hold for many years.” Also, at Duke… “I was among the creators of the Duke Hearing Center in 2008.”

GLOBAL CONSERVATION LEADER

INCLUSION ADVOCATE

PHILANTHROPY ACCELERATOR

Krithi Karanth Ph.D. ’08

Todd Sears ’98

Maab Ibrahim ’12

Beyond Duke Awardee

Karanth has devoted her career to working with communities throughout India to help them understand the environmental value of wildlife, while at the same time making sure they are compensated when wildlife threatens their livelihood. She helped launch Wild Seve in 2015, an initiative that provides a toll-free number to call when wildlife threatens a home or farm. Field staff assess damage and file and track compensation claims with the Indian government. The initiative has helped nearly a half-million people living in villages surrounding national parks and addressed more than 6,000 human-wildlife conflict cases. You’ll also know her as a…2012 Emerging National Geographic Explorer, the chief conservation scientist at India’s Centre for Wildlife Studies, and an adjunct faculty member at Duke and India’s National Centre for Biological Sciences. She gives back to Duke by…regularly sponsoring students pursuing research projects as part of the master of environmental management degree and helping to design the India semester abroad program for undergraduate students.

Sears has spent a decade fighting for the inclusion of LGBT+ people throughout the world, first, through Out on the Street, a networking group for executives in the finance industry, and later, as the founder of Out Leadership, an advisory firm he launched in 2011 that helps C-suite-level employees gain better access and inclusion across thirteen industries. Today, Out Leadership works with seventy of the world’s leading companies, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, creating economic power for underrepresented people and solidifying diversity and inclusion as an asset to businesses throughout the world. Sears also…cofounded the Duke LGBT Alumni Network, a group of alumni who advocate for inclusion and organize events for group members throughout the year, and has returned to campus for the past twenty years to mentor students.

At Google.org, the philanthropy wing of Google, Ibrahim is changing what it means for corporations to become part of the narrative for social-justice change. As the inclusion portfolio lead, Ibrahim has directed more than $32 million in grants to nonprofits that are working on racial and criminal justice issues by leveraging a combination of Google funding, products, and volunteer expertise. In addition, Ibrahim brings it full circle at Google, helping employees participate in volunteer projects that use their skills to accelerate the reach of the grants. Duke was significant to me because it was…“when I discovered my passions, found mentors who encouraged me to lean into curiosity, and made friendships that sustained and pushed me throughout my journey.” Some projects I’ve worked on include…“working with Beyoncé to expand the Homecoming Scholars Award to eight historically black colleges and universities and supporting the LGBT Center in New York, a project that will digitize and preserve the Stonewall Riots.”

DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

ForeverDuke

TRAILBLAZER FOR WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

LEADER IN THE FIGHT AGAINST DISEASE

Suhani Jalota ’16

Stephen Cochi M.D. ’77, H.S. ’77

Ellie Cohen ’78

Beyond Duke Awardee

As a student, Jalota launched the Myna Mahila Foundation, a nonprofit based in India focused on women’s entrepreneurship. The foundation employs women who produce and distribute sanitary pads throughout Mumbai communities, where there is a cultural stigma attached to menstrual hygiene. Employees not only break down debilitating stereotypes, but also earn income and learn valuable business skills. In four years the non-profit has launched a biannual health camp for women and girls in Mumbai, organized an annual menstrual hygiene conference, started a pop-up boutique that sells products made by employees, and—new in 2020—will host the “Run Red for Myna” marathon in Mumbai. Next is...pursuing a Ph.D. in health economics at Stanford University to develop skills that will enable her to devise, implement, and assess health interventions more effectively.

A board-certified pediatrician, Cochi spent thirty-four years working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading efforts to boost immunizations for children around the world. During his tenure with the CDC, Cochi managed the immunization program in the United States and is credited with eradicating polio and measles domestically. Currently he serves as the senior adviser to the director of the Global Immunization Division of the CDC. Before I joined the CDC, I...“was a pediatrician in the Indian Health Service from 1980 to 1982 on the Navajo Reservation in Gallup, New Mexico.” My work on polio and measles eradication has...“given me an extraordinary opportunity to have an impact on the lives of children around the world by increasing their chances to survive, develop, and reach their full potential.”

Established in 1983, the Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest award the Duke Alumni Association bestows on one of its own. It is given to an alum who has made significant contributions in his or her own field, in service to the university, or for the betterment of humanity. | The Beyond Duke Service and Leadership Award was first given in 2014 to recognize alumni who have distinguished themselves through service to their community, their country, or society at large. 54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ENVIRONMENTAL HERO

Cohen took what was once a local California bird observatory and turned it into, as one of her nominators put it, an organization that is “a powerhouse” in climate change. As CEO of Point Blue Conservation Science, she’s collaborated with scientists to listen to them, understand their work, and then infuse climate conservation into their research objectives, leading tens of thousands of collaborations locally and around the world. Now CEO of Californiabased nonprofit The Climate Center, Cohen is focused on executing bold green policies, including providing 88 percent clean, non-fossil-fuel electricity to 10 million people—one quarter of all Californians. I volunteer to...“help ensure a climatesafe, vibrant, and equitable future for all.” An example of my climate conservation efforts is...“leveraging almost $100 million in agricultural land conservation on roughly 2 million acres of forests, meadows, rangelands, and croplands for water, birds, other wildlife, carbon sequestration, and people by engaging more than 1,000 ranchers and farmers, dozens of public agencies, and other NGOs, and more than 50,000 students and teachers.”

DUKEISEVERYWHERE

CANADA Number of alumni:

876

Instagram: @gayathri.s.vasan

One year ago, GAYATHRI

made the move to Toronto, Canada—a brand-new adventure to pursue her post-Duke career in product management. To commemorate her first year, she completed the CN Tower EdgeWalk, the world’s tallest hands-free walk around a building at a whopping 116 stories up. “I truly believe that with hard work, a positive mindset, and the right people to support us, we can achieve anything and be proud of ourselves. These things have truly helped me start over in a new city and win at what I’m doing!”

Courtesy Gayathri Srinivasan

SRINIVASAN M.E.M. ’17

ForeverDuke

THENNOW

“The justice profession needs our strong voice. My top priority overall is increasing the readiness of our section to really face the challenges that will come.” —George W. Jordan III ’93, after being elected chair of the American Bar Association section of Intellectual Property Law

“My parents were the type of entrepreneurial business owners for whom Square was created.” —Amrita Ahuja ’01, the company’s CFO, on how its purpose inspires her

“I’m honored and excited for the opportunity. The ACS name has been synonymous with progress and hope." —William Cance ’78, M.D. ’82, on being named chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society

56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Retro The bulldozer has arrived

As its buildings fall into history, it’s time to remember when Central Campus living was a dream. | BY VALERIE GILLISPIE

n May, students moved out of their Central Campus apartments for the last time. The buildings are now being razed, and the future of Central Campus is uncertain. Over its nearly forty-five-year lifespan as part of our university, the Central Campus apartments remained the same, but the vision for what they could be changed as the years passed. Following the sale of married student housing on Morreene Road, there was a need for more residential units for graduate and married students, as well as undergraduates. Duke bought land that had previously housed workers for Burlington Industries, displacing a number of longtime residents. Small homes were removed, and the new apartments erected. When the cornerstone of Central Campus was laid in 1972, the program distributed at the event boasted that “The apartment units are of two-story, wood-frame construction with exteriors of brick veneer and wood siding. Every effort has been made to include high quality, low maintenance materials, with particular attention being paid to the problem of sound transmission between apartments.” It also detailed the hopes that administrators had for the campus “at a later time.” These included a day care center, community building, playground, swimming pool, and tennis courts. Both graduate and undergraduate students shared the campus, although over time, undergraduates came to occupy the majority of the units.

When it opened, Central was a less-expensive housing option than East or West Campus, and it offered apartment-like living, rather than a dormitory environment. It was fairly convenient to Ninth Street and the amenities there. While there were financial advantages to living on Central, it was also removed from the social life of East and West campuses. In 1983, the Central Campus Study Committee (made up of students, faculty, administrators, and Central Campus residents) submitted a report urging the university to invest in building a community feel on Central Campus. The report noted: “Extensive programming within the residence halls, opportunities for social interaction, and the development of a sense of community have all become integral facets of Duke’s evolving commitment to fostering a meaningful residential experience. While significant attention has been given to the dormitories on East and West Campus, another vital part of the community has not moved ahead with [the] changing philosophy of residential life.” In response, new features were provided on Central Campus, including paved basketball courts, a pool, a multipurpose building, a convenience store (Uncle Harry’s), and “an old-style English Pub with a limited menu reflecting genuine English dishes. Associated with the Pub will be a lounge area for darts, cards, billiards, and a place to come relax and talk.” These enhancements

APPEALING: Above, a handbook explaining the then-new campus; left, a flyer promotes the benefits of Central living

were completed in 1985, and Central Campus was again promoted to students as an appealing option. Advertisements from 1975 declare “avoid dormitory overcrowding, long lines for the shower…learn to love the kitchen, bathroom, and air-conditioning of a spacious, fully furnished, convenient apartment without moving off-campus!!!” and “Why live anywhere else?” As the more affordable housing option, Central appealed to many students on tight budgets. It also provided a different kind of social atmosphere, and it had a particular appeal to students of color. An October 2000 Chronicle article noted: “In the past, minorities have been disproportionately housed on Central Campus—last year, 35.2 percent of black students and 19.9 percent of Asian students lived on Central, while only 12.1 percent of white students did.” One student provided an insight as to why this was the case: “He said that while living next to mostly white fraternities on West may be appealing to some, there are fewer social benefits to living on West for minority students.” In the 1990s and early 2000s, major changes to Central Campus were considered as the apartments aged. These included new student housing, faculty housing, a commercial district, and even a monorail to better connect Central

to East and West Campuses. There was concern for how the proposed commercial and residential options would affect nearby non-Duke communities, and whether it would negatively affect the Ninth Street corridor. Other building priorities on campus delayed any action, however, and the recession in 2008 scuttled a major overhaul of the campus. Toward the end of the first decade of the 2000s, Central became home to a number of selective living groups and Greek organizations, rather than being clustered on West as they had been since the early 1990s. A 2010 Chronicle article explained that “The transition hinges on selective living groups’ willingness to give Central a chance. Administrators insist they don’t want Central to be framed as a punishment.” While the university invested in modest upgrades to Central Campus in the 2010s, the article said that “If all had gone according to plan, they would have traded the paint brushes and hoes for a bulldozer.” The bulldozer has arrived, and while the apartments have disappeared, they are still remembered—fondly by some, not so fondly by others—as a home and community for thousands of Duke students over these last five decades. n

“Why live anywhere else?”

Photography Duke University Archives

Gillispie is the university archivist. DUKE MAGAZINE FALL 2019

ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Warner H. Hutchinson ’38 of Naples, Fla., on April 29, 2016. Benjamin S. Horack ’39, LL.B. ’41 of Charlotte, on May 3, 2019.

1940s

William Ernst Jr. M.F. ’41 of Summerville, S.C., on Oct. 17, 2018. Joe C. Ridenhour ’42 of Kannapolis, N.C., on March 2, 2019. Curtis L. Blake ’43 of Hobe Sound, Fla., on May 24, 2019. Thomas S. DeLong ’43, A.M. ’47, Ph.D. ’54 of Sinking Spring, Pa., on May 29, 2019. Waldo C. Henson ’43 of Moorpark, Calif., on March 19, 2017. John L. Morgenthau ’43 of Exeter, N.H., on March 9, 2019. Donald S. Wall B.S.M.E. ’43 of Cincinnati, on Jan. 18, 2019. Joan D. Nix Drew R.N. ’45 of Wilmington, N.C., on March 31, 2019. Richard A. Martorell ’45 of Tampa, Fla., on March 13, 2019. Talmadge M. Neece ’45 of Durham, on Jan. 31, 2019. Robert S. Smith ’45 of Walnut Creek, Calif., on March 10, 2019. Paul M. Smurthwaite Jr. B.S.M.E. ’45 of Columbia, S.C., on April 14, 2019. Frances V. Parsons Britsch ’46 of Cleveland, on May 5, 2019. Kenneth E. Vincent ’46 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on April 18, 2019. Ralph W. Coonrad M.D. ’47, H ’48, H ’50, H ’52, H ’53 of Durham, on April 10, 2019. Herman F. Froeb M.D. ’47 of La Jolla, Calif., on Oct. 11, 2018. Charles B. Simmons Sr. ’47 of Wilmington, N.C., on March 12, 2019. Dorothy N. Giles Stevenson R.N. ’47 of Birmingham, Ala., on March 24, 2019. Patricia Way Goetz ’48 of Carmel, Calif., on May 2, 2019. John A. Simpson LL.B. ’48 of Ashland, Ky., on Feb. 15, 2019.

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ForeverDuke Jean I. Melvin ’49 of Kings Mountain, N.C., on April 15, 2019. Laurie V. Izlar Mullins ’49 of Starke, Fla., on March 25, 2019. Roland H. Nelson ’49 of Greensboro, N.C., on March 21, 2019. Morris Roseman Ph.D. ’49 of Walnut Creek, Calif., on March 12, 2019. Katherine Bartram West ’49 of Albuquerque, N.M., on May 13, 2019.

1950s

John C. Ayers Jr. ’50, M.D. ’54, H ’55 of New Bern, N.C., on May 22, 2019. Cordylia L. Crook Chapman ’50 of Charlotte, on April 7, 2019. William D. Gilmer ’50, M.F. ’51 of Brunswick, Ga., on March 6, 2019. Clark W. Jennings Jr. ’50 of Hickory, N.C., on May 27, 2019. Lois D. Hobbs MacNaughton ’50 of Mount Pleasant, S.C., on April 11, 2019. Mary Clare Ivey Matthews ’50 of White Oak, S.C., on June 1, 2019. J. Spurgeon McCartt B.Div. ’50 of Kingsport, Tenn., on April 10, 2019. B. Franklin Sprinkle ’50 of Morganton, N.C., on May 11, 2019. Doris H. Lewis Vechan ’50 of Amarillo, Texas, on April 5, 2019. Margaret Pullig Altany A.M. ’51 of Midland, Texas, on April 9, 2019. Ruth Schreiner Boyce ’51 of Chapel Hill, on May 11, 2019. Anne P. Tillett Reiser ’51 of Birmingham, Ala., on May 1, 2019. Charles W. Treat B.S.M.E. ’51 of Irondequoit, N.Y., on Oct. 8, 2018. Walter J. Wadlington III ’51 of Charlottesville, Va., on May 27, 2019. S. Page Butt Jr. B.S.E.E. ’52 of Lansdale, Pa., on March 29, 2019. Sally Kelly Clancy ’52 of Arlington Heights, Ill., on May 21, 2019. Thomas M. Divine Jr. ’52 of Naples, Fla., on March 29, 2019.

J. Douglas Galyon ’52 of Greensboro, N.C., on April 7, 2019. Sally A. Green Walton ’52 of Danville, Va., on March 22, 2019. Evelyn Vance Wilder ’52 of Gainesville, Fla., on April 21, 2019. George C. Bell ’53 of Kinston, N.C., on Feb. 3, 2019. Gaston H. Gage ’53 of Charlotte, on June 10, 2019. Kerwin E. Hyland Jr. Ph.D. ’53 of Exeter, N.H., on Nov. 24, 2017. Ann Fuller Johnson ’53 of Durham, on April 7, 2019. Mitta G. Carr Isley ’53 of Tarboro, N.C., on May 1, 2019. Francis Knowles Jr. ’53 of Ponte Vedra, Fla., on March 30, 2019. Robert R. Ross ’53 of Stuart, Fla., on Feb. 10, 2019. Jack C. Westman H ’53 of Newton, Mass., on April 2, 2019. John M. Brewer M.D. ’54 of Kershaw, S.C., on Jan. 17, 2019. Maryellen Street Fleming ’54 of Onancock, Va., on April 4, 2019. Noel Francisco Ph.D. ’54 of Backus, Minn., on March 18, 2019. Robert V. Hall ’54 of Greensboro, N.C., on April 19, 2019. Helen E. Willard Harper ’54 of West Columbia, S.C., on April 21, 2019. William B. Jones M.D. ’54, H ’55, H ’61 of Greenville, S.C., on March 12, 2019. Barbara M. Wilson Pope ’54 of Stedman, N.C., on Nov. 10, 2018. Dorothy E. Secrest Pope ’54 of Lillington, N.C., on March 15, 2019. Edward E. Anderson ’55, M.D. ’58, H ’58, H ’60, H ’66 of Durham, on March 26, 2019. David E. Brooks ’55 of Patten, Mass., on June 1, 2019. H. Donaldson Browning III ’55 of Jacksonville, N.C., on March 14, 2019. Frederick M. Campbell Jr. ’55 of Savannah, Ga., on April 4, 2019. Susan R. Brooks Chesson ’55 of Blowing Rock, N.C., on April 11, 2019.

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Pearls of Dalmatia: Slovenia & Croatia Sept. 21 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Oct. 5

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ForeverDuke Michael H. Harrington ’55 of Houston, on May 14, 2019. W. Lawrence Highfill Ph.D. ’55 of Raleigh, on Nov. 28, 2018. Carolyn C. Nuite ’55 of San Francisco, on Feb. 28, 2019. Henry C. Reiner Jr. B.S.M.E. ’55 of Dunkirk, Ky., on March 18, 2019. Lockwood D. Street ’55 of Hingham, Mass., on March 26, 2019. John M. Black ’56 of Mebane, N.C., on June 3, 2019. Judith M. Alexander Coker ’56 of Maggie Valley, N.C., on March 20, 2019. Ralph A. Klawitter M.F. ’56, Ph.D. ’62 of Missoula, Mont., on May 11, 2019. John A. Attaway Sr. Ph.D. ’57 of Winter Haven, Fla., on April 15, 2019. Walter E. Greene B.S.M.E. ’57 of Sanford, N.C., on Dec. 9, 2017. Robert E. Hendry ’57 of Fort Myers, Fla., on May 6, 2019. W. Leon Hisle H.A. Cert. ’57 of Lexington, Ky., on April 16, 2019. Dolores V. Sampedro ’57 of Colfax, N.C., on May 5, 2019. C. Thomas Warren Jr. ’57, M.A.T. ’58 of Medfield, N.C., on May 28, 2019. Arline Schmidt Winerman ’57 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on March 3, 2019. David L. Brewer B.S.M.E. ’58 of Winston-Salem, on May 25, 2016. Carlyle C. Craven ’58 of Raleigh, on March 29, 2019. Richard B. Jarrett M.Div. ’58 of Greensboro, N.C., on March 29, 2019. James D. Mallory Jr. M.D. ’58, H ’59, H ’66 of Nashville, Tenn., on March 23, 2019. Nancy Thomas Tilley ’58 of Durham, on May 23, 2019. Josepheus J. Allegood ’59 of Wilson, N.C., on May 22, 2019. Sally A. Davidson Foster ’59 of Spartanburg, S.C., on March 5, 2019. Carl E. Hester III ’59 of Lynchburg, Va., on April 25, 2019. Frances Olsen Hildebrandt B.S.N. ’59 of Morehead City, N.C., on March 22, 2019. Richard J. Hildebrandt M.D. ’59, H ’60 of Newport, N.C., on Jan. 24, 2018. Luther H. Lawing B.Div. ’59, M.Th. ’66 of Brevard, N.C., on April 9, 2019. James H. Perryman M.F. ’59 of Sautee Nacoochee, Ga., on April 13, 2019.

1960s

Charles P. Irwin III ’60 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in May 2019. Richard G. Page III ’60 of Morehead City, N.C., on May 14, 2019. Estelle Chewning Prince M.R.E. ’60 of Virginia Beach, Va., on March 5, 2019. William R. Wilson Ph.D. ’60 of Dallas, on Dec. 24, 2018. Victor Bongard Jr. ’61 of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., on March 30, 2019. Alan W. Gragg Ph.D. ’61 of Asheville, N.C., on April 12, 2019. Jerry S. Mann Kenion ’61 of Greensboro, N.C., on April 4, 2019. Michael C. Lewis ’61 of North Brookfield, Mass., on March 8, 2019. Douglas H. McGregor ’61, M.D. ’66 of Leawood, Kan., on Feb. 27, 2019. Allen G. Burgoyne LL.B. ’62 of Southbury, Conn., on March 31, 2019. Robert N. Davis M.D. ’62 of Greensboro, N.C., on May 22, 2019. James E. Elliott Jr. J.D. ’62 of Denver, on April 13, 2018. John W. Matthews ’62 of Fairfax, Va., on June 5, 2018. Bradford B. Spangenberg A.M. ’62, Ph.D. ’67 of Asbury, Pa., on May 21, 2019. Peggy N. Baker Fern ’63 of Rock Hill, S.C., on Nov. 6, 2017. Agnes Perkins Gorham ’63 of Knoxville, Tenn., on May 18, 2019. Arnold Kramer M.D. ’63 of Kingston, Pa., on Sept. 25, 2017. Sam Ramsey M.F. ’63 of Valdosta, Ga., on March 20, 2019. Linda A. Brookover Bourque A.M. ’64, Ph.D. ’68 of Venice, Calif., on March 20, 2019. Donna S. Peters Clark ’64 of Nashville, Tenn., on April 6, 2019. Daniel W. Jones Jr. B.Div. ’64 of Reidsville, N.C., on March 8, 2019. Martha C. Ridge McEnally ’64 of Greensboro, N.C., on April 16, 2019. Joseph C. Ramage ’64 of Richmond, Va., on April 19, 2019. Thomas R. Sigmon M.Div. ’64 of Charlotte, on April 5, 2019. Michael D. True Ph.D. ’64 of St. Paul, Minn., on April 28, 2019.

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ForeverDuke William J. Van Veen H ’64 of Brentwood, Tenn., on March 13, 2019. J. Kenneth Adlam Jr. ’65 of Abington, Pa., on March 23, 2019. Dallas M. High Ph.D. ’65 of Mount Dora, Fla., on March 10, 2019. Lee A. Kuntz ’65 of Stuart, Fla., on March 10, 2019. Edward L. Reilly M.D.’65 of Houston, on April 5, 2019. James G. Abert Ph.D. ’66 of Lancaster, Pa., on April 1, 2019. Eleanor A. Sampson Collins ’66 of Fleetwood, Pa., on Feb. 14, 2019. John N. Crook M.D. ’66 of Opelika, Ala., on March 16, 2019. Victor W. Hurst III H ’66 of Rockport, Mass., on April 14, 2019. William J. Jordan Jr. ’66 of Santa Monica, Calif., on Dec. 30, 2018. Robin E. Graham Wellman B.S.N. ’67 of Longmont, Colo., on Nov. 6, 2018. Terry Johnson Barnes ’68 of Fairfax, Va., on March 21, 2019. Carl W. Foeller Jr. ’68 of Acton, Mass., on Sept. 23, 2017. Howard W. Jones III M.D. ’68 of Nashville, Tenn., on March 9, 2019. John C. Cavanagh Ph.D. ’69 of San Antonio, on March 30, 2019. Patricia Wyngaarden Fitzpatrick ’69 of Redwood City, Calif., on April 11, 2019. Joseph C. Parker Jr. H ’69 of Louisville, Ky., on May 3, 2019.

1970s

John B. Henderson ’70 of Baton Rouge, La., on April 25, 2019. Kenneth G. McCarty Jr. Ph.D. ’70 of Hattiesburg, Miss., on April 2, 2019. Elliott N. Sutta ’70 of Centennial, Colo., on April 21, 2019. Henry N. Lovelace M.Div. ’71 of Clarksville, Va., on March 10, 2019. Marianne L. Frederick ’72 of Winston-Salem, on June 4, 2019. James W. Hawthorne Ph.D. ’72 of Baltimore, on Jan. 26, 2019. Robert W. Hewgley ’72 of Austin, Texas, on April 13, 2019.

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Paul A. Rodgman ’72 of Raleigh, on March 16, 2019. Charles L. Wingate ’72 of Harrisburg, Pa., on May 21, 2019. Douglas A. Medlin M.D. ’73 of Columbus, Ohio, on April 19, 2019. Lisle Wayne II H ’73 of Gallatin, Tenn., on March 3, 2019. Richard B. Noonan M.A.T. ’74 of Chatham, N.J., on May 26, 2019. William L. Combs M.S. ’75 of Saline, Mich., on March 6, 2019. William E. Garrett Jr. M.D. ’76, Ph.D. ’76 of Bahama, N.C., on May 4, 2019. Bruce S. Scolton J.D. ’76 of Panama, N.Y., on April 24, 2019. James E. Tompert ’76 of Troy, Mich., on March 28, 2019. Rebecca L. Byrd H ’78 of Norfolk, Va., on April 26, 2019. Theodore A. Kirk M.Div. ’78 of Black Mountain, N.C., on April 2, 2019. Susan M. Hoffmann Moon B.S.E. ’78 of Sterling, Va., on May 23, 2018. Frank W. Buckner Jr. M.Div. ’79, Ph.D. ’87 of Montgomery, Ala., on June 15, 2019. Patrick J. O’Connell ’79, M.Ed. ’80 of Eastham, Mass., on March 15, 2019.

1980s

Michael H. Rotberg M.D. ’80, H ’84 of Charlotte, on June 14, 2019. Steven D. Cochran ’81 of Los Angeles, on April 2, 2019. Henry B. Grant Jr. M.Div. ’81 of Rocky Mount, N.C., on Dec. 1, 2017. Mary T. Morgan M.B.A. ’81 of Detroit, on April 17, 2019. Martin L. Harper M.H.A. ’82 of San Antonio, on Aug. 16, 2018. Laurence L. Stewart M.Div. ’83 of Plainfield, Ind., on Feb. 6, 2019. James A. Cozby Ph.D. ’85 of Houston, on May 30, 2019. Harriet R. Brown Isbell M.Div. ’85 of Longmont, Colo., on March 2, 2019. James B. Newman ’85 of Charlottesville, Va., on March 18, 2019. Christopher B. Vanatta ’85 of Minneapolis, on March 2, 2019. Jonathan R. Spencer J.D. ’86 of Falls Church, Va., on May 13, 2019. Paul A. Payne M.D. ’87, H ’95 of Wilmington, N.C., on April 23, 2019. Michael A. Snyder M.B.A. ’87 of Princeton, N.J., on March 12, 2019.

1990s

Suzanne G. Crowther Avery M.S.N. ’91 of Durham, on March 20, 2019. Steven D. Ertel B.S.E. ’91 of Newton, Mass., on April 2, 2019. Jamie C. Hysjulien Ph.D. ’91 of Durham, on April 21, 2019. Jeffrey S. Hartman M.D. ’93 of Ames, Iowa, on June 8, 2019. John D. Germanotta ’94 of Milwaukee, on April 7, 2019. Christopher K. Lay M.B.A. ’94 of Longmont, Colo., on April 12, 2019. Michael R. Stroeh ’94 of Manassas, Va., on April 10, 2019. Erika C. Greenman ’95 of Glendale, Calif., on April 24, 2019. Wendy L. Guiliano Lauer M.B.A. ’97 of Abington, Pa., on March 21, 2019. Gregory E. McDonald M.B.A. ’97 of Davidson, N.C., on June 1, 2019. Jennifer J. Selden Leiser ’98 of Madison, N.H., on March 30, 2019. Jaclyn E. Sorese ’99 of Greenwich, Conn., on March 26, 2019.

2000s

Cynthia S. Collett M.H.S. ’01 of Raleigh, on May 20, 2019.

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Jane E. Lyons M.H.S. ’10 of Burlington, Mass., on May 27, 2019. Sameer D. Chervu M.S. ’14 of Atlanta, on April 30, 2019. Chelsea M. Decaminada ’15 of Westchester, N.Y., on May 4, 2019. Riley S. Wolfe ’15 of Manhattan Beach, Calif., on Oct. 23, 2017. Cassandra Ortenblad Kernstine M.S.N. ’17 of Dallas, on March 3, 2019. Agustin M. Gonzalez M.P.P. ’19 of Cary, N.C., on May 25, 2019.

WORKINPROGRESS

Thomas Barlow

A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP

s a photographer, I think that biology labs are inspiring places. The shiny equipment, the sterile surfaces, and the intersection between machine and nature are all things I find intriguing. And of course the natural systems that biologists study are extraordinary in their own right; even single cells, the most basic units of biology, are incredibly diverse, with spectacular internal structures. Imaging is and has always been a central component of biology research, and while photography has made artistic hand-drawing obsolete, the ability of a biologist to convey information visually is as important as it has ever been. Rigorous academic research doesn't provide the opportunity to investigate purely for the sake of aesthetics but, outside of the lab, I practice macro photography as a hobby. I put together "still-life" compositions with objects found in the lab or in nature, and photograph microscopic plants and animals with a DIY microscope setup. I use standard microscope

68 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Junior

objectives, micromanipulators, a DSLR camera, and, because of the physical limitations of the optics, special software to merge many exposures of a subject into a final image. The result is a sharp, deep rendering of an object normally too small to see with the naked eye. That process, of using specialized tools to make the invisible visible, reminds me of why I decided to be a biologist in the first place. Photography has been central in my decision to pursue a career in biology, from macro photography in high school, to microscopy in a research LITTLE THINGS: Clockwise setting at Duke. I am working from top left, the style of toward displaying some of my a Zinnia branching into personal photographs, as well two stigmas; the wing as some lichen images that I of a Luna moth; lichen have photographed for the Luon quartz collected by tzoni lab, at the visitor center in Lutzoni lab in Namibia Duke Gardens this spring. n

Photography by Thomas Barlow

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