Spring 2021

MAGAZINE

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NEW SERIES: Meet the Centennials p.24 DUKE MAGAZINE • SPRING 2021

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INSIDE: Making the biggest game of the year feel that way—without an audience. PAGE 18

M AG A Z I N E

Secrets of the Bovine How a Duke researcher cracked the code of a quirky tradition

Reagan Lunn

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always returning home Tanya Rolle Smith ’94, J.D.’98 and Geoffrey Smith ’94 are two alumni who stay engaged and revisit Duke any chance they get. With their latest planned gift, the Smiths are supporting academic, athletic and artistic excellence for the next generation of undergraduates at Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

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Spring 2021 | Vol. 106 | No. 4

Spring 2020 | Vol. 106 | No. 1

The Centennials

We’ll be following four members of the Class of 2024, who are navigating a Duke that, in some aspects of campus life, those who graduated just two years ago

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would not recognize. By Corbie Hill

Courtesy Bentley Choi

FEATURES:

FORUM

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The pure truth

Masculinity; lessons from tragedy; virtual Crazie-ness

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FOREVERDUKE

A researcher exposes the ugly subtext of a bovine spectacle.

By Barry Yeoman

Antonello Silverini

After a wartime childhood, ’19 is in pursuit of peace using high-tech methods.

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BRANKA PANIC M.I.D.P.

WORKINPROGRESS

Here to help

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As COVID hit, the partnership built between the nursing school and the university health system paid off.

By Scott Huler

Senior DANIEL KIM wants his screenplay to explore nuances within the Asian-American community.

Stephanie Roth

COVER: Illustration by Antonello Silverini

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FULLFRAME ENGINEERING’S NEW CREATIVE SPACE: With design labs, active-learning classrooms, and more, the 150,000-square-foot building is named for longtime engineering supporters Jerry C. (B.S.E.E. ’67) and Beverly A. Wilkinson and their family.

Photo by Bill Snead

UndertheGargoyles

Can we talk?

JOHN ROSE STANDS in the front of a lecture hall in the Gross Building, historically a space for teaching chemistry—its fifty or so students face-masked, spreading themselves out in social-distancing fashion, and occasionally glancing over at a somewhat faded periodic table of elements. Rose throws a provocative question on the (metaphorical) table: Is a reflexively liberal view built into the academy?

It’s hard to imagine a more relevant course to this moment than “How to Think in an Age of Political Polarization.” Rose, the professor, is associate director of Duke’s Arete Institute, which works through the Kenan Ethics Institute to explore “the pressing questions of meaning, value, and spirit that confront us as human beings and citizens.”

In his syllabus, Rose observes that those with whom we have deep disagreements, assuming we interact with them at all, “are often viewed as not just wrong but as irrational, immoral, even contemptible.” What sort of habits of mind and practices should we cultivate, he asks, in response to such a reality and in order to sustain a healthy democracy?

The semester is rich with readings. Rose has the students wrestling with, for example, William Deresiewicz’s article “On Political Correctness: Power, Class, and the New Campus Religion”; that’s a launching-pad for discussing whether a reader boycott is an appropriate response to J.K. Rowling’s comments on the transgender community. He weaves in some classic texts—John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. And he includes some Duke-centered commentaries, like the demands of Duke’s Black Coalition Against Policing, along with arguments for traditional policing.

One class member, sophomore Ivan Petropoulos, took his class-related insights to The Chronicle’s opinions section. “Coming into Duke, I imagined it to be a melting pot of ideas, where everyone could be heard without fear of being rebuked, silenced, or ostracized,” he wrote. That’s not what he found. “Even as a member of the winning team, my political existence here has been anything but fulfilling.

After all, what’s the point of playing a fixed game?”

Playing the game of political persuasion is no easy undertaking. A 2018 study by the Duke Polarization Lab, run by sociologist Chris Bail, explored so-called backfire effects. The study concluded that “attempts to introduce people to a broad range of opposing political views on a social-media site such as Twitter might not only be ineffective but counterproductive—particularly if such interventions are initiated by liberals.”

Still, the class survey highlighted the power of basic empathy. One student reported probing other students’ political views without judgment, “consciously removing individual investment,” adding, “I have managed to push opinions both left and right, and I have changed my own mind as well.” Another found it useful to focus on “what you agree on more than what you disagree on.” It’s a lot easier to have a conversation, the student observed, “if you can form some type of common ground first.”

—Robert J. Bliwise, editor

“Even as a member of the winning team, my political existence here has been anything but fulfilling.

After all, what’s the point of playing a fixed game?”

Early in the semester, Rose took the pulse of the class through an online survey. Half identified themselves as liberal, with the rest about evenly split between centrist and conservative. Almost 70 percent agreed that there are “politically sensitive issues that you feel too uncomfortable raising around other students.” The familiar elements of a cultural divide came up: gun control; wealth distribution; universal health care; immigration; restrictions related to COVID-19; acceptable pronouns; race and gender; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to one student, “You can’t defend Trump on absolutely anything.” Another steers clear of sensitive issues, even with close friends—“I find that people get defensive the moment you bring up a small point of contention.”

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021 | Vol. 106 | No. 4 | 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, senior associate vice president, engagement and development ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, Inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Mychal Harrison ’01, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu © 2021 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

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he bulk of your comments about our WINTER 2020 ISSUE came in response to “The Root of the Matter,” the piece in which Michael Ivory Jr. ’18 discussed his role in the Page Auditorium protest during Reunions Weekend 2018 and his thoughts about Duke and anti-racism. Sarah Harkrader Brau ’68, M.A.T. ’68 appreciated Ivory’s

democratic; manifesto is not. Programming for the upcoming reunions should provide a better platform for sharing frustrations and encouragement between the old and the young.” Dee Murray Stewart B.S.E.E. ’86 suggested that “There are no easy answers to solving real or perceived racism, but I think that Duke’s anti-racism initiative is a reasonable path forward.” Roger ByBMyicMhicaha y Jyr.Jr. Austin M.H.S. ’99 el eIvl oIvr or wished the manifesto read by the 2018 protesters was available.

Good point. You can read it at https://bit. ly/3pNp1y9.

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?

GTD_Winter_back cover_Lipuma_F.indd 1

“powerful prose” but felt he neglected to consider “the alienation caused by those tactics.” Overall, she said, “Listen, live, and learn. Dialogue is

11/2/20 4:55 PM

We were also protesting because we did not want to allow Duke any opportunity to believe that its work was done. There were issues both on and off campus so pressing that an institution as vast and as powerful as Duke celebrating its progress felt premature, to say the least. Gentrification continued to force nonwhite, and especially Black, Durham residents farther and farther away from the heart of the city they helped build. A coherent hate and bias policy was yet to be found, in the wake of such events as a Black Student Alliance poster defaced with the n-word, a noose found hanging on campus, and a homophobic threat against a queer Jewish student scrawled on the side of a residential building. To many, Duke was still “the plantation.”

Knowing all of this, while I felt the planned protest was justified, I was simultaneously terrified. My sole consolation was that whatever happened would not happen to me alone. I locked arms with Trinity board of visitors member Bryce Cracknell ’18, and our group interrupted the afternoon’s fanfare.

As one of us read the manifesto associated with our protest, several of the alumni in the room began to stir. At first it was a trickle of shouts: “Oh, come on!” “Get off the stage!”

And then came the tempest. At the foot of the stage, alumni clamored, most (if not all) of them white. On the stage stood a handful of students, primarily Black or of color. From the crowd came shouts of “You don’t deserve Duke!” “Just be grateful you’re here!”

Bryan Simmons ’72 and Stig Regli B.S.E.E. ’72, M.S. ’77 wrote to remind us that “Duke was an early force for combating racism in North Carolina,” and Al Sherwood B.S.E.E. ’72 agreed with a zero-tolerance policy for racism but DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2020

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Master of Environmental Management candidate and Orrin Pilkey Fellow Sarah Lipuma conducts research at the intersection of social equity and climate change. Sarah’s research is made possible by your unrestricted gifts of financial aid to the Nicholas School Annual Fund.

Finish the story at: giving.duke.edu/rising-tides

lunmunsupsopnodnd AnAanluam ersetrs t hehuenun iveivrseirtsyi’tsya’snatin-tria-craisctisetfeofrtosr.ts.

In the spring of 2018, I joined a group of student leaders and student activists in a protest on the stage of Page Auditorium during Duke’s Reunions Weekend. This weekend was a gilded one, as newly inaugurated President Vincent E. Price welcomed generations of Duke graduates to revel in just how far the university had come on so many accounts. In fact, this was a special celebration of the legacy of student activism.

What troubled me and my fellow protestors, however, was what truths Duke seemed to be sidestepping to justify celebrating what it called “progress.” There was, for one, the droves of student activists who would not set foot on campus, exhausted or wounded after years of researching, protesting, and challenging Duke, only to see change happen at a glacial pace. Adding to the toll taken on their well-being, just by virtue of the work of activism, there were Duke’s punitive measures. Through gestures ranging from a summons from Student Conduct to a police presence to discourage protest, the historical Duke has had no issue with flexing its muscle to quell dissent. For it to claim to honor past activists while threatening current-day activists presented an especially stinging irony to us.

DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2020

INBOX

Can Duke really become anti-racist? p.22

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suspected that rather than urging people to examine their own actions, Duke should simply take strong action against racist acts undertaken on campus: “That message alone would be infinitely more effective in preventing racist behavior than trying to convince people that they are.”

Our BOOK CLUB pages got some attention, too.

Thomas Dixon M.T.S. ’10 took issue with the thoughts of Corey Sobel ’07, author of The Redshirt, who compared the harsh treatment of debtors in Dickens’s Little Dorrit with the treatment of modern college scholarship athletes. Dixon disagreed with that comparison. “Mr. Dorrit is a narcissistic coward who nearly sabotages his daughter’s life and health,” he notes.

THE DOWNLOAD It’s a time-honored tradition: the

COMMENCEMENT SPEECH. We want the Class

of 2021 to hear from you. Give us your Commencement speech in 50 words or less. We’ll share some of them in the next issue.

Use #DukeWisdom2021 on Instagram and Twitter Megan Mendenhall

✍

If you have comments, drop us a note at P.O. Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or dukemag@duke.edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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Emma Steadman

INNOVATION ON CAMPUS

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“I became consumed with the idea of creating innovations that would give people with disabilities autonomy while dressing themselves and the ability to feel confident in what they’re wearing.”

—JUNIOR EMMA STEADMAN, COFOUNDER OF RUNWAY OF DREAMS AT DUKE TOGETHER AGAIN



“We write very personal and vulnerable essays and read them aloud to people, so it’s very challenging and definitely better in person.”

—FIRST-YEAR STUDENT MCKENNA PAULIK, MIDDLE, AT THE BRODHEAD CENTER

Maria Hock

LEARNING: Above, top, Sadie Obana models adaptive fashion; above, the “Forty-Five Portraits in Forty-Five Days” project, displayed in the Duke University Hospital concourse, captures health-care workers at the end of a long day; snow on West Campus; opposite: students, top left, study in the Gothic Reading Room; top right, M.E.M. grad student Anusha Vojjola asks a question during her half in-person, half remote engineering project management class; the Health Innovation Neighborhood on the third floor of the Wilkinson Building brings together interdisciplinary researchers whose work seeks to improve human health 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Photography by Duke University Communications staff unless marked

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LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

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DR/TL*

Brief mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

X XX.

It’s creepy, and it’s kooky: Dulichiella cf. appendiculata, a crustacean about the size of the eye of a large needle, can snap its GIANT CLAW (which makes up 30 percent of its weight) shut 10,000 times faster than the blink of a human eye. ➔ Malaria appears to have thrown the evolutionary process into overdrive on the African island of Cabo Verde. Genetic adaptations usually take thousands of years, but on Cabo Verde, settled only in the 1400s, malaria seems to have caused a HUMAN DNA RESPONSE in only twenty generations. ➔ Chimpanzee cells age faster than human cells—which makes sense. CHIMPANZEES live only about five-eighths as long as people.

PEOPLE Students don’t appear to move predictably leftward politically in their first year of college, but their dorm ROOMMATES seem to influence their thinking. ➔ Women with LUNG INFLAMMATION and scarring caused by interstitial lung disease (ILD) can safely carry babies to term if they are closely monitored by trained specialists. ➔ Harsher IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT means immigrant moms get poorer prenatal care and have babies with lower birth weights. ➔ If you say your body can smell something bad that’s not traditionally sniffable, you may not be wrong. OLFACTORY NEURONS in the nose may contribute to the body’s early response to influenza infection.

MISCELLANY As the International Seabed Authority develops deep-sea mineral exploration in the Atlantic basin, it is urging member states to participate in virtual commemoration of the millions of Africans who suffered and lost their lives in the MIDDLE PASSAGE ON SLAVE SHIPS. ➔ Looking to keep rogue drones out of your area? The Duke Humans and Autonomy Lab created a system to detect ROGUE DRONES in prisons and other outdoor places concerned about privacy and safety. The system involves a cell phone, radio frequency analyzer, and some other stuff, and it’s hidden in a tree, supported by a 3D-printed jumble that looks like a hawk’s nest. Plans for the nest are free! ➔ A new nanoscale device can absorb SOLAR ENERGY and trap existing heat but when necessary can reflect sunlight out of the atmosphere. Used widely it could control building climate so effectively that it could cut HVAC energy use by 20 percent. ➔ One good way to prevent future pandemics might be to stop cutting down FORESTS and trafficking in WILD ANIMALS.

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$4.5M

DUKE

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a $4.5 million grant to Duke’s Center for Water, Sanitation, Hygiene, and Infectious Disease (WaSH-AID) to do field testing of SANITATION TECHNOLOGY in communities in India. ➔ Thirty-seven DUKE RESEARCHERS were included in the annual list of Most Highly Cited Researchers. ➔ Duke senior Yuexuan Chen has been named a SCHWARZMAN SCHOLAR, a program that funds one year of study in Beijing. Chen is among 140 scholars chosen from more than 3,600 applicants worldwide. ➔ Henry Taylor ’18 is among 24 U.S. recipients selected for a GATES CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARSHIP, which supports graduate study at the University of Cambridge. ➔ Ravi Bellamkonda, Vinik Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering since 2016, will depart Duke in June 2021 to return to Emory University in Atlanta, where he will serve as the provost and executive vice president. ➔ Vincent Guilamo-Ramos M.S.N. ’17—a national leader in advancing adolescent sexual reproductive health policy, practice, and science— will become dean of the DUKE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF NURSING and vice chancellor for Nursing Affairs. He will be the school’s second alumni dean but its first male and first Hispanic dean. ➔ Greg Jones M.Div. ’85, Ph.D. ’88, dean of the DUKE DIVINITY SCHOOL, will step down at the end of the academic year to become president of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He began his second stint as dean in 2018, having previously led the school from 1997 to 2010. ➔ The new NAKAYAMA PUBLIC SERVICE SCHOLARS PROGRAM, part of the university’s efforts to encourage students to use their Duke experience to engage with large challenges facing communities around the world, will provide tuition assistance for five seniors who plan to enter public service following graduation. ➔ Kevin White, director of athletics since 2008, will RETIRE from the position in August. ➔ Shruti Desai, formerly of Washington University, became Duke’s new ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT OF STUDENT AFFAIRS FOR CAMPUS LIFE, succeeding Zoila Airall. ➔ A five-year, $4.5 MILLION GRANT from The Duke Endowment has created a new program called Academic Guides, which will embed fulltime advising and academic support professionals in Duke’s residential quads. ➔ The Katz Family Behavioral Health & Wellness Project for Student-Athletes, funded by a $1.5 MILLION ENDOWED GIFT from Danny Katz ’80 and his wife, Nancy Katz, will expand and enhance behavioral health and wellness for Duke student-athletes. ➔ Duke spent $1.26 BILLION ON RESEARCH IN FISCAL YEAR 2019, ranking it tenth in the country; it is the ninth-largest recipient of federal research support. n

$4.5M

$1.5M

$1.26B

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. istock

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Man’s inhumanity to man

Study explores the connection between anger, masculinity, and social pressure.

DAM STANALAND’s

study was designed to threaten the masculinity of its participants. Predictably, some of them got angry.

Of those, and even after a debriefing reiterating that there is no right or wrong way to be a man, a few issued threats or used violent language in their post-study comments. Yet some comments were poignant and sad.

“We got feedback that was like, ‘Oh, this confirms what my parents always thought about me,’ or, ‘This confirms what I think of myself,’ ” Stanaland says.

Stanaland, who is pursuing a joint Ph.D. in philosophy and public policy, designed his “ ‘Be A Man’: The Role of Social Pressure in Eliciting Men’s Aggressive Cognition” study to discern how anger and violent thought correlate to whether men’s sense of masculinity comes from within or is in response to social pressure.

Men in the latter category, Stanaland’s study indicates, tend to be younger and to have more fragile senses of masculinity.

In short, they think they have more to prove, which they express through anger and aggression.

“Those men who are doing it for external reasons really want to show you, ‘Hey, I’m masculine,’ ” Stanaland says. “ ‘Watch me punch a wall.’ Or, ‘Watch me degrade a minority group.’ ” Stanaland was raised in small-town South Carolina, where gender expec-

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tations were reinforced from a young age: Boys are not to show emotion, but aggression is acceptable; girls are to be kinder and sweeter, and should put effort into their appearance. Stanaland’s parents were an exception. “I feel more fortunate than my peers who grew up in such conditions with their parents, especially friends who have since come out as gay who had really bad experiences with their parents saying, ‘We will disown you,’ ” he says.

More research exists on the impacts of gender conformity on women and girls, Stanaland says, which makes sense: Women have been historically marginalized. Yet there are benefits to understanding the socialization and pressures that form fragile masculinity, he continues, which can be especially explosive and dangerous.

“Read the news,” he says. “Anything really awful happens at the hands of men.”

So through assistant psychology and neuroscience professor Sarah Gaither’s Duke Identity and Diversity Lab, Stanaland ran a pair of studies oriented toward fragile masculinity and its correlation to anger and violent thought.

Participants in two groups—195 undergraduate students, and 391 men age eighteen to fifty-six—were asked a series of questions related to

masculine gender norms (home repair, sports, etc.) and received an arbitrary score. Low scores were accompanied by language declaring the recipient less manly than average. For some, this was enough to pop the balloon of fragile masculinity.

The study zeroed-in on whether participants conformed to masculine norms because of external pressure or autonomously by asking them to agree or disagree with statements like “I’m masculine because other people expect me to be,” or “I’m masculine because it makes me happy.”

“That was kind of something new that we have added to the literature,” Stanaland says.

The outcome Stanaland was most interested in was physical aggressive cognition—that is, anger and violent thought. To measure this, participants were asked to complete words. Gu_ could become gun, or could become gum; ki__ could become kill, or could become kiss. The proportion of words completed aggressively versus nonaggressively became the measure of the participant’s aggressive thought in that moment.

In the end, the studies found that men in their late thirties and younger were more likely to conform to masculine norms because of external pres-

“Read the news.

Anything really awful happens at the hands of men.”

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sure and were more likely to behave aggressively if they felt their manhood was threatened.

“If [masculinity] is kept up based on other people’s evaluations...when someone insults that, it’s going to be really fragile and be more likely to crack under pressure and break,” Stanaland says.

Yet masculinity itself isn’t inherently good or bad, Stanaland is sure to point out. There are situations in which traditionally masculine behaviors, like being less outwardly emotional, can be beneficial, he says, such as in the workplace. It’s when masculine behaviors are carried out to an exaggerated extreme and for the wrong reasons that they become destructive and harmful.

And while psychologists are only starting to consider why men conform to these gender norms, Stanaland says presenting gender-diverse examples of men, women, and non-binary people and explicitly addressing harmful norms can help boys become less fragile, less aggressive men.

“What we can be doing better is try to show boys and young men that there are many ways to be a person—a human,” says Stanaland.

—Corbie Hill

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Art in the time of COVID

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The Nasher resists the pandemic by taking its mission beyond its walls.

he Nasher Museum of Art staff were facing COVID reality last summer. Their Ebony Patterson exhibit, “...while the dew is still on the roses…,” a rich, complex installation with art, video, patterned walls, and more than 12,000 individually placed flowers throughout the gallery, had to come down after having been open only ten days.

It was impossible to predict when the doors would reopen. “We were devastated,” says Wendy Hower, director of engagement and marketing. “The building looks like it’s asleep.”

The museum staff tried to think of ways to wake it up and still serve the community, especially through artwork by artists from the diverse and underrepresented groups the museum showcases. Given the pandemic’s outsized effects on Black and Latinx populations, the blow felt doubly heartbreaking. Then Marshall Price, the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of modern and contemporary art, opened his e-mail.

“It kind of fell in our laps,” he says. Artist and MacArthur grant-winner Carrie Mae Weems, a Black woman whose art is in the Nasher’s collection and who has collaborated before with the museum, had created an outdoor public art installation during a Syracuse residency, and she was spreading it out to museums in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Nashville, Tennessee. Did the Nasher want to participate?

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All photography courtesy Nasher Museum

“We felt like it was a really great opportunity,” Price says.

“We kind of rolled up our sleeves and got to work.”

Weems’ work, called Resist Covid/Take 6!, exists completely outdoors, largely as public-service announcements and statements of encouragement about surviving COVID. “Don’t worry, we’ll hold hands again,” reads the caption of an enormous banner hanging on the outside of the Nasher, showing a row of people holding hands. Says one of a series of banners on Campus Drive lampposts: “Because of inequity, Black, Brown & Native people have been the most impacted by COVID-19.

This must be changed!” Other banners and window clings thank frontline workers and remind people to practice social distancing. They show up on building sides and in windows all over Duke—on the Rubenstein Arts Center, on the gates to the (currently closed) Duke Gardens.

The signs show up all over Durham, too, from billboards to the windows of community partners like the American Dance Festival headquarters. Part of Weems’ design of the installation was that community collaboration.

“It functions in that context just as much as a public-service announcement as art,” Price says. None of the posters have Duke or Nasher branding. The point is to get people talking about how to respond to COVID; how it’s affecting them and their community; how Black,

brown, and native populations are being especially hard hit.

Buying billboards and printing up yard signs and posters isn’t cheap, and the Nasher partnered on both presentation and cost with Duke Arts and with Duke Health. Corrugated plastic signs, offered to residents free, now sprout in yards all over the Triangle, thanking workers and urging hand-washing.

And partners do more than hang signs, apply window clings, or distribute materials. ADF director Jodee Nimerichter sent out a call for submissions and ended up choosing a dozen dancers and companies to create dances in response to Weems’ messages. Each participant has then created a one-minute video, showing the dancer or group moving somewhere on campus or in Durham. The first video dropped in early February and showed dancer Tanu Sharma dancing in front of the Nasher; other videos showcase places like the downtown Durham bus station.

Dance is a perfect response to a pandemic that has had such a physical effect, Nimerichter says. The community is physically spread out now, yearning for touch and movement. “You come out moving the day you’re born,” so restrictions on movement seem to invite a response in dance, especially since dancers are themselves currently having to do most of their movement separately. “I think this installation is like a release of what’s been building up in their bodies,” Nimerichter says.

The Nasher has long collaborated with ADF, but when it started reaching out for partners, the response was so powerful

PUBLIC DISPLAYS: Weems’ outdoor installations appear throughout Durham and the Triangle.

that it made new friends as well.

One new partner is the Duke Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Associate director of engagement Jayne Ifekwunigwe says the center is gathering responses to the work. More than just the written-on-Post-its response museums often gather, an online questionnaire (on the Nasher website) will populate a database and allow Ifekwunigwe to analyze and interpret responses. “We invite visitors to speak their own truths” about how COVID has affected them and their communities, she says. “It was particularly important that we provided space for participants to name their losses and to express grief. We also wanted to encourage both hope and the possibility of transformation.”

Through images and response, through dance and yard signs, the installation sends that message of hope and transformation out into the community. “In my mind,” says Price, “these items are going out into the community and bringing this message with them.” They go out and they spread, from person to person or in larger ways through the population.

“They go out,” Price says, “kind of like a virus.”—Scott Huler DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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Examining a past harm to find a present-day healing Duke alumni doctors and an infamous day in Greensboro

A

COMBINATION of the shared distance of our current experience and the shadows of the past came together in December, when the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & the History of Medicine held a panel discussion as part of its Boyarsky Series on Race & Health. Called “Remembering a 1979 Moral Moment: Medical Activists, Racial Justice, and Confronting the KKK,” the presentation looked back at the Greensboro Massacre, the infamous November 3, 1979, attack by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party on a peaceful labor rally in Greensboro. The killers were acquitted

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by all-white juries in criminal court. But when the survivors sued in civil court, attorneys uncovered that the police had helped the killers and enabled the crime. Greensboro finally issued an apology for the events in October 2020.

The panelists recalled the massacre, its aftermath, and their own stories. After an opening presentation from a documentary film, panelist Paul Bermanzohn M.D. ’74 looked directly into his Zoom camera and spoke. Of the five people murdered that day, one had been a Duke medical professor and two were Duke alumni. Bermanzohn, shot in the face during the violence, and several other Duke doctors were also there.

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North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

Don Davis and Jim Stratford, Greensboro News & Record.

to which poor and Black patients were assigned then, she said, “the racism and classism literally stunk.

I can still smell the combination of urine, feces, and vomit.”

It’s not an easy video to watch, but you can watch it right now (the center has the video available on its pages). And though the panelists were unstinting in their criticism, they looked back not in anger but in the attempt to teach, to inspire. Joyce Johnson ’68, a survivor of the massacre and also one of the founding co-chairs of Duke’s Afro-American Society, went on to help found the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Commission, modeled on the process found“We cut our political ed by Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa. “We’ve got to face teeth by organizing the truth of our past,” she said, “and the truth of today. to struggle, to try “It’ll be different. And it’ll be and get Duke to better.”

Members of the Duke comchange and improve.” munity watched the presenta“Some people like to tion from all over Durham, all believe that Duke docover North Carolina. From all TRAGIC: Survivors of tors were so plentiful at over. They asked questions, and panelists respondthe rally questioned this event because Duke ed, spoke to one another from different rooms and police actions; above, was a home of progresdifferent states. And viewers asked questions. “Our a historic marker. sive thought and action,” moment seems so similar to yours,” one asked. “And Bermanzohn said. “An so little has changed. It seems likely we have to stand oasis of progressivism.” in the streets and like you face what comes to make The reality, he said, was quite the opposite. “I think change. Do you still believe change can come, and that the reason there were a lot of Duke doctors there do you have suggestions?” is that Duke was such a bad place. We cut our poNathan answered that change comes in one way: litical teeth by organizing to struggle, to try and get “Person by person.” Said Johnson, “Have the larger Duke to change and improve.” vision of equality, of truth, and knowing that it’s goMarty Nathan M.D. ’77 agreed. She attended the ing to be a struggle.” protest along with her husband, Michael Nathan ’69, The struggle remains, and if people must face the M.D. ’73. And Michael was one of the five killed questions of the day on Zoom, that’s the way they that day. Long before that, “my experience at Duke will face them. was also a radicalizing one,” she said. Describing the “Change can come,” Johnson said. “Change has carpeted semiprivate hospital rooms middle class and gotta come. We can do this, y’all. white patients got compared with the “public” wards “We gotta do it.”—Scott Huler DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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Hunter STark

Q&A

Matt Perault M.P.P. ’08 is the director of Duke’s Center on Science & Technology and an associate professor of the practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He also hosts a biweekly podcast on tech policy called TBD: Technology By Design. He was formerly head of global policy development at Facebook.

When you use tech products, how much do you worry about privacy and surveillance?

I am certainly concerned about both, and I try to adjust my use of tech products accordingly. If I don’t get much value from using a tech product, then I won’t use it. And if I do use a tech product, then I try to adjust

16

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the settings to make sure they balance my ability to get value from the product against any concerns I might have about providing data that could be misused. But in general, large tech companies are under tremendous scrutiny right now from regulators, from the media, and from users. So I think there are strong incentives for

them to be transparent with users about how their data [are] being used and to offer controls to enable people to manage that use.

If these companies were broken up, would that necessarily be a good thing?

The impact is very uncertain. It’s possible it could spur more competition. But it’s also possible that it could make it harder for companies to address many of the concerns that people have about tech products.

Large tech companies have invested enormous resources in addressing issues like misinformation and cybersecurity, and it’s likely that the scale of these companies is helpful in addressing those sorts of issues. When I worked at Facebook, I saw how much

THEQuad THEQuad

investment it made in improving safety and security at WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s not clear to me that separate companies would be able to offer better products to people.

If we’re looking to reform Section 230, which grants immunity to online content hosts for the speech of their users, should we be more concerned about misinformation or toxic content than about free expression?

We should be concerned about all of those issues, but we wouldn’t be

it doesn’t prohibit platforms from being held liable for violations of federal criminal law.

You recommend modernizing federal criminal law, and you cite the examples of voter suppression and incitement to riot as two areas where legislation would be helpful. Is it easy to make those judgment calls, and who should be doing the judging?

It’s important for the government, and not tech companies, to establish the rules in these areas. If we’re concerned about issues like online incitement to riot and voter

Has the argument been settled about whether these platforms are content developers or just content hosts, since that distinction is important in determining their liability?

It’s not monolithic. Tech platforms serve as hosts in some circumstances and creators in others. If you tweet on Twitter, then you are the content creator and Twitter is the host. But for certain products, like Amazon Video or Facebook Watch, tech platforms are clearly content creators because they are creating the content itself, and not just hosting it.

Similarly, The New York Times is a content creator when it writes

Neither Congress nor the Federal Election Commission have fulfilled their roles in modernizing election law to keep pace with changing technologies. better off if we repealed Section 230. Section 230 provides the basis of the user-generated content product model that has been at the core of Internet innovation. It protects any online content host from being held liable for speech by online content creators, meaning that it protects newspapers that host online comment sections just as it protects companies like Facebook and Twitter. And it empowers content hosts to moderate speech on their platforms, including taking steps to combat misinformation.

It’s also important to note that it doesn’t prohibit lawsuits against speakers who violate the law, and

suppression, then Congress should pass a law to outline the conduct that should be prohibited. If Congress passed a criminal law on voter suppression and fraud, then companies couldn’t use Section 230—which includes an exemption for federal criminal law—as a defense for cases that involve a violation of that law. Neither Congress nor the Federal Election Commission have fulfilled their roles in modernizing election law to keep pace with changing technologies.

We need new laws to establish stronger rules.

news stories, but a host when it hosts user comments on the New York Times Cooking Community. Section 230 says that you create content even if you only “develop” it “in part.” There are some questions about the boundaries of that language, and those boundaries haven’t been sufficiently defined by courts. That’s why I recommended that the FTC host a series of workshops to develop recommendations for what those boundaries should be, looking specifically at how the definitions in Section 230 should be applied to technologies like algorithms.

—Robert J. Bliwise

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SPORTS

Here Comes Duke!

How they kept the Crazie in Cameron

By Scott Huler | Photography by Reagan Lunn

18 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

SPORTS

I

t was going to be a strange season anyhow. A roster full of freshman talent that wasn’t instantly finding its way; some surprising early losses; and the sudden midseason decision by freshman Jalen Johnson to opt out of the remainder of his Duke basketball career and prepare for the NBA draft.

At least there’s that one constant: Cameron Indoor Stadium. Except: Is that a constant? How do you keep it Cameron without the Crazies? How do you retain one of the greatest home-court advantages in all of sports when it’s still a court, but “home” has lost a lot of its meaning and “advantage” is hard to even fathom? When the players run onto the court, the public-address announcer calls out, “Here comes Duke!” and the people ecstatically cheering are all at home—away?

It’s even harder than you think, says Meagan Arce, Duke director of sports marketing.

For one thing, crowd noise. That’s not hard, right? You choose some recorded crowd noise that works for you, you pump it in, and there you go. Except, no: “The static noise that plays literally the entire game,” Arce says, “is a track that actually the ACC gave us, so all the schools are using the same one.”

So the (virtual) crowd at Clemson or at Florida State sounds the same as the crowd at Cameron or Carolina. That hardly seems right.

It certainly didn’t seem right to Arce, who helps create the in-house atmosphere at Cameron. In charge of things like music and the PA announcer, Arce and her colleagues are like Rumpelstiltskin, trying to spin silence into craziness. “This year my whole focus is about the in-game atmosphere and trying to make it as normal as possible for our players.”

The players. Which makes sense. During most seasons, the focus is on the fans: entertaining them, keeping their energy up. But this year the fans are at home, so the focus is on the players themselves. “So they still feel like they have a competitive advantage, and they still get that quintessential feeling they would get on game day if there were a full house.”

But before you even get to excitement, you have to start with safety. There, Mikaela Ryan, game operations manager, has been at work since the full lockdown last year. She watched the NBA bubble and other pro bubbles to see CHEERS: The what worked, and she got busy. The chairs “crowd” reacts. for the players, for example, had to be

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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SPORTS three feet apart and organized in several rows. She had that organized, and then the ACC told her the chairs needed to be six feet apart, so that took another design cycle. Since players needed to keep water bottles, towels, and warmups apart, each player needs his own apparatus, which stands behind each chair and was designed based on a plant stand Ryan’s colleague Debbie Savarino ’93 saw in a catalogue. “I showed it to our facilities person, who showed it to our contractor, and he made these hydration stands. We get e-mails about it from all over the country; even high schools ask about it.

People think they’re these crazy things we’ve bought, but it was really just a local contractor who does things for us.”

Everything is like that. The scorer’s table needed to be separated from the players, so it went behind plexiglass shields, with two levels of scorers inside so they could remain separate. They call that the penalty box, and it’s a great solution.

But every solution creates its own problems—in this case how officials, coaches, and scorers make themselves heard. So next came an intercom system, with buttons, “and we set up speakers on the first and second row of scorer’s tables and then a few upstairs, where, like, PA and marketing people are,” Ryan says.

Television cameras have to be far enough from players to be safe but still have to find angles that tell the game story, though that’s actually one place where COVID makes things easier.

“With no fans, it obviously gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we can do with those cameras.”

And as for making it seem like there is a crowd, the cardboard cutouts you see all over the country weren’t going to be good enough for Cameron. Instead, if you watch a game at Cameron on TV you’ll see vast, eight-by-twenty-four-foot frames with scrims on them covering the Crazies bleachers, three levels deep. “Those steel frames are wrapped with a fabric that is like Spanx,” says assistant athletics director for athletics facilities branding Rachel Curtis. Using fabric rather than

“It’s weird when you can hear the sneakers squeaking on the court.

It’s very

surreal.”

20 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

cardboard gives “a deep richness of color and has some depth to it,” she says. “It plays well on camera.” And once you’re designing entire scrims, you don’t do anything generic.

One section of scrims spans the entire Cameron Crazies section, but you won’t see Barack Obama or other former players or famous visitors.

“We really wanted this to be about the Crazies,” Curtis says, so she and her colleagues went through uncountable photos to include Crazies you’ll remember, “to really tell the story of what it’s like to be in that heated environment in Cameron.”

So yes, of course, a million people painted blue, and a lot of Duke hats and shirts. But also Thing 1 and Thing 2 are there, and Cookie Monster guy is there, and Star Wars Storm Trooper guy is there. The Blue Devil himself actually appears more than once—hey, you have to take advantage of technology, right?

In fact, the layers of scrims mean that many speakers can be hidden throughout the bleachers, giving a sort of surround-sound effect. “Let’s say we play a ‘defense’ chant,” Arce says. Naturally, they play it from the student section, but with the multiple speakers set up throughout the section, “the idea is it can start in one speaker and then go to the next and to the next, as if the chant were started by a small group of people and it continued to grow, so it sounds more like a natural crowd would when they catch on to a chant.”

SPORTS

They have actual recordings of GAME TIME: Opposite page, scrims with Blue the pep band and the cheerleaders, Devil championship so genuine Duke chants shouted banners and Cameron by genuine Duke cheer squads, and Crazies; plexiglass genuine Duke songs played by the genuine Duke band, can emerge kept score keepers and referees protected; from exactly where scrims suggest above, team playing they would be. And when during Carolina before the “hot time outs”—say after Duke cameras and the hits a three and the opposition “crowd.” calls a time out—instead of playing “Shots” or “Temper,” Cameron standards, they’ll play songs chosen by the players themselves. It’s about the players.

In fact, to further support the players, Curtis undertook something of a secret project. “Behind the Duke bench,” she says, “we have our parents.” She didn’t tell the players what she was doing, and when she asked parents for photos she didn’t tell them why. “A lot of players on our team, they’re eighteen years old. These are the first games they’ve probably ever played without one or both of their parents watching them, and that really hit me like a load of bricks.” So, made on the sly, a scrim of the parents sits behind the bench, and it’s a hit with the players. “All of a sudden they walked in for practice one day, and they were like, ‘What?’ ” They shot pictures of the scrims back to their parents after practice.

When people are in the arena during the games, Savarino and Curtis sit with members of the Legacy Fund, significant donors to athletics. Since those donors can’t attend games, Curtis says, “I sit upstairs with an iPad, and I chat with those folks, as well as our parents, on a Zoom-type event.” They can see the action on television, “but I’m talking with them about the feeling, what’s happening.

“If a parent sees, say, [freshman forward] Henry Coleman take a charge and looks like maybe he gets hit a little bit, I’m able to go, ‘Oh, he’s up, he’s made it to the bench, he’s with the trainer,’ that type of thing. It’s kind of a different role.

“I never thought I’d be a sideline reporter for a small group.”

She says she felt a little sad at the first game. “It’s weird when you can hear the sneakers squeaking on the court. It’s very surreal.” But even as a Duke grad, “I’ve never been more proud to be a part of Duke than this year.”

Arce felt similarly, but she didn’t have that early jolt of sadness. “The first game of the season?” she says, “Seeing the team run out, and hearing the fight song? It was kind of one of those aha! moments. Like, okay, this is happening. We’re doing it. One of the things we’re known for is being one of the loudest and one of the craziest places to play.

“That’s exactly what we want. We want our players and our coaches to be able to say, ‘Okay, this feels right, this feels normal, we can compete. And the visiting team to say, ‘How is Cameron still the craziest and the loudest?’ ” n DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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BookClub WE ASKED

Theodore D. Segal ’77, a lawyer, Center for Documentary Studies board member, and author of Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University (Duke University Press), about his deep dive into the university’s history.

On finishing a project that started as a master’s thesis, after a forty-year pause When I went back as an adult to look at what I had written about Black campus activism at Duke as a young man, I saw things very differently. For example, when I first interviewed Duke’s Black activists, I was twenty-three and they were almost thirty. I saw them—even as undergraduates—as adults, almost as Black activist “action heroes.” I was enthralled with what they had done. When I went back forty years later, I said to myself, “Holy cow. These ‘activists’ were kids. They were young.”

Because, by this time, I had been a parent, I had dropped my children off at college, and I knew what that experience felt like. All of a sudden, these young people I had previously viewed as abstractions, I now saw as youngsters who could have been my kids. Returning to interviews with Black protesters I had done in 1979, I began trying to understand: who were these kids? What kind of families and communities did they come from? What were their parents saying about their activism? That perspective allowed me to tell the story of the Black student movement at Duke in a much more human, empathetic, and accurate way.

On what he’s learned I am an expert on one thing, and that’s what happened at Duke between 1963 and 1969. I don’t claim to be an expert on civil rights, race relations, or diversity and inclusion in higher education.

So when people ask me what Duke should be doing now to address systemic racism, I don’t have a specific answer. But, based on my understanding of the failures of the past, I do know that to address systemic racism, Duke must devote the same level of financial, human, and professional resources it does to attacking its other most important problems. If you look at what the university did in responding to an existential threat like COVID—the institution was reimagined in a matter of weeks. That is the level of effort and focus that will be needed if Duke is to undo its long legacy of systemic racism.

“Holy cow. These ‘activists’ were kids. They were young.”

On being fact-based and nonjudgmental in the book’s tone I don’t believe it is necessary, or helpful, to use words like “racist” in describing the Jim Crow attitudes and actions chronicled in the book. Duke is a school whose motto is “Eruditio et Religio,” and whose values include the union of knowledge and religion, a spirit of tolerance, and dedication to service. With desegregation, the university had a chance to live those values in how it related to its new Black students. Duke not only didn’t do so—it didn’t even try. So I describe in detail how the university failed these young people. This failure was indefensible.

But in writing the book, and in discussing the book, I let the facts speak for themselves. I avoid characterizing Duke leaders as “racist.” I keep the story in my book grounded in what leaders at Duke did and what they told me they were thinking. I believe this makes the story more powerful and illuminating.

22 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

On his feelings toward Duke now If I didn’t feel connected to Duke, or if I thought Duke was irredeemable, I would not have spent the past four years writing a book hoping that it would help the university to reckon with its racial past. I heard an interview with William Turner, a member of the Afro American Society in the ‘60s and a beloved divinity school professor for decades. He said, “The presence of Black students at Duke has transformed this university. [Telling the story] is not to glorify the university, it’s not to remove the tarnish, the stain. It’s not to proclaim some sort of pristine history. . . . It’s kind of like the Lou Rawls song, Tobacco Road: ‘I despise you because you’re filthy, but I love you because you’re home.’

You got skeletons, you got dirt. But that is the nature of God’s story.” Like Turner, I believe it is possible to love Duke but not sanitize its history. And by exposing the warts, by exposing the stains, you’re doing Duke a service, because it gives the school a chance to reckon with its past as it charts its anti-racist future. I feel way more connected to Duke now than I did as a graduate student forty years ago, that’s for sure. I love Duke.

There’s no question. But that love is not uncritical. It shouldn’t be. It can’t be. n

RECOMMENDATIONS from Paul Farmer '82

In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Farmer, a medical anthropologist, physician, and cofounder of Partners In Health, tells the story of how and why the virus ravaged three African nations.

Here, he shares his “remedial reading list” of social history and social anthropology works that helped him write his book.

Understanding West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic: Towards a Political Economy edited by Ibrahim Abdullah and Ismail Rashid Sierra Leonean historians cobbled together a corrective volume about Ebola in West Africa, which should have reached a broader audience.

Every one of my adult patients from 2014 and after had also survived civil war.

The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches by W. E. B. Du Bois; A Dying Colonialism

by Frantz Fanon, translated by Haakon Chevalier This remedial project also allowed me to read or reread work by Du Bois, who wrote piercingly about his own nation, but also about Liberia and other parts of the African continent. But this particular book is a reliably inspiring classic. It’s also great to find any excuse to reread Fanon (who was born in the Caribbean, worked in Algeria, and died way too young of leukemia) on colonial medicine, which was an endeavor focused primarily on control of epidemics rather than on the provision of clinical care. And, of course, care is what the sick are seeking, whether in Europe or West Africa.

HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone

by Adia Benton As for anthropologists, I started with the work of friends and colleagues like Benton, whose book is based on research conducted in Sierra Leone just prior to Ebola’s explosion. The notion of cultural humility, rather than misguided efforts to achieve “cultural competence,” suggested (and should always suggest) that remedial homework would allow me to fill in some of the massive gaps in my own understanding. This book and Benton’s other work were a first start.

Themes in West Africa’s History edited

by Emmanuel Akyeampong I rely a lot on social historians in part because I like to do field research on what’s in front of me myself, which is another way of saying that I go into such settings assuming that I will know next to nothing but can learn by looking around (at context) and looking back in time (thanks to historians with similar interests).

This little-read academic collection is exceptionally helpful and clear and steered me away from relying overmuch on less reliable reports.

BY DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY

American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press) Kirsten Fischer A.M. ’89, Ph.D. ’94 Everyone’s Sleepy but the Baby (Workman) Tracy C. Gold ’10 Marching Toward Madness: How to Save the Games You Always Loved (Carolina Academic Press) John LeBar Ed.D. ’73, professor emeritus and former coach, and Allen Paul A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm (Pegasus) Robert J. Lefkowitz, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of medicine (and Nobel Laureate), with Randy Hall Alice: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Charleston Renaissance Artist (Evening Post Books) Caroline Tinker Palmer ’98, Dwight McInvaill, Anne Gaud Tinker Public Intellectuals and the Common Good: Christian Thinking for Human Flourishing (InterVarsity Press) Todd Ream M.Div. ’96, Jerry Pattengale, and Christopher J. Devers Hesburgh of Notre Dame: The Church’s Public Intellectual (Paulest Press) Todd Ream M.Div. ’96 Accidental Preacher: A Memoir (Eerdmans Press) Will Willimon, former dean of Duke Chapel and professor of Christian ministry

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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20 THE CENTENNIALS

was always going to be distinct for this class.

BY CORBIE HILL

24 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

24 IT WAS ALWAYS going to be the class that gradu-

and in-person courses in an accelerated semester,

ated the year of Duke’s centennial, yet these 1,593

which some described as intense. Yet they also

students began their college career in 2020: the

made friends and ran for student government and

year of a massive movement for racial justice in the

checked out campus restaurants (often in grab-and-

United States, an election marred by violence and

go form) and played music. It was challenging and

misinformation, and a pandemic that altered society

taxing and strange, but memorable and fulfilling—at

and made fraught any in-person interaction. The

least according to the four members of the Class of

Class of 2024 navigates a Duke University that, in

2024 Duke Magazine will follow through their time at

some aspects of campus life, those who graduated a

Duke: Bentley Choi, Matthew O’Stricker, Colin Kaeo,

mere two years ago would not recognize.

and Brianna Cellini.

Their first semester at Duke was one without

Their generation is at the forefront of a complex,

roommates, club sports, football games with fans,

uncharted era. Between now and Duke’s centen-

concerts—name it, and it was altered. They ate

nial, we’ll see the strange new world we all inhabit

alone in their rooms and attended a mix of virtual

through their eyes.

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BENTLEY CHOI didn’t want to stick around campus during the holiday break.

It would have been too depressing.

She could have returned home to Korea—sure—but rather than deal with the rigmarole of international travel during the COVID era, she stayed in the U.S. After finals, campus cleared out, leaving international students like Choi in a ghost town. She wasn’t about to passively wait through the long weeks of break, the aroma of Chinese cuisine wafting down the hall exacerbating her loneliness and frequent fire alarms rattling her nerves, so she treated herself to Christmas in New York.

We connect on Zoom a few days after her return, and minutes into the call Choi shares her screen, launching into an impromptu slideshow.

“I waited half an hour to see this,” Choi says, pleased to share her photo of Rockefeller Center’s towering Christmas tree. “There was a huge line.”

Here’s a shot of Sour Patch Kids slippers hanging in a store. (They were overpriced. She bought them anyway. She regrets nothing.). Here’s the sun setting over the skyline. (It rained a lot, which was a downer, but eventually the weather cleared up.)

Here’s the Clintons’ house, from a side trip upstate. (Choi had mere seconds to snap the photo before Secret Service agents shooed her away.)

Here’s the ocean, from a quick stop in Connecticut.

Choi didn’t get to do everything she wanted to. She loves ice skating (which is a more common and affordable pastime in Korea), but was too nervous to skate at the Rocke-

Bentley Choi

26 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

feller Center rink—too many unmasked skaters.

Indeed, Choi was diligent and cautious: She got tested; she covered her face; she avoided risky situations. And she was baffled whenever she encountered laissez-faire attitudes toward COVID precautions.

Still, it was better than waiting through a lonely winter break on a deserted campus 8,000 miles from home. She returned from her ten-day trip refreshed and invigorated and substantially happier than she would have been otherwise. “I had literally no time to be depressed,” Choi says.

Choi (whose given name is Hanul) comes to Duke from Seoul, a product of South Korea’s famously rigorous educational system. She’s an achiever—a straight-A student and all that—yet her parents never really pressured her about school. Rather, Choi’s folks maintain an enjoy-yourself-along-the-way mentality, making them outliers in a driven culture, she says.

Choi’s a science nerd who hates math, and a music lover who reads classical scores for fun. She’s laid-back, unassuming, unhurried, and emotionally frank.

Choi has a gift, too, for turning stressful situations into funny stories. In her telling, her flight to the U.S. and arrival at Duke become deadpan comedy—even though that thirtysix-hour day was defined by seemingly exponential turns of bad luck.

Once in Durham, however, Choi found her footing quickly.

“I felt lonely for the first few days. But after that, I found good friends who FUN: Top left, in live right next to Times Square; a me,” she says. “I was Halloween look; at the beginning of a tasty Lunar the semester...the New Year meal beginning of college life.”

And she connected with a group of other students from Korea. Choi loves food, and meeting with this group to eat Korean food—real Korean food—and catch up means a lot to her. Indeed, she’s one of maybe six students from Korea in her class, Choi says: A dozen were accepted to Duke for the current academic year, and of those, half are in the U.S., while others took a gap year instead.

Aside from the food, Choi has had to adjust to an unexpected difference: the lack of shade. “It’s hard that there’s no skyscrapers at all here,” she says, admitting she thought Durham would be much bigger. “I miss city life so much.”

“I was at the beginning of the semester...the beginning of college life.”

A FEW DAYS into 2021, Matthew O’Stricker decided it would be a different kind of year. He would actually write down his goals. In the spirit of accountability, O’Stricker thought as he waited in line at a Georgia Starbucks, he would also share these goals with his mentors. “I sat down, had my peach green tea, and sipped it, and just wrote down my goals in different categories,” he says.

O’Stricker was home for holiday break, and he was trying to find his why. He has a history of seeking purpose through immersion—never as a dabbler. He tried his hand at debate, enjoyed it, and moved on. He started a podcast club.

He held student office all four years of high school, eventually earning the student-body presidency as a senior. In the summer of 2020 O’Stricker joined an anti-racist task force at his high school, though he had already graduated. Once arriving at Duke, he sought— and won—a senate seat in Duke Student Government.

O’Stricker is ambitious, yeah, and accomplished, yet he’s not sure which—if any—of these things are his “why.”

“I haven’t really thought forward within this, like, ‘this is my career.’ Should I?” he says, wondering aloud whether student government is his immediate future or if there are nonprofits or other organizations more in line with whatever his career path ends up being. He has identified something critical, though:

“What I get the kick out of most is helping others or figuring out a way to create change in the community I’m a part of.”

O’Stricker is a “country bumpkin,” he says with an audible smirk, from Douglasville, Georgia—a city on

his mentor. By the time O’Stricker arrived at Duke— his dream school—he had developed an interest in public policy.

For all his drive, ambition, and habit of holding public office, however, O’Stricker is an introvert.

Matthew O'Stricker

INVOLVED: Top, a favorite meal; birthday celebration; running for office; orderly closet; the work space

the Alabama side of Atlanta where “you’ll see more trees than buildings.” O’Stricker’s parents are culturally aware, he says, and they turned him on to Hendrix, the Isley Brothers, and the Beatles, though he was also drawn to aughts-kid fare like Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Drake, and T-Pain.

From an early age, if O’Stricker cared about something, he was all-in. First this was video games. Then it was humanities, and from middle school forward, he asked a lot of questions in class. A high-school history teacher responded by making O’Stricker find his own answers. She became

Sure, he’s a passionate speaker with infectious zeal—even in conversation—but he knows to leave time to recharge his batteries. And perhaps this is one reason he’s remarkably at ease attending Duke in its COVID-altered state. (Maybe this is hell for extroverts, he offers, but that’s not him.) He strikes up conversations wherever he is, gleaning insights from professors, upperclassmen, and workers at Burger King or the campus store—though he’s just as happy solo.

“I don’t know what another Duke is like,” he says.

“I don’t know what another Duke is like.”

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Colin Kaeo ON A HOT LATE-SUMMER DAY, the members of Duke’s marching band stood in a block formation on the practice field—seven or eight feet between them—and got reacquainted with their instruments. Maybe they hadn’t played all summer. Maybe they were a little rusty. No matter.

A young clarinetist stood near the rear, in the tall grass where it was shady.

Fresh from Texas, fresh from high school, fresh from a job fulfilling online grocery orders at Walmart, freshman Colin Kaeo initially wasn’t so sure he wanted to join Duke’s marching band.

He loves band, sure, and was first-chair clarinet and

drum major at his high school in McKinney—a Dallas suburb—but COVID made him reluctant.

Once he read the marching band’s precautions, however, Kaeo felt more at ease. He’s glad he joined, too, he says—even if the first rehearsal scored him twenty-odd mosquito bites, he recalls with a laugh.

In north Texas, where Kaeo was raised, sports are king. Marching band, too, is incredibly competitive, and Kaeo enjoyed that element. He immersed himself in the work ethic, performance aspect, and overall competitive atmosphere. He became a better communicator and more confi-

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dent leader, and unexpectedly found the value-add of making friends and having fun.

“Once I got to Duke band, this year since we weren’t even performing at games, it was pretty much just for fun,” he says fondly. “It was the first time in a long time that I played my clarinet and enjoyed playing it, just the experience of playing it.”

Kaeo learned fight songs, committing them to memory, and pop hits like Usher’s “Scream,” which very quickly made it to his running playlist.

But the most important thing about marching band was making friends. “I feel like I got really

“It was the first time in a long time that I played my clarinet and enjoyed playing it, just the experience of playing it.”

ALL NEW: Far left, with older brother Kyle; dorm room, Texas style; rest stop on the way from Dallas; marching band; class project—a device that monitors handwashing close with the other freshmen in the clarinet section,” says Kaeo.

Thanks to COVID, meeting people is not easy, which concerned Kaeo. He eventually found like-minded folks regardless. He met them in band, and at Pratt’s First-Year Design seminar, an in-person course that assigns real-world engineering challenges to teams of first-year students.

Kaeo’s FYD teammates became his

friends, and all while tangling with a problem related to bronchoscopy, which is the use of a tube passed from the throat to the lungs to identify or treat respiratory issues.

Kaeo admits it sounds dry, but he recalls an hours-long technical-memo drafting session in a Trinity House study area. He wasn’t looking forward to it all—whose idea of fun is that?—and yet it was a moment the friendship among these teammates coalesced.

“We were joking around, having fun,” Kaeo recalls. “Even though we were working on something that in itself wasn’t super fun to any of us, we really developed better camaraderie in that moment.”

BECOMING: From left, dorm style; afternoon tea at the Washington Duke; a moment away from screen time

Brianna Cellini ABOUT A DECADE AGO, Bri Cellini and her family flew from North Carolina to visit her cousins in Seattle.

Among the gifts they took west were Duke and Carolina T-shirts, and Cellini remembers her older brother’s horror when he realized the shirts were in the same bag. “They can’t touch each other,” her Heels-fan brother said as he rectified the situation.

Cellini thought it was funny.

Though Cellini’s parents are from Montreal, she was raised in Durham and Hillsborough.

Sports rivalry was her brother’s thing; skating and tennis are much more Cellini’s speed. Indeed, Cellini was a competitive figure skater until a middle-school injury, at which point she shifted to coaching. The Orange County Sportsplex’s skating rink is a sort of second home—in fact, her family moved to Hillsborough to be closer to it—and Cellini has shared its ice with Duke’s figure-skating club more than a few times.

“They were just so kind and open and supportive, and just really interested in my own life and what my future aspirations were,” Cellini recalls.

“They were always willing to give me advice if I asked for it. I thought that just really reflected what Duke actually is.”

Having spent her life in the Triangle, Cellini always figured she’d go away for college. She hardly considered Duke an option—too geographically close—yet a mini-camp her junior year gave her a taste for the school. It wasn’t until August of Cellini’s senior year, however, that she had her “Cinderella moment.” At her mother’s insistence, Cellini toured campus. Compared to other university tours, her Duke tour was refreshingly lighthearted. The forested paths of West Campus captured Cellini’s imagination, and she shamelessly whipped out her phone to snap pictures.

“The shoe fits,” Cellini says.

One thing that stood out from the campus tour was its guide—a double-major in engineering and English. Her

“The shoe fits.”

interdisciplinary focus appealed to Cellini, whose own interests combine humanities, medicine, social science, and athletics.

“I’ve always been fascinated by humans, human connection, and how our bodies function,” she says.

As an athlete, she’s seen her share of injuries, but also gleaned an understanding of what is best for the human body. As a skater and then a member of a tennis team, she’s learned how to care for herself, and also how to connect with others.

A middle-school interest in sports medicine and psychology evolved into a high-school focus on global health and policy, particularly related to food security and addiction.

Once at Duke, she zeroed in on mass incarceration and racial justice, too. Cellini started volunteering and interning with a Durham substance-abuse prevention program, Together for Resilient Youth, after its founder spoke in Nicole Schramm-Sapyta’s “Drugs and the Law” class, and also joined political scientist Adriane Fresh and social scientist Nicholas Eubank’s “Building a Dataset on Mass Incarceration” project as a research assistant.

“Recent events following the murder of George Floyd really brought to my attention the connection between drugs and policing certain areas and then mass incarceration,” Cellini says. “It’s the modern-century form of slavery, which is really difficult to come to terms with. But it’s true when you look at it and the statistics.” n

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The

pure truth

A researcher exposes the ugly subtext of a bovine spectacle.

BY BARRY YEOMAN ILLUSTRATION BY ANTONELLO SILVERINI

T

HE DEFENDANT’S name was Mr. Scrub Bull. He entered

Magistrate James McElroy Jameson’s makeshift courtroom in Pickens County, South Carolina, walking on four legs and escorted by rural and town policemen. There he stood, surely bewildered, as a court officer read the bill of indictments.

“The defendant works in a very underhand way,” the officer declared, “stealing the profits from every dairyman and butcher who has common cows, robbing the unsuspecting, the careless, and the ignorant alike, causing their innocent children to suffer for milk and working men to be in want of meat.”

The accused didn’t understand that he was facing criminal charges of genetic impurity. Bovine defendants never did understand. But this trial wasn’t for his benefit. It was for the education and entertainment of the many spectators who had gathered at the county fairgrounds in October 1922.

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“If you are a ‘scrub breed,’ the sooner you find it out the better.... A lot of useless energy would be saved if the ‘scrubs’ only realized their limitations and kept to the very important ‘scrub jobs,’ instead of making themselves drags on the universities of the countries.”

Across the country in the early twentieth century, cattle were routinely put on trial before crowds that reached into the thousands in what the U.S. Department of Agriculture called “Courts of Bovine Justice.” The criminal proceedings had real judges and real lawyers, who examined witnesses and addressed jurors. They were live courtroom dramas orchestrated by the department to teach Americans the value of purebred livestock, which were supposed to produce more food than their runty-looking “scrub,” or unpedigreed, peers.

The published account of the Pickens County trial is thin on details. But if it ran like the other trials, it followed a script written by a USDA employee to promote “the severe persecution of inferior breeding stock.” The text was packed with clever dialogue, to which presenters were encouraged to add “local color.”

Attorney: What is the difference between a scrub bull and a purebred?

Butcher: They are very much alike in some ways and different in others.

Attorney: Explain yourself.

Butcher: They are alike because they both multiply, but they are different because the scrub never gets the right answer.

What we do know is that the Pickens County prosecutor accused Mr. Scrub Bull of endowing his calves with “blood of unknown and poor quality.”

His very existence, the indictment said, robbed local children of “the privilege of having fine purebred calves to care for.”

The defense attorney likely argued that his client, while “less aristocratic” than a purebred bull, nonetheless “gives his best and in return only asks that he be fed, housed, and have his tranquility undisturbed.” That argument carried no weight, though.

Mr. Scrub Bull was convicted of all charges and sentenced to death, with local butchers serving as executioners. There’s no record of whether the spectators later ate him.

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N

inety years later, Gabriel N. Rosenberg, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies and history at Duke, started researching these odd bovine inquisitions.

Poring over newspaper accounts, he recognized that they were more than amusing spectacles. They had an ugly subtext, and it wasn’t about cattle at all.

While the USDA was promoting genetic purity in farm animals, the United States was witnessing the rise of a eugenics movement that aimed to limit the reproduction of people deemed unfit. Forced sterilization programs, which would continue through most of the century, came online in many states during this period.

This was also a heyday for “scientific racism,” the use of pseudoscience to measure and quantify the purported differences between the races. Shoddy science was used to justify both immigration quotas and the miscegenation laws that barred interracial marriages in some states until 1967.

“Scientific racists and eugenicists often cited live-

4-H Youth Development (UA023.008), Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries

PRIME: A 4-H stock breeding as a model for poster shows what could be accomplished how weak and through the careful governance of reproduction,” Rosenberg swaybacked bulls wrote in an article published were compared to this fall in the Journal of Ameri- swaybacked boys and a straightcan History. They weren’t cagey backed man. about their intentions. Henry Herbert Goddard, an Ohio State University psychologist and an early champion of intelligence testing, argued that some people are “scrubs” who should not receive higher education.

“The cattle raiser knows he must have the right breed of stock to begin with or he will fail,” Goddard told a reporter in 1923. “A scrub breed never produced a prize winner, no matter what fine environment was given it.” This applied to people, too, the psychologist said. “If you are a ‘scrub breed,’ the sooner you find it out the better.... A lot of useless energy would be saved if the ‘scrubs’ only realized their limitations and kept to the very important ‘scrub jobs,’ instead of making themselves drags on the universities of the countries.”

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ost-trial funeral oration, to be delivered by a religious leader or livestock specialist: “In regard to the charge and conviction of highway robbery, it can be safely said that the scrub bull is one of the greatest evils along our country highways today.… The houses and barns of his owner are in poor repair, are badly in need of paint; the fences, if there are any, are down, and the weeds have grown thickly along the roadside. The scrub bull robs his owner of ambition and the money it takes to keep his place in repair and make a pleasant home for his family. We must get rid of all our scrub bulls and stop this thieving.”

Rosenberg’s cattle-trial research originated from a broader interest: the intersection of livestock breeding and human sexuality. These two phrases rarely get uttered in the same sentence— which, according to his colleagues, is what makes the Duke scholar’s work stand out.

“His research not only breaks apart firm distinctions between the making of human and animal life,” says Alex Blanchette, an anthropologist at Tufts University. “It helps us glimpse in new ways how modern corporate agribusiness’s seemingly rational productivity and profit-seeking is inseparable from deeper histories of race and sex.”

Rosenberg wasn’t raised on a farm. But he did grow up in Indiana, which exposed him to what he calls “agrarian tropes.” He attended the state fair, took school field trips to farms, and visited relatives who lived in the countryside.

He brought that agrarian lens to graduate school at Brown University. Reading the scholarship in his field, he noticed a blind spot. “The history of sexuality, at least from the perspective of American historians, was written almost exclusively from a metropolitan perspective,” he says. It focused primarily on gay men and lesbians in large cities, and relied on activist-group records, gay newspapers, and urban court cases. “Is the argument here,” Rosenberg wondered, “that there is no history of sexuality in rural spaces?”

That question was his jumping-off point. For his dissertation, Rosenberg looked at the USDA’s 4-H clubs, which teach leadership skills to rural youth.

He discovered that, while teaching how to breed livestock, 4-H clubs also taught the principles of human breeding: gender roles, sexual morality, and DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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the perils of sexually transmitted diseases.

Health and sex education borrowed the language of the farm. One North Carolina 4-H poster from 1929 depicted two young bulls, one weak and swaybacked, the other strong and straight-backed.

Below them were photos of two swaybacked boys and one straight-backed man. “Grow a fine club member!” the headline said. “Train your muscles to carry your body well.”

Another illustration used by 4-H publications in the 1930s and ’40s compared five increasingly mature boys, each stripped down to his underwear and facing away from the camera, to five increasingly ripe ears of corn. Rosenberg reprinted both the cow and the corn graphics in his 2016 book The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America.

But farming principles weren’t just used to teach human reproduction. They were also used to teach how to control human reproduction.

R

osenberg’s home state of Indiana passed the nation’s first compulsory sterilization law, in 1907, “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

It followed on the heels of a 1905 state law barring the “mentally deficient” and “habitual drunkards” from marrying. By then, the American eugenics movement was getting under way, advocating that genetic science could be harnessed to craft a more physically, mentally, and morally fit nation. At least 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States without their consent (or sometimes knowledge) during the twentieth century.

Racial motives were never far below the surface.

Harry Laughlin, a biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and author of a model sterilization law borrowed by Germany’s Nazi regime, also championed the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe and virtually barred immigrants from Asia.

The law’s purpose, says a U.S. State Department history, “was to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” Laughlin later advised USDA on livestock improvement.

Likewise, women of color bore the brunt of American eugenic policies, including in North Carolina,

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In the 1920s, the American Eugenics Society offered $500 (equivalent to $7,000 today) to the preacher who delivered the best sermon on the theme of “Religion and Eugenics: Does the church have any responsibility for improving the human stock?” where forced sterilizations were performed until the 1970s. So many Southern women, many of them Black, endured the procedure that it became known as the “Mississippi appendectomy.”

While the practice has generally ended, a complaint filed with the federal government this fall alleged that women at an immigration detention center in Georgia had received hysterectomies in “high numbers” without informed consent.

The lines between eugenics and agriculture, Rosenberg says, were often blurred. One twentieth-century scientist who straddled the line was Hubert Goodale, a Massachusetts geneticist whose

New England aristocrats,” Rosenberg says—there was something inherently radical about applying livestock science (which embraced polygamy and incest) to human beings.

Still, the comparisons persisted. In the 1920s, the American Eugenics Society offered $500 (equivalent to $7,000 today) to the preacher who delivered the best sermon on the theme of “Religion and Eugenics: Does the church have any responsibility for improving the human stock?” In those sermons, “they’re using the agricultural analogy all the time,” Rosenberg says. “If you want to explain that in a country that’s largely rural and composed of people who have regular contact with livestock, then we need that analogy to be able to translate to people why we know the technocratic management of reproduction works.”

T

work involved dairy cattle and poultry. “He comes up with a fairly elaborate, baroque way to rate men on the basis of the quality of their offspring,” Rosenberg says—a system based on a certain type of livestock breeding. “His argument is that those are men who should be encouraged to have more children, and the government should subsidize their reproduction. Whereas if you do really, really badly, you should be coercively sterilized and you should be prevented from marrying.”

Not every eugenicist felt comfortable with this overlap. Among the members of the American Eugenics Society—“who tended to be WASP-y

he Courts of Bovine Justice provided a secular vehicle for that message.

In the 1920s, Rosenberg says, “the hottest American pastime was gawking at great trials” like the Sacco and Vanzetti robbery-murder trial of 1921 and the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Americans rarely attended public executions anymore, as they did in the nineteenth century. But, he adds, they still loved the showdown between good and evil that a courtroom drama offered.

USDA capitalized on this public thirst. It recommended entertaining spectators with “band music and a barbecue” and injecting “levity” into the trials where appropriate. Along with the judge, attorneys, farmer, butcher, and auctioneer, there should be a witless housewife who confuses man and bull.

Attorney: Mrs. Brown, have you any views on the merits of this case?

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Mrs. B.: Indeed I have. I think he is guilty; I can tell it by his looks.

Attorney: Whom do you mean?

Mrs. B.: That man right there. (She points to the judge.)

But, the USDA said, there should also be a strong and consistent message about genetic purity, reinforced at the end during the bull’s eulogy: “Let us bury him so deep in history and seal his tomb so tight that both he and his posterity will be lost of this world forever.”

Was there a human subtext? “All the evidence suggests that people who were engaging with the bull trials understood it to be a dual commentary,” Rosenberg says. “There was no way to read the bull trials without understanding it also to be in the context of broader eugenic advocacies. Because it was fundamentally about testifying to the capacity of the American state to make definitive determinations about who could and could not breed.”

The ironic coda to these trials, says Rosenberg, is that they had a faulty premise. Breed distinctions in cattle are arbitrary and based on physical characteristics—which geneticists call “phenotypes.” But these traits don’t neatly track an animal’s genetic makeup. “The scrubbiest bull in the yard may pro-

If pedigreed cattle were indeed more productive, studies pointed to another reason. “If you tell a farmer, ‘This purebred bull you bought, it’s way more expensive,’ the farmer is going to feed that bull better,” Rosenberg says. “He’s going to care for it. He’s going to make sure it’s not sick. He’s going to insert all of these environmental factors into the bull’s life. And that bull is going to be more productive because you treated it better.”

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he bovine trials ended in 1933. But the social issues they raised endure— in modern debates over immigration, white supremacy, and even how to manage the pandemic. “These issues still resonate today,” says Rosenberg’s colleague Juno Salazar Parreñas, an anthropologist at Cornell University. “When people say, ‘Old people should just die from coronavirus,’ they have ideas of who is a society for. That is very much about eugenics.”

Given these resonances, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Rosenberg’s research has nudged its way into popular culture. Last year, WNYC’s popular Radiolab broadcast an episode of the podcast The Memory Palace that focused on the cattle trials.

It didn’t mention Rosenberg by name, but linked to a talk by him in the show notes.

In the episode, host Nate DiMeo told the story of a bull who was convicted before 800 spectators in Neillsville, Wisconsin, in 1930, but escaped into the trees before he could be slaughtered.

“And I propose we let this one scrub bull stand in for all scrub bulls, though so few of them exist now well into the 2000s,” said DiMeo. “They have indeed been bred and engineered and eaten out of the population. But let’s let this one go, to run off into the trees. And let him keep on running: to find a pasture, some tall grass, and a life worth living, whatever that might mean.” n

“When people say, ‘Old people should just die from coronavirus,’ they have ideas of who is a society for.

That is very much about eugenics.” duce offspring that are highly productive, because it’s not a function of phenotype,” he says. “It’s a function of genotype.”

By the time the trials were under way, scientists were coming to understand this. “Population genetics is surging over the course of the 1920s,” Rosenberg says. “Their read on the situation is this: Pure-breeding is based on junk nineteenth-century race science that fetishizes the appearance of animals. But it doesn’t tell you anything about that underlying genetic material that you’re actually trying to conserve for future stock.”

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Yeoman teaches journalism at Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He wrote about Duke researcher Barton Haynes and the quest for a global HIV vaccine in the Winter 2019 issue.

Here to help As COVID hit, the partnership built between the nursing school and the university health system paid off. By Scott Huler

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Kim Coston was feeling the stress.

A student in the Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (A.B.S.N.) program at the Duke University School of Nursing, she felt the program, designed for students who already have a bachelor’s degree, was moving so quickly that she wasn’t sure she was absorbing everything. “I decided to decelerate,” she says; slow down, catch her breath. “Then COVID came, and I got more than I asked for.” Classes moved online, and clinical education in the Duke University Health System was put on hold. Her roommate didn’t return from spring break. Lack of breathing space was no longer anything like a problem.

During that lull, she started getting e-mails from her dean, urging her to consider going to work in the hospital.

The health system and the school of nursing were both in a difficult spot. With non-care providers kept out of hospitals, nursing students were prevented from advancing in their clinical rotations and their vital final preceptorships, during which they are basically apprenticed to a working nurse. But at the same time that DUSON faced the crisis of what to do with suddenly sidetracked students, DUHS was facing the crisis of how to fill suddenly mushrooming new roles caused by COVID, especially because of new personal protection equipment (PPE) requirements that work more efficiently with staff assistance, and the constant need for personnel to screen people entering the hospitals and clinics.

Getty Images

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COVID hit, says DUSON chief of staff Diane Uzarski, “is how we could help. What could we do? Knowing there was a tremendous need for licensed and unlicensed people.” It’s an instinct, she says, that’s fundamental to nursing.

For those paying attention, nursing was in the foreground of those early moments of pandemic response.

“I remember an image,” says outgoing DUSON dean Marion Broome (Vincent Guilamo-Ramos M.S.N. ’17 takes over the job July 1), “when the New York fiasco was happening.” News reports regularly showed care of COVID patients, in highly restricted rooms with large glass windows. “I remember the newscaster

what we’ve been saying for years: Nursing care is twenty-four/seven.”

Medical staff and specialists come and go, but nurses stay on wards and in rooms. And with COVID patients in intensive care, that usually means one nurse and one patient, together almost constantly. You can get surgery as an outpatient, Broome says. But “the reason you go to a hospital is for nursing care.”

“She basically took her and me and walked us through her whole day. So I was shadowing also. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool. This is like clinical, but a thousand times better.’ ” talking about how the physicians NEW ROLE: Nursing students like Kim were rapping on the window and Coston enjoyed the telling them things, getting reopportunities of the ports from them, how’s the panew Patient Sertient doing, what should we do.” vices Aide position.

Getting reports from and having discussions with, that is, not the patients themselves. With the nurses.

The doctors were out in the hallway, outside the glass.

“And the nurses were inside, and they would stay inside for six to eight hours because that’s the constant care they require. And it just kind of struck me as an analogy for 40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Stephanie Roth

THE FIRST THING we asked ourselves over here” when

THE UNPRECEDENTED UPHEAVAL caused by

COVID demanded a rapid and unusual response, and for that the school of nursing and the hospital would need to work together. But that’s nothing new. That kind of collaboration between DUSON and DUHS already has a five-year tradition. It centers on DANCE (Duke Advancement of Nursing, Center of Excellence), a program that provides a space for members of the DUSON and DUHS nursing faculties and staffs to work together, to communicate, and to find ways to help one another. Members of the two staffs meet monthly, making requests, offering ideas, looking for opportunities.

DANCE coordinator Staci Reynolds offers examples of ways DUSON has stepped in long before COVID hit.

The health system a few years ago recognized that because a cohort of nurses was nearing retirement, it was in a few years going to be short of perioperative nurses. The school of nursing created two electives for A.B.S.N. students, Reynolds says, “so we could create this pipeline to fill that

lag.” Taught by DUSON faculty and experts at the health system, the electives have provided the nurses the hospital needs. On another front, DUSON faculty members do significant research work in nursing practice and quality.

“So we teach staff nurses how to do continuous quality improvement in the clinical setting.”

“What it did,” DUSON dean Marion Broome says of DANCE, “was it provided a platform for when COVID hit. That communication was already there, relationships were already there.”

To tackle the COVID emergency, the partners created the brand-new Patient Services Aide (PSA) position.

The PSA role offered students the opportunity to hire on as paid nurses’ aides. The job offered two roles. One was screening people entering the hospital or working on COVID wards with the list of questions we’re all used to by now: Do you have a fever? Have you been exposed? Do you have a cough? The other was supervising health-care workers as they donned and doffed PPE. “Even though you can’t get into clinical because of COVID,” recalls Coston of the e-mails she got from her dean, “you can still get experience this way.” She first signed on as a screener, the position with easier hours and less risk. But she was soon receiving e-mails from her hospital supervisor: “Hey, guys, y’all should pick up PPE instead of screening. We need a lot more help that way,” she recalls the e-mails saying. Coston decided to help.

In the hospital, each PSA is assigned a spot managing a few patient rooms on a COVID ward. When anyone goes into or out of a room, the PSA makes sure they don or doff their PPE in the proper order: when the mask goes on or off, when the shoe covers, when the gown. Recent graduate Cate MacQueen recalls: “It was a weird dynamic at first. ‘Hi, I’m a nursing student and I’m telling you how to put on and take off this equipment you have been putting on and taking off now for months.’ ” But she loved the job. She wasn’t providing nursing care, but “it was a really good environment to learn, even on the periphery,” she says, recalling watching camaraderie develop on the new COVID ward and watching nurses work shift after shift, remaining professional. Each room had a walkie-talkie, as did each PSA, who could be summoned to a room where they were needed or run for supplies or offer other support services to the working nurses. “I feel like that was a critical moment for me at the beginning of my nursing career, to see such resilience in such a difficult time.”

Coston felt she learned more as a PSA than even in her clinical rotations. “In clinicals we would never get to be on an ICU or see stuff like that,” she says. As a student, she’s an observer; as a PSA, she’s part of the team. “So the other staff is more inclusive, more accepting.” On her first day, a new nurse was starting, and a veteran nurse in-

cluded Coston in her orientation. “She basically took her and me and walked us through her whole day. So I was shadowing also. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool. This is like clinical, but a thousand times better.’ ” Anthony Morrow, another student PSA, agrees. “Some people would view it as, I’m just the PPE observer,” he says. “But I’ve learned about ventilators from respiratory therapists, I’ve learned so much about interprofessional education, interprofessional collaboration. On rounds, it’s nurse practitioners, physicians, residents, fellows, just everyone. And I get to hear those conversations, see how nurses give reports, how they phrase things.” In clinical rotations and during his preceptorship, “you can get so caught up in just wanting to make sure you do everything right that you don’t take time to look at the big picture.”

As a student, he just watches; in his preceptorship, he’s just working. As a PSA, he can do both. “You can learn so much. That will put you way ahead of your colleagues who don’t have the opportunity to participate in it.”

Coston recalls seeing her first death while working a shift. One respiratory therapist was in the room, the other was outside and talked her through the process. “To actually have that experience, rather than watching video and online learning,” she says. “I can’t put the right word on it. Nobody wants [people] to die, but as far as learning goes….” And still being a student and having DUSON resources to lean on helped, too; when she struggled with what felt like the “just part of the job” response of those on the ward to the death, she had professors to discuss that with. And now Coston, a year ago considering slowing down her education to catch her breath, has clinical experience that places her at the head of her cohort.

The successful cooperation between DUSON and DUHS nursing has yielded a paper in the journal Nurse Leader called “The Power of Two.” The PSA program garnered a lot of attention; it has been so successful that it’s still running, even though nursing students have returned to hospital training. It has also been the subject of its own research paper, currently submitted for publication.

DANCE HELPED FACILITATE the assistance DUSON

could provide in the crisis. And while the students had an opportunity to help early on through the PSA role, many DUSON faculty had to wait. Around a third of faculty do clinical work within the hospital, but it was rare for that work to dovetail with COVID needs. And staff and faculty without clinical positions had at first to stand aside, to watch as hospital nurses worked overtime. “It was hard,” Uzarski, DUSON chief of staff, says. “Because unlike our nurse partners at the health system, for the most part our staff and faculty are nonessential employees. I was an ER DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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Jared Lazarus

nurse during SARS and H1N1, an ICU nurse during the HIV epidemic, so I was on the front line when we had public-health crises in this country.

“Those of us who have been in nursing for many years and who are now nonessential kind of had survivors’ guilt,” Uzarski continues. “We had a little bit of remorse that we could not play more active roles.”

“Especially after everything we feel like we’ve been doing to support our students and our clinical colleagues, now we feel like there’s an impact in the community as well, and that’s very rewarding.”

BEDSIDE: School of Not for long. DUSON faculty nurses quickly found ways to Nursing assistant professor Remi Hueckel help. They filled in to provide works with students. student health services so those nurses could work at the hospital. They scared up PPE (from as far away as China); they offered to assemble masks and other equipment. They even offered to help do things like walk dogs or help with childcare for nurses working long hours in COVID wards.

DUSON teaches more than the A.B.S.N. students, though. More-advanced nursing students—nurse anesthetists, for example—were never kept out of the hospital, because keeping up the flow of new nurses was too important. “Mary Ann [Fuchs, DUSON’s associate dean of clinical affairs] needs more nurses,” Broome said. “Because they are tired.” And if most DUSON faculty couldn’t suddenly volunteer on COVID wards, they could perform services that kept working nurses on those wards.

“You may have seen some of the stuff that was done with tents for testing,” Fuchs says. “Faculty staffed the testing tents.” Every faculty volunteer swabbing noses in testing tents meant one more nurse remaining at their post in the hospital. Midge Bowers, DUSON associate professor and lead faculty for cardiovascular specialty, worked the tents, and she emphasizes that nurses do more than just the job.

“I think the thing that nursing brings is they look at sys-

42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

tems, and see what needs to get done. And they figure out how to get it done. The [hospital] nurses can’t be in two places at once; we still need to staff our clinics. So who’s kind of an integrated partner in all this? Often it’s a faculty member.” And while she’s volunteering at a vaccination clinic or helping suddenly organize a popup or drive-thru clinic somewhere, she’s also teaching.

“I’m also an educator in whatever space I’m in. I’ve sat beside physician colleagues, med students, PA [physician assistant] students, and they’ve never been taught on how to give an IM [intramuscular] injection. Nurses know how to do that.” So she teaches her fellow volunteers how to make the injections. “It’s not hard,” she laughs. “I could teach you to give a vaccine. It’s understanding: this is the way you want to get into the muscle, it’s not subcutaneous, to get an effective vaccine, you do it this way.”

And it’s not even just technical medical complexities; it’s noticing the kind of things nurses notice. An older person might need help walking to the recovery area; making yourself heard through a mask might require extra work.

“And you have to know where the code cart is, and the fire extinguisher,” she says, recalling setting up the clinic in the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center. “Even if it’s a campus building, we still need to be able to resuscitate somebody if they go down.”

Wherever she’s volunteering, she brings that what-

next? nursing spirit. “It’s seeing the problem and not just looking for one solution but anticipating the next problem and proposing a solution for that. We’re always forward thinking. I say I live my life in PDSA cycles.”

PDSA stands for plan, do, study, act, and it’s foundational to nursing planning. She describes volunteering three times over the course of a week, “and there were updated processes every single time.”

That may be because of Remi Hueckel, assistant professor and faculty coordinator for the pediatric and neonatal nurse practitioner majors in DUSON’s master’s program.

“I like to sit in the back and watch the flow, and keep my eyes on how things are going,” Hueckel says of the time she spends volunteering at the Karsh vaccine clinic. “Because I don’t have the responsibility of being an administrator assigned by the hospital to get the clinic up and running, I could just watch it going on.” That meant that she could watch systems and cycles, respond, and educate other volunteers. She cites an example.

“It just happened this week. We were getting started, and the lead that day asked, ‘Who’s been here before?’ ” Only the lead and Hueckel raised their hands. That day’s volunteers were nursing students, medical students, PA students: “All these health-professions learners finally getting to be with patients for the first time,” she says. “So we just pulled them around the table, and I walked them through. They practiced on each other, finding landmarks, figuring out how they were going to administer the vaccine. We walked through documentation, the importance of that. We talked about flow.”

And then the day got started. “And it was fun—again, I like to sit in the back so I can see everything. I just took a pause at one point. I looked around, and I thought, ‘This is great. We’ve taken them from the wide-eyed, yes, I want to help.’ I looked around at each one of them, and they were all engaged, enthusiastically talking with their people coming to get the vaccine. As stressed as they were in the morning, by 11:30 each one came back and was, like, ‘Hey, this is awesome.’

“And you would just feel the energy going on there.

You can see it all coming together for them, and it’s kind of fun. This has been such a pleasure for us.” She gets to offer her services in a setting that not only trains students but improves the health of people in Durham. “Especially after everything we feel like we’ve been doing to support our students and our clinical colleagues, now we feel like there’s an impact in the community as well, and that’s very rewarding.”

SPEAKING OF COMMUNITY: “The community health piece is that we teach our community health course

through students being partnered with organizations in the community,” says Irene Felsman, assistant professor and faculty affiliate of the Duke Community Health Improvement Partnership program (D-CHIPP). Groups of nursing students join with groups providing community services to vulnerable populations, learning about community health through practice. “So when this pandemic hit, we contacted our partners and said to them, ‘What’s your capability of having our students stay involved online?’ ” DUSON students have been meeting with some of the community’s most vulnerable populations, using Zoom, FaceTime, “any way our population can connect with us,” Felsman says.

She gives the example of Durham Housing Authority residents that students worked with: often older people, often marginalized. When COVID meant that phone calls had to replace in-person visits, “it was very difficult for people to relate that there was a nursing student on the other end.” So the professor worked out a system for the students, two at a time, to meet in person, outdoors, with the clients, after which the clients have functioned much better. “I thought that was very innovative.”

Felsman does a lot of work with the Latinx community, and she brings up Latin-19 (Latinx Advocacy Team & Interdisciplinary Network for COVID-19), started by DUHS physicians Viviana Martinez-Bianchi and Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti when they recognized in April that almost 75 percent of patients in the ICU were Latino.

They convened a weekly meeting, not unlike the monthly DANCE meetings, to make connections. Felsman was involved from the start, along with other nurses, physicians, and members of community groups. “Now we have 500 people on our mailing list.” And, of course, “I have a lot of student volunteers.” Felsman mentions the SER (Salud, Estrés y Resiliencia/Health, Stress and Resilience) Hispano Project, a research project she’s involved with that studies the stresses involved with acculturation on the health of Latino immigrants. Research through that project, focused on the effectiveness of giving COVID training to health promoters, has received funding through the $5 million expansion in money the university made available to the Duke-Durham fund in June 2020.

The point of all this work, Felsman says, is the way DUSON works with the community, whether through community organizations, student volunteers, or simply long-term connections between the school and its community. Nurses, in a way, are like cartilage. They absorb the inevitable shocks between the bone of community reality and the bone of the health-care system.

“We use the term ‘flex’ a lot,” she says. “And ‘creativity.’

I think that’s a lot of what we’ve done. During COVID it’s just become a lot more visible.” n DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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ForeverDukeNEWSMAKERS

The White House/David Lienemann.

On January 22, Edwin Stetler ’42 turned 100. He lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Stefanie Feldman ’10 was tapped as deputy assistant to the president and senior adviser to the director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Biden administration.

Herbert Yu M.B.A. ’14 was recognized by Forbes magazine for founding Bonrisu, a company that sells handmade fabric face masks. The business saved a small tailoring business in Thailand, provided PPE for the New York area, and joined with Meals on Wheels in social impact.

Jackson Musker ’07 produced the podcast “The Sea in the Sky,” which was named one of Audible’s Top 10 listens of 2020. The podcast is inspired by Duke professor of biological oceanography and former Marine Lab director Cindy Lee Van Dover, who was the first and only woman certified to pilot the deep-diving submersible ALVIN.

7Have news to share about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.

F

our alumni have been nominated to Duke’s board of trustees by the executive committee of the board of directors of the Duke Alumni Association. Lisa Borders ‘79, Patricia (Patty) Morton ‘77, and Adam Silver ’84 are eligible for re-election to a second six-year term. (For biographical information: https://trustees.duke.edu/ board-trustees-2020-21.) Grant Hill ’94 (pictured) will be new to the board and will begin serving a six-year term as of July 1.

One of the most accomplished NBA and college players of his generation, Hill was a seven-time NBA All-Star and a twotime national champion at Duke; he was later inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall Fame and the Duke Athletics Hall of Fame. He has been named one of five independent directors to the NCAA’s board of governors, along with being named a board member and an officer of the NBA Retired Players Association.

He also serves on the boards of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, the NCAA, and Lake Highland Preparatory School. In 2017, he received the NCAA President’s Gerald R. Ford Award in recognition of his leadership as an advocate for college sports.

44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Claire Kremen Ph.D. ’87 was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize for her work on diversified farming systems and conservation.

Shortly after he entered the NBA in 1994, Hill established Hill Ventures. Through the private company, he has invested in multifamily complexes and other commercial real-estate ventures in several states, including North Carolina. He also has taken on broadcasting roles with CBS Sports, Turner Sports, and NBATV. Over the years, Hill has engaged with countless alumni and students. He has hosted an annual event at Homecoming, participated in each of his reunions, spoken at first-year orientation, and traveled to Duke events to participate as a speaker. In 2006, Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art presented “Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of AfricanAmerican Art.” Seven years later, he told Duke Magazine that he sees Duke as “a place that gets even better, even more exciting in its academic opportunities, even more inclusive, than it was when I was there.”

Hill lives in Orlando, Florida, with his wife, Tamia, a seven-time Grammy-nominated singer, and their two daughters.

Duke’s bylaws call for the election of one-third of its trustees by the graduates of the university. These four individuals are approved for final submission to the alumni body, with additional nominations permitted by petition. After notice appears in print, alumni may submit a petition within thirty days signed by one-half of one percent of the alumni body to nominate additional candidates.

All photos courtesy the individual unless noted

DUKEISEVERYWHERE

Seattle ALUMNI:

3,321

INSTAGRAM: @jxt.wang

Photography has been a godsend during the pandemic, says JUSTIN WANG B.S.E.E. ’19. Why else would he get up before dawn on a Sunday during a snowstorm to take this portrait at Seattle’s famed Pike Place? “To me it’s a way of feeling, of loving, of living, in a socially distanced world,” he says. “The pictures I capture will remember the little things in my life long after I’ve forgotten about them.”

The native Texan moved to Seattle months after graduation for a software engineering job at Amazon; he now works on robots that move things around

within the company’s fulfillment centers. Although in the past year he’s learned to appreciate solitude (“It becomes in itself a link between myself and the world, and between me and myself. Any and all worries vanish”), he also has kept up his Duke connections via video calling. “And on occasion, I might meet up with a few of my local Duke friends for board games or a wander-the-city day. These luxuries have afforded me a little piece of stability and normalcy during an otherwise tumultuous time.” n

ForeverDukePROFILE

T A formula for peace

Branka Panic's think tank uses artificial intelligence to aid humanitarian missions. | By Corbie Hill

he algorithm had been designed to predict famine.

If famines were spotted before they started, more aid could be routed to the affected country, more people could be saved. Or so the thinking went.

Yet there was a snag. Rather than occur naturally, modern famine is human-made and is a tool of war, says Branka Panic M.I.D.P. ’19. It was the summer of 2018, between her two years at Sanford’s Master of International Development Policy program, and as part of her studies, Panic was consulting for the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict, and Violence unit in Washington, D.C. One issue was that the famine-prediction algorithm, which was part of her work, inadvertently could notify malicious actors that certain populations were vulnerable.

Another issue, says Catherine Admay, senior lecturer with Sanford and Duke faculty director of the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center (and Panic’s mentor), is that there is little logic behind notifying a government about impending famine if the government is using it to starve its own population.

“If someone is pretending to be asleep, you cannot wake them up,” Admay says.

But then Panic and Admay approached the problem from a different angle. If the famine-prediction tool foresaw famine in a region, the World Bank could instead approach the government there, say it had detected upcoming famine, and offer assistance ahead of the fact. The government would be given a choice—prevent famine or cause it through further inaction—and would lose its deniability if it declined assistance and then famine occurred.

“It’s very hard to prove genocide,” says Admay. “But that kind of thing would count as proof.”

WORLD: Opposite, Panic takes a stand; left, at the launch of AI for Peace; above, with Peace Fellows at the Positive Peace launch in D.C.; right, presenting at Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center

“She is just on the move and getting things done with a laptop that I couldn’t do with my whole office.”

Panic returned to Duke with a renewed appreciation for quantitative data—and the seeds of an idea. She realized few spaces existed in which to discuss issues at the junction of artificial intelligence (a technical science) and peace-building (a social science).

To be fair, this revelation had been building for years; it was a synthesis of threads that wound through Panic’s life, first in activism and then in a career in peace and reconciliation.

In 2019, these threads would twine together as AI for Peace, an international think tank merging the computer science and humanitarian worlds, and driven by Panic’s moral compass and sheer force of will. “She is just on the move and getting things done with a laptop that I couldn’t do with my whole office,” Admay says.

Panic—pronounced pon-itch—grew up in Serbia and has known conflict from a young age. The Bosnian War broke out in the Balkans when she was nine, and several other conflicts ensued, lasting through her teenage years. Panic describes her parents as superheroes who shielded her and her

brother from the horrors of growing up in wartime. “The only thing we were noticing were actually sanctions and the economic impact,” Panic recalls. “You notice that stores are empty.

There’s nothing to buy there. You have to wait for milk in queues for hours to get it, and so on.”

In 1999, high-school-age Panic was active in Otpor! (literally, “Resistance!”), a protest movement opposing Serbia’s (and then Yugoslavia’s) authoritarian president Slobodan Milošević.

Panic and other teenagers active in Otpor! would leave class for daily marches against the government and its human-rights abuses.

In one story from this era that Panic shared with her Duke cohort, Panic and other teenaged members of Otpor! stood on a bridge that was about to be bombed by Milošević’s forces and sang in Serbian: Bomb this bridge, and you’ll be killing children. “That singing was to signal something to herself and to her friends, but also to signal something to her enemies about her humanity,” Admay says. “Let’s not break these bridges. We are connected!”

Photos courtesy Branka Panic

Panic’s direct action with Otpor! led

directly to her career.

“I wanted to back up my activism with knowledge from the college and university,” Panic says. So she studied political science and international relations (not at Duke—that comes later) and, before graduating, landed a job with the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, which was formed with the goal of transitioning southeastern European states to more democratic regimes.

Then Panic worked for the European Fund for the Balkans, which concentrated on Albania and the countries that previously constituted Yugoslavia.

Much of its peace-building model, Panic says, was based on post-World War II reconciliation between Germany and France—particularly involving the youth of both countries.

“A lot of these strategies were actually around having dialogue, how to exchange opinions—how even not to agree about certain topics,” Panic says.

Yet near the end of her time with the European Fund for the Balkans, Panic had a valuable realization. In hindsight, she says, this was one of the critical DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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ForeverDukePROFILE moments leading to the foundation of AI for Peace. Panic was in a refugee camp in Belgrade, working with migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. The refugees she met, from one perspective, had very little. At the same time and from another perspective, technology had given people in or fleeing oppressive nations agency and a voice. When Panic was active with Otpor!, the only way to speak out was to physically take to the streets, distribute fliers—that sort of thing. Not many years later, twenty-first century tools like social media amplified the voices of refugees and activists. This was still a vulnerable population, but it was a little less invis-

ed spring break—even as her master’s project deadline loomed.

“I’m sorry,” Admay remembers Panic telling her. “I’m in Nicaragua looking after kids who have nowhere to stay.” For Panic, Admay continues, the schoolwork never felt like enough. She also had to be actively involved in direct humanitarian action.

Panic attended Duke through the Rotary Peace Fellowship, which is a cooperative Duke/UNC program. (“If you manage to connect UNC and Duke to work together, then you can make peace anywhere in the world,” Panic says, sharing a Peace Fellowship in-joke.) Her cohort in this mid-career fellowship included Chris Lara M.I.D.P.

“We are not interested only in stopping wars or conflict or violence—that’s very important—but we also want to make sure that we sustain peace.” ible—and a little more empowered— thanks to something as increasingly ubiquitous as a smartphone.

“In many cases they barely had a backpack with them...but they always had a mobile phone,” Panic recalls.

“This was a sort of an essential technology to have to survive on this path, to know the routes, to get informed.”

Panic also realized it was time to expand beyond her native region.

Admay doesn’t tend to respond well when a student cuts out a few days before spring break, but it was hard to draw a hard line with Panic. In the spring of 2018, this was because Panic and friend Linda Lowe were in Puerto Rico, doing long-term recovery work after Hurricane Maria. It could still be frustrating, Admay admits, as when Panic skipped town for 2019’s extend48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

’19, whose prior decade with the U.N. included coordinating emergency famine response at the South Sudanese border. (After graduating from Duke, he resumed humanitarian work with the U.N.) Panic’s master’s project was on famine response, and Lara felt she had a keen sense of food security and famine as a weapon of war.

In their conversations, Lara talked with Panic about how the U.N. as a whole operates and what the moving pieces of its humanitarian system are.

He and Admay saw firsthand how Panic’s experience in peace and reconciliation combined with lessons in tech and AI she learned in a Belgrade refugee camp and at the World Bank.

“Quantitative analysis is powerful, and algorithms can work, for good or for bad,” Admay says. “You really need to be harnessing the good as a way to push back on the bad.”

Photos courtesy Branka Panic

After graduating, Panic headed to Silicon Valley, where she started AI for Peace. And though from one perspective this was her first full immersion in the tech world, the experience was also nothing new. She had built bridges between citizens of previously warring Balkan states in her first career. Now she was building a coalition of computer scientists and humanitarians.

Each field spoke its own lingo, had its own strengths. Policy experts thought in social-science terms and qualitative data. AI experts thought in formulas and were fascinated to learn about the root causes of violence and the nature of policy itself.

AI for Peace appealed to computer scientists’ sense of philanthropy, too.

“Some of them feel saturated with the work in their offices. They don’t have this direct contact with social issues and problems that they can tackle,” Panic recalls. “They felt that this can be their contribution.”

AFOG typically stands for “another [effing] opportu-

To ensure that AI for Peace was a truly global initiative, Panic assembled an advisory board with members in Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Colombia, India, and the U.S. (Lara is a member.) Panic wrote AI guidelines for policymakers based on principles of “do no harm,” a document Lara says deserves widespread attention.

The organization concentrates on three main areas: humanitarian action, democracy and human rights, and human security.

“The third one, I think, is crucial for actually explaining to people what we mean when we say ‘peace,’ ” says Panic. As a concept, she continues, human security is not the same as (and is a sort of opposite of ) national security. Rather than concerning itself with the security of borders or protecting the notion of states, human security focuses on people themselves.

“We want actually to cover this concept of positive peace,” says Panic. “We are not interested only in stopping wars or conflict or violence—that’s very important—but we also want to make sure that we sustain peace.”

nity for growth,” Admay chuckles. It’s usually an exasperated response to an unforeseen uphill battle. Yet for Panic, Admay says, this acronym breaks down to “another fantastic opportunity for growth!”

That ability to pivot and grow during dire situations expressed itself in AI for Peace’s pivot when COVID-19 overwhelmed and shut down much of the world in early 2020. Panic left San Francisco for Croatia, and her fledgling organization became a purely digital collaborative—and therefore truly global.

In the spring of 2020, AI for Peace joined with data-scientist collaborative network Omdena for its AI Policy Pandemic Challenge, a ten-week project that used data or AI-related technologies to analyze the impact of pandemic policies and lockdowns on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The seventy-plus participants, representing twenty-one nations on six continents and drawing from both AI and policy fields, met in Slack channels. Lara’s roles included ensuring participants kept the seventeen goals of the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in mind. He also did some gentle moderation, bringing participants back to Earth if their heads strayed to the clouds.

A focus on vulnerable populations requires a “leave no one behind” mindset, but it seems, as Lara posits, that the COVID era has members of the computer-science community ready to embrace it.

If that is the case, and if collaborations between computer scientists and humanitarians can lead to positive change, then Panic is positioning herself as a nexus beMISSION: Left and tween their worlds. It’s a role above, Lessons she’s inhabited since a young from Panic’s global age. activism led to her Working in the Balkans think tank. and facilitating dialogue between the sides in conflict and having peaceful dialogue is useful, “even when you work with AI experts and field experts,” she says.

“Sometimes it feels like we speak different languages, so definitely facilitating this dialogue comes as a very important and necessary thing.” n

“Quantitative analysis is powerful, and algorithms can work, for good or for bad. You really need to be harnessing the good as a way to push back on the bad.”

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

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ForeverDukePROGRAM The Great Shift leads to the Great Return

Virtual events have helped bring unengaged alumni back into the fold.

By Bridgette A. Lacy

M

hadn’t attended a Duke Alumni Association event since the early 1980s. The retired certified public accountant and single mother had been raising her children. “My life was too full,” she says.

But the pandemic-era shift from in-person to virtual events is drawing alumni like Zeigler, a North Carolinian, back into the Duke community.

She’s not the only one; from March to June 2020, more than 6,000 alumni attended nearly 200 virtual events sponsored by alumni affairs. Thirty percent of those attendees had not been engaged with Duke in the last five years.

Ziegler joined the Duke Asian Alumni Alliance’s COVID-19 webinar, which included Anna Uehara M.S. ’14, Ph.D. ’19, a member of the Response Task Force for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I wanted to know more about the vaccine. Being retired, I had the time to do it. I wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth.”

“It’s important to be always learning something new,” she says. “We’re all in bubbles with a less than truthful picture of the world.”

Stephen McLaughlin ’72 attended eight of the Zoom events sponsored by the Duke Black Alumni, among other virtual events. “The discussion confirmed the racism that exists in this country and that we haven’t reckoned with it,” he says. McLaughlin enjoyed hearing the various points of view.

“I liked the pulling together of ARTHA ZEIGLER ’74

50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

experts on topics of interest... So much of the discourse on social media is echo chambers, people reinforcing their own beliefs,” he says. “I would rather hear trusted sources talk about a range of issues from Supreme Court decisions to ethical issues. I think it would reduce some of the polarization.”

Dan Pitt ’71 enjoyed listening to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver ’84 talk about his career. “It was cool to see him,” he says. Pitt would like to see more events highlighting interesting people connected to Duke, including professors.

Alumni report being attracted to the combination of interesting subject matter and the convenience of participating from home. “If you are in a fairly remote area, you don’t have to drive,” Zeigler says. “I don’t have to find a parking space, walk to the location. You don’t have to dress up or get your hair done.”

Pitt says the virtual events have a broader appeal, while many of the traditional in-person events were targeted to more recent graduates and to those drawn to sports outings.

And there’s also an opportunity to stretch themselves. “Last night, I signed up for ‘Black & LGBTQ+ at Duke—A Journey in Resilience and Progress,’ ” says Zeigler. “At church, we are working on racial and economic equity. I’m not Black. I’m not gay. At first, I thought, why should I attend? But then I thought, I need to know their truth.” n

Sterly Wilder ’83 senior associate vice president, engagement and development

Unprecedented.

Extraordinary.

Educational.

That’s a bold claim. But I think it’s all true. The launch in late January of the Forever Learning Institute is the culmination of all we’ve confirmed as we have been navigating ways to provide programming during this pandemic and stay-at-home environment: • Duke alumni love to learn.

• Duke alumni will attend programs in large numbers.

• Duke alumni want to hear from “our” trusted experts on the key issues facing the country and world today.

• Duke alumni want to be together.

The topics of the inaugural FOREVER LEARNING INSTITUTE— “Social Movements and Change Agents”; “The Human Experience”; “America Today”; “Advancing Health and Wellness”—reflect the compelling issues of our times, offering alumni, parents, and friends a chance to connect through conversations around books, lectures, videos, and performance, and the opportunity to expand their knowledge so they can add their voices to these national conversations. The small but mighty Lifelong Learning

team created this choose-your-own-adventure structure after listening to what alumni said they want. They’re dedicated to feeding your desire to be always learning.

While I know that many of us feel Zoomed out, nothing inspires me more than to join a program with a Duke alum or faculty expert. I love to be surrounded on the screen by Duke faces— many I know, but many I want to get to know—who, regardless of geographic location, are able to be engaged and informed and challenged. It represents our work and revised mission to engage alumni from around the world in a way forever changed by this pandemic.

Of course, we cannot wait to welcome you back to campus and to share these programs with you in person and in the regions. But we now know that we can reach and provide rich content to all of our alumni through a virtual lens.

That is exciting. And that is Forever Learning.

BE FOREVER DUKE. n

Jared Lazarus

ForeverDukeMINIS

Party time A popular app is alumna’s latest professional turn.

Courtesy Sima Sistani

W

hen she was growing up, Sima Sistani’s parents limited her TV time. One of the shows Sistani ’01 relished as a child was the sitcom Perfect Strangers, about a happy-go-lucky immigrant with an unbridled enthusiasm for all things American.

“We did the ‘dance of joy’ a lot,” Sistani says, referring to the silly kicking and chanting routine performed by the show’s lead characters. “I always loved to watch TV and movies, read books, or play games.

The storytelling aspect really appealed to me. Because my parents wouldn’t let me watch more than thirty minutes of TV a week, I wanted it so badly. At the same time, Hollywood never felt like a space that was available to me as a first-generation Iranian-American growing up in Alabama who had no connections or ties to that world.”

Warner merger, and Vivendi was imploding—a lot of interesting things were happening in media,” she says. “I talked to research analysts and learned more about these companies. It was really exciting.”

She transitioned from the finance industry to media with a position at Creative Artists Agency, a top entertainment firm, where she often read movie scripts for A-list celebrities. With the rise of technology, Sistani foresaw that content and media consumption would be driven by Silicon Valley, not by Hollywood.

After roles with Yahoo! and Tumblr, she cofounded Houseparty in 2015, partly inspired by the differences in communication between Sistani and her tenyears-younger brother, now a physician in Memphis, Tennessee.

“He wouldn’t answer when I called,” Sistani says.

“Instead, he’d respond with a text asking if everything was okay. At some point, calling became too burdensome, and as a culture, we moved into asynchronous “I want my kids to know the correct facial communication. There are response to excitement, not just the right emoji.” lots of advantages to texting and posting on news feeds, Sistani did make it to Hollywood. It was just one but at the expense of direct human interaction. I stop on the circuitous ride that led to where she is want my kids to know the correct facial response to now—cofounder and CEO of Houseparty, a soexcitement, not just the right emoji.” cial-networking app designed for family and friends Already popular among Gen Z users, downloads to connect via spontaneous video chats. of Houseparty surged at the start of the COVID-19 Yet when Sistani first left Alabama for Duke, she pandemic as people searched for ways to stay conhad no idea where her path would lead. “I was all nected. The app allows up to eight users to video chat over the place,” she says. She started off majoring in in “rooms”; users can have infinite rooms and float public policy, switched to English, then to women’s among them. The app also includes built-in games. studies, before finally settling on sociology. “In hindLike many other families, Sistani and her husband, sight, everything makes sense. Sociology is the science Alex Herzick ’03, were forced to slow down over the of human relationships, the ways in which cultural past year and spend more time at home. The couand social structures shape society. It was also where a ple, who met in business school at Northwestern lot of the of the work around organizational behavior University, instituted regular family dinners, along was happening at Duke at the time. I’ve spent a lot with weekly cocktail date nights. Unable to schedule of my career thinking about how cultural norms get their annual vacation with Duke friends spread all embedded in technology. But at the time, I remember across the country, they now hold happy hours on my parents asking, ‘What are you going to do with a Houseparty instead. sociology degree?’ ” “One of the reasons Houseparty grew so much over She planned to go to law school and landed a sumthis past year is because people are looking to deepmer internship at a law firm. She hated it. She ended en relationships,” Sistani says. “Even though we’re up getting a job at Goldman Sachs, working in the physically distant, technology keeps us connected. In international equities division on the trading floor in some ways, it can make us feel even closer to those Chicago. “It was around the time of the AOL-Time we love.”—Kat Braz

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ForeverDukeRETRO

The gloves were on

Duke’s boxing team didn’t last long but it wasn’t lightweight.

By Valerie Gillispie

S

everal years ago, I came upon striking photographic negatives of Duke students… boxing? Was that a real thing? A little research in the University Archives revealed a short but remarkable athletic program— one worth remembering.

Boxing first became popular at Duke in the 1910s.

At the cornerstone-laying of the new gymnasium (now Brodie Recreation Center) in 1920, boxing was demonstrated as part of the festivities. The gym was even built with boxing spaces included. Team boxing began at Duke in 1928 but revved up when boxing champ Addison “Add” Warren was hired as coach in 1931. Warren had been a champion boxer at UNC, holding both the heavyweight and light heavyweight national intercollegiate titles (boxing was not an NCAA sport until 1932), and after graduating, he boxed professionally until he broke his arm. As the coach of boxing, he began to recruit local students as well as those from farther afield.

54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

The Duke team began to win more matches, becoming state champions in 1933. In 1935, the Chanticleer yearbook noted that under Warren, boxing was “rapidly advancing to the point where it will threaten the major sports in popularity and interest.” In 1936, Ray Matulewicz ’37 and Danny Farrar ’38 were the first two Duke students to win individual national championships in any sport. Matulewicz repeated the feat in 1937. Farrar and Matulewicz are both recognized in the Duke Athletics Hall of Fame for their milestone accomplishments.

Both men, along with fellow Duke boxer Al Mann ’37, competed in the Olympic trials for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Matulewicz made it to the final but lost in a controversial decision. Nevertheless, The News & Observer reported that “he made such a fine impression on the Chicago fight JABS: Matulewicz, experts and on John Berhne, coach opposite page, of the U.S. Team, that he was invitshows off his ring ed back to the final trials…there is a form; top, taking movement on foot to take the Duke advice from Coach boy along as the 17th member of the Warren; crowd U.S. team.” Indeed, he was chosen as enjoys team action an alternate on the U.S. team but did in the ring. not get the opportunity to compete.

Matulewicz became a professional boxer under the name Mat Raymond after graduating in 1937. Warren served as his manager. Before a match in Madison Square Garden, Raymond memorably put lead weights under a carpenter’s apron to qualify as a heavyweight—the division with the largest purse. He fought impressively for several years, and at the conclusion of his career, Mat Raymond was ranked sixth in the world.

Coach Warren was a well-liked member of the Duke community, praised by his boxers for his support and optimism.

The Chronicle noted in 1940 that “Add himself is rapidly bePhotography Duke University Archives

coming a campus tradition. His unfailing good humor and his readiness to talk on any subject under the sun have made him known to nearly every student.” In his book The Six-Minute Fraternity: The Rise and Fall of NCAA Tournament Boxing, E.C. Wallenfeldt conveys a story, or perhaps a legend. At a party at the Washington Duke Hotel following a match with the University of Virginia, Warren drank a bit too much and began using “loud and graphic profanity.” UVA’s coach quietly asked him to stop, and “Add, in a reaction of mortification, moved to the center of the suite and announced, ‘I hear that I have been using bad language, so I want to apologize and say I am sorry to all you bastards!’ ” In 1940, the team had a record of several lackluster seasons with no standout stars. Boxing was criticized as a sport that invited injury to student-athletes, and indeed, the Duke boxers suffered broken bones and concussions.

The Chronicle reported: “Conference officials…have recently commented upon the growing tendency to turn conference bouts into slug fests, rather than into exhibitions of the fine art of boxing.” In March 1940, the Duke Athletic Council unanimously voted to discontinue boxing, to the disappointment of Warren and many students. The Chronicle announced the decision with the pithy headline “Boxing KO’d

by Council Yesterday.” At the same meeting, the council added a sport that had been played unofficially for two years and was increasingly popular: lacrosse.

Duke’s boxing program existed only for twelve years but produced Duke’s first NCAA champions. The photos from the 1930s not only help us learn about the team but also give us a sense of what it must have been like, crowding around a small basement ring and watching bygone Blue Devils “duke” it out. n Gillispie is the university archivist.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

55

ForeverDuke In Memoriam 1940s

Helen Walters Evernham ’41 of Whiting, N.J., on Oct. 30, 2020.

William D. Stedman ’42 of Winston-Salem, on Dec. 23, 2020.

A. Richard Thomas ’43 of Wyoming, Ohio, on Dec. 20, 2020.

Neale W. Baugh ’44 of James Island, S.C., on Sept. 4, 2020.

Ralph F. Hudson ’45 of Altoona, Wis., on Dec. 11, 2020.

Dorothy Sugg Lee ’45 of College Station, Texas, on Dec. 2, 2020.

Betty Jean Trawick Bailey ’46 of Florence, Ky., on Dec. 3, 2020.

Louise Dabbs Bevan ’46 of Sumter, S.C., on Nov. 24, 2020.

Geoffrey J. Taylor ’46, B.S.M.E. ’48 of Laurinburg, N.C., on Sept. 30, 2020.

Florence Gentner Crowley ’47 of Hockessin, Del., on Nov. 15, 2020.

Susan Meighen Gillett ’47 of Tampa, Fla., on Nov. 5, 2020.

Patricia Weiland Hutson ’47 of Tupelo, Miss., on Oct. 25, 2020.

Alfred H. Platt ’47 of Aurora, Colo., on Nov. 15, 2020.

Hal D. Carter ’48 of Sacramento, Calif., on Sept. 11, 2020.

William E. Josey III ’48 of Sandy Springs, Ga., on Nov. 29, 2020.

Edith Deyton Makepeace ’48 of Sanford, N.C., on Dec. 23, 2020.

Lloyd L. Williams ’48 of Miami, on Dec. 17, 2020.

Fay Reifsnyder Biles ’49 of Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 28, 2020.

Edward R. Cathcart ’49 of Inman, S.C., on Dec. 6, 2020.

Barbara Lacombe Grant ’49 of Brewster, Mass., on Nov. 19, 2020.

Clyde H. Harriss Jr. ’49 of Salisbury, N.C., on Nov. 14, 2020.

Joan Query Hogan ’49 of Davis, Calif., on Dec. 25, 2020.

Thomas J. Keevan ’49 of San Rafael, Calif., on Oct. 31, 2020.

Helen E. Laughlin ’49 of Sarasota, Fla., on Oct. 24, 2020.

Clyde H. McDowell ’49 of Raleigh, on Dec. 3, 2020.

Margaret A. McFarlan Schulz ’49 of Memphis, Tenn., on Dec. 22, 2020.

T. Bragg McLeod ’49 of Charlotte, on Jan. 5, 2021.

Gilbert A. Rannick M.D. ’49 of Johnson City, Tenn., on Oct. 17, 2020.

Howard A. Scarrow ’49, Ph.D. ’54 of Setauket, N.Y., on Dec. 3, 2020.

E. King Scoggins B.Div. ’49 of Bishopville, S.C., on Nov. 15, 2020.

Kathryn Van Nortwick Whichard ’49 of Greenville, N.C., on Oct. 25, 2020.

1950s

Ruth Sauer Georgiade A.M. ’50 of Durham, on Oct. 15, 2020.

George S. Mitchell Jr. ’50 of Newport News, Va., on Nov. 13, 2020.

David L. Tubbs ’50 of San Jose, Calif., on Oct. 22, 2020.

Marion Glover Wester ’50 of Southport, N.C., on Oct. 26, 2020.

Patrick H. Coleman ’51 of Loveland, Ohio, on Dec. 6, 2020.

John C. Conner ’51 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Nov. 7, 2020.

Walter W. Flythe ’51 of Martinsville, Va., on Nov. 18, 2020.

James A. Greene ’51 of Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4, 2020.

Benjamin E. Jordan Jr. ’51 of Pinehurst, N.C., on Dec. 19, 2020.

William R. Maple, M.F. ’51 of New Bern, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2020.

Lillian Haldeman Moore Ph.D. ’51 of Blacksburg, Va., on Nov. 21, 2020.

Explore charitable strategies to help you BUILD A PLAN FOR THE FUTURE. The world is changing fast. Stay up to date about ways to integrate tax changes into charitable planning, discover opportunities to have an impact at Duke, and get insights from Duke’s Office of Gift Planning.

Visit the Blueprints blog at giving.duke.edu/blog for the latest information.

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919-613-1508 giftplanning@duke.edu

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Our Journey Continues Recovery from the effects of the pandemic together with the personal and social challenges of the past year are giving rise to necessary change and a more sustainable future in travel.

With Duke University leading by example, Duke Travels is charting a course for travel that champions the values that make Duke excellent and us proud.

Duke Travels is committed to working with tour operators and suppliers that incorporate best practices for safeguarding your health as well as in socio-cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability.

At www.duke-travels.com, learn how we are working for:

Duke Travels collaborated with faculty and students at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment (NSOE) on a two-year project to develop approaches and metrics to monitor and improve environmental impact and journey sustainably.

Currently, Duke Travels is working with a team of Duke students in an NSOE course on “Sustainable Business Strategy” to strategize our program’s alignment with Duke’s climate commitment. Duke Travels is committed to being a carbon-neutral program by Duke’s centennial in 2024.

We believe travel is life changing. We believe travel is world changing.

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Exploring Alaska’s Coastal Wilderness, June 12-19, 2022 Lindblad Expeditions Photo Copyright David Vargas

DUKE. WE TRAVEL SMART.

MORE DUKE MEMORIES ONLINE Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at

alumni.duke.edu Henry N. Ware ’51 of Dunnsville, Va., on Oct. 26, 2020.

Theodore J. Ziolkowski ’51, A.M. ’52 of Bethlehem, Pa., on Dec. 5, 2020.

Edward L. Emes Jr. ’52 of Washington, D.C., on Nov. 27, 2020.

Charles C. Fishburne ’52 of Pittsboro, N.C., on Nov. 24, 2020.

Arthur W. Judd ’52 of Hot Springs, Ark., on Dec. 18, 2020.

Patsy Wooten Kelly ’52 of Raleigh, on Nov. 12, 2020.

Daniel F. Koch Sr. M.F. ’52 of Springfield, Mo., on Nov. 24, 2020.

Alfred C. Krayer Jr. ’52 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Nov. 22, 2020.

Joan Ingwersen Mabon ’52 of Kennebunk, Maine, on Dec. 19, 2020.

Robert M. Price Jr. ’52 of Edina, Minn., on Dec. 31, 2020.

Margaret Worrell Anderson ’53 of Darien, Conn., on Nov. 2, 2020.

John L. Fishel M.D. ’53 of Panama City, Fla., on Oct. 29, 2020.

John F. Flanagan M.D. ’53 of Lakeland, Fla., on Dec. 18, 2020.

Frank J.S. Maturo Jr. A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’56 of Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 29, 2020.

William A. Rich B.Div. ’53 of Burlington, N.C., on Nov. 26, 2020.

Norman M. Rosenbaum ’53 of Scarborough, Maine, on Dec. 19, 2020.

Raymond G. Behnke B.S.M.E. ’54 of Laconia, N.H., on Nov. 28, 2020.

Leslie F. Chesson B.S.E.E. ’54 of Cary, N.C., on Dec. 5, 2020.

Prudence Todd DeLap ’54 of Richmond, Va., on Oct. 5, 2020.

Barbara Ireland Holmes ’54 of Yadkinville, N.C., on Nov. 30, 2020.

Edith Lenore Larson M.Ed. ’54 of Laurel Springs, N.J., on Nov. 20, 2020.

James W. Smith ’54 of Gastonia, N.C., on Sept. 26, 2020.

Bobby L. Womack M.F. ’54 of Hartsville, S.C., on Dec. 7, 2020.

Emma Paschall Bauman R.N. ’55, B.S.N. ’56 of Pacific, Mo., on Dec. 19, 2020.

Lawrence J. Coulthurst Jr. ’55 of Succasunna, N.J., on Dec. 11, 2020.

Rhett T. George Jr. B.S.E.E. ’55 of Durham, on Dec. 14, 2020.

Eugene R. Keever ’55 of Topeka, Kan., on Nov. 12, 2020.

Ernest G. Wigfield Jr. ’55 of Old Tappan, N.J., on Dec. 24, 2020.

Robert G. Abernethy Jr. ’56 of Jamestown, N.C., on Oct. 30, 2020.

Leonard H. Brubaker ’56 of Augusta, Ga., on Dec. 6, 2020.

George M. Davis M.A.T. ’56 of Vienna, Va., on Dec. 9, 2020.

Barbara Guild Gilbert ’56 of Savannah, Ga., on Nov. 18, 2020.

Joseph C. Greenfield Jr. H ’56, H ’57, H ’58, H ’59 of Durham, on Oct. 14, 2020.

Robert G. Hadley ’56 of Hickory, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2020.

Maryanne Robinson Hughes A.M. ’56, Ph.D. ’62 of North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, on Dec. 10, 2020.

Hsioh Shan Wang H ’56, H ’57, H ’58, H ’59, H ’60, H ’66 of Durham, on Dec. 10, 2020.

Calvin J. Willis ’56 of Halifax, Va., on Jan. 4, 2021.

L.E. Barnhill Jr. M.D. ’57 of Coral Springs, Fla., on Oct. 7, 2020.

Larry L. Farmer ’57 of Lynchburg, Va., on Dec. 7, 2020.

Tandy Jones Gilliland A.M. ’57 of Greenville, S.C., on Nov. 8, 2020.

John C. Goodall Jr. ’57 of Skokie, Ill., on Nov. 24, 2020.

Robert C. Hobson ’57 of Wilmington, N.C., on Dec. 15, 2020.

August W. Hock ’57 of Libertyville, Ill., on Dec. 16, 2020.

Jerry G. Hubbard ’57 of Rome, Ga., on Nov. 16, 2020.

Lynn David Ikenberry ’57 of Chapel Hill, on Nov. 27, 2020.

Charles E. MacKenzie ’57 of Oxford, Pa., on Nov. 1, 2020.

M. Douglas Harper Jr. Ph.D. ’58 of Houston, on Oct. 10, 2020.

Ronald P. Krueger ’58, M.D. ’65 of Ocean Springs, Miss., on Dec. 14, 2020.

Robert L. Baldridge B.Div. ’59 of Asheville, N.C., on Dec. 12, 2020.

Sue Morris Hopper M.A.T. ’59 of Shelby, N.C., on Nov. 13, 2020.

Charles R. Martin ’59, M.D. ’63 of Jacksonville, N.C., on Jan. 1, 2021.

1960s

Martha Lee Barr ’60 of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 14, 2020.

Jerry L. Brammer ’60 of Lawton, Okla., on Dec. 30, 2020.

Robert G. Crummie ’60, M.D. ’64 of Rutherfordton, N.C., on Nov. 16, 2020.

Alexander C. McLeod M.D. ’60 of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 6, 2020.

Patricia Hine Shebey ’60 of Watchung, N.J., on Nov. 14, 2020.

Carol Hedden Hacket ’61 of Mercer Island, Wash., on Sept. 19, 2020.

Charlotte F. Hamlin Ph.D., ‘61 of Greensboro, N.C., on Oct. 5, 2020.

Julie Kline Hopper ’61 of Scottsdale, Ariz., on Sept. 24, 2020.

Wilbur I. Jackson B.Div. ’61 of Knightdale, N.C., on Nov. 29, 2020.

Ralph W. Doermann Ph.D. ’62 of Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 4, 2020.

George S. Hopkins ’62, M.H.A. ’68 of Santa Rosa, Calif., on Nov. 10, 2020.

Frank I. Lloyd Jr. B.Div. ’62 of Sanford, N.C., on Nov. 2, 2020.

William W. Reinhardt ’62, A.M. ’64, Ph.D. ’69 of Richmond, Va., on Dec. 18, 2020.

Gerald P. Sierchio, H ’62, H ’63 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on Dec. 1, 2020.

Martin I. Victor M.D. ’62, H ’62 of Rockledge, Fla., on Sept. 9, 2020.

Harold F. Clark Jr. ’63 of Rifle, Colo., on Oct. 21, 2020.

Betty G. Debnam, M.Ed. ’63 of Raleigh, on Nov. 1, 2020.

Mary Lee Saylor Hood ’63 of Towson, Md., on Oct. 28, 2020.

Harriet Hester Johnson ’63 of Paintsville, Ky., on Dec. 1, 2020.

Douglas M. Lawson Ph.D, ’63 of Dallas, on Dec. 26, 2020.

Judith J. Morris ’63 of Wilmington, Del., on Dec. 9, 2020.

Donald F. Noe ’63 of Charlotte, on Nov. 24, 2020.

Jesse Q. Ozbolt ’63 of Kingwood, Texas, on Dec. 9, 2020.

Ernest R. Porter B.Div. ’63 of Waynesville, N.C., on Dec. 8, 2020.

Charles Z. Potts ’63 of Washington, N.C., on Dec. 23, 2020.

George G. Smith Jr. ’63 of New Bern, N.C., on Dec. 3, 2020.

Sandra Boger Steadman M.A.T. ’63 of High Point, N.C., on Nov. 26, 2020.

Joseph P. Driessen ’64 of Phoenix, on Nov. 7, 2020.

D. Leigh Holt Jr. ’64 of West Nyack, N.Y., on Nov. 9, 2020.

Morris W. Sandstead Jr. ’64 of Louisville, Colo., on Dec. 10, 2020.

Richard F. Clark B.S.E.E. ’65 of Plymouth, Mass., on Oct. 29, 2020.

Carl E. Conrad ’65 of Haddam, Conn., on Nov. 29, 2020.

Thomas M. Memory LL.B. ’65 of Taylorsville, N.C., on Dec. 24, 2020.

Earl W. Brian Jr. M.D. ’66 of Easton, Md., on Nov. 2, 2020.

F. Mark Davis Ph.D. ’66 of Silver Spring, Md., on Nov. 25, 2020.

Marcia Proctor Fein ’66 of Mountain View, Calif., on Oct. 24, 2020.

Christopher J. Horsch LL.B. ’66 of Chicago, on Nov. 11, 2020.

Elizabeth J. Mayo MacLaughlin ’66 of Westerville, Ohio, on Oct. 27, 2020.

Linda Clark Obenour M.D. ’66, H ’66, H ’67, H ’68 of Lynchburg, Va., on Dec. 2, 2020.

Channing O. Richards, LL.B. ’66 of Charlotte, on Nov. 14, 2020.

Philip B. Bestic ’67 of Pawleys Island, S.C., on Nov. 20, 2020.

Nancy E. Dayton B.S.N. ’67 of Knoxville, Tenn., on Dec. 5, 2020.

Charles J. Law Jr. Ed.D. ’67 of Raleigh, on Nov. 4, 2020.

Gregg E. Springer ’67 of Colorado Springs, Colo., on Nov. 27, 2020.

Margaret Plant Calestro ’68 of Columbus, Ohio, on Dec. 10, 2020.

Edmund M. Clarke Jr., A.M. ’68 of Mount Lebanon, Pa., on Dec. 22, 2020.

William F. Landing Ed.D. ’68 of Mount Pleasant, S.C., on Nov. 26, 2020.

William R. Leighton Sr. ’68 of Houston, on Nov. 27, 2020.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

59

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO NORTH AMERICA

IN 2021 Railways of New England, Sept. 23-28 The Great Lakes, Sept. 30-Oct. 7 Columbia & Snake Rivers, Oct. 17-24 IN 2022 A Civil Rights Journey, Mar. 6-12 Exploring Alaska, June 12-19 The Great Lakes, Sept. 22-29

MEXICO, CENTRAL AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN IN 2021 Panama & Colombia, Nov. 13-20

IN 2022 Exploring Costa Rica, Feb. 19-Mar. 1 Whales of Baja & Magdalena Bay, Mar. 4-9 Cuba: Featuring Afro-Cuban Heritage, Nov. 11-18

SOUTH AMERICA

IN 2022 Patagonian Frontiers of Argentina & Chile, Feb. 24-Mar. 11 Galápagos, July 1-10

Email us with interest or questions at duketravels@duke.edu www.duke-travels.com

TRAVEL NEXT WITH DUKE? EUROPE & RUSSIA

IN 2021 Undiscovered Ireland, Sept. 25-Oct. 6 Pearls of Dalmatia: Croatia & Slovenia, Sept. 30-Oct. 14 Flavors of Chianti, Oct. 7-15 Greece & the Greek Isles, Oct. 8-16 Grand Danube Passage, Oct. 9-24 IN 2022 Holland & Belgium: featuring The Floriade 2022, Apr. 25-May 3 Iberian Treasures: Less Traveled Spain & Portugal, May 4-15 Scottish Isles, the Faroe Islands & Iceland, May 4-16 European Coastal Civilizations, May 11-20 Discovering Eastern Europe, May 24-June 8 The Amalfi Coast, June 8-16 Alpine Splendor: Switzerland & Austria, July 18-31 Flavors of Catalonia, Oct. 1-9 Alsace of France, Oct. 2-10 Sicily in Depth, Oct. 9-20 Cappadocia, Coastal Turkey & Greek Islands, Oct. 12-24

ASIA & THE FAR EAST

IN 2022 Insider’s Japan, Apr. 18-30 Along Central Asia’s Silk Road, May 7-23 Singapore and the Islands of Indonesia, Oct. 10-25

AFRICA & THE MIDDLE EAST IN 2021 Tanzania, Sept. 2-15 Moroccan Discovery, Sept. 14-27 Ethiopa, Oct. 1-15 Athens to Egypt to Aqaba, Oct. 29 -Nov. 11 IN 2022 Egypt (Spring), Mar. 7-21 Israel, Mar. 24-Apr. 4 Madagascar, Summer Classic Safari, July 30-Aug. 14 Southern Africa, July 31-Aug. 13 Moroccan Discovery, Oct. 16-29 Egypt (Fall), Oct. 17-31

ARCTICA

IN 2023 Expedition to Antarctica, Feb. 5-18

OCEANIA

IN 2022 New Zealand, Mar. 10-25

TRAVELS

**Please note that departures and dates are subject to final confirmation.** Photos courtesy of iStock

THANK THE WORKERS OF THE WORLD! ABOVE: RESIST COVID / TAKE 6! window cling on Durham Station in downtown Durham, NC. Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. Photo by J Caldwell.

RESIST COVID / TAKE 6! is led by MacArthur winning artist Carrie Mae Weems’ Social Studies 101 in association with Pierre Loving and THE OFFICE performing arts + film. Carrie Mae Weems is currently the artist-in-residence at Syracuse University. At Duke, RESIST COVID / TAKE 6! is co-presented by the Nasher Museum, Duke Arts and Duke Health. At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition is made possible by The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; Thomas S. Kenan, III; Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation; the Lyna J. Rogers Fund; and Ann and Rhodes Craver. Art Distribution Partners: The Beautiful Project, Black Space, Chet Miller, Durham Children’s Initiative, Durham Co-op Market, Durham County Library, Durham Chapter of the Links, Durham Office on Youth, Kids Voting Durham, iNSIDEoUT, North Carolina Central University, Pauli Murray Center, Student U, Walltown Recreation Center Mature Adults Program. Locations: Sarah P. Duke Gardens, MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (Carpentry Shop), the American Dance Festival’s Samuel H. Scripps Studios, Campus Drive (street pole banners), Durham Freeway billboard, Durham Technical Community College, the Durham Station (GoTriangle), the Fruit, GoTriangle buses, Golden Belt, Lakewood Shopping Center, Nasher Museum of Art, North Durham billboard, Rubenstein Arts Center, and the Stanford L. Warren Branch Library. Community Programming Partners: American Dance Festival, Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program at Duke, Duke Chapel, Duke’s Forum for Scholars & Publics, Duke’s Global Health Institute, Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Duke, North Carolina Arts in Action. Media sponsor: The Chronicle

ForeverDuke Richard D. Mack H ’68, H ’69 of Byfield, Mass., on Oct. 18, 2020.

Novello E. Ruggiero H ’69 of Watertown, Conn., on Oct. 30, 2020.

1970s

Shirley Hanks Borstelmann ’70 of Durham, on Oct. 23, 2020.

Jeffery G. Derge Ph.D. ’70 of State College, Pa., on Dec. 3, 2020.

Daniel J. Hurst H ’70, H ’71, H ’72, H ’73 of Winston-Salem, on Dec. 7, 2020.

Edward J. Reidy Th.M. ’70 of Bermuda Dunes, Calif., on Oct. 8, 2020.

James A. Ebben A.M. ’71 of Madison, Wis., on Nov. 30, 2020.

Ernest A. Raba H ’72, H ’73, H ’74, H ’75 of Raleigh, on Dec. 9, 2020.

Betty Jean Foust Ed.D. ’73 of Raleigh, on Oct. 22, 2020.

Peter J. Grandstaff Ph.D. ’73 of Manchester, Mo., on Dec. 14, 2020.

Robert H. Neilson Ph.D. ’73 of Fort Worth, Texas, on Dec. 17, 2020.

William N. Hendricks III Ph.D. ’74 of Richmond, Va., on Oct. 12, 2020.

Caroline Cook Marshall ’74 of Westminster, Md., on Nov. 26, 2020.

Robert S. Parker ’74 of Dryden, N.Y., on Nov. 26, 2020.

Jerome R. Smith ’74 of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

Charles E. Bayless Ph.D. ’75 of Kokomo, Ind., on Nov. 18, 2020.

Thomas R. Cate H ’75 of Houston, on Nov. 8, 2020.

Peter R. Hauspurg ’75 of Santa Monica, Calif., on Nov. 3, 2020.

Michael A. Brown M.D. ’76 of Windermere, Fla., on Dec. 8, 2020.

James T. Faucette A.M. ’76 of Oxford, N.C., on Oct. 15, 2020.

Laura Anne Kreps ’76 of Durham, on Oct. 18, 2020.

William L. Peters M.B.A. ’76, J.D. ’76 of Springfield, Va., on Dec. 30, 2020.

Michael J. Auth M.B.A. ’77 of Westford, Mass., on Nov. 3, 2020.

Christopher J. Clark ’77 of Colorado Springs, Colo., on Nov. 4, 2020.

Mark B. Edelstein H ’77, H ’78, H ’79, H ’80 of Detroit, on Jan. 4, 2021.

Alan Mansfield J.D. ’78 of New York, on Jan. 11, 2021.

1980s

Meredith S. Marando-Blanck ’80 of Audobon, Pa., on Oct. 17, 2020.

Alan E. Seyfer H ’80 of San Antonio, on Oct. 7, 2020.

Mark W. Ryan J.D. ’81 of Chevy Chase, Md., on Nov. 30, 2020.

James R. Patton II I ’82 of Waco, Texas, on Dec. 21, 2020.

Stephen D. Chiabotti A.M. ’83, Ph.D. ‘86 of Montgomery, Ala., on Oct. 10, 2020.

Stephen P. Soltoff Ph.D. ’83 of Newton, Mass., on Dec. 8, 2020.

James E. Brawley M.B.A. ’84 of Mebane, N.C., on Oct. 27, 2020.

Amy Louise Digiosia Speed ’84 of Fairfax, Va., on Dec. 8, 2020.

1990s

Terri Marie Brode M.B.A. ’95 of Darien, Conn., on Oct. 31, 2020.

Dorothy J. Brundage A.M. ’97 of Durham, on Nov. 15, 2020.

Michael W. Gleason M.B.A. ’99 of Fernandina Beach, Fla., on Nov. 6, 2020.

2000s

Sridhar Sourirajan A.M. ’04 of Cary, N.C., on Nov. 10, 2020.

2010s

Eric S. Williams H ’11 of St. Louis, on Oct. 15, 2020.

Hannah M. Colton ’13 of Albuquerque, N.M., on Nov. 10, 2020.

2020s

Chan-gyu Han M.B.A. ’20 of Durham, on Dec. 4, 2020.

Michael E. Mutersbaugh ’27 of Raleigh, on Dec. 12, 2020.

DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021

63

WORKINPROGRESS

Daniel Kim Senior

A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP

HIDDEN FIGURES: Clockwise from top, Ahn, left, and Wong; movie poster for silent film featuring Hayakawa; Ahn and Wong again; Ahn as a Japanese soldier in 1959’s Yesterday’s Enemy

64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

E

masculated and neutered or evil and calculating? Domineering dragon lady or helpless concubine? In twentiethcentury Hollywood, the choices for Asian-American actors were few and far between. Often, the roles available were reductive and one-dimensional— stereotypes come to life. The types of roles also fluctuated unpredictably decade to decade to reflect evolving attitudes toward Asians: Evil caricatures like Fu Manchu were popularized during the “yellow peril” of the early 1900s, but during World War II, Chinese immigrants became the benign, hardworking allies in films like The Good Earth, while Japanese characters became evil masochists.

My screenplay, Hollywood Asian, is based on a true story; it follows Korean-American actor Philip Ahn as he

navigates the tumultuous landscape of twentieth-century Hollywood. He and his Chinese-American childhood friend, Anna May Wong, climb the ladder of Hollywood success in unorthodox and sometimes painful ways. However, Ahn is haunted by a specter, which takes the form of a famously violent Japanese villain played by Sessue Hayakawa, and over time, Ahn slowly becomes the demon that he has feared since childhood.

These three actors were the first of their respective ethnic groups to receive stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I discovered their fascinating, intertwined lives on a Wikipedia binge while completing an assignment for my Asian-American theater class. When I moved to Los Angeles for the Duke in L.A. program, I was inspired to tell their stories after reading their biographies in my free time while working in film development. Over the summer, I applied for and received several grants, including Duke’s Benenson Award in the Arts and a Pacific Studies grant, to research more about that era and receive support for the screenplay. I am continuing to revise my screenplay through the Studio Duke program in conjunction with my mentor, Julien Thuan ’97, a literary partner at the United Talent Agency.

As an aspiring Asian-American creative, I want to recognize the historical figures who paved the way in Hollywood and to share their compelling stories.

I also hope to raise awareness of the industry-driven stereotypes that continue to affect representation today and explore nuances within the Asian-American community, which is often perceived as a monolithic group. n

Photos courtesy Daniel Kim

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Secrets of the Bovine How a Duke researcher cracked the code of a quirky tradition

Reagan Lunn