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We asked the Duke Stores' textbook-sales division for a list of this semester's ten best sellers. Here's what students bought for required reading:
Hughes-Hallett's Calculus
Masterton's General Chemistry
Campbell's Biology
Booth's Craft of Research
Crowley's Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students
Mendenhall's Course in Business Statistics
Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
Bizzell's Negotiating Difference
"You are beginning a new life. Get into it. Savor it. Don't move too quickly past it to think about how this is going to help you get somewhere else. It's terrible to live your whole life always seeing your present activities as instrumental to what happens next, never enjoying what you are actually doing until you're old and tired and it's too late."
--President Nannerl O. Keohane, in her opening convocation for undergraduates in August,
addressing the "palindrome"
Class of 2002
"Go to the library. Say to the librarian: I've come to get it. Will you help me?"
--Poet, author, actor, and educator Maya Angelou, speaking to
a packed house of first-year students in Duke Chapel during orientation in August, supported in part by the Delta Gamma Leadership in Ethics and Values Endowment
"Some of the best years of my life were spent at Duke University and I look forward to sharing that experience with other young people through this gift."
--
$20-million endowment from
her and husband Bill Gates
to launch the University
Scholars program for gifted
undergraduate, graduate,
and professional students
"It's enough to bring tears to my eyes. I'm so happy. Our kids needed a win for their confidence."
--
Fred Goldsmith, head football coach, in The Chronicle, after Duke defeated Northwestern 44-10 for a 2-0 season, the first time since 1994, when Goldsmith took the
Blue Devil helm
"Whatever his misdeeds, Bill Clinton cannot approach John F. Kennedy's record for sexual escapades in the White House, or Richard Nixon's penchant for abusing power to obstruct justice. Nor should Kenneth Starr be let off the hook for his excesses in using a sexual relationship to 'get' Clinton."
--
William H. Chafe, president of the Organization of American Historians and dean of the faculty
of arts and sciences at Duke, in
his opinion piece "Character in Politics: Robert Kennedy and
Bill Clinton" in The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Believing that Duke students need more guidance through their learning process than the current undergraduate curriculum offers, the committee determined to provide greater curricular structure and coherence in terms of required areas of knowledge, skills, and substantive themes."
-- from a report by the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Review Committee, which is drafting
a revised undergraduate
curriculum for the year 2000
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We asked students in a freshman writing seminar, "What's been your biggest surprise about campus life during your early Duke days?" Here's a sampling of the responses:
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"The friendliness of the students and the sense of community. Most college campuses around the country don't seem to have the positive feeling that Duke does."
--Brian McGinnis
"The prevalence of alcohol in
the social life of Duke students. Although there is a significant minority that does not engage
in heavy drinking, I was surprised that it is a common belief even at Duke that you must drink in order to have fun."
--Marko Djuranovic
"I was surprised at the number
of students who seem to take their work almost too seriously--students who are already
'stressing' over Organic Chemistry and other such classes."
--Maggie Stone
"My biggest surprise has been how little time for sleep there is."
--Ligeia Donis
"Just how apropos the 'Work hard, play hard' saying is here. After only two weeks on
campus, I've already noticed a remarkable pattern. The dorms quiet down remarkably on Sunday nights, and stay that
way for most of the week.
But Thursday through Saturday, it's a whole other story."
--Ellen Mielke
"Having never traveled much
and coming from a small, rela-tively homogenous community, meeting people from across
the nation and around the world was a real eye-opener. Thanks to Duke's wide diversity,
I will return to Tennessee feeling like a cosmopolite, a man of the world."
--Robert Reagan
"How much freedom, choice, and responsibility we are given. I used to be in the midst of fairly strong parental control; I wasn't really accustomed to making decisions on my own."
--Wonseok Choi
"I'm shocked by the brilliance of so many of my classmates. I came from a small school where it wasn't difficult to be at the top academically. Now, it will definitely be a challenge to make a name for myself."
--Loly Otero
"Probably most surprising is that there are almost no unattractive people here. It feels like The Twilight Zone meets The Truman Show."
--Buchanan Vrazel
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