In Brief: January-February 2005

  • President Richard H. Brodhead has appointed an eleven-member committee to begin the search for the next university minister. The committee is chaired by the Reverend Charles M. Smith '62, M.Div. '65, a member of the board of trustees and director of connectional ministries for the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church in Raleigh. Craig Kocher, assistant dean of Duke Chapel and director of religious life, is serving as acting dean until the search is complete. The committee expects to make its recommendations to Brodhead before the end of the academic year. Nominations and general thoughts about the position should be sent to the University Minister Search Committee at Duke, Box 90871, Durham, North Carolina 27708.
  • President Emerita Nannerl O. Keohane and her husband, Duke political science professor Robert Keohane, have accepted positions at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She will become the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of public affairs and will join the faculty of the University Center for Human Values, and he will become professor of international affairs. The Keohanes are spending this academic year on sabbatical as fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California.
  • The Duke Primate Center's Andrea Katz '77, a staff specialist, and Charlie Welch, a research scientist, have been named Chevaliers de l'Ordre National by the Malagasy government in recognition of their efforts on behalf of environmental protection in Madagascar. Katz and Welch have spent fifteen years in Madagascar leading the development of the 800-acre Parc Ivoloina conservation center and zoo.
  • Law professor and constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky will handle oral arguments in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the placement of a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin. Last year, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the monument had a valid "secular purpose." Thomas Van Orden, a homeless man who formerly practiced law, filed suit against the state in 2001, arguing that the monument violates the First Amendment ban on "establishment of religion." The appeal is expected to be heard in February.

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