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t’s been a semester when Duke has been, to a great extent, experienced online, from the ordering of meals through Duke Dining, to the ordering of books through the libraries, to workshops through Duke Creates (paint like Bob Ross!) to workouts through Duke Recreation (Zumba on your screen and in your home!). At semester’s end came a perfectly pitched virtual performance, courtesy of the a capella group Speak of the Devil. That was a virtually staged “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a testimonial to hope, resilience, and the fact that good music really did emerge from the 1970s.
likelihood of violence, should DOJ plan a sting operation? Should it then apply “pretextual prosecutions” for even incidental violations of the law? Or would such an approach produce civil-liberties concerns? The DOJ students planned actions: “Let’s reach out to Germany over election interference.” They appealed for deliberation within their ranks: “Look over that document. It’s fairly exculpatory.” And as new crises flared up—like the need to respond to a leak about DOJ activity in Indiana—they assessed the complexity of it all: “It really is a lose-lose, possibly half-win situation.” The CEO of Valens, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, says he liked the shift from the typical crammed, single-day simulation in physical space. With more time comes more complexity, but also the luxury to make better decisions. Students can hang out in the simulated world a bit longer, and they can get to know the characters, how they fit together, and how their actions affect the unfolding scenario. From the other side of the equation, those shaping the scenario have more time to keep introducing inputs—news stories, tweets, memos from other teams. One takeaway, according to Gartenstein-Ross, is that decisions have “secondand third-order consequences,” some of which “are far less positive than we might hope.” He also wants students to appreciate how the actions of adversaries can throw a wrench into even the best-laid plans. “When I hear someone trying to sell a major policy proposal, and all they can see is an upside with no downside, it’s obvious that they are selling an illusion.” It was, above all else, a lesson about working in teams and across teams. At the start, the students were told that only an authentic spirit of cooperative endeavor could manage the maddening complexity. It would be a shared exercise of building, then, that metaphorical bridge over troubled water. —Robert J. Bliwise, editor
“It really is a lose-lose, possibly half-win situation.” One unusual twist on the virtual endeavor was a simulation sponsored by Duke’s American Grand Strategy program and led by the consulting firm Valens Global. The idea was to get students immersed in big, intractable problems contained in a scenario that, even back in early October, seemed within the range of the probable: It is early 2021, and the U.S. has just emerged from a turbulent election. The contested result has produced violence, some of it fueled by foreign actors. One of the teams, the Department of Justice, had a cast of characters—each of them inhabited by a particular student—ranging from the assistant attorney general for national security to the deputy director of the FBI. Through a string of virtual get-togethers, the students, one of them Zooming in from Duke Kunshan, processed an onslaught of information. This was meant to resemble an extended game of chess, with the players needing to be ever-adaptive. There was early word, for example, about white nationalists flocking to a small town in Indiana, where they were aiming to establish an exclusively white settlement. Given the
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