Duke University Alumni Magazine


GRADUATION:
IN PRAISE OF POLITICS


Photo: Les Todd
n her commencement address, ABC News' chief congressional analyst, Cokie Roberts, urged graduating seniors to consider getting involved in their government--the one institution that links all Americans--through political participation and public service.

More than 3,400 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees were awarded at the May 16 ceremony before a crowd of more than 15,000. Roberts was one of five to receive honorary degrees; in awarding her a doctor of humane letters degree, President Nannerl O. Keohane noted that Roberts has been eloquent in calling on the profession of journalism to exercise "greater care with respect to facts, fairness, and quality of writing."

Clockwise Photos: Les Todd, Jim Wallace, Jim Wallace, Chris Hildreth

The other honorees were President Emil Constantinescu of Romania, who was a visiting professor in Duke's geology department in the 1991-92 academic year and who was awarded a doctor of science degree ("You ended your Duke service to assume one presidency, at the University of Bucharest, that would be a stepping-stone to another"); jazz musician Sonny Rollins, doctor of arts ("Jazz is an international language, and you are instrumental in shaping and propagating that language"); Carolyn Heilbrun, a Columbia University professor emerita and a leading feminist literary scholar, doctor of humane letters ("Few scholars can claim to have helped invent an area of intellectual exploration, but if the field of women's biography and autobiography can claim a founder, it is you"); and George B. Autry, founder of the socioeconomic research center MDC Inc., based in Chapel Hill, who was honored posthumously with a doctor of laws degree ("For more than thirty years, MDC has demonstrated that public-policy research can change lives.").

Roberts, who covers politics, Congress, and public-policy issues for ABC News, told members of the graduating class that it is easy to be contemptuous of professional politicians. But "to denigrate the professional is to denigrate the profession. We demand professional doctors and we respect the art of medicine, we respect professional bridge builders, and we respect the science of engineering. To say that only amateurs, non-professionals, should be in politics is to denigrate government, the profession of government.

Photo: Les Todd

"Even though I know that is extremely popular, I would argue that is very dangerous, because we in this country have nothing that binds us together as a nation except our government. That's it. We have no common religion, we have no common history, we have no common ethnicity, we have these days no common language."


FUNDING
FUTURES


t its spring meeting, the board of trustees approved an operating budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 of $604.5 million for the university's academic endeavors, up 6.5 percent over the

current year. When restricted funds for specific projects are included, the university's overall budget for fiscal 1999-2000 totals $1.01 billion.

The budget for the first time excludes Duke Hospital, which is included in a separate spending plan for the new Duke University Health System. The university budget, however, does include the School of Medicine and related administrative expenses.

Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III told the trustees that the new university budget holds growth in academic support and administrative costs to 3 percent and allocates additional support to computing initiatives, African and African-American studies, university libraries, and deferred maintenance. He said the budget reflects continued strong support for the university's twin policies of need-blind admissions and meeting the full demonstrated financial need for undergraduate students, with unrestricted undergraduate financial aid increasing 4.2 percent over the past year. In total, Duke expects to spend $35 million in university resources for financial aid programs.

The budget anticipates no significant changes in enrollment and is based on a Durham enrollment of 5,925 undergraduates. The spending plan includes the previously announced 3.5 percent increase in the tuition for undergraduates next fall--the lowest in thirty-three years--and an overall increase of 3.2 percent to $31,839 in tuition, fees, room, and board for incoming arts and sciences students.


STELLAR
STUDENTS


n addition to the previously announced Rhodes Scholar, Neil Hattengadi, and Marshall Scholar, Evan Young, two members of the Class of '99 have earned prestigious international fellowships.

Jeffrey Horwich of Polston, Montana, was named as one of eighteen Luce Scholars for 1999-2000. The award provides travel and living expenses for a year-long internship experience in Asia. At Duke, Horwich, a public policy major, was a singer with the choral group the Pitchforks; the composer of several instrumental pieces, including a saxophone quartet; and co-founder of DevilNet, a student-managed online service. He will be placed in Japan to pursue a journalism internship.

As one of ten students nationally to win a Churchill Fellowship--meant to honor students with superior credentials in science, engineering, and mathematics--Christopher Beasley will be studying at Churchill College of Cambridge University. Beasley, of Athens, Alabama, majored in physics and mathematics at Duke. In his work at Churchill, he will be at the intersection of those disciplines, focusing on string theory.

Hattengadi, Young, Horwich, and Beasley were all A.B. Duke Scholars as undergraduates.

For the second year in a row, ten Duke students have won Fulbright Awards for up to

a year of university study, independent research, or teaching outside the United States. These highly competitive fellowships are funded by the United States Information Agency and by donors from different countries. The current recipients are:

  • Tico Almeida, a graduating senior from Waunakee, Wisconsin, who plans to use the fellowship to study international trade and labor rights;

  • James Bloom, a graduate student in art and art history from Greenwich, Connecticut, who plans to study the visual culture of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century;

  • Kirstin Bowie, a graduating senior from Leesport, Pennsylvania, who plans to study welfare reforms in Denmark;

  • Deborah Broderson, a graduate student in art and art history from Olympia, Washington, who plans to study public space and aesthetics in Denmark;

  • Frederick Colby, a graduate study in religion who lives in Raleigh, who plans to study the history of Sufism in Syria;

  • Jan Hoffman French, a graduate student in cultural anthropology who lives in Durham, who plans to study questions of legal rights, identity, and memory among Afro-Brazilians and Indians;

  • Stephanie Holler, a graduating senior from Bedford, Pennsylvania, who plans to teach English in the Republic of Korea;

  • Jason Ko, a graduating senior from Warren, Ohio, who plans to teach English in the Republic of Korea;

  • Margaret Lancaster, a graduating senior from Church Hill, Tennessee, who plans to study pharmaceutical biology in Germany;

  • Sasapin Grace Prakalapakorn, a graduating senior from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who plans to study public health in Thailand.

The Fulbright program was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by former Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. It was designed to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Each year the programs allows more than 800 Americans to study or conduct research in some one hundred nations.


TENNIS,
EVERYONE?


ith trustee approval, Duke has begun construction on a six-court indoor tennis center; it will name the complex for Karl Sheffield '54 and his wife, Alice, of Atlanta--who are avid tennis players and equally avid boosters of Duke's men's and women's tennis teams. The Sheffields are giving the university $1.5 million to help pay for the facility, expected to cost $4.4 million. It will include a 5,500-square foot support building housing locker rooms, coaches' offices, and reception and meeting space. Completion is set for the fall.

The Sheffield Tennis Center will serve as the southeastern anchor to the West Campus recreational complex now taking shape alongside Cameron Indoor Stadium, Card Gym, and the Aquatic Center. When construction is completed later this year, there will be a plaza in front of Cameron and the new Wilson Center with the Schwartz-Butters Building anchoring the northwest end.

Designed by Cesar Pelli Associates from New Haven, Connecticut, the tennis support building office will be built with the same Duke stone and glass curtainwall as the Schwartz-Butters Building and the Wilson Center. The tennis building will be built of precast walls and a metal roof. It will be partially concealed behind the support building on one side and by extensive landscaping on the other side next to Wannamaker Drive.

Not only will the air-conditioned tennis center be available for meets and practice by the men's and women's tennis teams, but it will give students, faculty, and staff a place to play tennis in bad weather. "With a first-class indoor tennis facility, Duke will be able to attract the very best athletes to what already is one of the nation's most competitive programs," Karl Sheffield says. "We believe Duke can be consistently among the very best in intercollegiate tennis for generations to come. Equally important, we will have a wonderful all-purpose facility for student tennis and recreation."

Sheffield is president of Compass 21, a private company that is a consultant to corporations and governments on international food distribution. He served as chairman of the Food Industry Campaign Against Hunger and is a past president of Chandler Leigh & Co., a food distribution consulting firm. Fund raising for the tennis center has been led by Duke alumnus Roger Hamilton '64, also of Atlanta. More than twenty other donors have contributed to the effort.

The $20-million Wilson Center now nearing completion will give students around-the-clock access to a large recreational space dominated by a new three-court gymnasium. The new facility also contains three multi-purpose rooms (one dedicated to dance and aerobics), a 10,000-square-foot weight and training area, an indoor jogging track, classroom space, improved locker facilities, administrative offices, and a lounge. The Schwartz-Butters Building, a $12.5 million, six-story addition to Cameron Indoor Stadium, is scheduled to be completed this fall. It will house an academic center for student athletes, men's and women's basketball offices and facilities, and a new sports Hall of Fame.

In addition to the new West Campus facilities, Duke completed the $5-million Brodie Recreation Center on East Campus in 1996. The basketball court and bleachers were recently replaced in Cameron Indoor Stadium, and additional refurbishment is planned. The Intramural Building was given air conditioning and a new synthetic floor in 1996, the Wallace Wade Stadium football playing field was overhauled in 1996, and more than $1.5 million has been spent in the past four years on new athletic fields on East Campus and improvements to ones on West.

Edifice complex: sheffield tennis center anchors recreation buildings alongside cameron, card, and the aquatic center


A DEAN FOR
ENGINEERING


Engineering First: New Dean Johnson
ristina Johnson, a University of Colorado electrical engineering professor and leader in interdisciplinary research that melds light with electronics, has been named dean of the Duke University School of Engineering. Johnson is an internationally known ex- pert in optics, signal processing, and computing and director emerita of the Optoelectronics Computing Systems Center at the University of Colorado. She succeeds Earl Dowell, who is stepping down after an unprecedented sixteen-year term leading Duke's engineering school.

Johnson's research and teaching are in such areas as holography, which is the creation of three-dimensional images with light wave interference patterns, along with optical and signal processing, liquid crystal electro-optics, and affixing a novel variety of liquid crystals to silicon to create new types of miniature displays and computer monitors.

Over the last few decades, optoelectronics has become the basis for a mammoth communications and computing industry, spawning inventions ranging from worldwide networks of high-capacity optical fiber communications to laser-based disk recorders and players for computer data, music, and movies.

She holds about thirty patents, and her own research projects have provided the University of Colorado about $42 million in grants and contracts. She has also been active in engineering education, winning a regional Emmy nomination in 1991 for a ten-part educational television series, Physics of Light. This series and its curriculum were distributed to schools throughout the Rocky Mountain region.

Johnson is the first woman to lead Duke's sixty-year-old School of Engineering. According to the American Society of Engineering Education, there are five other permanent, and one acting, female deans of engineering in the United States.

In 1985, Johnson was named a Presidential Young Investigator, among the highest honors given to a young engineer, and that year she also helped found the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute Center of Excellence in Optoelectronics. In 1994, she was named one of the nation's top 100 engineers under forty by the National Academy of Engineering. She is also a fellow of the Optical Society of America and winner of the 1993 International Denis Gabor Medal for Outstanding Achievements in Modern Optics. In 1994, she received the Photonics Spectra Circle of Excellence Award for her invention of a new form of liquid crystal display. In 1996, she was given the Colorado Technology Transfer Award for her work with industry.

While at Colorado, Johnson co-founded two spinoff companies. One is ColorLink Inc., which makes components for color projection devices based on differing polarizations, or vibrational states, of light. Another, called KAJ, LLC, was set up as an intellectual property licensing company to assist the startups of new firms using technology pioneered at her center.

Johnson received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She joined the University of Colorado faculty in 1985 after research work at IBM and Trinity College in Ireland. She also excelled in sports, playing varsity hockey and lacrosse at Stanford, competing at the international level in cricket while in Ireland, and earning a red belt in Tae Kwon Do, the level just below black belt.


A RESEARCH
INTERRUPTION


n mid-May, federal officials lifted a four-day ban on federally financed human experiments at Duke University Medical Center. The ban was lifted after medical center officials agreed to overhaul the system of protections for human subjects.

In a letter to Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs, Michael A. Carome, chief compliance officer the Office for Protection from Research Risks, said: "OPRR has determined that DUMC [Duke University Medical Center] has developed the satisfactory corrective plans that were required in OPRR's letter of May 10, 1999," when the ban was imposed.

The OPRR, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, monitors all human experiments carried out with federal financing. After a December visit, investigators criticized Duke's institutional review board procedures for trials involving human subjects. According to the investigators, the board lacked adequate citizen representation, some of the voting members may have had a conflict of interest, meetings were apparently held and research approved without a quorum, and informed-consent requirements were not followed rigorously. Federal officials took their action after what they judged to be an inadequate response by Duke to the list of violations, but pointed out that they had found no evidence that patients had been injured.

Following the research suspension, a team led by Snyderman and Edward Holmes met with OPRR officials and reviewed with them DUMC's strategies to ensure compliance with federal regulations. Shortly after the meeting, DUMC submitted a revised plan for corrective action. The plan was accepted, and the research resumed.

Snyderman said he was "extremely grateful that the hard work" of Holmes, dean of the school of medicine, and an institutional review board task force had been recognized by OPRR.


BENEFITS
FOR LAW


n the largest gift to legal education in North Carolina, the estate of the late Kathrine R. Everett has pledged $14 million to be divided between Duke and the University of North Carolina law schools. Duke Law School will use the gift to support its Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security (LENS) and other projects.

Kathrine Everett, who died in 1992 at the age of ninety-eight, was a respected North Carolina lawyer whose career spanned seven decades. She was one of the first women to graduate from the University of North Carolina Law School, where she ranked at the head of her class, and the first woman to argue and win a case before the North Carolina Supreme Court. She earned the top score on the state bar exam in 1920. In 1951, she became one of the first two women elected to the Durham City Council, serving there for twenty years. Later in her life, Kathrine Everett established UHF television stations in Durham, Greensboro, Wilmington, and Fayetteville.

Her husband, Reuben Oscar Everett, was one of the first five law students at Duke. Their son and only child, Robinson O. Everett, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1950 and joined the

Duke Law faculty that same year at age twenty-two, the youngest faculty member in Duke's history. He earned a master of laws degree from Duke Law School in 1959. In 1954, the Everetts were the first family of lawyers sworn in together to the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.

Robinson Everett served in the Korean War in the Judge Advocate General's Department and afterward as a commissioner of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals. He remained in the Air Force Reserve until he retired as colonel in 1978. In 1980, President Carter appointed him chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. Everett founded Duke Law School's LENS Center in 1993. The center is dedicated to the teaching and study of national security law and advising policymakers on critical national security issues.


ARCHIVING
ADVERTISING


Collecting icons: from the extensive archive of print ads and commercials given to the hartman center
ells Rich Greene BDDP, at one time among the most successful advertising agencies in the industry, has donated its archive of print and television ads to Duke Libraries after ceasing operations last year.

The agency created many well-known commercials and product slogans over the years, such as "At Ford, Quality is Job 1"; "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"; "Try it, you'll like it"; "Flick my Bic"; "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz"; "Raise your hand if you're Sure"; "Hefty, Hefty, wimpy, wimpy"; "Friends don't let friends drive drunk"; and "Trust the Midas touch."

The archive, which covers the agency's thirty-two-year history, was donated last summer to Duke's John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, a division of the university's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Library staff members spent ten months organizing the archive, and it is now available for public use. The archive is substantial. It consists of 235 boxes of materials that mostly reflect the firm's creative work, but it also includes some marketing reports and other internal documents. In all, there are tens of thousands of original print ads and television commercials on videotape.

"This is a very rich archive and a strong record of the agency's work," says Ellen Gartrell, director of the Hartman Center. "We're thrilled to house it because Wells Rich Greene BDDP was renowned as one of the most creative agencies in the business."

Wells Rich Greene was founded in 1966 by Mary Wells and two partners, Dick Rich and Stewart Greene. An intelligent, energetic, and aggressive leader, Wells became known early in her career as the first woman in advertising to break through the industry's "glass ceiling," especially after she landed a $12-million account with American Motors Corporation in 1967. Based in New York City, the company made its reputation with innovative work and experienced intense growth in its first decade of business. Among the firm's major clients over the years were Braniff International Airways, Cadbury Schweppes, International Business Machines (IBM), MCI Communications, the New York State Board of Tourism, Pan American World Airways, Procter & Gamble, Ralston Purina Company, Royal Crown Cola, and Sheraton Hotels.

The agency's demise began in 1990, when Wells stepped down as chief executive officer and sold out to Boulet Dru Dupuy Petit (BDDP), a French advertising giant also known for its creative work. A number of management problems arose in the years that followed and the firm gradually lost one client after another. The final blow came in January 1998, when Procter & Gamble canceled its contract with the company.

Faced with the prospect of what to do with the company archive and wanting to make sure that its history was preserved, agency executives contacted the Hartman Center, says Jan Sneed, formerly the agency's executive vice president of corporate communications. "It was our belief that Duke University has the most comprehensive archives covering the advertising industry."

There are few internal documents in the Wells archive because the company shut down in a relatively short period and some materials were lost. Gartrell said she hopes to improve the archive in the next couple of years by encouraging the agency's former employees to donate any remaining materials they may have in their possession.


IN BRIEF



  • Graduate school dean and vice provost Lewis Siegel has added interim vice provost for research to his portfolio, assuming many of the duties of the late Charles Putman in the oversight of research support and development. Siegel was appointed dean of the graduate school and vice provost for interdisciplinary activities in 1991.

  • John Harer, chair of mathematics, has been named to the new position of vice provost for academic affairs. He came to Duke in 1992 as a visiting professor. He had served as department head at Washington and Lee University and as a professor at the University of Michigan. Under new provost Peter Lange, four other vice provosts--Cathy Davidson, Bruce Kuniholm, Jim Roberts, and Judith Ruderman--will continue in their old assignments with some title changes and enlarged responsibilities.

  • Michael J. Palmer, formerly deputy county manager for Durham County, is now director of Duke's Office of Community Affairs. The centerpiece of the Office of Community Affairs is the university's three-year-old Duke-Durham Partnership Initiative--a wide-ranging collaborative program between Duke and the twelve neighborhoods surrounding the university, along with the seven public schools that serve those neighborhoods. Following a career in industry, Palmer joined the county administration in 1987 as director of internal audit. He was promoted to assistant manager for services in 1990, assistant county manager five years later, and deputy county manager in 1996.

  • Glenn Edwards, who was director of Vanderbilt University's Free-Electron Laser Center, is professor of physics and director of Duke's Free-Electron Laser Laboratory. He replaces John Madey, the inventor of the free-electron laser (FEL), who left Duke for the University of Hawaii last year. FELs differ from ordinary lasers in that they extract laser light from electrons that have been liberated of their normal bondage to atoms. Because of this freedom, FELs can make amplified light in an unusually large variety of different wavelengths, making them extremely useful scientific tools.

  • Gary L. Stiles has been appointed chief medical officer and vice president of Duke University Health System (DUHS). He joined the Duke faculty in 1981 and has for the past ten years served as chief of its division of cardiology. In 1996, he was appointed medical director of DUHS Network Development. In this capacity, he has been responsible for coordinating relationships between Duke physicians and those practicing throughout DUHS's eighteen-county primary referral region.

  • Clark C. Havighurst, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, has been named interim dean of Duke's law school. He succeeds Pamela B. Gann, who is leaving the law school to become president of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. The law school is conducting a national search for Gann's permanent successor. At Duke since 1964, Havighurst teaches courses in antitrust law and health care law and policy. He is the author of three books and many articles in the health-care field.




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