Duke Magazine Winter 2021 by DukeMagazine

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DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2021

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all the way up Hands-on learning creates limitless potential. Thanks to donors like you, gifts to the Annual Fund support undergraduates like Philip Liu and provide experiences of a lifetime. READ MORE:

giving.duke.edu/all-the-way-up 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?

Listening critically With 12 million downloads, “Scene on Radio,” a podcast produced by Center for Documentary Studies audio director John Biewen, has found success with a democratic approach.

GTD-winter-AF-back-cover-F.indd 1

9/29/21 10:09 AM

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An algorithm for a better world. At Duke, we can’t begin to count ourselves among the greatest without changing the systems that prevent us all from rising. Computer science professor Nicki Washington is developing a new formula for equality in the tech industry: Disrupting the policies, practices and points of view standing in the way of marginalized computer science students. Making sure we all count, now that’s an algorithm for a better world.

NICKI WASHINGTON Director of Cultural Competence in Computing Fellows and Professor of the Practice in Computer Science

Learn how at dst.duke.edu/better-world

leaving a light on For Pavel Molchanov ’03, writing Duke into his will at 40 was a no-brainer. When his Duke economics education helped launch his early career success in the renewable energy industry, Pavel knew he wanted to give back to the university that had given so much to him. Bequests like Pavel’s are illuminating new opportunities for Duke students, ensuring they can always find their way back home to a Duke ready to propel them forward. Finish the story at: giving.duke.edu/leaving-a-light-on Through gifts to the Annual Fund, planned giving and other contributions, the outrageously ambitious at Duke are forging a better world. What will you make possible?

(919) 681-0464 giftplanning@duke.edu

INSIDE INSIDE

Winter 2021 | Vol. 107 | No. 3

Spring 2020 | Vol. 106 | No. 1

ONE OF THE

GOOD GUYS

With his acclaimed podcast, John Biewen aims to challenge his listeners as much as he challenges himself. By Scott Huler

Alex Boerner

INBOX

THEQuad

Rethinking a residential model; sculpting a math concept; documenting a wealth gap

FOREVERDUKE

How a love of endangered leatherback turtles brought two alumni together

FEATURES:

Reckoning With America's Longest War A conversation among three individuals with very different perspectives on—and experiences with—Afghanistan By Robert J. Bliwise

Two x Two With three carefully orchestrated air shipments, four pairs of Coquerel’s sifakas from the Lemur Center were moved to start a breeding colony in Europe. By Karl Leif Bates

Courtesy Kelly Stewart

The Weight of Gold

WORKINPROGRESS

Graduate student Dave Haas is fixated on building fitness wearables—for freeswimming animals.

In the jungles of Peru, Duke researchers are helping communities resolve complex health issues. By Corbie Hill Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz

FULLFRAME FINALLY: More than 1,700 members of the Class of 2020 returned to campus for their COVID-19 delayed commencement ceremony. Their speaker Ken Jeong ’90 told them: “True success is capitalizing on your own uniqueness. Find your integrative self.” Photography by Duke Communications

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

ack in a distant era, the fall of 1983, I learned that Duke would be launching a new alumni magazine and hiring a founding editor. Quite an attractive opportunity: A startup magazine. A research university. A first plunge into the exotic South.

Not long before that, John Piva had come to Duke as vice president for alumni and development. As a finalist for the editor position, I found myself in John’s office, which was alongside the classics department—a nice meshing of the administrative and the academic. He asked me, wryly but meaningfully, why I would want to leave the familiar embrace of my alma mater (Lafayette, where I had been working) to join a university that hadn’t figured out what it wanted to be. I answered, more or less, that Duke as a work in progress was itself a draw for a prospective editor. My answer, I assume, helped land me the job. That and the fact that I was relatively nimble in navigating Bullock’s Barbecue, the prime eating spot in what was then a very different Durham. My lunchtime host was alumni director Laney Funderburk ’60. It was my inaugural encounter with barbecue as a noun. Also with presweetened iced tea—into which I thoughtlessly applied a couple of packets of sugar. Laney observed my lack of cultural awareness without comment. My sugar high, I later figured, made me an intriguingly energetic prospect as I shuttled from interview to interview. When the job offer came, Laney said that Duke would expect from me a five-year commitment. Well, that promise of five years became more than thirty-eight years. Writing for the magazine, I’ve engaged with two homegrown Nobel laureates and five Duke presidents, asked how Duke came to build one of the coolest-ever English departments, and probed the strategy and the serendipity behind Duke’s earning a place among the hottest-ever colleges. One editorial colleague, Aaron Kirschenfeld ’07—now a light-blue loyalist at UNC-Chapel Hill, as its digital-initiatives law librarian—traced the zigzaggy path to the definitive color dubbed Duke Blue. Another, Bridget Booher ’82, A.M. ’92, profiled the iconic booster of the Duke Blue brand, Coach K. The magazine has signaled that Duke is sufficiently self-confident to ask hard questions of itself. We’ve explored a federally imposed shutdown of human-subject research at the medical center; efforts to confront sexual violence among students; the challenging campus conversations around race; and, through my two cover stories, the notorious episode around lacrosse. What this kind of magazine offers is access to sources, space for storytelling, and time for reporting. It offers, in a word, context. Readership surveys consistently show that alumni trust the magazine and look to it as their main source for feeling up-todate on the university. Duke’s impressive evolution—East Campus becoming a firstyear campus stands out as a milestone—is tied to the student experience. For one of my favorite stories, a student led me, along with a couple of local food experts, in sampling the many iterations of dining on campus. For another, I looked at how undergraduates navigate the countless choices they’re faced with:

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what major to pursue, where to study abroad, what organizations to join. Now and again, their choices have led students to the magazine’s internship program. Other students have come to learn about the magazine’s sensibility through my teaching (the firstyear writing program, the Focus program, and the Sanford magazine-journalism course). Some have gone on to become journalists; several are book authors. Post-graduation, two headed to China: Emily Feng ’15, as NPR’s Beijing correspondent, and Phil Tinari ’01, as the director of a groundbreaking contemporary-art museum. The journalist who became a mentor for me was Clay Felker ’51, the founding chair of the magazine’s advisory board—and founding editor of New York magazine. The board came into being around the time the magazine came into being, and it included the then-education editors of Time and Newsweek (Susan Tifft ’73 and Duke parent Jerry Footlick, respectively). Clay always pressed me to mine the enormous intellectual resources of the campus, to apply those resources in making sense of the issues of the day. A magazine builds a relationship with its readers by projecting a clear identity, he would say, and a university-based magazine should be defined by interesting ideas. There have been important allies on campus as well. One was John Burness, Duke’s now-retired senior vice president for public affairs. He might disagree with some particular editorial decision. But he saw his job, he told me, as defending the magazine and educating Duke’s hierarchy about the importance of preserving the magazine’s integrity. The core contributors to the magazine’s trajectory have been my colleagues on the magazine. Our inaugural team, including Sam Hull and Sue Bloch, took to writing headlines poolside at Duke’s Faculty Club. (“Leaping Lemurs! It’s a Living Library!” was one for the ages—and not without relevance in the current issue.) That team twice earned Magazine of the Year honors in a national alumni-magazine competition. Today’s staff—Adrienne Martin, Scott Huler, and Corbie Hill, along with art director Lacey Chylack and staff assistant Delecia Hatcher—have in common a wide-ranging curiosity, an interest in the workings of the campus, and a commitment to journalistic standards. Historically, the staff, along with the advisory board, has embraced a sometimes tricky insider-outsider perspective: eager to scoop up inside knowledge about Duke developments; equally eager to find storytelling avenues that readers outside the campus would find compelling. After this issue, the search will start for a new editor, and I’ll be moving on to a new role, though with continuing opportunities to write—and maybe with more opportunities for indulging in plates of barbecue and multiple refills of iced tea. No sugar required. —Robert J. Bliwise, editor

MAGAZINE

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

By the number of letters we received, it seems the theme of our Special Issue 2021—freedom— resonated with you, as we hoped it would. noted the challenge of putting out an ideas-driven magazine in today’s environment and wrote: “I thought you struck a good balance of ideological perspectives in your most recent issue, with a fair representation of different voices in interesting and thoughtful essays.” John Rudd ’71 agreed, calling the issue “interesting and thought-provoking over the course of many viewpoints.” Robert Reising Ed.D. ’69, who told us he submitted the longest-ever dissertation in Duke history, succinctly described the issue as “spectacular—so timely, insightful, and powerful.” After reading “Q&A With Ed Magee M.B.A. ’04,” Gordon Dalbey ’64 wrote that while in his youth, he, too, believed freedom was defined by “no fear,” fifty years later, he sees things differently. “I’ve learned that fear, like pain, can warn of impending danger. In that sense, it can either paralyze or mobilize you. Certainly, it can threaten bondage, but it can also promise deliverance. Mature freedom lies in wisdom to discern the difference, not in the fantasy of no fear.” Tom deShazo ’49 wrote that Duke Magazine editor “Robert Bliwise’s excellent, scholarly cover essay on art freedom almost intimidated me to silence,” and noted that “deeper in the issue it’s clear there are plenty of ways to view freedom, ways to lose it, essential work to preserve it.” After reading Quinn Smith Jr.’s essay “My Indigenous Existence,” Wallace Chuck Neely J.D. ’70

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freedom

ucated scholars. “I was struck by the similarity to George Washington; he was also a slave-holder, bought up land while still a teenager, was a war hero, and led the Virginia militia against Indian tribes allied with the French in the French-Indian War. Food for thought?” Meanwhile, Duke Cancer Institute’s Aretha Rice called “Good Chemistry”— about two Duke Ph.D.s with a podcast and a mission to make science assessable—great, informative, and timely. “Would love to see more like it.”

noun

free·dom | \ frē-dem

Definition: What does it mean to you?

posed a question: “As for land acknowledgements of living on stolen land, didn’t almost every tribe live on land it stole by killing off other indigenous owners?” Dave Applegate M.S. ’89 appreciated “A Place for Them to Practice” by classical studies professor Jed W. Atkins. Applegate wanted the conversation to continue: “I think Duke as an institu-

Kaufman ’57

“Mature freedom lies in wisdom to discern the difference, not in the fantasy of no fear.” tion and perhaps Duke Magazine should continue to explore the views of those who are more rural and conservative— how people perceive freedom, risk, government involvement, religion, and so many other issues now split along the rural-urban divide.” Richard M. Waugaman ’74 proclaimed Atkins a “useful role model to faculty and students at Duke—and elsewhere.” And he praised Atkins’ field. “Classicists have long been some of my favorite people. One of them explained to me that they don’t engage in critical literary-theory wars as some English professors do.” English professors, what say you? The Summer 2021 issue also received some comments. Jeff Lapic J.D. ’70 noted something about President Andrew Jackson, after reading “Mining the Complications,” which examined the prize-winning books by two Duke-ed-

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | Vol. 107 | No. 3 |

CORRECTIONS

In “No Funny Business,” the Retro story in the Summer 2021 issue, the last name of a student was misspelled. His name is Art Steuer. In “We Call It a Free Throw” in the Special Issue 2021, the date of Duke’s national championship game against Butler was incorrect. The game was played on April 5, 2010. Also in the Special Issue, in the In Memoriam section, Robert G. Atcheson ’72 was misidentified. He died on January 24, 2021, in Beirut, Lebanon. n

✍

If you have comments, drop us a note at 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.

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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. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

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THE

LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

TOGETHER: The Class of 2025 gathers on East Campus for the annual photo.

The Essay

Duke’s newest class was shaped by the pandemic; in almost every case for these students, their class-taking shifted online in the spring of their junior year in high school, and they were thoroughly online for their senior year. Here we offer a sampling of application essays with a pandemic focus, all of them highlighting a mix of resilience, rethinking, and reinvention. The essays have been abbreviated and lightly edited. My mom was stuck in India for six months, during which my dad, my brother, and I were at home alone. This was something new to me, as I’d always been used to my mother being around. I learned how to become a better independent worker in managing the extra responsibilities. And I learned to cook a lot of new meals that my mom used to make. Although it’s a very frustrating process, cooking showed me the valuable idea of experimentation. It may have taken a million failed attempts at making a pizza to finally learn how much yeast is too much. But through cooking, I learned to stay persistent and never give up—no matter how bad the food tastes the first time around. Mudit Agrawal, from Morrisville, North Carolina, is particularly enthusiastic about the first-year engineering design course he has been taking. He’s a member of the Energy Club, plays club basketball, and is a video intern for the men’s basketball team.

Inset photos courtesy the pictured students; background photo Duke University Communications

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THEQuad As I watched the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 25,486 on April 11, 2020, my stomach clenched. I knew the story behind one of those digits: my grandfather, Big Daddy. One week before, we were preparing for his return home after months of hospitalization. And then he was gone. Like countless others, I didn’t get to say goodbye. With his loss, I approached the days ahead fearful and sad, feeling that things would never be the same. Yet there was light: My Nani, a vibrant, vital physician, came to stay with us. Her cheery “Good Morning!” replaced the noisy teenage chatter I usually walked through on my way to class. In between her telemedicine from the kitchen table and my online schooling across from her, we spent our days navigating puzzles, binging Grey’s Anatomy and, best of all cooking. As we prepared spicy tuna rolls and savory shakshuka, Nani recounted stories about her and Big Daddy’s fifty-five years together from their first meeting (arranged by their parents) to their journey from India to England to New Jersey and many big and small moments in between. Our days together had revealed that whether by mastering a tikka masala or a 1,000-piece puzzle, I will always try to find comfort and connection in times of pain and uncertainty. Rani Bleznak, from Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, enrolled in the Knowledge in the Service of Society Focus cluster, where she found an early favorite class: “Critical Race Theory.” She, too, plays club soccer. She’s also involved with Coach2Inspire, a nonprofit founded at Duke and dedicated to “positive youth development” through coaching and mentoring.

When quarantine began, the virus seemed abstract; it was difficult to imagine what effect it might have on the world, let alone my community. It seemed instead to present a way for me to focus entirely

on schoolwork and finish my junior year as well as I could. That all changed when COVID-19 took the life of my friend’s father. After he died only a few hours after going to the

emergency room, I searched my conscience; I realized I hadn’t taken the virus seriously, nor had I even considered how I might help others affected by it. With this in mind, I registered for an EMT certification course. I studied the enormous textbook that I could hardly fit into my backpack, took Zoom classes multiple times each week, and completed lengthy in-person meetings each Sunday. After spending the entire summer learning medicine and practicing mock medical and traumatic emergency procedures, the final exams arrived. I passed three certifications—local, state, and national—and also passed all five stations of the practical exam. I am now a certified EMT. When I began this endeavor, I saw it as an extension of the community service I had already done; I had admired the first responders around the world. Now, after understanding the depth of study required, I have a new level of respect for all those who keep us safe. Andrew Shaffer comes from Greenwich, Connecticut; he started his time at Duke in the Genetics and Genomics Focus cluster, and says his favorite classes so far include “Ethical Implications of Genome Research” (from Focus) along with Latin 251, “Refresher Latin for First-Year Students.” He participates in club soccer.

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Inset photos courtesy the pictured students; background photo Duke University Communications

Mid-July, my grandfather tested positive for COVID-19. He was considered asymptomatic. Two weeks later, I said my last words to him, and he passed the next morning. My senior year was starting, I was about to turn eighteen, and it all felt hollow. I take solace in knowing my grandfather lived a full and joyous life. He grew up during the Great Depression, served as a sergeant in the Korean War, was happily married for forty-seven years, and adopted and raised four children. We were close. For the last eight years, he lived less than ten minutes away, and my siblings and I often visited to watch a Yankees game or grab lunch. He was an inspiration. Through him, I learned how to keep a positive outlook, the value of hard work and human connection, and how to greet each day with a sense of purpose. Though I miss him, I am thankful for the time we had together. I try to honor and celebrate his life by living his values. John Hession comes from Wilmington, North Carolina. His favorite classes early in his time at Duke—both part of his Focus cluster, Science and the Public—are “Patient Advocacy” and “Our Complex Relationships With Technology.” He’s a member of Duke Applied Machine Learning and is also a Duke Arete Fellow, which, as he puts it, provides an “eight-week crash course in effective altruism.”

Hannah Kragt has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, since the age of five. Although she’s drawn to STEM classes and is a prospective biomedical engineering major, she identifies her Writing 101 section, “Coming of Age and Happiness,” as a fall-semester favorite. In addition to campus activities reflecting her engineering interests, she has continued tutoring students (by Zoom) from her hometown.

COVID altered norms guiding my life. Classes ended. Interactions ceased. Relationships evolved. My father, a UPS pilot, was quarantined and gone four months. COVID

seemed intent on ruining my life—until I began listening to mom discuss her hospital shifts. My mother is everything to me. She’s also

everything to Anchorage, where half of Alaska’s population reside. She’s one of Anchorage’s lead ER physicians. I’d heard news programs broadcasting COVID statistics. I’d seen newspaper headlines citing new cases. My mother’s stories affected me more. She returned exhausted from shifts. I’d learn how many she intubated. Worse, I’d hear how many she watched die. But I’d witness her satisfaction in how many she saved. I sensed the responsibility she shouldered. COVID changed my life: It deepened my drive to follow my Mom into practicing medicine.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THEQuad

DR/TL*

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

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

X XX.

It’s tough being an orphan, surely. But evidently primate orphans’ troubles begin even before their mother dies. Offspring born in the last four years of their mothers’ lives are more likely to die before their mother does, and if they do live, their offspring are less likely to survive. The loss of time in MATERNAL “APPRENTICESHIP” years may be one of the causes. Listen to—and appreciate—your mother! ➜ Keeping track of large colonies of seabirds through the use of DRONES AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE monitors them as successfully as having scientists out there with them. Plus, it’s much cheaper.

PEOPLE If you want to get people to buy more of your product, it turns out that PRAISING YOUR COMPETITORS helps; people in a study shown a Tweet by KitKat complimenting Twix were 34 percent more likely to buy KitKats—and no more likely to buy Twix. So perhaps you should also read a fine story in the Carolina Alumni Review? ➜ Those kids who didn’t eat the marshmallow and waited for two? Evidently they grow up to not only be healthier adults but to age more slowly. A study that tracked thousands of people from birth to age forty-five found that children who had HIGHER LEVELS OF SELF-CONTROL had healthier bodies and brains, felt more satisfied, and had fewer age-related diseases. ➜ An opposable thumb is nice, as is a nice roomy cranium, but do you know what else separates us from our ape cousins? WE’RE GOOD WITH WATER. That’s physiologically: The human body uses 30 percent to 50 percent less water each day than our near ape relatives. Breathing, sweating, peeing: We’re just more efficient at those things. The ability to wander farther from watering holes may have been a real advantage in dry savannah conditions. ➜ Kids who struggle with MENTAL-HEALTH issues appear to have more age-related health issues later in life, too. ➜ When agencies fund themselves through FEES AND FINES FROM LOW-LEVEL CASES (think highway patrol or county sheriff’s offices), the burden disproportionately falls on low-income people and on Black and brown citizens.

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MISCELLANY Not only can you print electronics, now you can make them of recyclable inks. A fully recyclable transistor, made out of three carbon-based inks, can be printed onto paper and then completely recycled. Printed electronics, using carbon nanotubes and graphene inks, are not new; but using BIODEGRADABLE, WOOD-BASED NANOCELLULOSE as the insulating element removed the last nonrecyclable plastics from the transistors. ➜ WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY—say, a smartwatch—seems to be able to recognize in its wearers diseases like colds and the flu before symptoms show up. Researchers are hopeful this will be useful for COVID-19 and other emerging diseases. ➜ The statistical principle of overlap weights can help doctors figure out which COVID-19 treatments work best, returning information on effectiveness by using REAL-WORLD DATA, especially in cases where COVID-19 strikes patients with existing medical issues. ➜ CLIMATE CHANGE is helping trees in the eastern part of the continent while harming those in the west. The eastern forests of North America have younger and smaller trees, and their seed production has increased; among the larger and older trees of the west, not so much.

DUKE The Duke endowment had a 55.9 PERCENT RETURN in its most recent fiscal year, growing to a record $12.7 billion. ➜ Duke ran the table in the ALAN WATERMAN AWARD this year. Given by the U.S. government to only two researchers every year, the award is considered the highest honor for an early career scientist or engineer. This year Nicholas Carnes, the Creed C. Black Associate Professor of public policy and political science in the Sanford School, won one, and Melanie Matchett Wood ’03, a mathematician at Harvard University, won the other. Each will receive a five-year, $1 million research grant. ➜ Four new members joined the DUKE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES on July 1: Michael J. Bingle B.S.E. ’94; Eddy H. Cue ’86; Nancy-Ann DeParle; and Grant H. Hill ’94. They will each serve six-year terms. Three observers were appointed to the board: Vikas J. Patel, Doha Ali ’21, and Gerardo A. Párraga J.D. ’21. ➜ By the end of September, more than 99 percent of the Duke work force was COVID-19 VACCINE-COMPLIANT. ➜ A team of Duke first-year engineering students won a $15,000 prize from the NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH in an undergraduate biomedical-design challenge. ➜ Professor of computer science and engineering Cynthia Rudin was the second winner of the $1 MILLION SQUIRREL AI AWARD for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The award is considered the Nobel Prize of AI research. n

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

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DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THEQuad

Not spreading the wealth

Duke professor’s research reveals why the income gap is just part of the problem.

t’s been a while since the Great Recession, when millions of people lost jobs, homes, their savings, between late 2007 and mid 2009. Nobody has called the last decade the Great Recovery, but many people have managed to rebuild their wealth portfolios. Though not everyone. William Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics as well as the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, puts it simply. If you’re Black, he says, economically “things go worse.” What’s more, while almost all groups showed at least some recovery of wealth in the decade since the recession ended, Black and Latinx families in the professional segment of the labor force lost wealth and are still behind where they were. Black families started out with less wealth, and then during the Great Recession, Black families lost more wealth than any other group, collectively losing 48 percent of their wealth, while white families lost 26 percent. Latinx families lost 44 percent. The evidence is in economic data. One important point: In their research, Darity and his coauthor, Fenaba Addo, faculty affiliate of the Cook Center and associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, are talking wealth here, not income. “There’s a disconnect between employment and accumulation of wealth,” Darity says. “The primary factor that determines how wealthy a household will be is their capacity to obtain resources from previous generations. It’s not primarily a result of you having a job and generating income.”

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And that’s not just inheritance, by the way. That wealth transfer includes things like borrowing from an older, more-established relative—and paying back slowly if at all—when crisis comes rather than, for example, taking on a high-interest payday loan that rapidly and deeply increases debt. Darity and Addo have done work previously making the point that middle-class is better defined by wealth than by income. “The critical reason for using wealth instead of income is because wealth can actually function as a substitute for income if there are unexpected losses,” Darity says. You lose a job, you can spend down savings, take a loan out on your house, sell a car—but only if you have savings, home, car. That wealth can be transformative in the security it provides. Their paper represents findings unsurprising in a nation with a racial wealth gap the paper calls “massive, persistent, and well-documented.” According to Addo: “We found the labor force of Black workers improved like everyone but still lagged behind white and Latinx households. It took [Black households] a decade out from the recession to recoup the wealth that they had lost during the recession. Whereas we really started to see gains in white households three and five years out post-recession.”

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Roger Haile

“Black households fare the worst,” Addo differential between Blacks and whites says simply, “because they have less reis quite persistent,” employment doesn’t sources to draw upon.” solve problems created by centuries of And that gap echoes through the econlost wealth and lost opportunities. omy. “We actually have some evidence to That is, says Darity, “there are folks MONEY MATTERS: Darity suggest,” says Darity, “that Blacks who are who think if you could close the unemin the professional/managerial class have ployment gap, you could close the wealth lower levels of wealth than whites who are in the workdifferential.” Darity doesn’t think the data support that ing class.” Being a manager, attaining professional status, belief. doesn’t help much if you’re Black; you’re still likely to be “Employment,” he says, “is a source of income. It’s not wealth-poor, which Darity and Addo define as having a direct or significant source of wealth.” “less [in wealth] than three months of the income poverty And until Black households start being able to build threshold (50 percent of median income).” wealth, the next recession—and the next, and the next— The conclusions are stark, though, as Addo says, “I don’t will hit them just as hard.—Scott Huler think our findings are too shocking.” The paper puts it simply: “If you belong to a historically marginalized racial or ethnic group, your racial status is the stronger predictor of your economic position than your education, income, and in this case, em“The primary factor that determines ployment state and position.” And though “the unemployment rate how wealthy a household will be is

their capacity to obtain resources from previous generations. It’s not primarily a result of you having a job and generating income.”

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THEQuad

Stubborn blubber isn’t happening just to you While studying dolphins’ daily energy cost, Duke marine-mammal biologists found the cetaceans just might not lose weight as easily after forty.

ow much energy does a dolphin the wild—the ocean is a big place, especially burn in a day? if you’re following individual creatures—makNot only what’s the caloric ing facilities like Dolphin Quest and Dolphin cost, but can a dolphin afford to Research Center invaluable to marine mammal forever be dodging boats? That’s biologists. so much effort. And how many burned calories For the study, the results of which were pubkeep a mammal warm in cold seawater? How lished in the Journal of Experimental Biology much lost biomass—that’s sea life in this conin August 2021, dolphins were given doubly text—is too much before a dolphin can’t get labeled water—that is, water containing deuenough to eat? terium, a heavier (but non-radioactive) isotope How do you even measure that, anyway? of hydrogen, and heavy oxygen. Through blood You go where you know there are dolphins, or urine samples, researchers could tell how fast and you ask them nicely. heavy water was leaving If they don’t want to the dolphins’ bodies and participate in research accalculate their metabolic “There are species tivities, “they just swim rate. differences, away, and that’s fine,” says They found that a dolAustin Allen, a Ph.D. canabsolutely, but there phin burns less energy per didate in conservation biday than expected. Anothare certain patterns ology at the Duke Marine er possible finding—and across every mammal, one that merits further Lab. Dolphins are intellistudy due to this study’s humans included.” gent, meaning researchers sample size of ten individand aquatic-facility staff uals—is that dolphins forcan ask them to play games as part of a study ty and older seem to carry a little extra weight, or lift their tail for a blood sample. There’s no no matter how much they exercise. forced participation and nothing punitive. That may sound familiar. The animals always get their full food, and “Mammals’ bodies all kind of work in similar study-related activities hold their attention. ways,” says Chana Kaufman ’20 who particiIn 2019, Allen spent three weeks at Dolpated as an undergrad through the Bass Conphin Quest in O’ahu, Hawaii, as part of a nections “Are Dolphins Really That Smart and dolphin-metabolism study designed by Duke Does It Make Us Like Them More When They evolutionary anthropologists Herman Pontzer Are?” team (which studied energy expenditures and Brian Hare, Hare Lab graduate student as part of its research). Today, she is a veterinary Hannah Salomons, and himself. Some of the school student at UC Davis. “There are species team worked with the cetaceans of the Dolphin differences, absolutely, but there are certain Research Center in the Florida Keys. Studypatterns across every mammal, humans including a dolphin’s daily calorie cost is difficult in ed. You can kind of extrapolate principles from

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THEQuad THEQuad

CHUBBY: Dolphins’ middle-age spread show patterns across mammals.

certain species and apply them to others.” To clarify the comparison, Allen mentions Pontzer’s paper “Daily Energy Expenditure Through the Human Life Course,” published in August in the journal Science. Its main finding, based on a sample size of 6,400, was that there’s no midlife metabolism dip in humans—rather, it drops off after sixty. The dolphin lifespan isn’t all that well-known, Allen adds, but it’s rare for a dolphin to live into its forties, fifties, or even sixties. “It might just be that that drop-off instead of sixty in humans is closer to forty in dolphins,” he ventures. “It’s hard to compare with the different lifespans.” This didn’t express itself in the dolphins’ energy levels, though. Some of the older animals were quite active, Allen says. These are individuals, after all, with distinct habits and personalities. Kaufman, who was active in the Duke Canine Cognition Center and its Puppy Kinder-

garten as an undergraduate, called them “sea puppies” because of their similarities with dogs. She recalls throwing a football to her favorite, a big twenty-four-year-old male named Pax. “If you walked along the walkways or the decks, they would swim up and follow you and look at you,” she says. “If you walked past without saying hi, they would chirp at you.” Indeed, dolphins are excited to see you every morning, Allen says. He loves working with the animals, and his research— which, yes, involves asking dolphins to swim around and play and be ridiculous— ties directly into whether wild dolphins have enough available prey to swim around and hunt and be prolific. From a conservation standpoint, finding out how much it costs to be an animal is critical to measuring non-lethal, detrimental, cumulative effects at the population level. Energy, he continues, is one of the more direct ways to influence survival and reproduction. Dolphins won’t be doing enough of either without an adequate food supply. “It’s not as obvious as an animal getting caught in a net, but I think it’s really critical,” Allen says.—Corbie Hill

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THEQuad

Write the power

In Faulkner Fox’s “Plays That Change the World” workshop, students study political theater—then find their own story to tell.

hen Faulkner Fox planned her inaugural political-theater workshop for fall 2020, she didn’t predict an imminent summer of activism. At first, she’d thought it would be an in-person class attending in-person theater, but then the coronavirus made that impossible. Months later, a second global phenomenon: The Black Lives Matter movement surged in response to murders like George Floyd’s, which Fox (and her students-to-be) experienced in real time. Fox hadn’t been anywhere. She hadn’t even been inside a

Wiley, who were guest lecturers. Students write and workshop their own scripts, following their own sense of the political—not partisanship, but politics in a broader sense, which is more about power dynamics. Fox wants her students to feel empowered by articulating their view of the world through political theater. “Politics is the transfer, metabolization, and application of power,” says Kelly. “It’s a moving target.” Kelly is the playwright and performer behind The Talk,

“When I met my students in fall 2020, this would not be theoretical. Some of them actually would have participated in

CHANGING

grocery store, but then she was in the streets, marching for racial justice. “When I met my students in fall 2020, this would not be theoretical,” Fox says. “Some of them actually would have participated in changing the world over the past summer.” Writing and activism can stem from the same impulse, says Fox, a lecturing fellow of English, but penning a script is not the same as, say, registering people to vote. Yet she feels theater’s power. Books can be put down. Streaming TV can be paused. The uninterrupted directness of live theater sets it apart, she says. Her “Plays That Change the World” workshop, which was offered for the second time this fall, introduces students to political theater, including the works of North Carolina playwrights Sonny Kelly and Mike

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written after having to convey to his son—as countless Black parents have done—that one day elements of society would react to him as a threat. Kelly had written The Talk after the 2015 death in police custody of Freddie Gray. By fall 2020, when Kelly was a guest lecturer in “Plays That Change the World,” there had been five more years’ worth of Black people dead from racist or police violence. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were fresh in the playwright’s memory—same as the students’; same as Fox’s. The plays her class studies are intentionally provocative, but Fox also didn’t want to overwhelm her students. Some in the fall 2020 section, for instance, couldn’t handle Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over—which addresses police brutality—during the Derek Chauvin trial.

Courtesy Faulkner Fox

G THE WORLD

“All of us have experienced so much trauma that I didn’t want to add more,” Fox says. So she gave her students veto power, later letting the 2021 class vote on the plays they would study. Fox established a supportive, constructive environment for her student playwrights. Scripts went through draft after draft; characters and scenes were added and scrapped. Throughout, Fox’s guiding advice was to be specific. If a writer of political theater can’t go into specifics about their chosen topic, it means they’re resistant in some way, making it the wrong topic for that time. “Especially in a lot of fiction classes, there’s not really that focus on, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ” says senior Tommy Pratt, who took the course in 2020. “It’s sort of retro now. Going back to that in a more academic way in Faulkner’s class was really cool.”

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over the past summer."

Pratt, a creative writing minor, tends toward surreal or humorous fiction. He took “Plays That Change the World” to learn to tighten his prose. Pratt gets bogged down in descriptions, he says, and writing dialoguedriven scripts taught him to move a story forward with character actions. (Pratt’s play, by the way, featured a dysfunctional business partnership and a fictionalized Rudy Giuliani.) Fox is an optimist. Humanity has been though dark times, she says, but people always stand up and take action. It’s all that’s ever changed anything before, she maintains. One tool she can give her students is political playwriting, and a broader definition of politics within which they can engage critical issues onstage. “It’s important as a teacher of the arts that it’s their story,” Fox says. “It’s their voice.” —Corbie Hill

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THEQuad

All the pieces add up

Mathematicians unite to create a sculpture that’s more than a work of art.

s the summer of 2021 lengthened and autumn began to approach, the website for “Mathemalchemy”—the unique, hallucinatory, room-sized mathematical mixed-media sculpture under construction by mathematicians from all over the world—showed a countdown to its unveiling. On August 15, 2021, at noon, in Gross Hall on West Campus, students, supporters, and the dozens of mathematicians who created parts of it would join together to unveil it. Well, funny old world. That date came from the early notions behind the sculpture, which currently exists in Gross Hall, Room 355, though it’s hardly in its glory. The piece all but completely fills the corner room. You probably have to look in through windows to see it, and the inconceivably intricate de-

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tails—the prime-number crossword puzzle paving stones; the sculpted pages of notes on tricolorability; the perfectly hexagonal wooden pillars designed to both represent geometric relationships and recall the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland; the brightly colored crocheted theta-curve knots—are a bit far away to comprehend, much less appreciate. Things like the scatterings of clay critters marching around or the tiny baked goods in the Mandelbrot bakery you may not even be able to see. Above all, the red-and-yellow glass dodecahedron atop the lighthouse, itself a good eight feet tall, shines its light at ceiling level. The stereographic projection from the complex sphere atop the dodecahedron should project a breathtaking shadow pattern across the ceiling. But since the sphere disappears into the framework above the drop-ceiling through a hole made by

removing some acoustical tiles, the pattern lands mostly unseen on HVAC ducts and sprinkler pipes. In a way, though, this is a perfect first showing for “Mathemalchemy.” The sculpture is an expression of the intricacy and delight of mathematics, so facing down a problem may be simply an example of its success. “It’s about using your power of thinking to understand and get your way out of a problem,” says Ingrid Daubechies. “What’s more human than that? I mean, everybody likes that.”

ican Mathematical Society, Daubechies gave a presentation, including a tiny maquette of what the sculpture might look like, though everything was wide open: The sculpture would accommodate virtually anything the mathematicians wanted to include. A sculpture like this is in Daubechies’ wheelhouse. She has done such groundbreaking work in signal processing that The New York Times recently called her “the godmother of the digital image.” Among her arm-length list of fellowships and appointments is a MacArthur “genius grant.” But recent Duke postdoc in mathematics Shahar Kovalsky, who happened to be visiting as the sculpture was being set up, described her as “passionate about math, and art, and science, and community, and mostly getting people interested.” So, naturally, when Daubechies suggested the joint artwork, people signed up, spread the word, and set up a plan to get together for several workshops at Duke to create the sculpture. It was to come basically in three large bursts, the first scheduled for March 2020. “And you know,” she says, “what happened in March 2020.” But instead of postponing the project, the group (ultimately numbering twenty-four main mathematician/artists) constantly met and talked online, then worked alone. That independence allowed people to make their work ever more intricate, Daubechies says. “The level of detail you see is because we had time and everybody lovingly worked on their pieces.” One central element is a quilt by Ehrmann. There’s that lighthouse, and several images of mathematicians at different stages of life. There are converging and diverging ball arches, scrolls, examples of symmetries of various forms, and even Zeno’s path, on which the famous tortoise plods along. The sculpture’s website contains videos, explanations, and a rotating map of the original maquette. Once the sculpture has survived its early practice run at Duke (“It’s meant to be a site where you will see whether anything starts sagging in two months”), it will spend its next months at the National Academies building in Washington, D.C. It will travel thereafter, eventually finding a permanent home back at Duke. “Mathemalchemy” represents the surprises at the heart of math, the way mathematicians love to collaborate, and what happens when you get creative people together and let them loose. Kovalsky put it more simply. “For me, it is the essence of Ingrid,” he said. “It really is.” —Scott Huler

“The level of detail you see is because we had time and everybody lovingly worked on their pieces.”

PRODUCT: Opposite page, the room-sized “Mathemalchemy” delights in its details; left, the cat (Schroedinger’s?) bakes topology treats in the Mandelbrot bakery; Japanese temari ball arches above draw the eye to the sculpture’s limits; chipmunks sort acorns into prime or composite numbers.

“Mathemalchemy” came about because Daubechies, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering, saw a piece of textile art by fiber artist Dominique Ehrmann in a Cape Cod museum. “I thought, ‘Oh, wow, if she can build this whole world [in the complex quilt Daubechies saw], maybe we can try to do something with mathematicians.’” The first thing Daubechies did was contact Ehrmann, who was in from the start. “My bait for her was to show her the quality of work some of these mathematical artists were doing,” she says. At the next annual meeting of the AmerCourtesy Ingrid Daubechies, Elizabeth Paley, and Bronna Butler

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

BookClub WE ASKED

… Maureen Farrell ’01 about The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (Crown), which she cowrote with Eliot Brown—the saga of the rise and fall of one of the most-valuable and most-hyped start-ups and its unusual leader.

Duke Magazine: What struck me in this book is that there’s something about the idea of a visionary that really captures people and that was a big driver in this story. Farrell: I completely agree with you. Neumann had this ability to explain this whole vision of the world and what it would be and captivate people. I think as we dug deeper in the story, we saw that time and time again, Adam would pitch someone and usually the main person who held the checkbook, “It must be a really the man who held the good company. checkbook, would become obsessed Even if we have our with him. And then doubts, Fidelity their underlings would never invest would do all this in a company work and say, “Here are all these red where there were flags,” and that man red flags.” with the checkbook was way too smitten with Adam, even with the red flags, and would just move ahead anyway. It was pretty interesting to see. All the warning signs were there, and people were too captivated by him to take heed.

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DM: Yes, and yet everything we’re taught about business, all the popular portrayals say that you have to know the business—it comes down to numbers. But here, while it ultimately becomes about that, for a long time, the business of this business is overlooked. Farrell: My coauthor and I have talked about this a lot. It’s like this kind of herd mentality. There is this sense that certain institutions, say a Fidelity… there’s this sober mutual fund that typically does serious due diligence. But we found that here the Fidelity guy was really upset because his nemesis at another firm wrote a check to Adam Neumann earlier, so he was desperate to get in. So it came down to something like, “Okay, well, Fidelity’s in it. It must be a really good company. Even if we have our doubts, Fidelity would never invest in a company where there were red flags.” It’s like this kind of crazy cycle and mass delusion almost because there are these institutions that everyone sort of believe in. As much as Adam Neumann is the driver of this whole story, there should be checks and balances in capitalism. He did crazy things; he pushed the limits. But no one was willing to stand up and show leadership and stand up to him for fear of missing out. I found that very depressing the whole way through.

DM: In the end, was Adam Neumann a good businessman? What was his skill set?

Brie Anderson

DM: Your book talks about this start-up moment, how part of the start-up era was an allowance for debt with the idea the money could be made later. Do you think part of this story is that these start-ups, this technology was so new and happening so quickly that a lot of people didn’t quite understand it? Farrell: I think it was essentially the riches; vast amounts of wealth were being created out of nothing, seemingly, amounts people had never seen before, and the speed at which it happened. There was this whole new crop of companies, and there was this fear of more staid industries where you look at profits and losses. With more-traditional industries it takes a while to build a great company, and in theory, it seemed like these new companies were just these unicorns that were being invented so quickly and turning into huge companies. So yes, there was a tendency to say, “We don’t quite understand what’s happening or how this is going to build, but it could be the next big thing, and we just don’t want to miss out on it.” I think we’re still very much in that era.

Farrell: I think he is one of the most brilliant marketers and fundraisers of all time. And I think that is a huge part of being an entrepreneur. I think the tricky thing with him was he was so good at convincing other people to give him money and he attracted really amazing talent to WeWork, also. They had an incredible roster of employees. A lot of the time, his ego got in the way, but I think he has qualities no one else has. There are just so few people who have a vision, and the ability to articulate it, and make people follow them in the way he did. I think he thought he could do everything, and he thought he could build this incredible company, and push for everything he wanted for himself, and it would all work. And it obviously all came crumbling down around him. DM: Does that mean with the right partnership we might see him again? Farrell: I think we’re going to see him again. He now is a billionaire, in terms of what he has been able to cash out and all the money he’s gotten from WeWork. He’s started to invest in things, but I think he’s not done. I think he desperately wants to have a next act and is trying to figure out what that is. I think he’s restless. It’s not enough for him to be a billionaire. I think he’s quite narcissistic, but yeah, we’ll hear from him one way or another, and the question is going to be who will stand with him and alongside him again. n

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

BookClub continued... RECOMMENDATIONS from LUCY

CORIN ’92 Jessica Eve Rattner

In The Swank Hotel (Graywolf Press), the novelist takes a surreal look at the outset of the 2008 financial crisis to explore trauma, cultural expectations, and the political and economic crisis of the early twenty-first century. Here, she shares the books that helped her get through this (also surreal) year:

Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks I cannot believe this novel is out of print, but I finally got a copy. Other than rereading Lynda Barry, which always works, this is where I found comfort in reading this year. A book that dares to suggest that maybe being great is not all that good, that tunes into the rhythm of daily life over time in a way that is gently, gently, insistently palpable in both its sweetness and its devastation.

Machine by Susan Steinberg A crystalline novel for people like me who want the intricacy of the finest sort of short story but sustained. Hypnotic and woozily atmospheric access to the obsessive quality of adolescence that makes you never really leave it behind.

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya I turn to this great, great novelist when I want to know that what I read will shake me to the core and make me laugh, somehow simultaneously. Dance With Snakes might be my favorite book, but Senselessness might be the book to read right now—just be ready. How to face and not face the reality of atrocity. That is what this book takes you through.

The Fiume Crisis by Dominique Kirchner Reill Thank God for historians. I love this book because it takes on the power of narrative itself and dares to extricate it from the powerful and actually return it to the people.

That Winter the Wolf Came by Juliana Spahr This book of poems just blows me away. It’s about all the hard things of our time—what is happening to the planet and what is happening on our streets— and gives me a way to feel part of the larger effort to contend with the reality of it. It’s brilliant and hard as hell and makes me feel together with the mind that made it.

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by DUKE ALUMNI & FACULTY Music in My Life: Notes From a Longtime Fan Alec Wightman ’72 (Small Batch Books) Wightman chronicles his musical evolution from the great rock ’n’ roll of the 1960s to numerous Neil Young concerts in the ’70s and on to decades discovering singer-songwriter favorites like John Stewart, Jesse Winchester, Tom Russell, Rosie Flores, and Dave Alvin. A Place to Hang the Moon Kate Albus ’93 (Margaret Ferguson Books/Holiday House) Three orphaned children hope the World War II evacuation of London will be their chance at a forever home. The Ten Commandments of Marriage—Secrets of a Divorce Lawyer David W. Erdman ’71 (SPARK Publications) As an attorney, Erdman has been involved in 5,000 marriages. Here, he gleans lessons from those clients to help keep couples together. Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb James H. Thrall Ph.D. ’05 (Lexington Books) An examination of the responses of three British authors to the emerging modernity of the early twentieth-century moment encompassing the First World War. Your Guide to Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss Katharine O’Connell White ’94 (Mayo Clinic Press) An OB/GYN, miscarriage survivor, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and vice chair of academics in the OB/GYN department at Boston Medical Center combines the latest medical research with the information you need when you experience pregnancy loss. Experiencing Design: The Innovator’s Journey Jeanne Liedtka, Karen Hold ’85, and Jessica Eldridge (Columbia University Press) A guide for how to create deep design experiences at each stage of the design-thinking journey, whether for an individual, a team, or an organization.

The Murderess Must Die Marlie Parker Wasserman ’69 (Level Best Books) After allegedly murdering her stepdaughter in Brooklyn in 1898, Martha Place, speaking from the grave, explains how she became the first woman executed in the electric chair. Gentefication Antonio de Jesús López ’16 (Four Way Books) A poetry collection exploring themes like the immigrant experience, the “survivor’s guilt” of higher education, and the trials of Latinx students. Find Your Fierce: How to Put Social Anxiety in Its Place Jacqueline Sperling ’06 (Magination Press) A toolkit that walks teens through strategies to help them overcome social-anxiety disorder. Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory Without Pain Marianna De Marco Torgovnick (Fordham University Press) The author, a Duke professor of English, presents her perspective on death, mourning, loss, and renewal after the deaths of her mother and brother led to the solace and insight offered by classic books and the practice of meditation. Griffin the Dragon and the Game of Chess for Kids Ken Mask M.D. ’88 (eBookit.com) In this book for young readers suggested by the author’s son, Griffin the dragon teaches Jackson the hyena and their friend Cattails to play chess. Unequal Cities: Structural Racism and the Death Gap in America’s Largest Cities Edited by Maureen Reindl Benjamins ’98 and Fernando G. De Maio (Johns Hopkins University Press) The editors gathered a team of experts to explore the racial and ethnic inequities and the ten-year gap in life expectancy between our healthiest and unhealthiest big cities. Coach K: The King of Cameron The Chronicle (Duke Student Publishing Co.) Current and former Chronicle staffers, plus contributors like NBA commissioner Adam Silver ’84, examine the milestones of Coach K’s career and more. About 80 percent of the proceeds will go toward supporting The Chronicle.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

QuadEx

Two Personal Histories of the Future

In August, Mary Pat McMahon, vice provost/vice president for student affairs, and Gary Bennett Ph.D. ’02, vice provost for undergraduate education, unveiled QuadEx, Duke’s new residential model. The model, according to their joint announcement, is built on the foundation of “seven quads on West Campus that will enhance social and intellectual connection and foster bonds that will last a lifetime.” What will that look like in practice? Consider the (possible) trajectories of two future (hypothetical) students; we’re naming them Cameron and Wade. Before arriving on campus, Cameron and Wade revel in their new status as members of the Class of ’26—an extraordinary class of accepted students, they’re assured. Wade receives his housing assignment, Randolph on East Campus, which is affiliated with Keohane Quad. Cameron learns that she’ll be living in Bell Tower, affiliated with Edens Quad. Wade visits the Nasher Museum’s Roy Lichtenstein exhibit with his Randolph facultyin-residence. He heads over to Keohane for a welcome barbecue. There he meets his quadmates, who invite him to their weekly trivia night, and the Keohane faculty affiliate, who interests Wade in an upcoming workshop on memoir-writing.

Wade kicks off orientation week with a Habitat for Humanity home-building project in Durham.

For Cameron, orientation opens with a deep dive into science labs around campus. These experiential programs are worked into the opening part of orientation (formerly a “pre-orientation” involving just a slice of the class) for all first-years.

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Cameron attends a varsity field-hockey game with her Bell Tower and Trinity neighbors. They become a cheering section for the players from Edens Quad—and later, she becomes a member of Edens’ own team in IM field hockey.

THEQuad Near the end of their first year, Wade and Cameron choose their roommates from their own East Campus houses and the other houses linked to their respective quads. They’ll each block with a group of friends and find out where, within Keohane or Edens, they’ll be living. Cameron and Wade move in symbolic and festive fashion “from Brick to Stone”: They mark the transition to West Campus with celebratory fervor, including alumni participation, and a formal induction—sealed by the quad-specific handshake and other annual traditions (are you wearing your quad colors?).

For Cameron and Wade, the sophomore-year social calendar starts with back-to-school quad parties; the featured attractions are a Friday concert with the John Brown Big Band in Edens, and a Saturday Beat the Heat Slip ’n’ Slide Fest in Keohane.

Wade, along with Randolph and Blackwell peers from last year, is now transplanted to Keohane on West Campus. Wade rolls onto the Keohane bowling team; he also joins a fraternity that (like all Greek organizations now) doesn’t have a housing section on campus, but that holds its own social and philanthropic events.

Wade enrolls in a Keohane “quad course,” offered by the quad’s faculty affiliate and student, on controversies in astronomy.

On a predictably perfect spring day at semester’s end, Cameron and Wade, along with all sophomores, celebrate choosing their majors at Duke Gardens—a major in history for Wade, computer science for Cameron.

In their East-to-West shift, Cameron’s crew from Bell Tower and Trinity have become Edens residents.

Cameron enrolls in an Edens quad course on the history of Durham’s Black Wall Street. She also joins the Edens yoga club. She finds her way onto the undergraduate mock-trial team, which requires a different form of concentrated energy. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

Wade studies in Berlin for the fall semester. When he returns, he chooses to live in the Hollows, Duke’s newest and much-sought-after residence hall, with roommates he met during Duke-in-Berlin. He attends a joint welcome-back dinner for returning Keohane Quad members; the dinner features the first of several conversations about how his global experiences might inform the rest of Wade’s Duke trajectory.

Following a D.C.-based summer internship with Politico, Wade signs on for a Keohanesponsored panel on careers in journalism. He hears from recent Duke graduates working in organizations from The New York Times to BuzzFeed.

The Edens-based Cameron finds a leadership niche on the Quad Council, spookily overseeing Edens’ Halloween Haunted House. With its competition for the most outlandish costume, it quickly becomes a Halloween tradition for the whole Duke community. One nontraditional feature: Guided by the tech-savvy Edens faculty affiliate, quad members design dueling zombie robots.

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Cameron and Wade both chose to live in 300 Swift as seniors, though they remain quad-affiliated. They join up to lead a foodie tour of Durham for fellow seniors, funded by their two Quad Councils.

Before graduation, they each participate in a quad-sponsored “What Would You Do Differently (WWYDD)?” panel, reflecting on their time at Duke and giving advice to their newest quadmates.

Cameron takes in an Edens career conversation on sports management—flavored, of course, by the communal and multi-generational experience of Cameron Craziness.

FOREVERDUKE + FOREVERQUAD! Five years later, over homecoming weekend, Cameron attends a dinner with Edens Quad residents to talk about her early career: working in the front office in the National Hockey League. Wade comes back to celebrate Keohane’s newest inductees as they graduate from Brick to Stone. In typical homecoming fashion, he hangs out with fellow alumni; in the particular context of the quad, he leads a discussion on how virtual-reality technologies are affecting journalism. —Text by Robert J. Bliwise with Landy Elliott, Illustration by Gary Hovland

Cameron and Wade contribute an interactive piece about the QuadEx experience to Duke Magazine—which tells the QuadEx story through virtual reality.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

The Centennials YR

Bentley

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OUTER BANKS IMMERSION: Choi, right, and her friends, Elaijah Lapay and Clara Harms

entley Choi is gearing up for a busy semester. mental health of their congregants. She learned, too, that It’s her second year at Duke, and, in classic church is more than a religious gathering place in the South Blue Devil fashion, she’s taking on a lot. She’s but fills social roles as well. prepping for the LSAT. She’s an R.A. in Edens. And she saw more of the South itself. On July 17, Choi She’s finalizing the proposal for a major of her own met up with a friend who attends East Carolina University design. She’s realigning herself from biology and quantitative in Greenville, North Carolina, and together with one more research to the more qualitative side of public health. friend traveled to the coast for a three-day trip. “This was my In the background, though, she’s troubled by increasingly first time seeing the beach in North Carolina,” she says. desensitized attitudes as COVID mutates and its crisis drags The Seoul-raised Choi, who was shocked by Durham’s on. She’s trying to keep her bubble small. When we spoke, it comparatively small size a year ago, experienced the rural was the beginning of September, Duke was re-tightening its expanses of eastern North Carolina, where population density masking guidelines after a single week of classes, and when she is low and cows dot the roadside. In that all-too-brief, all-toomentioned summer, it sounded like ages past. optimistic time after widespread vaccination but before the “Summer was really nice,” Choi says, because of “the balance widespread Delta variant, Choi, following the CDC’s guidance between work, and taking a rest, and getting back on track.” at the time, doesn’t recall wearing a mask the whole trip. Choi is one of four Centennials—students whose 2024 “Whenever I travel, I try to compact all of my plans into graduation will coincide with Duke’s hundredth anniversary— one day,” Choi says, describing whirlwind see-it-all visits to Duke Magazine is shadowing through their time as undergrads. New York City. This wasn’t possible in eastern North Carolina, Last year saw the four (Colin Kaeo from suburban Dallas, where destinations can be two or four or more hours apart. Brianna Cellini from Durham-adjacent Hillsborough, Matthew Still, she had a memorable visit to New Bern, with its bearO’Stricker from greater Atlanta, and Hanul “Bentley” Choi themed public art (sculptures everywhere) and its role as the from Seoul) arrive on and adapt to a COVID-altered campus. “It would be an easy thing to say, ‘I don’t have a car. I don’t have Now they are sophomores as parents here. I don’t have whatever,’ and kind of stay isolated. the university re-emerges in fits and starts from the depths of But to have that situation and yet be so fully immersed in so the pandemic. many different things I think is really unique.” Choi, who has not been home to South Korea since her August 2020 flight into RDU airport, initially thought the birthplace of Pepsi-Cola (a touristy museum-slash-shop in a centerpiece of summer 2021 would be a coast-to-coast road nineteenth-century pharmacy), and then visited the Outer trip (destination: San Diego). Instead, she landed an internship Banks for the first time. But on Outer Banks day, it rained— with Duke Divinity School’s Clergy Health Initiative and took okay, it poured—and Choi couldn’t see a thing. And if you smaller trips, including a memorable introduction to coastal can’t see a thing, you can’t take photos. And if you can’t take North Carolina. The internship, she says, helped her zero in photos, you can’t send them to your family in Korea. on her purpose. In Choi, Tice saw someone who shrugged off setbacks— “If I hadn’t had her, I don’t know what I would have done,” someone, for example, who got her wisdom teeth removed says Duke Global Health Institute Research program leader over the summer and returned to work almost immediately, Logan Tice, who supervised Choi and six other interns. “I’ve all without a car or even a family support network in the same never seen anybody else just understand [the work] so well hemisphere. What’s a little rain to a person like that? and do it quickly and carefully.” “It would be an easy thing to say, ‘I don’t have a car. I don’t Under Tice, Choi cleaned raw data from heart-rate have parents here. I don’t have whatever,’ and kind of stay monitors worn by 400 or so Methodist pastors in a stressisolated,” Tice says. “But to have that situation and yet be so reduction study, removing erroneous or blank readings. Choi fully immersed in so many different things I think is really finished this work in a fraction of the expected time, so Tice unique.” expanded Choi’s roles to include literature review and socialAccordingly, and despite the rain, Choi enjoyed the Outer media work. Banks and wants to return someday—during better weather, “When you think about pastors, they touch the lives of so of course. True, Choi doesn’t care for salt water, but she knows many people,” says Tice. “It’s kind of like the butterfly effect. her mom loves the beach, loves to do beach-house stuff. In By making them better, you’re making whole communities a more distant someday, a very pandemic-era, once-it’s-safer better.” someday, she’d like to take her parents. Choi came away from her internship with an appreciation “Once they come for my graduation, we’ll see if we can go,” for the stress that pastors carry—all while anchoring the Choi says.—Corbie Hill Photo courtesy Bentley Choi

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

RECKONING WITH

America’s Longest War

FOR THE UNITED STATES, the war in Afghanistan was the most protracted war in history—longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam combined. Shortly after the seemingly chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in mid-August, the magazine convened a conversation among three individuals with very different perspectives on—and experiences with—the U.S. in Afghanistan.

An investigative reporter for The Washington Post, Craig Whitlock ’90 has covered the global war on terrorism for The Post since 2001 as a foreign correspondent. He wrote The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Simon & Schuster). Published this past summer, the book is based on his exhaustive research into the Lessons Learned project from the Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan; Army oral histories; Congressional hearings; Defense Department memos; and archived interviews with key administration officials, outside advisers, lawmakers, and foreign leaders. A history major at Duke, Whitlock was editor of The Chronicle in his senior year.

Nate Schwartzbauer graduated from

West Point in 2012 and served in the Army as an infantry and special-forces officer for nine years. As a Green Beret, he served on three continents, leading teams of Americans, Afghans, Africans, and Europeans. He left active service in 2021 to focus on issues related to the health of American democracy. With his wife, Paige, he is launching a nonprofit focused on establishing connections between military veterans and Afghan families resettled in the United States. He is a Master of Public Policy/M.B.A. dual-degree candidate at Sanford and Fuqua. His academic interests include American grand strategy, improving community social capital, and reviving American civic virtue.

Aman Farahi, who grew up in

Afghanistan, studied at Middlebury College and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Since 2010, he had been living and working in Kabul as an economist with the World Bank, the Ministry of Finance, and the United Nations Development Program. In those roles, he was concentrating on issues tied to macroeconomics, public finance, and development economics in Afghanistan. Farahi came to Duke two weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government. Enrolled in the Sanford School’s Master of International Development Policy program, he is specializing in publicfinance management.

The conversation was moderated by magazine editor Robert J. Bliwise. 30

www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Courtesy Nate Schwartzbauer

THEQuad THEQuad Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld worried that the U.S. lacked an exit strategy—and that was early in the war. That makes me wonder what the policy needs or the psychological impulses might have been that prompted decades of, as you say, Craig, deceit and lying on the part of American officials.

CW: In the early years, there was this real concern on the part of the Bush administration that the U.S. military might get stuck in Afghanistan, and they wanted to avoid this, obviously. They knew what had happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and they were still mindful of what happened in Vietnam—this was only about twenty-five years after Vietnam. One of the first questions President Bush got at a primetime news conference shortly after the war started in October 2001 was, “Could we get stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan like we did in Vietnam?” Bush dismissed this. He said, “No, no, we’ve learned our lessons from Vietnam. We’re not going to fight a guerilla conflict with conventional forces.” That was one reason why they didn’t send many troops at first, that they sent a limited number of mostly special forces, CIA operatives, and it was mostly an air war. There was this one Army oral history from a logistics officer. He was in charge of trying to do the laundry and showers at Bagram Air Base, which had been an old Soviet base that we’d taken over in northern Afghanistan. And even up till December of 2001, he had been told, “Don’t install any showers at Bagram for our troops there, because they’re not going to stay. They’re going to come right back.” For a couple of months, the troops had to send their laundry out by air to Uzbekistan to get cleaned. Nate, the U.S. had the stated aim of defeating Al-Qaeda. And that quickly became muddled with the broader aim of doing whatever it might take to prevent Al-Qaeda from taking root later on in Afghanistan. If we kept our focus on

Al-Qaeda, would that have been the better course? After all, the Taliban was not the group that had attacked the United States.

NS: There is some older strategic wisdom that I think is illuminating for answering that question. Clausewitz, in his On War said: “War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. The political object, the original motive for the war, will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.” I think that quote could not better frame any conversation about the longest conflict in American history. I think senior level policymakers, generals, and flag officers fundamentally lost sight of this Clausewitzian truth on warfare, that war is the continuation of politics by other means. We lost sight of that original objective of going in to not necessarily to defeat Al-Qaeda, but to neutralize Al-Qaeda to prevent future attacks. Various actors in the military-industrial-political complex had differing objectives and end-states, like nation-building, that they wanted to be met; none of them really harked back to that original Clausewitzian definition of the war. CW: Al-Qaeda by 2002 had really disappeared from the country, but then the political goals, the military goals shifted to not just neutralizing Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan but trying to make sure that Al-Qaeda could never come back. But that’s a very different objective, right? It’s one thing to kick them out, but to say we want to ensure they can never come back, that’s a vague objective. How do you do that? How will you know that they could never come back? Al-Qaeda’s leaders had fled to other countries and their network had changed, had become more amorphous, it was creating affiliates in other countries, and it was a decentralized organization. There was one interview that really still jumps out at me. It was with Nicholas Burns, a career diplomat. Burns said that by 2004, nobody was having any conversations in the Bush administration or with allies about how long we might need to be here in Afghanistan. He said, “We let things drift. We let things go on autopilot.” That was a pretty critical change from the earlier commitment to avoid another Vietnam or another version of the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“No, no, we’ve learned our lessons from Vietnam.” AUTHOR: Journalist Craig Whitlock ’90 has spent over twenty years covering global terrorism.

Simon & Schuster

Aman, you have lived out a chunk of the history of Afghanistan. At the time the U.S. invaded, Afghanistan had been seeing constant warfare since the Soviet invasion two decades earlier. In a population of around twenty-two million, three million or so were already taking flight as refugees. There were problems of illiteracy, problems of malnutrition, and a sizable chunk of the GDP came from the opium trade. Plus, it was a population that by experience, by habit, was hostile toward the idea of centralized or federalized authority. Did the U.S. understand Afghanistan?

AF: Well before 2001, the U.S. was engaged in supporting the Mujahideen in the 1980s, in the fight against the Soviet-backed DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

government of Afghanistan. The U.S., even if it did not understand Afghanistan from direct experience, should have learned from the failed ten-year Soviet military occupation. Afghanistan is well-known as the graveyard of empires. It should have been clear that military victory would be very difficult, especially with other regional players active there. Craig, in the book you do SERVICE: Top, austere rural quite a bit around George Afghanistan; Schwartzbauer Bush’s 2002 speech in which with disguised Afghan he outlined his vision of partners during a mission Afghanistan, a vision that really could be seen as nation-building: a stable government, a national army, educational provisions for boys and girls alike. Should someone at that time have asked whether the U.S. had ever succeeded at the goal of nation-building, at least after the postwar Marshall Plan in Western Europe?

CW: Bush had campaigned for the White House against this whole idea of using U.S. military to nation-build, as he put it, and he was critical of what the Clinton administration did in Somalia and Haiti and the Balkans. Yet, after the U.S. invasion, when Al-Qaeda’s leadership was killed, captured, or fled, and the Taliban was toppled from power, the U.S. made these half-hearted measures to try and stabilize and build up the Afghan government, Afghan institutions, at a time when it needed it the most. In some ways Bush was stingy at a critical moment, when doing more would have really 32

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helped, whether it was building up infrastructure or helping to build up a government. According to Craig’s book, from the very start, the U.S. underestimated how much Afghan security forces would cost, how long it would take to train those forces, how many soldiers and how many police would be needed to battle the insurgency. And then the basic strategy of the U.S. military was essentially to clone itself in its structure and its customs and its practices, even though the U.S. template did not really square with the Afghan experience and needs.

NS: I worked primarily with commandos, or the ANA [Afghan National Army] special-operations forces. They received a lot of intensive training from their U.S. counterparts. And they were good. They performed well under combat. And up until the capitulation of Kabul, they were bearing the brunt of the fighting, compared to the larger conventional Afghan army. But it took an immense amount of time, resources, and engagement that the American military’s force structure can’t support. There are only a small number of American special operators relative to the rest of the military, and they can’t be mass-produced—let alone quickly. Our conventional forces that paired with the conventional ANA and police forces weren’t particularly suited to this task of building capacity, despite that massive amount of resources provided to the Afghan army. To your point, this is why trying to clone the U.S. military in the Afghan army in a widespread way was an ill-fated stratCourtesy Nate Schwartzbauer

THEQuad egy. More consideration should have been given to existing Afghan structures and continuing to pair them with special operators, which happened in the very first part of the war. It might have actually required fewer troops than we sent over the years. There’s also a psychological component to warfare; it can manifest down at the ground-troop individual level all the way up to top leadership. That psychological piece of the war became anchored in the U.S. decision to leave and in the airpower necessarily going away—once that idea of a vanishing support structure seeps into the ranks, it’s almost like a contagion that compromises morale and the will to fight. CW: Nate, you said you were deployed from 2018 with the Afghan National Army. That was before the U.S. government under Trump had committed to a withdrawal. There were negotiations with the Taliban. Did you feel good that at that point that there would be some kind of political reconciliation or that they could hold off the Taliban indefinitely? Or did you sense there was too much of a strain on them and if the U.S. pulled out, this just wasn’t going to hold out?

there were more jobs, basic institutions were being built. More girls were going to school, female teachers and health workers were training. Then progress stalled. So how much was gained for the money spent? First, Afghanistan’s institutions were very weak. That includes financial institutions. Afghanistan never had the absorption capacity to absorb all of this money. All the pressure to spend this money fueled the culture of corruption; Afghanistan’s public sector remained corrupt right until the day Kabul collapsed. Donor money from groups like USAID also fell outside the lines of whatever process of national planning existed, so it was highly likely that you would end up building a school where local conditions had no need for it.

By the time the Taliban took over, people had lost the belief that the system would function at all after the U.S. withdrawal.

NS: I think there was optimism within the ANA community. There was a lot of pride with the ANA special operations; they knew they were providing the main effort in the fighting. There was also optimism on our part that we finally had a general, General Austin Miller, who understood that there needed to be a political end state—the first general in a very long line of generals who understood that. I was there when President Trump tweeted that we were going to withdraw. There was an overnight on-the-ground change in how the Taliban was postured when we faced them in combat. They were immediately emboldened. And in subsequent operations—especially during the winter fighting season, which is typically the downtime—they certainly got a little charge. Aman, U.S. officials, as Craig notes, approved more projects than what they could possibly keep track of. They had to deal with lots of turnover among those who were supposed to be doing the oversight. A lot of the money ended up with overpriced contractors, with corrupt Afghan officials. A lot of what was funded was never built. A lot that was built was built sloppily or with little attention to local needs. What were your experiences with project development?

AF: Much of the progress was focused in the first decade of the war. The GDP was growing, people were doing better,

CW: I think Aman is exactly right on that. I also think these weren’t constant problems for twenty years; there were different stages. During the Bush administration, there was at first a real paucity of development money— just when more attention and money would have done some good. During Bush’s second term, there was constant message traffic from the U.S. ambassador in Kabul begging for more money for Afghanistan. And yet, the White House and the State Department were saying, “Forget it. We’re all focused on Iraq.” When Obama came into office, he sent in a surge of troops, but he was only going to do it for eighteen months or so. And so, there was this rush to try and throw money at the problem. It went from not enough to too much. The whole metric of success was how much you could spend, and nobody really cared if it made any sense. We were trying to do these nation-building and development projects while Afghanistan was still at war, and the insurgency was gradually getting worse. And so you also see interview after interview with military officers and aid workers saying the strategy was to try and stabilize parts of Afghanistan where the insurgency was strong. But that had it all backwards. You can’t stabilize a country and do development projects when there’s still shooting going on. AF: That issue brought up by Craig played out, from around 2012 to 2014, as I was working at the World Bank. Money was chasing conflict. We were incentivizing districts, incentivizing provinces and provincial governors, telling them, “Look, if there is conflict in your province, there will be these development dollars that will come there. And if you are a peaceful province, then you get very little.” We also have to remember that even as we never got the balance of expenditures right, the government in Afghanistan delivered very little in development. By the time the Taliban took over, people had lost the belief that the system would DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

function at all after the U.S. withdrawal. The political leadership had several chances. They had all the money in the world. They had opportunities to resolve their political differences. And none of that happened. From the beginning of the war, we were very aid-dependent. In 2018, the total public spending was roughly eleven billion dollars, for security along with development. Of that eleven billion dollars, 2.5 billion dollars came from internal revenue; the rest was outside grant money. And that was one of the best years for generating internal revenue. Craig’s book mentions a U.S. State Department official who observed that one indisputable ingredient for corruption is money. And guess what? The U.S. had the money and the U.S. ultimately should be seen as bearing a lot of responsibility for the corruption that grew out of all that monetary disbursal.

CW: In 2007, the U.S. ambassador, Ronald Neumann, was going with the British ambassador to Kabul to meet with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan. They were going to give him a hard time about all these corrupt officials in his government that he needed to get rid of. One in particular they were giving him a hard time about was Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was sort of the boss of Kandahar. Karzai just looked at the British ambassador and the U.S. ambassador and said, “You realize who’s giving my brother the money, don’t you? It’s the CIA and the U.S. military.” There were moments when America might have made a reasonable exit. Early on, Taliban leaders expressed a willingness to begin discussions about Afghanistan’s future, but the U.S. treated the Taliban just like Al-Qaeda. Another moment, later on, might have been when Osama bin Laden was killed during Obama’s administration.

tion by and large, and it was kind of a high point for Afghan democracy. The insurgency wasn’t that strong at that point. And looking back, that might have been another moment when we might have been smarter and Karzai might have been smarter and said, “Okay, to stave off an insurgency, we need to bring them into the fold somehow while they’re weak.” But as time went on, the Taliban sensed that as long as they could hold out, they could call the shots on any political reconciliation. It became harder and harder. You mentioned bin Laden’s death. Politically that certainly would have been easier. But our presidents—they didn’t have faith in the later years that the Afghan government would be able to stand on its two legs. Obama tried to end the war by the end of his second term. In December of 2014, he had announced an end to all U.S. combat operations and said, “We’re going to draw down over the next two years.” Of course, that didn’t happen.

The U.S. decision to leave and the airpower necessarily going away…it’s almost like a contagion that compromises morale and the will to fight. CW: Part of what you’re referring to was the Bonn Conference in late 2001. Withdrawal would have been hard politically, because there was such fear after September 11, and people really did lump the Taliban and Al-Qaeda together. There was just no political appetite to sort of be magnanimous to the Taliban and invite them back into the political system. Our Afghan allies in the Northern Alliance also weren’t real keen on that idea. Another point would have been in 2004 after Hamid Karzai was first elected president. That actually was a free and fair elec34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

There’s some hope that the need for international support might moderate today’s Taliban. At the same time, women are not being allowed to resume their working lives, and girls are not being allowed to attend secondary schools. What do you imagine Afghanistan’s future will look like?

AF: The immediate future does not look good, certainly from an economic perspective. We’re already seeing a lot of people lose jobs. When the U.S. troop levels declined from 2012 to 2014, we saw a massive effect on the economy. Before that,

our economy was growing 9 percent on average, and after, from 2015 to 2020, it was 2 percent on average. What I see happening is the economy continuing to shrink, maybe to the level of the late 1990s—that and a deepening crisis in the banking sector. All of that will set up a humanitarian crisis. We just have to watch what happens and what the Taliban policies are. If they say they have changed, can we verify that change? So far, Courtesy Aman Farahi their actions have been those of a victor claiming all the WORKING: Farahi spoils. They’re not giving much in presents to the heads the way of gestures to the internaof donor agencies. tional community. We should also consider the security situation. The current administration suggests that America’s security imperatives will be well-served by this so-called “over-the-horizon” strategy. But then there’s the drone strike that, because of faulty intelligence, went tragically wrong during the precipitous withdrawal in August.

NS: I’m skeptical of the “over-horizon” scenario. It’s extremely difficult to be able to prosecute a war from behind a screen. I’m not saying that’s all the means available to the national-security apparatus, but it is harder doing it remotely. Much of my work during my deployment was designed to be the most minimal American footprint as possible—but still a presence that provided a set of eyes on the ground in the prosecution of that war. We might have to be prepared for the resurgence of transnational terrorism based in Afghanistan, and this requires the combatant commands and the intelligence community to have to pivot their current approach and techniques very quickly. I hope we don’t have to see a resurgence, but I think there’s reason to be concerned. CW: We’ll always have these debates: What went wrong? I’ve covered the so-called “War on Terror” for a long time, and I think the United States needs to define what its objectives are right now in Afghanistan. Are we looking at it purely from a threat perspective, so that we’re worried about Al-Qaeda coming back into Afghanistan and we’re going to continue with counterterrorism tactics that have had only a marginal effect over the last twenty years? Is there a political way that would be more effective in Afghanistan? It’s hard to think of the Taliban as a partner. But if we’re trying to minimize the threat in Afghanistan, it would

seem that the most effective way is to get the Taliban to not tolerate any jihadist in Afghanistan who might want to plot attacks against America. A big failing in the War on Terror is that we really don’t have a preventive strategy for dealing with this problem; we’ve been reactive. AF: We hear from the Taliban that they need technical skills to run the government. But the shift in Afghanistan’s world view is so extreme that I don’t think people with my skill levels have any future there. Aman left Afghanistan and was on his way to Duke just two weeks before the fall of Kabul. Nate, during that same ending phase, weren’t you working to extricate some partners in Afghanistan?

NS: A couple of my interpreters had already been in the United States for more than a year. My partner force commander, however, was still very much involved in the fight. A bunch of us who had worked with him had been in touch. One of us—three rotations after me, in the same role—was actually on the ground at the Kabul airport. He was able to grab our Afghan partner and make sure he got out, which he did. He’s in the United States now. Nate, how would you reflect on the impact of the war, and the way it ended, on U.S. veterans who saw service in Afghanistan?

NS: Some struggled as this final phase was unfolding, and some continue to struggle more than others. But, for me, what resonates with veterans is that, despite the changes in policy over the twenty years we were there, at the end of the day, we managed to keep it an away game. Did we avoid terrorist attacks on the American homeland? Yes, we did. Was it the most efficient way? Probably not. But that wasn’t our decision. We went over because we were asked to, and we did our duty. Nation-building—that wasn’t really the interest we were asked to serve. And promoting freedom? Well, I think we can claim incremental progress around the attachment to freedom in Afghanistan. That may be small solace for the blood and treasure we spent in the conflict. Or it may turn out to be a bigger thing. In any case, there’s a good amount of healing to be done, both on the veterans’ side and with the Afghan refugees brought here. My two biggest concerns are with the Afghan refugees and the resettlement process here, and then an entire generation of service members who served over there. Veterans’ mental health is going to be a really big issue. And as a result of our choices in this war, properly setting up the Afghans we are resettling here is a moral imperative for our entire country. n DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

TWO x TWO

With three carefully orchestrated air shipments, four pairs of Coquerel’s sifakas from the Lemur Center were moved to start a breeding colony in Europe.

By Karl Leif Bates ritt Keith hustled around the took a minute longer, but this was nokitchen and out into the yard where near the stress of the worst-case for fresh clippings like an anxious mother hurriedscenario of being chased around and netted. ly packing her kids off to school. She gently stuffed The kennels were gently closed and latched, and a few a handful of sumac, sweetgum, and tulip poplar leaves into minutes later, around 8 a.m., the precious cargo and a wabrown paper lunch sacks labeled “Izzy” and “Slausy,” then ter-filled pitcher with more fresh sumac were snugly tucked tore the bags open a bit because Sifakas aren’t big on probinto the back of a Duke-owned Subaru for the drive to the lem-solving. Carrots, sweet potatoes, in-the-shell nuts and a airport in Atlanta. few other special treats were poured into Ziplock bags. Aside from alerting Duke leadership to the potential for a Keith, a Duke Lemur Center colony curator, had cared for disaster, Duke Lemur Center officials have been quiet about the pair of Coquerel’s sifakas since they were born one day their efforts to relocate four pairs of breeding sifakas to zoos apart in 2015. She knew, as she packed up the food, water, in Germany and the United Kingdom. Sifakas are as deliand care instructions, that she might never see Isabella or cate as they are beautiful, and there was a good chance they Wenceslaus again. would die in transit or shortly after their arrival. Isabella, the dominant partner, quickly climbed inside her Izzy and Slausy were about to begin a thirty-six-hour jourcustom-fitted crate to investigate the lunch bag. Wenceslaus ney that would mark the beginning of a new chapter in le-

36 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

HANGING OUT: Left, Elliott and Wenceslaus the Idle, above, at the Duke Lemur Center before emigrating to zoos in the U.K. and Germany

Photography by David Haring

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

SHIPMENTS

MAY 19

MAY 27

SEPTEMBER 22

Beatrice of Swabia from Durham and Elliot from Los Angeles, both age eight, to Chester Zoo, U.K. They’ve been a couple since 2017.

Sigismund, age four, from Baltimore, and Justa, age nine, from St. Louis, to Cologne Germany. They’ve been a couple since they both arrived at Duke in 2018. Euphemia, age ten, from Baltimore, and Hostilian, age five, from Durham, to Tierpark Belin. They’ve been a pair since 2020, although Euphemia has lived in Durham since 2013.

Isabella and Wenceslaus the Idle, both six, from Durham, to Tierpark Berlin. They’ve been a pair since 2018.

38 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ers, they need to eat fresh leaves every day or they die. Their extraordinarily long intestines are prone to deadly kinks, obstructions, and clostridium infections. And while Duke and other centers have succeeded in breeding them in captivity, their infant mortality is around 50 percent. Many captive sifakas now live into their twenties, but their average life expectancy works out to just seven years. Isabella, lemur number 7201f, is the daughter of Charlemagne, which makes her the granddaughter of the TV star Jovian, who played the live-action Zoboomafoo in the children’s program of the same name. Her mate, 7200m, Wenceslaus the Idle, Coleslaw or Slausy, is the son of another prolific Duke mother, Rodelinda. These are second-generation captive-bred sifakas, among the few to survive to adulthood and fertility. There are no wild-caught Sifakas left in captivity. Duke invited applications in 2017, and four European zoos responded. Four pairings were decided from a potential population of just sixty-six animals. Those born elsewhere, Euphemia and Sigismund from Baltimore, Justa from St. Louis, and Elliot from Los Angeles, were brought to Duke in 2017 and 2018 and paired with Duke mates years ago to ensure compatibility. Keith pauses. “Everything has to be…perfect.” Each receiving zoo sent a person to be trained at Duke in sifaka care, and Keith visited Europe to see what the new accommodations would be like. Duke also provided an authoritative sifaka-care handbook, written and refined by Katz and Lemur Center veterinarians, who know more about lemur care than anyone in the world. In June, the transfers began. The first sifaka pair, Beatrice and Elliot, were already on their way to Atlanta when the last bureaucratic hurdle popped up. Lemur Center Executive Director Greg Dye was informed of a missing United States Department of Agriculture form a good three hours after the Subaru had merged on to I-85 south. He had to decide whether to call the mission back, but he chose not to while Duke staff in Durham and Washington worked frantically to get the paperwork unstuck in time for the flight to London. The manifest said two live animal packages, fifty-five kilos. No care technicians, no vets. The lemurs travelled as freight in ordinary $300 kennels like an eighty-pound dog would need, refit by Lemur Center staff to include little pieces of home: a raised floor for two days of bodily functions, some shavings, a water bottle, a sturdy branch to hang onto or crampedly sit on, and the paper lunch bag full of fresh leaves. And on top of it all, a

“We can’t have all the animals in North America. It’s just not responsible.” ROAD TRIP: mur conservation or cost them their lives. Transferring the breeding pairs had been Opposite, clockwise, more than four years in the making. The loss Britt Keith rounds up of habitat continues to push lemurs to the fresh leaves, helps brink in their native Madagascar, making the animals into their the U.S. population of Coquerel’s sifakas— custom crates and, half of which resides at Duke—a lifeboat of above, says goodbye sorts. The thought began to dawn that there in September. should be other outposts of breeding sifakas. “We can’t have all the animals in North America. It’s just not responsible,” Keith says. To decide which pairs could travel, the official stud book kept at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago was consulted. “We didn’t want to give away all our good genes,” Keith says, as the walkie-talkie on her desk quietly chatters and squawks. But they also didn’t want to doom this isolated new population with inbreeding. “At this point, everyone’s a little bit related.” Athletic and long-limbed, and always willing to look a human visitor squarely in the eyes, the russet and cream-colored sifakas are “fragile and needy. They require a lot of staff time and vet time,” says Andrea Katz, the semi-retired former curator who helped shepherd the breeding program for many years and began the discussions of some kind of transfer more than a decade ago. “Sifakas are super-delicate,” echoes Keith. For start-

Photography by Karl Leif Bates

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ta to London and then a ninety-minute van ride to the Chester Zoo in Upton-by-Chester, U.K. Much of that time, they were simply sitting in a room waiting for the humans to agree on the paperwork. Heathrow customs held them for ten hours before a government veterinarian could be persuaded to let the lemurs go. For each delivery, the road crew bivouacked in a hotel near Atlanta awaiting any word and wheels up for at least ten hours. Registrar and data manager Amanda Greene used a flight-tracking app on her phone to be sure the plane was really in the air, still in the air, and finally down in London. “It was only a six-hour flight, but it seems like it took a week,” she says. “A week and a half later, we did it all again. The anxiety level only decreased a little bit.” The second shipment was Sigismund and Justa for Cologne and Euphemia and Hostilian (another grandchild of Zoboomafoo) to Berlin on the same Lufthansa plane. It seemed to be going more smoothly until a freight handler in Atlanta found a box of pet gerbils on a different level of their plane. German authorities require that only one kind of animal be on a flight. A few phone calls later, the rodents were bumped and given coupons for a later flight. The Lemur Center has done everything NEW HOME: it can to make the transition from Durham Mealtime for Justa to the new homes safe and smooth, but and Sigismund in there will be important differences. For the Cologne Zoo example, the sifakas’ absolute favorite leaf in Germany is sumac, which is abundant in the summers when they browse all sorts of plants in their natural-habitat enclosures at the Lemur Center. Duke struggles to keep a good supply of sumac for them year round, packing seven giant chest freezers with fresh cuttings in the fall. But European zoos have an entirely different collection of plants. “We’re gonna know a lot more about browse and babies after this first winter,” Katz says. “I’ll be very interested to see what we can learn from the European zoos.” Lemur Center staff expected the worst of the transfers, but the lemurs all seem to have survived the trip. Tierpark, in the former East Berlin, is holding an extra pair from Duke—Isabella and Wenceslaus—because a zoo in England lost its financial footing in the pandemic and decided it had better not commit. For now, all four pairs are safely settling into their new homes and the birth control is off. Still, expectations are tempered by hard experience and tragic losses over the years. “If they’re all still alive a year from now, that would be success,” Katz says. “Five years from now, if there’s one baby, maybe two,

“Five years from now, if there’s one baby, maybe two, that would be amazing.” truly giant zip-close bag full of many other zip-close bags of fresh snacks, a just-in-case-of-escape net, and a bright yellow folder with instructions and phone numbers for anyone who might have to deal with an issue along the way. The box was roomy, but not exactly a forested enclosure. The kennels were fitted with green filter fabric over the windows for privacy, but the front flap was a curtain that could be raised for inspections. Customs officials always ask the techs to take the powerful nine-pound sifakas out of their boxes, but they’re wild animals that aren’t normally handled, and they can leap more than twenty feet from a standing start. “We’ve learned to say they bite and scratch,” Keith says. “That seems to work.” Beatrice and Elliot spent thirty-six hours in their customized crates on that first trip—from Durham to Atlan40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Courtesy Cologne Zoo

that would be amazing,” Greene says. Isabella and Wenceslaus left months later than the others, and a second move for them would probably have to wait another breeding season at least. Sifakas are only fertile once a year, during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. Babies are born in January and February. The pair might eventually end up in Dublin, if it can be arranged. The name sifaka is a Malagasy onomatopoeia for the gentle humming grunt the animals use to communicate. As their journey began, Isabella uttered the noise quietly as the two kennels sat next to each other in the back of the Subaru. “It can be a contact call, like looking for him,” Keith said. Photo Chester Zoo

SETTLING IN: Beatrice and Elliott at the Chester Zoo in the U.K. after their marathon air trip in May

“That’s a normal sound we hear when they’re with their family.” “They’re gonna be great. They’re gonna make babies!” Greene reassured her colleagues before getting

behind the wheel. For another pair, her words may ring true. In July, not long after their arrival at Tierpark, Euphemia and Hostilian were seen breeding. n

Bates is the executive director of research communications for Duke. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ONE OF THE

GOOD GUYS On his acclaimed podcast, the Center for Documentary Studies’ John Biewen isn’t sure he’s right—and that encourages the audience to listen. BY SCOTT HULER PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX BOERNER

ou know about John Biewen’s bicycle if you have listened to episode eleven of season two of “Scene on Radio,” the podcast he created as part of his work as audio director at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. Season two of “Scene” was titled “Seeing White,” and in fourteen crystalline

episodes, it addressed the issues of race in America by naming the elephant in the room: whiteness. Instead of treating white as “plain vanilla,” as Biewen says in the episode—whiteness as somehow normal, with anything different being the unusual—the series investigates whiteness as a construct, as a thing in itself. Whiteness as the issue. And it’s the issue as investigated (and produced and hosted) by a white man—a white man willing to honestly and firmly, if carefully and even gently, address the harsh realities of whiteness and its history.

42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

he bicycle episode involves Biewen, as a young man, walking a bicycle through a largely Black Philadelphia neighborhood. The story has become foundational to Biewen’s awareness of race and how we perceive it. He recorded it, live-storyteller style, before a rapt audience at Motorco, a performance hall in Durham, in 2017. He describes himself, at age twenty-six having recently given up on graduate-school study of philosophy, walking his bike through an uncertain neighborhood, preparing to ship it home. He’s accosted by two Black boys, probably in their early teens, who threaten him with a knife and demand the bike. He describes almost sleepwalking through the encounter, finding a way to get some help for himself and emerging unscathed when the boys walk off. For years, he said, it was a story of an odd encounter with something like danger. Looking back on it, though, he is critical of both who he was then and who he’s been since. “Thinking back on what was in my head that day, there’s something more cringe-worthy,” he says in the podcast. His world had always felt safe to him. And though he knew the neighborhood was troubled, “I think I expected to get credit for displaying my lack of fear, my nonracist, non-profiling swellness.… ‘Damn, look at that, there goes one of the

The show’s fourth season, “The Land That Never Has Been Yet” (a line from a Langston Hughes poem), does something similar, addressing the ways racism, patriarchy, and greed have limited American democratic institutions from the beginning—by design. He invited onto the podcast Chenjerai Kumanyika, who served as cohost of both “Seeing White” and “The Land That Never Has Been Yet.” “The thing I noticed about John,” says Kumanyika, “was he was willing to have a conversation about basic American myths and ideas about America and patriotism that, to be honest, most of my liberal friends weren’t.” In fact, Biewen sought out Kumanyika, who is Black, for that conversation. Kumanyika, now assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, met Biewen at CDS when Kumanyika attended an audio boot camp there. After a previous audio training session, Kumanyika had written a highly regarded piece about the whiteness of the public radio voice. At CDS, he didn’t study with Biewen, but Biewen had read the piece and sought him out. The podcast at that time was still just an idea, but the conversation started. “We ended up sitting at a picnic table outside of CDS and talking for quite some time and really kind of clicked,” Biewen recalls now. And some time after, as Biewen worked

“I think I expected to get credit for displaying my lack of fear, my nonracist, non-profiling swellness.… ‘Damn, look at that, there goes one of the good white folks. Forget mugging that guy. Give him a round of applause.’ ” good white folks,’ ” he imagined the residents thinking. “ ‘Forget mugging that guy. Give him a round of applause.’ “So, yeah. I was naive. Arrogant in a way. Presumptuous. I was pretty white.” And the key to the show, and to Biewen’s searching voice that drives it, is finding a way to openly equate arrogance and presumption with whiteness, yet doing so with understanding instead of finger-pointing. It’s easy to criticize overt racists—the “bad” white people—and few will challenge that. In “Seeing White,” Biewen criticized “good” white people like himself—and encouraged listeners to do the same. 44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

on the bicycle story, he was aware of the many ways it could misfire. “I e-mailed him and I said, ‘I’m writing this thing. I feel like I could use your eyes. It’s very racially loaded, and I’m a little afraid.’ ” Kumanyika made a few suggestions but basically approved. Biewen realized that maybe it would help the series if he asked for more. “That was kind of the moment where I thought, ‘Hmm.’ There was this kind of persistent unease that I had about doing this series on whiteness as a white guy and feeling like, ‘I could really use some backup here.’ That it’s going to really make it so much better and also just to have somebody to check me and my blind spots.”

As a result, in both “Seeing White” and “The Land That Never Has Been Yet,” Kumanyika challenges Biewen on his assertions and provides a kind of model of what conversation and action about race ought to look like. “He is brilliantly clear and blunt, and fiercely honest and direct and insightful. And at the same time, kind,” Biewen says of Kumanyika. “He could have said more cutting things about my cluelessness at times, and he was always, ‘I can see—I hear that, but….’ You know?” Kumanyika sees the conversation the same way. “John is rigorous and curious. He comes from two disciplines that, in my mind, make him a really dangerous person to have a conversation with. One, he is a philosopher.” Biewen studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and it was a philosophy Ph.D. program he dropped out of when he took that walk with the bicycle. “Two, he was a public radio reporter who did investigative work. I would make sweeping comments, like I do sometimes in the series, like, ‘For the majority of American history, the American project has been about, you know, these kinds of oppressive things.’ He would immediately—that reporter brain—he’s going to go, like, ‘Hmm, that might be true but maybe we should take a little bit of time and investigate that a little more carefully before just making a blanket statement like that.’ ”

umanyika has in a way described Biewen’s entire journey as a reporter and producer. Born in the small Minnesota town of Mankato, about an hour southeast of Minneapolis, he grew up in a progressive family: His parents were educators—his mother a guidance counselor, his father a teacher— with, for example, a strong “consciousness of racism in America, and that it was an important thing.” Good values, but also part, Biewen says, of what allowed him to grow up thinking of himself as one of the good white people. He went to Gustavus Adolphus, a small liberal-arts college in Minnesota, taught in Japan for a bit, made that abortive stab at graduate school. On the advice of one of his undergraduate professors, he tried public radio reporting and found a home there. As Kumanyika said, Biewen is at heart both a philosopher and a researcher, and

the two combine in the way he tells audio stories. During his years working for various public radio entities, though his own reporting for a time remained straightforward, he listened to the rise of the storytelling branch of public radio: “This American Life” with Ira Glass, “RadioLab” with Jad Abumrad, documentary projects by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva), and podcasts like “Serial,” developed by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder. (Each of those producers, by the way, has a chapter in Biewen’s 2017 book, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound.) The techniques those

storytellers used began making straightforward news reporting frustrating. In 1994, Biewen reported a documentary called “Oh Freedom Over Me,” focused on volunteers registering voters in Mississippi in 1964. It’s a powerful documentary (and was repurposed into an episode of “The Land That Never Has Been Yet”), but it’s still not the kind of intimate storytelling to which he has since turned. That turn began a long time ago, in response to the shrinking of the story length public radio shows could devote to long stories. Wesley Hogan, longtime CDS director, recalls a conversation with him. “He described a landscape where he first had twenty-two minutes, then it went down to seven, and then to 3.5,” she says. “And when they went from 3.5 minutes to ninety seconds, he basically said, if that’s the longest you’re going to have, I’m going to have to find something else. And that’s when he came to us full time.” That was in 2005, but he’d been at CDS for several years by then. Working for American Radio Works, a documentary arm of American Public Media, he had wanted to move to North Carolina for personal reasons. He came to Durham after a friend who had worked on an oral history of Jim Crow with CDS made the connection. “They were trying to start an audio program, and they liked the idea of having an experienced audio documentarian around, even though I wasn’t going to be working for them.” Originally CDS did nothing more than provide a free office. “And then over the next several years, we kind of swallowed each other up, you could say.” CDS created a position for Biewen to teach a course each term, and he pursued his documentary work independently. The work that finally changed his life was a piece called “Little War on the Prairie,” which he did for “This American Life” in 2012. It was about the Dakota War of 1862, in which after years of failed dealings with the United States, starving members of the Dakota tribe fought with Minnesota settlers. A bloody period of fighting ended with a truce, after which thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Biewen’s hometown. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, and he had been thinking about the story for years. Growing up, he had learned nothing like the messy truth. He knew he needed to do it for a show like “This American Life,” because that show “would be comfortable with what I wanted to do”: include personal elements of his own story, “not just a reporter standing outside the story.” That connects to what he teaches his students. Documentary “is still journalism, but I talk about that documentary has always had a greater comfort level with subjectivity,” he says. “That a work with a point of view or even that can be quite polemical—think of Michael Moore—gets counted as documentary, just assuming that it’s essentially factual and it’s asserting what it’s asserting.” 46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

As the podcast revolution advanced, Biewen realized that he no longer even had to try to pitch public radio shows to find a place for his work. He could simply make it and share it. The first season of “Scene on Radio” combined some of Biewen’s older work (repurposing, for example, a series he had done retracing the route John Steinbeck took in Travels with Charley), some student work, and some new work, including an interview with Biewen’s colleague Tim Tyson Ph.D. ’94, whose book The Blood of Emmett Till included his astonishing interview with Carolyn Bryant, the woman whose false claim that Till had flirted with her caused his lynching. Podcasting removed the last obstacle to Biewen simply doing work he was proud of. Straight radio journalism was always going to be focused on policy and more specific issues of any particular moment; documentary podcasts could pursue stories closer to the heart, without worrying about time format (episodes can range from twenty minutes to an hour), using all the tools available to a producer: music, musings, silence, and, above all, uncertainty.

t’s that open-spirited uncertainty that drives listeners’ loyalty to the podcast, suggests John Barth, one-time chief content officer of audio creator and distributor network PRX. He has known Biewen for decades and says, “He reached a certain point in life, and you look back and say, ‘Do I really know what I know? And why do I think I know it?’ and then you start poking at it.” That became more evident in the “Men” series, the show’s third season (on that one, Biewen invited journalist Celeste Headlee to, as Kumanyika does in two other seasons, play the foil and provide a perspective from the group disadvantaged by the group in Biewen’s focus). Barth says Biewen’s been a first-rate reporter and producer all along, but the freedom of podcasting allowed him to leap forward. “I don’t think this would have happened otherwise,” Barth says. A podcast series “is like writing a book. He needed that literal open canvas of that white screen to do what he needed to do in audio. Maybe America needed that: to get out of the obsessive Twitter now and pull back, and shave away all the preconceptions, the history that we think we know that we don’t really know. “There’s a lot of winnowing and freeing yourself from boundaries and structure to get where he had to go.” And that’s a place of uncertainty. “John, in that second season,” Kumanyika says, “was willing to be someone

RESEARCH: Biewen comes well prepared for the process of creation.

“John is rigorous and curious. He comes from two disciplines that, in my mind, make him a really dangerous person to have a conversation with.”

who did not know as much.” By the time he reached out, Biewen had interviewed luminaries like widely praised historian Nell Irvin Painter and Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He had gone through readings of all kinds, including those Kumanyika had sent, yet he still asked Kumanyika for help. “He’s already consumed all of that by the time you hear his voice for the first time, yet he appears as a guy who just wants to understand better. And I think the fact that he’s able to authentically offer that allows listeners to go on a journey with him, with us, and still allows them to feel like they’re making up their own minds. I think that’s so important.” He goes on to note that the season was inspired by Biewen’s “curiosity and sense that this was what needed to happen.” And that fourth series, about how American democracy was framed by capitalism and white supremacy, dropped its first episode the day Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial went to the U.S. Senate. But still the show comes from a place of uncertainty, even of wrongness. Like the bicycle story in season two, Biewen’s investigations of race, of democracy, of patriarchy, start with something that seemed right but wasn’t. “I tried to frame the setup question for the episode to be about a theme,” Kumanyika says. “To take those liberal,

more centrist ways of understanding those questions, to take those seriously. So the rest of the episode and our conversation is about unfolding what we’ve learned.” That’s good pedagogy, and it’s also good storytelling. “When someone is wrong,” he says, “that’s a way more interesting and exciting story to listen to than when someone’s right.” Just the same, Biewen’s willingness to portray his own muddled thinking and his journey to understanding isn’t an effort to make a white voice somehow not worth listening to regarding racial issues. Kumanyika says his voice isn’t more authentic than Biewen’s. “When he speaks certain questions with his voice, it does a certain kind of work that my voice can’t do.” White people can get confused by the difference between alliance and exploitation. Is race real, or not? Depending on the conversation, that can be a terrifying question to ask. “Because it’s coming from his voice, it gives other people who think like him a certain permission to ask that same question.” According to Biewen’s colleague Tyson, “That allows us to have the conversation that we’re really not comfortable enough to have, often, unless we have our trustworthy guide and narrator who doesn’t come on a high horse.” Tyson focuses on Biewen’s capacity to genuinely engage with his sources and his interlocutors. “He comes realDUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ly well prepared to this process of creation, and this art of thinking aloud in public, and encouraging and listening to others think aloud in public.” The host of “Scene on Radio” demonstrates, Tyson says, “a full and democratic style of listening.” Which may be one of the few things that can encourage listening in those who hear it. Listening is what people have been doing. “Seeing White” took “Scene” to completely unexpected heights. From a somewhat experimental audio series that started in 2015 and garnered a few thousand listeners per episode, the show leaped to a must-listen podcast now in its fifth season. In some ways “Scene” is like many a podcast: A host introduces the show’s topic. Research is summarized, interviews are conducted, separated by music and beats. At the end of the episode, the host and cohost discuss what they’ve learned. But again, in some ways it’s obviously different. Some 12 million downloads later (some of the most-listened-to episodes have been downloaded around 700,000 times), the series has twice been nominated for the Peabody, the highest award in audio. “Seeing White” garnered its first nomination; the second nomination came for season four. For its willingness to honestly raise uncomfortable questions the show has won a Media Literate Media Award from the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Salon, Vulture, and the Oxford American have praised it. Fortune called it “deceptively mellow.” But what the show has really won is listeners. A comment chosen at random from the show’s 10,000 reviews on the Apple Podcasts app: “This is the single most important podcast I have ever listened to. As a white woman with a black son and daughter, I am continuously moved to be better.”

he series on race, men, and democracy were well timed, and “Seeing White” has even had a second, perhaps even stronger run after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. If you want to talk about timing, Amy Westervelt, cohost of the podcast’s fifth season (it started in September 2021 and addresses the ongoing climate catastrophe), had to reschedule her interview for this story because California, where she lives, was on fire and she had to flee. Westervelt was chosen as cohost because of her own widely praised pod-

48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

“I’ve had people in 2020 tell me that ‘Seeing White’ was prescient, because, apparently, from their perspective, the perfect timing was 2020, right? And it did have a whole new life after George Floyd’s murder. But my response, always, was that it was late. That any time in the last 400 years would have been a good time for that series.”

cast “Drilled,” a true-crime approach to how we got to this crisis in the first place. The season is called “The Repair,” for its focus on how to fix the problem rather than simple doomsaying. Westervelt notes that she plays a different role in “The Repair” than Kumanyika and Celeste Headlee played. In the seasons about men, about whiteness, and about how white men created American democracy for their own benefit, Biewen was himself, if not the enemy, at least something of a defendant. As Biewen told Kumanyika, as a white man, he really needed “some backup” on those topics: a cohost from the disadvantaged group who could help hold his feet to the fire. Though certainly white men are more than culpable in the climate catastrophe, that’s an everybody problem. “It’s less of an accountability role,” Westervelt says of her work on season five. “It’s more of a context and information role.” If Biewen found a source that seemed

ENTER: Biewen, who teaches a CDS course, is willing to have conversations that others are not.

trustworthy—or not—she could provide backstory. She jokingly calls herself a climate information sherpa. “There was one time where John sent something this person had posted on Twitter, and I was like, ‘Oh, that guy is such a doomer, I can’t stand him.’ And John was, ‘Really? What? I haven’t heard of this—tell me more!’ ” So they looked into the climate doom industry, which encourages people to believe change is impossible, “and how much it intersects with white supremacy and patriarchy and all these other things [that SOR has focused on], and it was great.” The season does emphasize the possibility of change; it looks to places like Scotland, which has large fossil-fuel industries like the United States and nonetheless is taking significant action and seemingly surviving. But mostly it addresses the climate in the way previous seasons have addressed their problems: by pushing them to the foreground and using current events to shake listeners out of their complacency. “In a sick way,” Westervelt says, “the endless climate disasters do, I think, help kind of shake people out of that complacency.” Biewen takes the attention, the accolades, and even the timing with a characteristic shrug. “I’ve had people in

2020 tell me that ‘Seeing White’ was prescient, because, apparently, from their perspective, the perfect timing was 2020, right?” he says. “And it did have a whole new life after George Floyd’s murder. But my response, always, was that it was late. That any time in the last 400 years would have been a good time for that series.” But he does appreciate the high regard in which people hold the show, and he sees the current series as the result of the work that people praise. He says, for example, that when starting “Seeing White,” he had already done a lot of thinking about the problems it engages: “The insight that we’re just people, right, as white people, and then other people have race,” was a notion he had recognized and already tried to shed. “But [the climate] is one that does feel like it really came out of the last five years of work that I’ve done, and particularly with ‘Seeing White’ itself. A really tangible shift for me was realizing that it’s not nearly enough to just not be one of the racists.” Just the same with the climate. Using tote bags, recycling, and declining straws at restaurants is not going to cut it with the climate in full, undeniable crisis. Which gives him, perhaps, the most satisfying of the “Scene on Radio” outcomes: the awareness, underscored in all episodes, that there is work to do—and that it can be done. “For people on the receiving end of these forms of oppression, and have been more harmed by the lack of democracy we have in this country, it’s all late. But yes, there’s a sense in which it feels like we’re in a particularly dire situation. And yeah, the two biggies for me are, are we still going to have any semblance of a democracy three years from now? And are we going to have a livable planet a few decades from now?” And the way his cohosts challenge Biewen, he challenges his listeners. “It may be that one of the reasons his audience is not [even] larger is because it is so challenging,” says Barth. “We’re at a moment where really taking a critical look at so many assumptions about what’s behind this society is supremely uncomfortable and actually in the end really depressing.” But the way Biewen and Westervelt focus the current season on ways to address the climate crisis has been in the previous seasons all along. “Scene on Radio” brings up issues to understand, face, and try to resolve them. It’s not about doomsaying. “I don’t ever come away from it with a feeling of hopelessness,” Barth says. “It’s like, ‘Now I’m getting closer to 100 percent of the story.’ ” Warts and all, Biewen is committed to sharing the whole story. He’s still got that bicycle, after all, though he says he hasn’t ridden it in years. Perhaps it stands for work to do, places to get to. n DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

THE

weight OF

In the jungles of Peru, Duke researchers are helping communities resolve complex health issues.

GOLD BY CORBIE HILL

SLOW RIVER, FAST BOATS: The Peruvian Navy rushed sick Madre de Dios villagers to regional hospitals at the request of Duke researchers.

he flight from Lima to Cusco takes an hour and twenty minutes, and the road from Cusco into the highlands climbs to nearly 20,000 feet. From there it descends, unpaved and passing along cliffs and through cloud forest and eventually into jungle over the course of ten, twelve hours. At the bottom is a little town, and from there one travels by river, because there are no more roads. The Rio Madre de Dios flows through a Peruvian department, or state, of the same name. Bill Pan, a joint Duke Global Health Institute and Nicholas School of the Environment associate professor of global environmental health, and Ernesto Ortiz, senior manager of programs at DGHI’s Global Health Innovation Center, have traveled this Amazon tributary, studying methylmercury exposures related to widespread artisanal gold mining. It’s a complex public-health issue with no easy solution. Consider: The activity that is poisoning the soil, the river, the people is also one of the only livelihoods in the rainforests of Madre de Dios. “They don’t have any other way to bring food to the table,” Ortiz says. Nestled in a remote corner of Peru and bordered by Brazil and Bolivia, the South Carolina-sized region (with a population smaller than Durham—much smaller) of Madre de Dios has historically been neglected by authorities and racked with poverty. For centuries, it has attracted outsiders who extract resources, then leave, with locals doing the dangerous work. First they came for rubber, in the 1800s. Then they came for timber. Since the 1960s, it’s been small-scale, largely unregulated gold mining—artisanal gold mining, as it’s commonly called—which requires mercury for the extraction process. Pervasive exposure to this heavy metal has resulted in high rates of anemia and likely affected fetal development.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz

“A lot of them said,

Yet that single public-health thread—methylmercury exposure—leads to a tangle of others. Miners live crowded together and work in unsanitary conditions; alcohol, prostitution, HIV, and tuberculosis are rampant. Away from mining towns, tiny gold mining on the rise again, though, they know there’s no indigenous communities are seeing emergency-level mercury substitute for another trip to Madre de Dios. exposures—fish, a dietary staple, carries the toxin. Beyond that, “Even though some of the research activities have slowed the majority of mining is illegal, and attracts other illegalities, down, the nexus with the communities and even authorities such as narcotrafficking. Peru, too, remains highly centralized, is still going,” Peruvian colleague Ana Maria Morales says in so all policy decisions are made far away, in coastal Lima, where Spanish, as translated by Ortiz. Duke “is very sensitive to the the government turns over quite often. And international deneeds of the community,” she says, adding that “the region has mand for gold—for jewelry, for electronics—remains the drivbenefited a lot” because of the evidence generated from, and ing force behind the entire crisis. communicated locally by, the researchers. A Duke team led by Pan and Ortiz has been at the forefront Although Morales has held her share of high-profile pubof science-based change in the region for ten years, exhauslic-health positions over the span of three decades—currently: tively studying mercury exposures in rural Madre de Dios and executive director of Peru’s Central Nacional de Salud Interadvising the Peruvian government on public-policy intervencultural at the National Institute of Health of Peru; previoustions. This was all interrupted by COVID-19, and the Duke ly: regional director of health directorate in Huánuco, head of team found itself absent from Peru for far too long. Many epidemiology at the Peruvian Ministry of Health, founder of gains made in Madre de Dios—which hardly thrives during a Madre de Dios NGO CENSAP, to name a few—she is first good year—were lost. and foremost a doctor in her home region of Huánuco. She is Yet Pan and Ortiz are ready to return. They’ve also Duke’s primary liaison and closest ally remained connected to rural communities and the in its work in Madre de Dios. BIRD'S EYE VIEW: The Peruvian government; they’ve continued the work Pre-pandemic, Pan would travel to Peru Alto Madre de Dios as best as possible from a distance. With artisanal every other month. He was supposed to reis home to several indigenous communities from different ethnic backgrounds. On the left is Manu National Park—a world biodiversity hot spot.

52 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz

‘Well, we can make more money in gold turn last summer, but a visa issue coincided with U.S. embassy closures. Now, he’s aiming to finally return in January or February. There’s a pediatric study of in utero mercury exposure, for one, that has been paused since February 2020 and needs restarting. “I hope Duke continues the work, or actually gets more presence in the region, because things have slowed down a lot,” Morales says.

rtiz was born in Pittsburgh to Peruvian parents. The family returned to Peru after his physician father finished his residency, and from the age of four, Ortiz was raised in Lima. He didn’t spend too much time outside the capital as a child thanks to terrorism, violence, and economic crisis. By his late teens, Peru had stabilized, and Ortiz found a passion for travel. Then he attended med school, through which he got to know his country’s rural interior. Ortiz returned to the United States for a master’s in public health from the University of Iowa, where he remained for five

mining.’ ”

years to study infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans. In 2007, he returned to Peru, researching tropical infectious diseases at Naval Medical Research Unit Six (NAMRU-6) in Lima. Pan started working in Peru in 2004 and met Ortiz during his four years at NAMRU-6. Pan, who was with Johns Hopkins University at the time, originally studied malaria, child diarrhea, and cysticercosis in the country. In 2011, Pan and Ortiz both came to Duke. That year, Pan investigated how the construction of the Interoceanic Highway through Madre de Dios affected malaria rates. Environmental disturbance such as new road construction brings people in contact with disease vectors like insects and wild animals. Pan oversaw a two-stage population study along the new highway, but a high attrition rate among field workers dragged what should have been two or three months of data collection into more like nine. “A lot of them said, ‘Well, we can make more money in gold mining,’ ” Pan recalls. “After about two weeks, we lost three field workers out of ten. After four weeks we lost eight field workers out of ten. And these weren’t people that were

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

“Our work started on something and has gone beyond that specific work on heavy metals. No one has created a

relationship with the community we have.”

Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz 54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

uneducated. We had nurses. We had biologists. We had a veterinarian.” Pan found no malaria in the region—and he’s not sure why—but when he returned to Durham, he sought researchers at Pratt and the Nicholas School experienced in issues related to small-scale gold mining and mercury. He met with Ortiz, and they planned a 2012 return to the region. “I was like, ‘Hey, you know, I know that area pretty well,’ ” says Ortiz, who averaged monthly Madre de Dios trips during his time at NAMRU-6. Pan and Ortiz and their team traveled the Rio Madre de Dios by iN THE FIELD: boat, stopping at small communiTop left, the team ties of 100 or 200 people to test for helps evacuate a mercury exposures. Nobody knew sick woman to the them or were even expecting them hospital; nurse Reyna in many cases. The team planned Gutierrez takes a ahead, though. It helped that Orblood sample; DGHI’s tiz is Peruvian American and an Ortiz during an M.D., and he wore a white coat to anemia screening; ease first impressions. Before destudents Charlotte scending into the river basin, the Lee '15 and Axel team had presented its study to Berky M.E.M. '14 teach the health directorate of Madre de Peruvian children Dios, so Ortiz carried printed letabout oral hygiene. ters signed by the regional health authority. He would start with the local health provider, who would then introduce him to the community authority. In indigenous villages especially, the team would then present the study to the entire community, and without the authorization of everyone, it could not proceed. “We did this in every community,” Ortiz says. Some communities pushed back. Some communities said no. Another researcher came a year ago, residents would say. They took samples and never came back. Why should I trust you? The Madre de Dios region has historically been forgotten by authorities, Morales notes, so there’s a lot of mistrust. A large percentage of the population is indigenous, of various ethnicities, and there was often a difference of cosmologies between scientists and residents. Research practices could clash with tradition, Morales adds. In some cultures, a baby’s first haircut is given by what amounts to their godfather. Taking a hair sample from an infant violates this tradition. “There’s lot of communication that has to happen,” Morales says. “There’s an intercultural approach we have to take and an intercultural dialogue, because we have to understand very well and be very humble in the way we approach them.” In gold-mining towns, the nature of the study—mercury exposures related to artisanal gold mining—made miners

wary. You’re going to shut us down, they said. You’re against us. You’re environmentalists. “And we’re like, ‘No, we’re not environmentalists. We are taking care of your health,’ ” says Ortiz. “We just want to come up with recommendations of how to make your work safer for you and your family.’ ”

n its comprehensive map of mercury exposures across the watershed, the team found clear spatial clustering of high levels. It was high in locations where mining occurred, naturally, but also in indigenous communities that had no mining activity. Fish is a major dietary staple in these communities, which leads to increased mercury exposure. Across the region, 62 percent of the population’s mercury levels exceeded the EPA’s threshold of one microgram of mercury per gram of hair, or, 48 percent exceeded the WHO’s threshold of two micrograms. “It was extremely high among women of childbearing age and very high among children,” Pan says. By now it was 2015, and these data were the result of three studies over the course of several years in Madre de Dios. The Duke team shared its results with the Peruvian government— no response. Morales, terrified by the findings, stepped into action. “She began contacting all the people that she knows in the Ministry of Health and said, ‘You need to pay attention to this, because this is a major problem,’ ” Pan says. By May 2016, Morales had organized a meeting in Lima with multiple government ministries. Ortiz, Pan, and collaborators Luis Fernandez of Wake Forest University and Beth Feingold of SUNY Albany (formerly of Duke’s Nicholas School and Global Health Institute) presented their preliminary data, meeting with ministers and outlining different interventions to limit or reduce mercury exposures. “That day they declared a state of emergency in Madre de Dios,” Pan says. It accomplished nothing. First off, it was the Peruvian government’s usual intervention, says Morales: Send in the military and blow up mining equipment, which neither helps miners find alternative livelihoods nor builds partnerships with communities. Secondly, Pan says, the minister who declared the state of emergency was out of power by July, and the new minister defunded it. Beyond that, an attendee at the meeting in Lima leaked the mercury exposure map to The Guardian, which published it. As a result, Pan says, three journals rejected the paper. Peru— or any country—needs peer-reviewed, published scientific research to set long-term policy, he explains. With the paper delayed, so were science-based interventions in Madre de Dios. “It really hurt Peru,” Pan says. Duke teams continued to travel to Peru, such as the 2018 Bass Connections project that brought Chris Lara (M.I.D.P. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

FIELD VISIT: From left, Ernesto Ortiz, Nicholas School associate professor of molecular environmental toxicology Joel Meyer, Axel Berky M.E.M. '14, and Bill Pan at a biological station

“Universities and research institutions have many of the assets that [policymakers] might actually need to back up decisions and be stronger. But everything is about building

’19) to Rio Madre de Dios. After a career with the United Nations, where he worked in political affairs and humanitarian diplomacy during crises, Lara attended Duke as a Rotary Peace Fellow and is now a DGHI senior policy adviser with a focus on science diplomacy. That was the year of the second meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention on Mercury (COP-2) in Geneva, Switzerland, which had ratified an international treaty six years prior to limit mercury pollution. Lara attended as a representative of the Duke Gold Team. He had 56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

bridges.”

decided to stay involved in Peru, but from the diplomacy side. “In 2019, we came back [to Peru], now with a bigger team from Duke,” Lara says, “and with a closer relationship with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Environment.” When Lara joined, Pan says, his UN experience brought theories of change and science diplomacy to the team. Lara identified connections with non-government entities that partner with government entities and opened new channels to government ministries. “Universities and research institutions have many of the assets that [policymakers] might actually need to Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz

back up decisions and be stronger,” Lara says. “But everything is about building bridges.” By this point, there was a new health minister in Lima. Another state of emergency was declared in 2019. Rather than destroy mining equipment, the military was sent in as a police presence to enforce existing laws relating to where and how legal mining can take place. Out of this state of emergency came an attempt at a formalization process, which would make it easier for illegal miners to operate legally. “It was a good effort, but it just didn’t work,” Pan says. “They came at it from a much more community partnership point of view than they did the first time, which was good.” Indeed, Duke-led science diplomacy—the use of peer-reviewed research to drive public policy—was gaining incremental ground in Peru. The second state of emergency slowed down artisanal mining in Madre de Dios in 2019, Pan says. The team was seeing results. “Now, 2020 hit. COVID comes, and mining anecdotally is going back up pretty rapidly.”

n Peru, the pandemic-driven economic crisis is pushing people back into mining, Morales says. Duke has played a major role in generating evidence of artisanal gold mining’s health impacts, but with fieldwork paused and research funds lacking, there is a growing gap of evidence being generated, she says. He and Ortiz speak glowingly about the contributions of their colleagues at Wake Forest University—any success in Madre de Dios is a success, period. And the Duke team remains as active as it can from a distance. “Our work started on something and has gone beyond that specific work on heavy metals,” Morales says. “No one has created a relationship with the community we have.” Aside from documenting anemia’s prevalence in mercury-exposed communities, Morales continues, Duke researchers would give residents rapid tests and inform the local health post of individual cases. In indigenous communities, the Duke team also found and reported hepatitis-B outbreaks that would have otherwise gone undetected. Duke has intervened to have critically ill villagers rushed to regional hospi-

Courtesy Ernesto Ortiz

tals. In September 2021, in fact, Ortiz and Morales contacted Peruvian officials on behalf of two sick infants in remote Manú National Park, and they are in part responsible for the rapid dispatch of a Peruvian Army helicopter that airlifted the babies to the Puerto Maldonado hospital. Around the same time, Pan was also contacted by the former Peruvian minister of health, who was connecting him with a person in the ministry who wants to take action on gold mining and mercury exposure. On top of that, Pan is an appointed scientific team member for a Ministry of Environment group related to the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Indeed, high-level work continues, and connections to Madre de Dios remain strong, even as a return trip to Peru is critically overdue. And the Duke team keeps the driving force behind this crisis in mind as it pushes for better outcomes. “There’s a lot of demand for gold,” Ortiz says. “As long as there’s the high demand and not awareness, and the end users are us, we should make sure that we demand from our sellers to track where their gold is coming from.” n

MERCURY EVERYWHERE: This map illustrates emergency-level mercury exposures in Madre de Dios based on multiple studies done over the course of several years. A 2016 press leak made it public prematurely and delayed science diplomacy interventions.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukePROFILE

Once upon an

island

How a love of endangered leatherback turtles brought two alumni together.

BY ANTON ZUIKER

ate one sun-drenched afternoon in May, on the southwest tip of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Kelly Stewart Ph.D. ’08 was kneeling on the empty beach of the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge when the park ranger pulled up on his all-terrain vehicle to see what she was doing. A low peninsula with nearly three miles of uninterrupted, stunningly beautiful white sandy beach, the 327-acre refuge is one of the largest leatherback sea turtle nesting sites in the U.S. and its territories. It is almost always closed to the public so that endangered leatherback and hawksbill turtles, and the threatened green turtles, can use the beach safely. Stewart had special privileges to be there—she manages the local turtle-conservation project—and she and an assistant were 58 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

carefully sifting the area from which tiny leatherback turtles had hatched and emerged the night before. Counting the left-behind shells, they uncovered four stragglers still absorbing the yolk of their eggs. Stewart gathered them into a soft-sided bucket for safekeeping until dark, when she would release them to the water and wish them well on their life of swimming the oceans. Eventually, Stewart drove the turtles in her own ATV to where Aaron Hutchins M.E.M. ’04 and his family were sitting, there for the few hours in which locals are allowed to fish from the beach. Hutchins was born on the island and has been coming to Sandy Point since before it was a federal property. U.S. Fish and Wildlife rules prohibit touching the baby turtles or taking photos, so he and his family leaned over the bucket to marvel at the

five-inch-long, soft-looking turtles and their AT REST: Green turtle after nestoutsized front flippers. ing at dawn at As they chatted, Stewart and Hutchins Sandy Point. realized that they had been students at the Duke Marine Lab at the same time: In 2004, Hutchins was finishing his studies at the Nicholas School of the Environment while Stewart was in her second year of pursuing a doctorate in marine ecology. They didn’t know it then, but their dedication to these turtles would bring them together on this sun-drenched peninsula. Standing above the hatchlings, they confirmed details about Stewart’s upcoming Turtle Day education and fundraising event that Hutchins soon would host at his business—the LeatherPhoto courtesy Kelly Stewart.

back Brewing Company. Maker of several popular brews, including Beach Life Blonde Ale and Island Life Lager, the company sports a leatherback turtle logo on its cans. The leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the largest of the sea turtle species. Considered endangered and protected by international treaties, the species was thriving in the Atlantic during the 1990s and 2000s, says Stewart. For the last decade, however, leatherback nests have been declining at all of the major nesting beaches in the Northwest Atlantic, including St. Croix. What’s happening to the turtles? Stewart and her peers want to know if they’re simply switching beaches—she and her colleagues in Puerto Rico regularly compare data—or if they’re disappearing from the seas, and why. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukePROFILE

Since childhood, Stewart has been curious about the ocean and the creatures that live in and near it. She grew up far from the Caribbean— in northern Ontario, Canada—but her curiosity about the ocean and its ecosystems started early. She spent parts of her childhood visiting Northern Ireland, her birthGROWTH: Above, students measure Rosie the place. She wandered a priturtle as she leaves the beach at Sandy Point; right, vate beach with dreams of Stewart and Hutchins. being a marine biologist or a foreign correspondent. Her professors at the University of Guelph further fueled her interest in marine biology, ported by a grant to do sea turtle genetics work around the and after graduating, she continued to soak up whatever she Caribbean and other places the turtles may go. could about sea turtle behavior. By the time she saw her first The beach is where she does the fieldwork, but she retreats to leatherback turtle in 1998 (just south of Avon, North Carolia seaside cottage in Frederiksted just down from the refuge to na, at the time the farthest north for a confirmed leatherback compile the data, and once nesting season is over, she’ll return nest), she’d been mailing letters to most of the authors in the to San Diego to work with colleagues to analyze the data. first edition of Biology of the Sea Turtle. Jeanette Wyneken, a “This is a lifestyle,” she says, eyes twinkling. professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, Hutchins’ island life has spanned roles in government, adinvited her to do her master’s work there; she mentored Stewvocacy, community development, eco-tourism, and business, all with a goal to protect the natural environment of the Virgin Islands and a commitment to keeping active and strengthening community. There was the childhood spent scampering about in the St. Croix bush, art as she documented leatherback nesting on Florida’s central where he’s now leading a nonprofit organization constructing Atlantic coast—work featured by science writer Carl Safina in multi-use trails. There was a job as director of the U.S.V.I. his book Voyage of the Turtle. Environmental Protection Division, which meant protecting In 2001, Stewart presented her leatherback research at the waters throughout the territory, including around the famous annual sea turtle symposium in Philadelphia. Larry Crowder, national park on St. John and at the Buck Island marine sancthen a Duke professor of environment, was there, too. Struck tuary. He also worked to develop the nation’s first coral-reef by her intellectual spark and the data she’d already collected, he indicators under the Clean Water Act. Then, as V.I. and Puerencouraged her to consider Duke’s doctoral program. to Rico program director for the Nature Conservancy, he “Kelly has made extraordinary contributions on her own worked to launch coral reef restoration programs and land and in teams that she’s worked with,” says Crowder, now at conservation strategies. Stanford University. Throughout her career, he says, “she’s And, of course, the turtles: seeing them at Sandy Point and maintained the Kelly Stewart authenticity.” around St. Croix, and then again during college when he travToday, Stewart is director of the St. Croix Leatherback Projeled to Costa Rica to support a research project on leatherect, a collaboration of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the backs, and now on the cans of the beer he’s proud to produce Washington D.C.-based Ocean Foundation, where she is a on the island. research scientist. She also collaborates with the Marine Turtle “I wanted to name something after the leatherback turtle Genetics Program of the federal Southwest Fisheries Science for a long time,” he says, sitting on the beach where he learned Center in La Jolla, California (NOAA-NMFS), and she is supto swim.

“We’re getting close to having a perfect genetic match between a hatchling and a nesting female.”

60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

BORN: Above, a Hutchins and his business partrecent hatchling and ners opened Leatherback Brewing mother leatherback; Company in 2017, the same year Stewart, left, and that hurricanes Irma and Maria Makayla Kelso reloswept over the island. They persecate hawksbill sea vered and soon were honored as turtle eggs that were the St. Croix Chamber of Comlaid by a roadside. merce New Business of the Year and certified as a VI Clean Coasts eco-business that is helping to reduce the influx of single-use plastic in the USVI. Now they have a brewpub on St. Thomas and are distributing their beer to Puerto Rico, the British Virgin Islands, and Florida—not far from where Stewart first studied leatherbacks. A female leatherback will leave up to fourteen nests each season, and turtles that visit Sandy Point also will drop eggs on Culebra Island, Puerto Rico, and other islands in the Caribbean, says Stewart, during a coffee break in July. It was the end of the leatherback nesting season, and her team had counted just ninety-seven nests from twenty-seven individual leatherback turtles. In the 2000s, there had been 500 to 700 leatherback nests at Sandy Point each season. But Stewart and her team had recently seen a turtle named Rosie back on the beach. “She’s the fifth-biggest leatherback turtle ever observed at Sandy Point, and she still has the flipper tag—PPQ244—that was put on her in 1999.” Rosie’s carapace, not including head, tail, and flippers, measures 174

centimeters; that’s about five feet, eight inches. The average nesting female leatherback measures 153 centimeters and weighs up to 1,000 pounds. Rosie is a grandmother by now. Female leatherbacks usually return to nest at the same beach or a beach in the region where they themselves hatched. With genetic samples from the hatchlings at Sandy Point, Stewart will be able to learn more about the family histories of these turtles and their behavior, including how soon a female leatherback is sexually mature (likely ten to fourteen years). “We’re getting close to having a perfect genetic match between a hatchling and a nesting female,” she says. Duke students are part of that developing science. Stewart co-teaches the Duke “Sea Turtle Ecology” class on Culebra and Sandy Point. (The Nicholas School is waiting to learn whether next spring’s trip can proceed, depending on COVID restrictions.) In the field, Stewart tells students and volunteers to put away their cameras and pay attention to the behavior of the turtles—to learn to anticipate a turtle by recognizing the smell of wet sand turned over the by strong flippers, to listen to the entranced breathing of the turtles as they drop their eggs into the caverns they’ve dug, or to see the shark bites and fishing-line injuries that chronicle a turtle’s life in the seas. Blog posts written by Duke students on those trips reflect Stewart’s gentle teaching and the majesty of the turtles in their environment. Stewart was eager to finish her coffee and get back to building that database of leatherback genetic data. Across the island, Hutchins was on his way to the brewery and his island adventures shop. And out in the ocean, leatherback turtles were circulating, hunting for jellyfish, and waiting for dark. n Zuiker is a research-communications specialist in the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He blogs about Eastern box turtles at smol. zuiker.com.

Photos courtesy Kelly Stewart. All photos were taken under appropriate endangered species permits at Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukeNEWSMAKERS Karen Winkfield Ph.D. ’04, M.D. ’05 was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board by the Biden administration to help guide federal initiatives that focus on cancer.

Heather Vacek M.Div. ’06, Th.D. ’12 has joined Moravian Theological Seminary as its next dean and vice president.

Kafui Dzirasa, Ph.D. ’07, M.D. ’09, H ’16 was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Lisa Borders ’79, a Duke trustee, featured the inaugural Duke University Women’s Impact Network (WIN) Scholars, Idalis French ’19 and Katie Taylor M.E.M. ’21, on her podcast “Enlightened.”

Suzanne McCormick ’89 became the first woman CEO of the YMCA.

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto A.M. ’03, Ph.D. ’07 was named dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas.

Gechi Tesic ’11 joined the Dallas office of the Polsinelli law firm in its securities and corporate finance practice group.

Jainey Bavishi ’03, an expert on responding to the challenges of climate change, has been selected as a deputy at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

62 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

J.J. Redick ’06 has retired from the NBA after fifteen seasons. Redick is Duke’s all-time leading scorer with 2,769 points in his college career and remains its alltime leader in three-pointers (457) and free-throw accuracy (91.2 percent).

Frederic Bouchard Ph.D. ’02 was elected to the Royal Society of Canada—a prestigious council of Canadian scholars focused on promoting learning and research in the arts, the humanities, and the sciences.

Deb Wojcik ’97 M.A.T. ’00, M.E.M. ’00 has been named the director of the Research Triangle Cleantech Cluster, an initiative of business, government, academic, and nonprofit leaders focused on accelerating the growth of the Research Triangle region’s clean-technology economy. Wojcik was the managing director of graduate programs and services for the Pratt School of Engineering and the Nicholas School of the Environment.

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. All photos courtesy the individual unless noted

ENGAGEMENTForeverDuke Sterly Wilder ’83 Senior associate vice president, engagement and development

Chris Hildreth

Celebrating our Founders…

ach fall, the university community gathers to celebrate the founding of Duke—members of the Duke family and the giants on whose shoulders we have stood, those men and women who helped make our university the extraordinary place it is today. Many of these names are on buildings, quads, classrooms, and iconic spaces. However, there are also many who have given their all to Duke through their service and commitment, the unsung heroes who make our campus beautiful every day, who take care of our students and facilities…the list goes on. Founders Weekend is a time to celebrate our past, and each year we honor all of these men and women. For a young university—almost 100 (which is barely reaching teenager status for some of our peers)—we have come so far in large part due to the visionary leadership, commitment, and loyalty of all of our founders. Each fall, we celebrate during this special weekend on campus, and for a few important moments, the university stops to reflect on its past and enjoy its present, while looking ahead to the bright future and opportunities ahead. TRIBUTE: Mario This year’s Founders Weekend Moore stands (September 23-26) was particularly by his painting special as we also celebrated the Class of Wilhelmina of 2020 commencement. For the first Reuben-Cooke, which hangs in time in two years, we awarded Uni- the renamed versity Medals, and we named the So- building. ciology-Psychology Building in honor and memory of our beloved alumna, trustee, and friend, Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke ’67. For me, the weekend was quite emotional. To see our beloved campus alive again on a beautiful fall weekend and to celebrate what is great about this place we call home filled me with joy. In the University Medals ceremony, we honored Peter Nicholas ’64, cofounder of global medical device company Boston Scientific Corporation, who, with his family, gave the naming gift for the Nicholas School of the Environment; Rick Wagoner ’75, former Duke trustee and

Photography by Duke University Communications

former president of General Motors; and posthumously, Maryanne Black, former associate vice president for community relations for the Duke University Health System. We also presented the Distinguished Alumni Award to Sue Gordon ’81, a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke and former principal deputy director of national intelligence; and the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award to public policy professor Bruce Jentleson. The Friday afternoon ceremony to name Sociology-Psy-

chology (or Soc-Psych, as we always called it) was an extraordinary celebration of the life of Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, but more important, for me and for many who knew her, it was a time to celebrate her leadership, her love for Duke, and what her life meant to so many. As one of the first five Black undergraduate students, she was the strength and the glue that held her classmates together. We also heard that she was the strength and the glue that held her family together, and that she exhibited these qualities in her work, her commitment to Duke and The Duke Endowment, and in everything she touched in her life. While the Class of 2020 Commencement was long overdue (but much appreciated), the graduation ceremonies spoke to our present and future. The University Medalists and the Reuben-Cooke dedication spoke to our past. We often talk about the Duke family and its significant and life-changing contributions. But it is also the many who have followed in their steps, those whom we celebrate each fall, that reminds us of where we have been and how far we have come. n

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukeMINI

Engineering victory Three former Duke football players created a business from one bad break and lots of teamwork.

eople often warn, “Don’t start a company with your friends.” But Kevin Gehsmann B.S.E. ’19, Clark Bulleit B.S.E. ’19, now a first-year medical student at Duke, and Tim Skapek B.S.E. ’20, all former Duke football players and Pratt School of Engineering alumni, didn’t listen to that advice. Leveraging their Duke experience, the trio founded PROTECT3D, a company that makes custom protective splints, pads, and braces for athletes using 3D printing. Since launching in 2019, the business has taken off. They’ve won more than $100,000 in awards and grants and brought in more than $1.25 million in private funding. They’ve opened an FDA-regulated 3D printing manufacturing facility in downtown Durham, and they’ve partnered with Duke, North Carolina State University, and professional football and hockey teams to bring their custom products to athletes. They even created an iPad app that allows athletic trainers to do body scans of athletes to get accurate measurements for the printed gear. Gehsmann, Bulleit, and Skapek were just three Pratt undergraduates experimenting with 3D-printed protective athletic gear in Duke’s Innovation Co-Lab in 2018

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when Duke’s then quarterback, Daniel Jones ’19, broke his left collarbone in a game. Hap Zarzour, executive director of athletic medicine at Duke, had heard about their work and asked them to print a pad to protect Jones’ collarbone following his surgery. Less than three weeks later, Jones was back out on the field, wearing one of their 3D-printed pads. “I don’t think any of the three of us thought to ourselves, ‘All right, our focus for the next year is we need to figure out how we can start a company,’ ” Skapek says. “Instead, we started out by applying our learning to help some teammates.” As for that old saying about working with your friends, the difference maker is that the trio entered entrepreneurship straight from a football-team environment: playing together, showing up for each other, everyone giving their best effort. It built a bond of trust that carries over to their business. TEAMWORK: From “If you’ve gone to battle with left, Clark Bulleit, your friends,” Gehsmann says, Kevin Gehsmann, “then that’s a little bit different.” and Tim Skapek

—Christina Holder

Taking on the perpetrators, supporting the victims At a Los Angeles middle school in 2020, a student targeted an Asian American classmate with twenty punches to the head.

anjusha Kulkarni ’91, a Los Angeles community activist and attorney, knew she had to act. She met with the family of the injured student, worked with local school district officials on behalf of the family, and held a press conference to take a stand against violence against Asian Americans—a soaring statistic in 2020’s pandemic year. The boy’s family, weighing the thought of leaving the U.S. in the face of such a personal threat, said they appreciated Kulkarni’s advocacy so much that they changed their minds.

CHANGEMAKER: “They felt like they belonged,” she Manjusha Kulkarni says. says her socialIt was a meaningful moment for justice interests Kulkarni, who recently was named began at Duke. one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 for her work on behalf of Asian Americans. It reminded her of why she is devoted to this work, she says. It also marked a turning point that mobilized Kulkarni, the executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council in Los Angeles, an advocacy organization, to launch Stop AAPI Hate. The group, cofounded with Rus-

sell Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, and Cynthia Choi, the co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco, supports Asians and Pacific Islanders who have experienced acts of violence and discrimination. The group swiftly went into action, creating an online form that allows victims to report accounts of violence and hate against them, and to find resources to support them through what often is a traumatic experience. Stop AAPI Hate follows up with law enforcement about the logged incidents—nearly 10,000 to date—and works with local governmental human rights agencies, that track hate incidents and advocate for policies and laws to protect the Asian American community. The group’s efforts are paying off. A recent study conducted by the Asian American Psychological Association revealed that a third of people who had filled out Stop AAPI Hate’s online reporting form said they experienced lower stress levels after submitting their account. As the study notes, the organization has had an impact on improving the mental health of Asian Americans following traumatic experiences, since those who have experienced racism show more symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, among other ailments. Kulkarni’s advocacy work for the Asian community in California has earned her recMyleen Hollero ognition as a 2014 Champion of Change by former President Barack Obama and brought her to the current White House to advocate for change. Kulkarni says she can see the beginnings of her career fighting for social justice by looking back at her time at Duke. She grew up in an Indian American family in the Deep South and came to Duke as one of under twenty South Asian American and Indian American students. She formed a tight-knit group of friends and in between pursuing her political science major and women’s studies certificate, she helped start Spectrum—a student-led group representing students of color. “We need to address what is happening now,” she says, “and work to prevent it from happening again.” —Christina Holder

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDuke PROGRAM Uniting to make change By Bridgette A. Lacy

raditionally, college graduates support their alma maters. But a group of Black college graduates from various institutions, ranging from Howard University to Duke, believe their voices would be more persuasive and more effective by speaking in concert to address common concerns. Duke will be hosting the Black Alumni Collective National Conference April 28-May 1. The theme of the conference is A.S.C.E.N.D: Amplify, Serve, Connect, Excel, Network, and Diversify, according to Tadena Simpson ’05, conference cochair of the Black Alumni Collective Planning Committee. The collective was created in Atlanta in the fall of 2018; the conference was developed by alumni leaders to help unpack new opportunities, examine trends, and share best practices. One of the missions of the conference is to connect Black student leaders at the various colleges with alumni to advance progress on campus and beyond. “We want to go forward, go higher…there’s power in a collective voice,” says Sanders Adu ’94, conference co-chair of the planning committee. “We are targeting 500 Black alumni from more than fifty schools. We have reached out to HBCUs, large state schools, and private schools.” The four-day event will be a combination of in-person and virtual events. It will include networking sessions, along with panel discussions, including lessons on Black leadership, the power of Black media, Black girl magic, healthcare disparities, and Black protest in sports, Simpson says. “There will be something for everyone.” The group plans to invite prominent speakers in the arts, politics, and health. In addition, conference attendees can tour Duke’s campus and take note of Black contributions to Duke’s history, like Duke Chapel, designed by Julian Abele and the recently christened Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke Building, named for one of Duke’s first Black undergraduate students. She went on to become a lawyer, law professor, university administrator, and trustee for both the university and The Duke Endowment. Prominent Black business owners will also be highlighted, with the goal to support Durham’s Black business owners. “One of our panels is around Black Wall Street, which will feature Durham and Tulsa and their legacies,” Adu says. n For more information about the conference, check out https://blackalumnicollective.org/.

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DUKEISEVERYWHERE Hawaii ALUMNI:

1,107

INSTAGRAM: @the.carmen.sandiego

oving during a pandemic is hard. But when the destination is Hawaii, it softens the landing. It was only a few months ago that Carmen Hoyt ’18 made the island of O’ahu her new home after taking a research-assistant role at the Oceanic Institute of Hawaii Pacific University. Growing up in southwest Florida, Hoyt spent her days kayaking, surfing, and paddle boarding— anything sun-soaked and adrift over water. The ocean mattered so much to her that she knew she wanted to play a

role in its conservation. She credits the Duke Marine Lab for helping to secure her first internship. “Whether you’re considering marine biology, or only studying a summer or semester there, take the opportunity seriously,” Hoyt says. Now, working to protect some of Hawaii’s endemic species against a growing tourism industry, Hoyt says that good stewardship is about striking a balance. After all, the ocean is a resource that helps us discover both new and far-off places and our inner selves. n

ForeverDukeAWARDS

The Art of Change The year 2020 changed the world as we know it. These Duke alumni showed us that in the midst of unspeakable difficulty, we can lift up each other, come together, make change that has the power to change us all. The Duke Alumni Changemaker Award is a one-time award honoring individuals across schools who made a difference for their communities and the world in pandemic year 2020.

Shana S. Abraham ’12 The daughter of Indian immigrants to the U.S., Abraham wrote Rise: How Empowering Women Elevates Us All after experiencing societal norms she describes as discriminating against her gender. She wrote the book to create accessible strategies to help everyone promote women’s empowerment and gender equality. Her mantra: “Anyone can be a changemaker: You just need the right tools.”

Todra L. Anderson ’87 As the CMO of Memorial Hospital Miramar, Florida, Anderson led more than 1,500 physicians and allied health professionals in the fight against COVID-19, including special teams that worked to ensure safety and excellence were upheld. Most notably, Anderson worked with her city’s African American community to build trust, talk about the vaccine, and empower informed decisionmaking.

Darin Buxbaum B.S.E. ’03 As stay-at-home orders were enacted across the U.S., Buxbaum got to work. He set up phone trees to connect isolated seniors served by Wider Circle, a community health organization he cofounded in Silver Spring, Maryland; established a free COVID-19 hotline for seniors

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to ask questions about the virus; and partnered with Uber, food banks, and chefs to provide weekly food, hygiene supply, and medication deliveries. The result was more than 1,500 vulnerable seniors receiving 82 tons of food and supplies and 180,000 meals.

Kathryn S. Crutcher ’00 As a Duke history major and former teacher, Crutcher set out to share a more representative history of the U.S. than she could find in current textbooks and children’s books. She founded Shout Mouse Press (SMP), a nonprofit writing and publishing program committed to amplifying unheard voices. In 2020, Crutcher developed a mentoring program for Black teenage writers, who wrote children’s books about 2020’s dual pandemics—COVID-19 and racial injustice.

Bianca M. Forde ’05 In 2020, Forde leveraged her position as a federal prosecutor to become an activist challenging judicial-system policies that disproportionately affect communities of color. She organized a national movement to stand against inequitable policies, conducted trainings on how prosecutorial discretion can and must be used to rebalance the scales of justice, and wrote a memoir about her experience: Prosecuted Prosecutor: A Memoir & Blueprint for Prosecutor-led Criminal Justice Reform.

Magan Thigpen Gonzales-Smith M.P.P. ’14 As the first executive director of the nonprofit Durham Public Schools Foundation, Gonzales-Smith mobilized more than 1,000 community members and partnered with more than twenty-five restaurants to provide more than 700,000 meals to children and families. In Durham public schools, more than half of school-aged children typically receive meal assistance.

Matthew Hepburn B.S.E. ’92, M.D. ’96 Hepburn, a former Army physician, has spent much of his career preparing for the COVID-19 pandemic, working in policy and clinical trial roles. As the vaccine development lead for Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government’s effort to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market quickly, Hepburn worked closely with Dr. Anthony Fauci and led a vaccine-management team of more than 100 in six separate vaccine-development efforts valued at $6 billion.

Shandiin H. Herrera ’19 A 2019 Terry Sanford Leadership awardee, Herrera has paved a path of public service. In 2020, she joined Lead For America to work as a policy analyst with 110 Navajo tribal governments as

part of the Navajo Nation. When the pandemic shut down offices, the chapters were unable to allocate funds for relief despite having a budget; many community members were left without access to basic necessities. With the women of her community, Herrera raised more than $17 million through crowdfunding to benefit the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund, which has provided weekly distribution of food, personal protection equipment, and cleaning supplies, and will help establish a nonprofit for sustained community assistance such as ensuring the Navajo Nation has access to clean water, Internet access, and affordable housing.

Michael Johnson ’04 As an assistant immunobiology professor at the University of Arizona, Johnson spearheaded efforts to create the Nation-

al Summer Undergraduate Research Project during a COVID-19 summer when many internships were canceled. The initiative created rewarding remote summer research opportunities for 250 BIPOC undergraduate students in the microbial sciences, including the opportunity for students to be mentored by experts, attend professional-development seminars, and present their summer research via a virtual platform.

Grace C. Kohn B.S.E. ’14 In early 2020, Kohn cofounded SheSyndicate, a nonprofit organization in partnership with the UN Capital Development Fund and Artesian Capital to educate, mentor, and advocate for the next generation of female entrepreneurs, investors, directors, and senior leaders, especially in STEM. In addition, Kohn launched TechSavvy, a program that pairs unemployed women with mentor

BEYOND DUKE AWARDEES recognizing alumni who have distinguished themselves through service to their community, their country, or to society at large. Carla McGuire Davis M.D. ’96 | Patricia Deza ’16 | Amy E. Hepburn ’97, M.P.P. ’01 | Lucas T. Metropulos ’15 | Michael P. Scharf ’85, J.D. ’88 | Howard John Wesley B.S.E. ’94

partners to provide skill-building and networking opportunities for the virtual workforce.

Rani E. Kumar M.E.M. ’21 In 2020, following the death of George Floyd, Kumar, a former action-minded Peace Corps volunteer, created a petition to press for racial-justice action at her alma mater, Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She launched a collaborative drafting process, soliciting student and alumni input, and provided detailed recommendations that drew upon research from Duke and similar peer institutions. Recommendations covered BIPOC representation at Nicholas; a curriculum audit creating a process for reporting and addressing issues of discrimination and racism; anti-racism training; and others—many of which have been implemented. n

CHARLES A. DUKES AWARDEES recognizing alumni volunteers who serve in Duke leadership roles and have devoted themselves to extraordinary, long-term efforts that help Duke further its mission: R. Derek Bandeen ’84, M.B.A. ’85 | D. Michael Bennett ’77 | Valerie Thompson Broadie J.D. ’79 | Janice A. Gault ’87, M.D. ’91 | Thomas A. Natelli B.S.E. ’82 n

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukeRETRO What a way to live

In the early 1970s, Duke underwent a dramatic change in its residential experience. By Valerie Gillispie

uke recently announced a new residential plan, QuadEx, which will connect the East Campus freshman dormitories to one of seven quads on West Campus. As QuadEx is being launched, we might look back at another time when residential life underwent a massive change. From 1930 to 1972, Duke was still divided by sex, with the East Campus housing the Woman’s College, and West Campus housing Trinity College (for men). Male freshmen lived in dorms together, separately from upperclassmen. The idea of residential “federations” was first discussed in 1967. Federations meant a group of close-by dormitories, made up of multiple living groups, including independent houses and fraternities. A federation would have its own dean and faculty, who would be connected to the group. The idea was to make the residential experience a richer one that better connected the residential and academic experience. In 1969, the Residential Life Committee, chaired by Professor Howard Strobel of the chemistry department, made preliminary recommendations that all students should live in federations of 350 to 500 students. More controversially, the committee also recommended “the abolition of both the freshmen houses and the fraternities and independent

tertainment, some freshmen houses engage in loud games and carousing.” Some fraternities came up with alternate ideas. Kappa Sigma proposed the terrifyingly named Animal Quad federation, which would encompass four fraternities, two freshman houses, and several “affiliate groups of women.” While Animal Quad did not come to fruition, there was still interest in setting up a few federations, each with male and female students, on a somewhat experimental basis. This would mean that men would live on East, and women on West. Student Les Hoffman wrote in The Chronicle, “The adoption of this proposal would be a significant first step in eliminating the girls’ school-that-just-happens-to-be-near-a-boys’ school atmosphere that often pervades this uniquely segregated University.” In this case, “co-ed” meant that men and women would be in separate but contiguous dormitories. To test the waters of men and women actually living in the same hall, an experimental living group was planned, with Professor John Clum of the English department overseeing it. This became SHARE, or Student House for Academic and Residential Experimentation, which opened in 1970. Along with SHARE, several federations were proposed for the upcoming 1970-71 school year, but logistical reasons interfered—the different administrations of Woman’s College and Trinity College had difficulties “The adoption of this proposal would be a significant first standardizing and coordinating issues like board, which was step in eliminating the girls’ school-that-just-happens-tothen required on East Campus. be-near-a-boys’ school atmosphere that often pervades this Over the 1970-71 school year, uniquely segregated University.” the Residential Life Committee again worked to smooth a path for the formation of federations. At the same time, the desire for NEWS: Opposite, groups as living groups,” as reported in The Chronicle. As truly co-ed dorms was growing. The Chronicle’s one might expect, this suggestion was hotly debated on There were logistical challenges take on the living campus. The committee then suggested that the fraternities for this idea, too. For example, arrangement and independent living groups could continue, simply not the dormitories did not have adresidentially. On May 2, 1969, The Chronicle ran a photoequate bathrooms for an evenly graph of young men playing outside with the caption: “The divided group of men and women. Duke fraternity: will it survive?” (Spoiler alert: It did.) To allow the shifting of men and women across campusAs for the elimination of freshman dorms, the committee es, some fraternities and independent houses were asked to was concerned about the present state of male freshmen: move, in some cases, to the opposite campus. These groups “The freshmen are isolated from the rest of the Universiwould then displace other students, so there were complex ty. They usually have great difficulty in meeting and getting plans for moving various groups around, reported exhausdates with girls. Thrown back on their own devices for entively in The Chronicle. In 1971, the school year opened with

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three formal federations: Kilgo and Few on West, and Baldwin on East. Each had a different character, depending on the houses that made up each federation. Some freshmen were also incorporated into independent houses and fraternities. A three-year evaluation report in 1974 noted that there had been real success in creating an academic and social community, as well as areas that could use improvement, but concluded that federations should be further supported and expanded. Co-ed dormitories—men and women in the same residence—also expanded in the early 1970s, especially after Photography Duke University Archives

the dissolution of the Woman’s College and bringing together of male and female students under Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. In 1982, a Task Force on Federations issued a report in which they determined that the by then five federations had not created the communities that were originally envisioned. One reason was the lack of separate dining halls and lounges made it more difficult for the various houses in a federation to naturally come together. In addition, there was tension between independents and fraternities, and uneven faculty participation and guidance. In the end, the committee recommended a “de-emphasis” on federations, allowing them to continue if students were interested, but backing away from pursuing a campus-wide federation model. It did commend Professor Howard Strobel, the writer of the 1969 committee report recommending federations, for his unwavering support of and work for the federation model for over a decade. However, with waning enthusiasm, federations faded away by the

1984-85 school year. Unlike federations, the QuadEx model brings the entire undergraduate class into the quad concept. As ever at Duke, the residential experience will change, sometimes dramatically as it did in the early 1970s, but never without the ingenuity and creativity of Duke students who care deeply about the Duke experience, and the experience of future generations of students. n Gillispie is the university archivist. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

ForeverDukeIN MEMORIAM 1930s Sam Robertson ’39 of Clayton, N.C., on July 13, 2021.

1940s Deborah Cantor Glasser ’42 of Oak Bluffs, Mass., on July 19, 2021. Jean Downer Hodges ’42 of Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., on July 22, 2021. Edwin Stetler ’42 of Mechanicsburg, Pa., on Aug. 10, 2021. Kathleen Watkins Dale Foreman ’43 of Naples, Fla., on June 26, 2021. Joseph Nelson Jr. ’44 of Lynchburg, Va., on Jan. 24, 2021. Virginia Currie Anders ’45 of Greenville, S.C., on Sept. 21, 2021. Lewis Gordon Hale Jr. ’45 of Wenham, Mass., on Aug. 7, 2021. Robert Kibler ’45, M.D. ’49 of Atlanta, on July 27, 2021. Clifford Turner ’45 of Abingdon, Va., on Sept. 10, 2021. Sarah Cheek Hockenjos ’46 of Basking Ridge, N.J., Jan. 27, 2021. Sara Jordan Hoyt ’46 of Atlanta, on Sept. 24, 2021. James Lyerly Jr. ’46 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 3, 2021. Melvin Satlof ’46 of Auburndale, Mass., on Sept. 16, 2021. Paul W. Yount Jr. ’46 of Hendersonville, N.C., on Aug. 23, 2021. Ray Branton B.Div. ’47 of Winston-Salem, on Jan. 30, 2021.

Albert Thomas ’47 of Columbia, S.C., on April 10, 2021. Hubert McEntyre ’49 of Boiling Springs, S.C., on June 26, 2021. Marilyn Skinner Newell ’49 of Lake Wales, Fla., on Aug. 10, 2021. Edwin Stancik ’48, A.M. ’49 of Burlington, N.C., on July 1, 2021.

1950s Marilyn Bailey Evans-Jones ’50 of Jacksonville, Fla., on July 23, 2021. Golde Steiner Feldman ’50 of Richmond, Va., on June 29, 2021. Malcolm Magaw Ph.D. ’50 of Marietta, Ga., on Sept. 23, 2021. Emily Helseth Myers ’50 of Mount Pleasant, N.C., on Aug. 12, 2021. Richard Wall ’50 of Ellicott City, Md., on Jan. 8, 2021. Connie Brose Whitaker ’50 of Kissimmee, Fla., on Sept. 24, 2021. John Harris Jr. ’51 of Raleigh, on Sept. 30, 2021. Edward Loeser LL.B. ’51 of Southlake, Texas, on Aug. 28, 2021. Paul Miller ’51 of Towson, Md., on July 3, 2021. Mary Whittle Whanger ’51 of Durham, on Aug. 31, 2021. Chuck Wilson ’51 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Aug. 14, 2021. John Colvin ’52 of Holly, Mich., on July 4, 2021. James Crawford Jr. ’52 of Asheville, N.C., on Sept. 9, 2021. Betsy Smith Daniel ’52 of St. Pauls, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2021.

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ForeverDukeIN MEMORIAM Tom Flint ’52 of Fort Myers, Fla., on June 28, 2021. Stephen Franks ’52 of Hendersonville, N.C., on July 13, 2021. Ann LeStourgeon Harris ’52 of Raleigh, on Aug. 19, 2021. Ron Nelson ’52 of Monterey, Mass., on Aug. 7, 2021. Roland Nunn ’52 of Clayton, Calif., on Aug. 7, 2021. Richard Pippel ’52 of Tallahassee, Fla., on Aug. 27, 2021. Marjorie Farnham Pressly ’52 of Lynchburg, Va., on Sept. 18, 2021. Doris McCullough Whitfield ’52 of Durham, on Sept. 22, 2021. Larry Bauman ’53 of Evans, Ga., on Aug. 9, 2021. Thomas Darkis ’53 of Danville, Va., on Sept. 19, 2021. Mary Howland Dawson ’53 of Durham, on Sept. 12, 2021. C. Harley Dickson B.Div. ’53 of Asheville, N.C., on Aug. 19, 2021. Veleair Courtlandt Smith II ’53 of Hurricane, W.Va., on July 27, 2021. William Werber ’53 of North Bethesda, Md., on Aug. 19, 2021. William Bryant ’54, M.D. ’58, HS ’58-’60, HS ’62-’63 of Charlotte, on Aug. 24, 2021. Richard Dixon ’54 of Fairfax, Va., on July 12, 2021. John Nessen Jr. ’54 of Minnetonka, Minn., on Aug. 15, 2021. John Sheehan Jr. ’54 of Johnstown, Pa., on July 28, 2021. Edward Swecker ’54 of Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 4, 2021. Ann Henson Matheson Bunn ’55 of Birmingham, Ala., on July 17, 2021. Lou Ann Unzicker Drummond ’55 of Little Rock, Ark., on Aug. 5, 2021. Tom Foard ’55 of Alexandria, Va., on Sept. 14, 2021. William Strickland ’55 of Auburn, Ala., on July 14, 2021. James Trimble H ’55 of Montclair, N.J., on Aug. 8, 2021. Douglas Whitlock II ’55 of Bethesda, Md., on Aug. 27, 2021. Winnifred Allen Addison ’56, M.D. ’60, H ’60, H ’62, H ’65, H ’72 of Durham, on June 26, 2021. Edward Cowell Jr. ’56 of Southern Shores, N.C., on Sept. 21, 2021. William Cozart, Jr. B.S.M.E. ’58 of Charlotte, on Sept. 1, 2021. Henry Dixon II ’56, M.D. ’61 of Eastville, Va., on June 26, 2020. James J. LaPolla Sr. ’56, M.D. ’61 of Beaufort, S.C., on Aug. 5, 2021. Dennis Mahoney ’56 of Denver, on Aug. 24, 2021. M. Finley Maxson ’56 of Skokie, Ill., on Sept. 13, 2021. Carlyle C. Ring Jr. J.D. ’56 of Alexandria, Va., on Aug 19, 2021. Palmer Shelburne H ’56 of Colfax, N.C., on July 21, 2021. Ernest Linwood Wright III ’56 of Danville, Va., on Sept. 29, 2021. Irwin Dickman J.D. ’57 of New York, on July 20, 2021. Clyde Ferguson A.M. ’57, Ph.D. ’60 of Manhattan, Kan., on July 15, 2021. Eugene Harris ’57, J.D. ’60 of Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 22, 2021. Yvonne Holland R.N. ’57 of Sylva, N.C., on Jan. 29, 2021. Reid Huntley Ph.D. ’57 of Columbus, Ohio, on Jan. 23, 2021. Oliver William Jones HS ’57-’61 of La Jolla, Calif., on Aug. 10, 2021. Louis Manarin A.M. ’57, Ph.D. ’65 of Henrico, Va., on Aug. 20, 2021. S. Strome Maxwell ’57 of Tallahassee, Fla., on July 16, 2021. Hilda Fisher Pickens ’57 of Timonium, Md., on Feb. 17, 2021. 74 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

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

Charlotte Yates Shawcross ’57 of The Villages, Fla., on Sept. 15, 2021. Sally McIntosh Ziegler ’57 of Colorado Springs, Colo., on Sept. 10, 2021. Buck Couch ’58 of Asheboro, N.C., on Aug. 20, 2021. James F. Davis ’58 of Burlington, N.C., on Aug. 30, 2021. Grady Dawson Jr. B.S.C.E. ’58 of Burlington, N.C., on Aug. 9, 2021. George Duda Ph.D. ’58 of Brentwood, Calif., on May 15, 2021. Robert Shorter A.M. ’58, Ph.D. ’65 of Winston-Salem, on July 19, 2021. Anne Romberg Willis ’58 of Williamsburg, Va., on Feb. 8, 2021. Winnie Satterfield Cheney ’59, A.M. ’08 of Clemmons, N.C., on June 28, 2021. Craig Choate ’59 of McMurray, Pa., on Sept. 6, 2021. Sandra Weiss Powell ’59 of Spartanburg, S.C., on Aug. 24, 2021. James Dan Pratt ’59 of Tequesta, Fla., on July 20, 2021. Charles Roe ’59, M.D. ’64 of Dallas, on Sept. 1, 2021. Anne Judell Thompson ’59 of Raleigh, on Sept. 11, 2021. Theron Watson ’59 of Forest City, N.C., on Aug. 1, 2021. Eleanor Ellen Grainger Whitaker ’59 of Kinston, N.C., on May 21, 2021.

1960s Preston Bradshaw Jr. M.D. ’60 of Raleigh, on Sept. 10, 2021. Katharine Walker Cummings ’60 of Raleigh, on July 4, 2021. Richard Frazier ’60 of Escondido, Calif., on Aug. 10, 2021. Ralph Goldman ’60 of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., on Sept. 18, 2021. Norman Kowal A.M. ’60, Ph.D. ’66 of Asheville, N.C., on Sept. 13, 2021. Judith Moses Latham ’60 of Falls Church, Va., on Sept. 26, 2021. Kurt Rusch ’60 of Mayfield Heights, Ohio, on Aug. 30, 2021. Thomas Stim Ph.D. ’60 of Phoenixville, Pa., on March 27, 2021. Jimmie Suttle M.A.T. ’60, A.M. ’65 of Ferguson, N.C., on June 30, 2021. Stephen Vermillion ’60 of Monterey, Va., on Aug. 1, 2021. Frank M. Bunch III ’61 of Wilmington, Del., on July 4, 2021. Frank Coleman A.M. ’61 of Quartz Creek, Colo., on June 12, 2021. Arthur Mashburn Jr. Ph.D. ’61 of Lewisburg, Va., on July 21, 2021. Grace Snead Osborne ’61, M.A.T. ’62, Ed.D. ’68 of Toronto, Ontario, on Aug. 22, 2021. Charles Ping Ph.D. ’61 of Athens, Ohio, on July 27, 2021. Peter Boyce Ph.D. ’62 of Hobart, Australia, on July 8, 2021. Linda Earle Duncan M.A.T. ’62 of Durham, on Aug. 5, 2021. Kermit Mohn ’62 of Raleigh, on Aug. 17, 2021. Calvin Morgan Jr. M.D. ’62 of Johnson City, Tenn., on Sept. 23, 2021. George Morris M.F. ’62 of Centennial, Colo., on July 28, 2021. James Warren Pritchard ’62 of Atlanta, on Aug. 6, 2021. Rouse Pusser Jr. ’62 of Chesterfield, S.C., on July 19, 2021. George Rosenstein Jr. A.M. ’62, Ph.D. ’63 of Lancaster, Pa., on July 21, 2021. Warren Stone III ’62 of Wilmington, N.C., on July 9, 2021. Brian Gracey ’63 of Gainesville, Ga., on July 13, 2021. Robert Harris Jr. B.Div. ’63 of Farmingdale, Maine, on July 13, 2021. Ben Allen Jr. M.D. ’64 of Greenville, S.C., on Sept. 1, 2021.

alumni.duke.edu

Beulah Ashbrook A.M. ’64 of Memphis, Tenn., on Sept. 14, 2021. James Cheek III ’64 of Nashville, Tenn., on Aug. 27, 2021. Pat Heafner B.Div. ’64 of Cary, N.C., on Jan. 8, 2021. William Helms Jr. B.S.C.E. ’64 of Goldsboro, N.C., on Nov. 20, 2020. Grant Hollett Jr. ’64 of Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., on Aug. 1, 2021. Walter Johnson Jr. J.D. ’64 of Greensboro, N.C., on July 24, 2021. Chandler Robbins III ’64 of Sarasota, Fla., on June 14, 2021. Alec Alvord Th.M. ’65 of Asheville, N.C., on Aug. 11, 2021. William Bender M.D. ’65 of Pensacola, Fla., on Aug. 27, 2021. Donald Brooks ’65, J.D. ’68 of Alpharetta, Ga., on Feb. 13, 2021. Reginald Burleigh LL.B. ’65 of Presque Isle, Maine, on Aug. 31, 2021. James J. Kiser III ’65 of Pawleys Island, S.C., on July 17, 2021. Richard Linnemann ’65 of Alexandria, Va., on July 15, 2021. Stanley Nicholson Ph.D. ’65 of Missoula, Mont., on Sept. 13, 2021. Frank Perry Sr. Th.M. ’65 of Burlington, N.C., Sept. 5, 2020. Dudley Salley A.M. ’65 of Tarpon Springs, Fla., on July 3, 2021. Janet Shaban ’65 of Sacramento, Calif., on June 26, 2021. Arlis Sheffield II ’65 of Bedford, Va., on Jan. 16, 2021. Pat Battle ’66 of Gainesville, Ga., on Sept. 16, 2021. Richard Buhrman LL.B. ’66 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on Aug. 9, 2021. Al Collins Jr. A.M. ’66, Ph.D. ’67 of Gainesville, Fla., on Aug. 15, 2021. Ed Cooper Jr. M.D. ’66, H ’75 of Greenville, N.C., on Sept. 10, 2021. William D. Jones ’66 of White Stone, Va., on June 26, 2021. Thomas Kinney ’66, M.D. ’70 of Durham, on May 25, 2020. Jane Carson Schnabel ’66 of San Diego, on Sept. 17, 2021. Paul Webster III H ’66 of Lancaster, S.C., on Aug. 13, 2021. Wayne Arrowood M.Div. ’67 of Staunton, Va., on Aug. 22, 2021. David Broadbent M.D. ’67 of Rochester, N.Y., on Sept. 6, 2021. John Gates Ph.D. ’67 of Wooster, Ohio, on July 11, 2021. Susan Hagist Kobayashi B.S.N. ’67 of Bishop, Calif., on Sept. 6, 2021. Jimmy Norred M.Div. ’67 of Greensboro, N.C., on Aug. 19, 2021. Susie Bell Panz ’67 of Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 9, 2021. Theadosia Hogan Ribet M.Ed. ’67 of Durham, on July 25, 2021. Robert Schwartzman H ’67 of Marcos Island, Fla., on Aug. 4, 2021. Denis Craig ’68 of Alameda, Calif., on March 15, 2021. James Fox ’68, J.D. ’71 of Winston-Salem, on Aug. 15, 2021. Timothy Gamelin Ph.D. ’68 of Highlands Ranch, Colo., on June 30, 2021. Anne Wilson Rueter ’68 of Ann Arbor, Mich., on June 25, 2021. Robert Wicklund Ph.D. ’68 of Bainbridge Island, Wash., on Dec. 12, 2020. Dana Wilbanks Ph.D. ’68 of Denver, on May 12, 2021. Patrick Carone Ph.D. ’69 of Indiana, Pa., on Aug. 24, 2021. DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

WHERE DO YOU WANT Iberian Treasures: Less Traveled Spain & Portugal, May 4-15

Exploring Alaska’s Coastal Wilderness, June 12-19

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

Patagonian Frontiers, Oct 19 - Nov 3

TO TRAVEL WITH DUKE? EUROPE & RUSSIA

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

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

Holland & Belgium: featuring The Floriade 2022, Apr. 25-May 3, 2022 Iberian Treasures: Less Traveled Spain & Portugal, May 4-15, 2022 Scottish Isles, the Faroe Islands & Iceland, May 4-16, 2022 European Coastal Civilizations, May 11-20, 2022 Discovering Eastern Europe, May 24-June 8, 2022 Swiss Alps & Italian Lakes, May 25-June 3, 2022 Seine River & Normandy Passage, May 29-June 6, 2022 Barging Amsterdam to Bruges, with The Floriade 2022, June 1-9, 2022 The Amalfi Coast, June 8-16, 2022 Norwegian Splendor, June 27-July 12, 2022 Circumnavigation of Iceland, July 24-Aug. 1, 2022 Flavors of Catalonia, Oct. 1-9, 2022 Alsace of France, Oct. 2-10, 2022 Sicily in Depth, Oct. 9-20, 2022 Cappadocia, Coastal Turkey & Greek Islands, Oct. 12-24, 2022

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

AFRICA & THE MIDDLE EAST SOUTH AMERICA Galápagos, July 1-10, 2022 Patagonian Frontiers of Argentina & Chile, Oct 19-Nov 3, 2022

Egypt & the Eternal Nile, Mar. 7-21, 2022 Israel: Timeless Wonders, Mar. 24-Apr. 4, 2022 Madagascar, June 19-July 3, 2022, July 10-23, 2022 and October 2-15, 2022 Classic Safari, July 30-Aug. 14, 2022 Southern Africa, July 31-Aug. 13, 2022 Tanzania and Zanzibar, Sept. 11-24, 2022 Moroccan Discovery, Oct. 16-29, 2022 Egypt & the Eternal Nile, Oct. 17-31, 2022

ANTARCTICA

OCEANIA New Zealand, March 4-20, 2023 Australia & New Zealand, Sept 14-Oct 5, 2022

Expedition to Antarctica, Jan. 6-19, 2023 Photos courtesy of iStock

Email us with interest or questions at

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

O U T R A G E O U S A M B I T I O N S:

Mentoring Young Leaders SHANE STANSBURY T’95 calls his colleague and mentor, Tony

“I take that from Tony’s playbook, helping students find

Brown, “the best teacher I never had.”

their place in civic and public life,” Stansbury says.

Brown came to the Hart Leadership Program not long before

“The job’s not done when the student graduates,” says

Stansbury graduated and they met later at an alumni event.

Brown, who maintains contact with more than 2,000 former

As teaching colleagues, they share an approach grounded in

students.

values, ethics and strong relationships with their students.

Stansbury’s own career testifies to that. From his time as

“I believe that the clarification of values often becomes a

a Hart Fellow through his work as a federal prosecutor, he

call to action to create benefits for others,” says Brown. He

remained close with his mentors. Now back at Duke, he and

urges students to think hard

Brown remind students that

about what problems they

their journey together has

want to solve and why.

just begun.

www.sanford.duke.edu

IN MEMORIAM ForeverDuke Charles Chewning Jr. ’69 of Richmond, Va., on Sept. 9, 2021. Robert McConnell H ’69 of Greenville, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2021. Marty Valiant M.D. ’69, H ’72 of LaBelle, Fla., on July 31, 2021.

1970s Betty Carter A.M. ’70 of Greensboro, N.C., on Sept. 29, 2021. Lewis Cockerill Ed.D. ’70 of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., on July 6, 2021. Mike Geer ’70, M.D. ’75 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on July 11, 2021. Daniel Smith ’70 of Denver, on July 25, 2021. Elizabeth Baker ’71 M.D. ’75, H ’79 of Columbia, S.C., on Aug. 30, 2021. Paula Caplan A.M. ’71, Ph.D. ’73 of Rockville, Md., on July 21, 2021. Phillip Magnuson ’71 of Dayton, Ohio, on Aug. 8, 2021. Sam McMillan M.Div. ’71 of Boone, N.C., on Sept. 2, 2021. Tom Soule H ’71 of Ithaca, N.Y., on Aug. 1, 2021. Eddie Williams III ’71, M.D. ’74, H ’78, H ’79, H ’83 of Columbia, S.C., on Aug. 17, 2021. Robert G. Atcheson ’72 of Beirut, Lebanon, on Jan. 24, 2021. John Bickel Jr. ’72 of Owensboro, Ky., on Sept. 15, 2020. Diane Campbell M.Ed. ’72 of Fuquay-Varina, N.C., on Aug. 3, 2021. Robin Bounous Drew ’72 of Durham, on July 12, 2021. David Lawer ’72 of Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 30, 2021. James Lowry H ’72, H ’74 of Rio Rancho, N.M., on Aug. 26, 2021. Charles Ramsdell H ’72 of Greenville, N.C., on Aug. 31, 2021. Cliff Wheeler M.D. ’72 of Lakeland, Fla., on July 26, 2021. Ann Wightman ’72 of Middletown, Conn., on March 11, 2021. Craig Davis H ’73 of Coral Canyon, Utah, on July 28, 2021. John Dutton Jr. M.A.T. ’73, A.M. ’77, Ph.D. ’78 of Raleigh, on July 26, 2021. David Greenleaf ’74 of Morehead City, N.C., on Sept. 6, 2021. Boyd Holliday M.Div. ’74, Th.M. ’75 of Lake Junaluska, N.C., on Sept. 6, 2021. Henry Ross M.B.A. ’74 of Monroe Township, N.J., on Jan. 19, 2020. John Wagoner Jr. ’74 of North Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Aug. 12, 2021. Charles Jenkins Ed.D. ’75 of Laurinburg, N.C., on Aug. 27, 2021. Henry Mullins M.S. ’75 of Manlius, N.Y., on July 18, 2021. Frank Owen ’75 of San Luis Obispo, Calif., on June 12, 2021. Rick St. Pierre ’75 of Alpharetta, Ga., on July 28, 2021. John Sartorius Ed.D. ’75 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on Sept. 3, 2021. Don Williams Ed.D. ’76 of Concord, N.C., on Aug. 27, 2021. Greg Duncan M.Div. ’77 of Durham, on Aug. 22, 2021. James Starnes J.D. ’77 of Newport Beach, Calif., on April 5, 2021. Wayne Hurr Ph.D. ’78 of Annapolis, Md., on Sept. 5, 2021. Michael Mumma ’79, M.D. ’83 of Sarasota, Fla., on July 8, 2021.

Charles G. Alty ’82 of Lynchburg, Va., on Aug. 25, 2021. Rebecca Lang Clodfelter ’82 of Guilford, N.C., on Aug. 14, 2021. William Huffman Ph.D. ’82 of Flagstaff, Ariz., on March 22, 2021. Lawrence Stanback ’82 of San Francisco, on Aug. 18, 2021. Karen Tibbetts Goggin B.S.N. ’83 of Lake Frederick, Va., on July 15, 2021. Richard McCann H ’83 of Chapel Hill, on Feb. 5, 2021. Teresa Miller ’83 of New York, on Aug. 6, 2021. Karen Chancellor M.D. ’84 of Memphis, Tenn., on Sept. 10, 2021. Peter Durning ’84 of Vero Beach, Fla., on June 8, 2021. Charles Kime ’84 of Vonore, Tenn., on Sept. 4, 2021. Joseph Braverman ’86 of Silver Spring, Md., on June 5, 2020. Lawrence Carrozzella M.B.A. ’86 of Wallingford, Conn., on Aug. 19, 2021. Jan Kinkel Hanner ’86 of Greensboro, N.C., on Sept. 27, 2021. Ted Rollins M.B.A. ’86 of Greenville, S.C., on Aug. 15, 2021. Priscilla Meadows M.B.A. ’87 of Irving, Texas, on Aug. 17, 2021. Claude Kayler M.Div. ’89 of Lake Junaluska, N.C., on July 16, 2021. Mary Katherine Norton ’89 of London, U.K., on July 4, 2021. Catherine Morgan Stockwell ’89 of Virginia Beach, Va., on Sept. 13, 2021.

1990s Richard Brekke M.S. ’91 of Harlem, Mont., on June 29, 2021. Bruce Tindall A.M. ’91 of San Diego, on July 17, 2021. Roger Gammon H ’92 of Austin, Texas, on Aug. 29, 2021. David Spaulding M.Div. ’96 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Aug. 19, 2021. Joe Martin M.B.A. ’97 of Indianapolis, on Aug. 30, 2021. Heyward Hall II ’98 of Columbia, S.C., on Aug. 8, 2021.

2000s Alexandra Charles ’01 of St. Louis, on Sept. 20, 2021. Christopher Moore ’02 of Greensboro, N.C., on Aug. 27, 2021. Warren Owens M.Div. ’03 of Marion, N.C., on Aug. 1, 2021. Christopher Hogan H ’04 of Suffolk, Va., on Aug. 14, 2021.

2010s Natravis Cox H ’13 of Tupelo, Miss., on Sept. 1, 2021. Sophie Elizabeth Allen ’16 of Cary, N.C., on Aug. 14, 2021.

2020s Miriam Cho M.Div. ’20 of Durham, on Aug. 23, 2021. Chase Johnson M.P.P. ’21 of Chapel Hill, on July 28, 2021.

1980s Janet Hingston ’80 of Lambertville, N.J., on Sept. 7, 2021. David Bobak H ’81, H ’82, H ’83 of Solon, Ohio, on Sept. 11, 2021.

DUKE MAGAZINE WINTER 2021

WORKINPROGRESS

Dave Haas

Ph.D. candidate, Marine Science and Conservation

A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP

FOLLOW: Left, the FaunaTag at work; above, the printed circuit boards that make up the brain and sensor inside the tag

efore becoming a student again in 2011, I worked

it take to build an Apple Watch? We went from that nest of

for PopCap Games. We made Bejeweled and

wires to having everything on a single printed circuit board.

Plants vs. Zombies, and I was COO for a while and

In early 2018 I started working with Pratt’s Nan Jokerst

ran worldwide game studios. When I turned forty, I decided

and Martin Brook and co-taught a class called “Sensors and

to leave and do something different with my life.

Sensor Design.” That was pivotal. One of my co-inventors,

My heart had always been in science.

Sam Kelly, who was a mechanical engineering undergradu-

I lived in Seattle, where there’s an endangered popula-

ate, and I basically did all of the work to build this.

tion of Southern Resident killer whales. I kept thinking this

In May of 2021, I was finally able to travel and put the de-

would be an interesting career to have, to try and help with

vice on live animals. I learned I’m going to have to do some

the conservation and recovery of populations like those.

more refinement. I’m going to have to be able to shine light

I was motivated by the idea of these fitness wearables in

deeper into their bodies to get information.

human biomedicine. Increasingly you can see them now in

Not only can I measure bio-optically, get information

terrestrial animals, but I was very motivated to think about

about the animal’s heart rate, but because this device has

how we can build a tag that can tell us something about

accelerometers and gyroscopes, I can actually see the

the diving physiology of free-swimming animals.

vibrations from the heart happening and the systolic and

We built a prototype device that was good for getting stopped at TSA checkpoints. It was just this mass of wires. The fact that we collected any data at all with that thing in a saltwater lagoon was a small miracle.

the diastolic phase of the heartbeat, which has never been done before. Next iteration on the hardware side is trying to get deeper into the tissue using laser diodes. I’m trying to use the lowest

I’m not an engineer by trade. I was a physics dropout

power thing because I’m trying to build something that will

who knew how to program, self-taught as a kid in the ’80s

work in the wild for as long as possible, with as little battery

and ’90s. I have ended up learning everything I need about

power as possible, and with as little mass as possible, that

power systems, circuits, capacitors, resistors—what would

still floats. n

80 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Photography courtesy Dave Haas

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NICKI WASHINGTON Director of Cultural Competence in Computing Fellows and Professor of the Practice in Computer Science

Learn how at dst.duke.edu/better-world

(919) 681-0464 giftplanning@duke.edu

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M AG A Z I N E

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Listening critically With 12 million downloads, “Scene on Radio,” a podcast produced by Center for Documentary Studies audio director John Biewen, has found success with a democratic approach.

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