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"The McGovern-Davison Children's Health Center will serve as a model for children's health care in the twenty-first century," says Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs. "This facility will be the hub of an entire network of Duke pediatric care that includes hospital-based critical care, campus-based outpatient care, and community-based health services." In addition to centralizing children's care, the building was developed with pediatric patients in mind. Bright colors are splashed throughout the facility, and an atrium soars five stories to bring in light and air. Fish and a remote-controlled submarine travel through a 2,500-gallon aquarium, and drinking fountains are shaped like sleek robots. Beside the health center is a play area, which occupies children with an interactive water garden, a story-telling area, and K's Court, a half-court for basketball. "For small children, the usual medical center environment is pretty scary," says Michael Frank, chair of the pediatrics department. "We've designed the Children's Health Center to try to make the experience less frightening for children and less overwhelming for their parents." The center is named for Houston pediatrician John P. "Jack" McGovern B.S.M. '45, M.D. '45, whose $6.5-million gift helped launch the fund-raising effort, and in honor of his mentor, Wilburt C. Davison, founder of Duke's medical school and its first pediatrician. Nearly 300 companies and individuals, including more than 200 Duke employees, contributed to the building campaign.
The settlement is the first the government has negotiated with a college or university under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Justice Department official John L. Wodatch, in an article in The News and Observer, called the agreement "far-reaching." "It took us a few years to work out the terms, but we all think it's a very good settlement because it is so comprehensive," he said. Duke News Service director Al Rossiter told the paper that the work will be done in a few years at the cost of several million dollars. "Making the Duke campus more accessible to everyone is a high priority, and we've been working hard to do that. We do take this seriously. It's something we want and plan to do." Rossiter told the newspaper that Duke currently has twenty-five disabled students, including nine who have difficulty with mobility. Details of the settlement include the modification of elevators, entrances, food-service lines, telephones, drinking fountains, locker rooms, and bathrooms; creation of accessible paths, sidewalks, hallways, doors, and ramps among all university buildings used by students; scheduling of all classes and programs used by people with physical disabilities in buildings that are wheelchair-accessible; scheduling campus shuttle bus routes so wheelchair-accessible buses run frequently and regularly; making at least 2 percent of all dormitory rooms fully accessible; providing accessible seating and other facilities in Cameron Indoor Stadium; providing accessible parking throughout campus; using Braille and raised letters for campus signage; and adding signs that point the way to accessible pathways.
The Kenan grant will fund a permanent endowment held by the Kenan Fund for Ethics, with the annual income supporting the institute at Duke. The Kenan Institute for Ethics joins three other Kenan institutes in North Carolina: the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the N.C. School of the Arts; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology, and Science at North Carolina State University. Projects slated for the new institute in the next three to five years include programs supporting Duke's new two-course Ethical Inquiry requirement for undergraduates as part of Curriculum 2000, an initiative to expand and strengthen service-learning across the curriculum, and the promotion of academic integrity among students from middle school through university. Another program will help businesses explore issues of ethics and civic responsibilities; a series of forums will discuss new moral challenges created by recent technological, institutional, and cultural developments; and new projects will explore and model ethical dialogue about contentious issues, including a television program on religion and ethics in a pluralistic society. In its first five years, the Kenan Ethics Program has introduced new ethics courses and modules, and a variety of initiatives promoting moral deliberation in campus life. It also has worked locally, regionally, and nationally to promote excellence and innovation in ethics teaching from elementary school through university. The institute's director, Elizabeth Kiss, founded the Kenan Ethics Program.
Mandatory student fees will be $740, and typical room and board for two semesters will be $7,387. Tuition for fourth-year students will be $24,030, tuition for Pratt engineering students will be $24,980, and for all other undergraduates, $24,890. Forty percent of Duke students receive financial aid, with cash grants for next year expected to average $17,300, up nearly 11 percent. The board approved four changes that will enhance some students' aid packages: determining summer savings requirements on a case-by-case basis; reformulating home-equity consideration caps relative to family income; reviewing cases where expected parental contributions would exceed 20 percent of total income, lowering those contributions where appropriate; and reviewing situations where parents have saved in their children's names, counting those savings as parental assets rather than student assets. Because Duke's $1.68-billion endowment is considerably less than most private research universities and several public universities with which it competes for faculty and staff, tuition is particularly important for supporting academic programs. Officials say Duke's expenses, like those of other research universities, typically rise faster than the rate of inflation. Tuition rates for the graduate and professional schools for 2000-2001, with increases from the previous year, are: Divinity School, $11,250, up 4.9 percent; Fuqua School of Business, $28,200, up 7.6 percent; Graduate School, $20,840, up 4.1 percent; Law School, $26,650, up 4.5 percent; Nicholas School of the Environment, $19,760, up 4.5 percent; School of Medicine, $27,600, up 3.4 percent; School of Nursing, $21,492, up 4 percent.
"Gedney was an amazing photographer, an American original," says Margaret Sartor, a research associate at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies who helped develop the site. "He covered everyday subjects in a way I had never seen before, finding elegant beauty in the lives of ordinary people doing everyday things." Born in Albany in 1939 and raised in upstate New York, Gedney led a modest life. He discovered photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then worked at CondŽ Nast publications and Time, Inc. Eventually, he accepted a post teaching photography at Pratt, remaining there for more than twenty years. Gedney's projects included a photographic documentation of the lives of a Kentucky family, a series of portraits of contemporary American composers, studies of San Francisco's counterculture in the late 1960s, and stints in India, Ireland, and England. Among his many accolades were a Fulbright fellowship, a New York State Creative Arts Public Service fellowship grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography. In 1986, Gedney was diagnosed with AIDS. He died three years later after handing over responsibility for his photographic archive to Lee Friedlander, a close friend and prominent contemporary American photographer. Duke accepted the Gedney collection in 1992 as a gift from Friedlander and Gedney's brother, Richard Gedney. In addition to creating the book What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney, Sartor has collaborated with a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to create a retrospective of Gedney's photographs. That exhibition, "Short Distances and Definite Places: The Photographs of William Gedney," opened in San Francisco in January and will travel to a number of other venues in the United States. Made possible by Duke Libraries and a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the website includes nearly 5,000 photographic images of Gedney's finished prints, work prints, and contact sheets, as well as images selected from his handmade photographic books and book dummies. There are also about 1,200 images and transcriptions from Gedney's notebooks and other writings. To view the Gedney website, visit scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/gedney.
The Truman Scholarship was awarded to two Duke juniors, David Matthew Baugh of Raleigh and Lakeytria Windray Felder of North Charleston, South Carolina. Baugh, an A.B. Duke Scholar, is completing a self-designed curriculum in international development and health, with career goals of health advocacy and working to improve national public health programs. He chairs the University Honor Council, co-chairs the Academic Integrity Review Committee, and is a member of the Undergraduate Judicial Board. Felder, a B.N. Duke and Reginald Howard scholar, is a double major in political science and African and African-American studies. She is planning a career in policy analysis and public-interest law. Felder is president of Duke Women of Color United and president and political action chair of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Thirty-one Duke students have been named Truman Scholars since the program's inception in 1977. The Henry Luce Scholarship, which allows eighteen young Americans to live and work in Asia each year, has been awarded to senior Jeremy Huff of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Huff, a vice president of Duke Mock Trial, says he expects he will be placed in a position oriented toward the law, perhaps in a governmental agency, private law firm, or non-governmental organization. His admission to Harvard Law School will be deferred for the Luce award year. Beau Mount '99, of Franklin, North Carolina, and Brooke Nixon '00, of Carmel, Indiana, will each receive one-year fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Mellon fellowships cover tuition and fees and provide a stipend for one year's study in preparation for college teaching and scholarship in the humanities. Mount will be studying in Princeton University's doctoral program in comparative literature, and Nixon will enter the culture and media program at New York University. Duke went four-for-four with Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, which recognize excellence in science, mathematics, and engineering. All four students nominated won the award: Pavan Cheruvu of Tampa, Florida, a sophomore studying biological engineering and chemistry; Kevin Lacker of Cincinnati, Ohio, a sophomore majoring in mathematics; Daniel Neill, of Tampa, Florida, a junior majoring in electrical engineering and computer science; and Scott W. Smith of Mahwah, New Jersey, a sophomore studying electrical engineering and computer science. A Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans was awarded to Neil Hattangadi '99, currently in Oxford, England, on a Rhodes Scholarship. The Soros fellowship is a grant for up to two years of graduate study in the United States for "able and accomplished New AmericansÉto partake of the American dream." Senior Julian Harris' selection as a Rhodes Scholar was announced last winter.
Provost Peter Lange says the purpose of the merger is to look to the future. "We have two university reports and an external review arguing that while the two departments are strong in the short term, over the long term, one unified department would allow for more effective exchange of information between the faculties," he told the Academic Council in January. "As a long-term prospect in a dynamic and innovative field, breaking down the current boundaries and building a large, unified department would create a context for new research and also improve the faculty's ability to establish links to other biological sciences at Duke." The merger was driven by concerns that Duke's biological sciences might suffer during a period of rapid change in the field. A 1998-1999 external review of the botany and zoology departments had warned that while both departments had strong national reputations, maintaining the status quo of separate departments would prevent faculty from taking advantage of developments in related disciplines, and that unifying would allow a more effective exchange of information and research. Part of the merger process addresses concerns raised by members of the two departments, as outlined in an internal task force report supported unanimously in a combined vote of the department faculties. That report recommended a structure for the new department and endorsed proposals related to tenure, graduate and undergraduate programs, and the mechanics of the merger itself. The university has pledged to provide $3 million to improve facilities, including research and teaching labs, and to add three new graduate fellowships. The university's original plan was to create an interim chairmanship for the new department, but shifted focus slightly in naming Kathleen Smith, a professor of biological anthropology and anatomy, to a two- to three-year term as chair of biology. Administrators say Smith's appointment will allow her to implement necessary changes in the fledgling department and will afford the university the luxury of a thorough national search for an external chair.
More than 400 companies produce jackets, sweatshirts, caps, mugs, notebooks, and a wide variety of other merchandise bearing Duke logos; 93 percent of those licensees have complied with factory disclosure requirements adopted last year as part of a code of conduct governing the manufacture of Duke-licensed products. Aimed at eliminating sweatshop conditions in factories used by companies licensing the university's trademarks, the code set minimum age, wage, and benefit limits; prohibited harassment, abuse, and forced labor; required healthy and safe working conditions; recognized employees' collective bargaining rights; and committed licensees to allow independent external monitoring. After sit-ins by students in January 1999, Duke officials and Students Against Sweatshops signed an agreement committing the university to seek disclosures of all licensees' factory locations by January 2000. Duke's agent then renegotiated contracts with 409 licensees to require factory disclosure. In March 1999, each licensee was informed that detailed factory location information had to be submitted to the Collegiate Licensing Company by January 1. Follow-up letters were sent informing those who had yet to disclose factory locations that they would be considered in breach of contract if they failed to respond by January 31. Nearly 80 percent of those firms beat the deadline. Jim Wilkerson, Duke Stores' head of operations and licensing, says the twenty-eight companies that failed to disclose factory locations produced about 8 percent of Duke's annual royalty revenue. "Duke is committed to full disclosure as a way to assure that products bearing a Duke trademark are not produced under abusive or unfair labor conditions," he says. "We gave our licensees abundant time to comply with our request to provide addresses for their manufacturing facilities and we're pleased that the overwhelming majority did. Public disclosure of factory locations is a key step in opening the doors of the factories to scrutiny by the public and others."
The new Bass Fellows are: Pankaj K. Agarwal, Earl D. Mclean Jr. Professor of computer science, who teaches computational geometry, computer graphics, computational complexity, and randomized algorithms; Richard B. Forward Jr., Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of zoology, who teaches physiology of marine animals and marine animal navigation; James T. Hamilton, Oscar L. Tang Family Associate Professor of public policy studies, who teaches courses on the regulatory process and political analysis for public policy; M. Susan Lozier, Truman and Nellie Semans/Alex Brown and Sons Associate Professor of earth and ocean sciences, who teaches atmosphere and ocean dynamics, oceanography, and ancient and modern perceptions of our natural world; Charles M. Payne, Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of history, who teaches courses on the civil-rights movement, urban education, and African-American activism; and Gregg E. Trahey, James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professor of biomedical engineering, who teaches diagnostic imaging, advanced diagnostic ultrasound imaging, signals and systems, and medical instrumentation. Six other endowed professorships were created through gifts from one anonymous donor and the following five individuals and families: the Bishop-MacDermott Family Professorship, created by Archer and Sandie Bishop with their daughter Kristin MacDermott '90 and her husband, Michael MacDermott, and their son Thompson Bishop, a Trinity sophomore; the Bridges Family Associate Professorship, established by Robert E. Bridges '78 and his wife, Amy; the Susan B. King Professorship, created by Susan Bennett King '62; the Marcello Lotti Professorship Endowment, established by Diane Britz Lotti '74 and her daughters Ariane and Samantha, in memory of her husband; and the James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professorship in Engineering, established by James L. Vincent '61. Robert E. Torray '59 and his wife, Nancy, have given more than $1 million to provide scholarships for economically disadvantaged undergraduate students. Duke admits students based on academic performance and potential without regard for their financial circumstances, and the Torray Scholarship is directed primarily toward those students whose families can make little or no contribution to the cost of their child's college education. Approximately 10 percent of the Class of 2003 fell into that category, and two members of that class have received the inaugural Torray scholarships. Perkins Library has received $1 million from Gretchen Schroder Fish '68 and her husband, Edward, in support of renovation efforts. Duke University Libraries is seeking $30 million in the Campaign for Duke to renovate the facility, expand and preserve the collections, and advance technological resources.
a $1.6-billion cultural center. His other projects include the Regional Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia, the Princeton University Stadium in New Jersey, and the Samsung Cultural and Education Center in Seoul, Korea. Construction of the $15-million Duke museum, expected to begin next year, has been made possible by a $7.5-million gift from Raymond D. Nasher '43, a Dallas art collector, philanthropist, and real-estate developer.
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ediatric patients at Duke Medical Center have not always had an easy time of it, facing not only their illnesses but clinic spaces that were at once cramped and fragmented. But the new $30.5-million McGovern-Davison Children's Health Center changes all that. The spacious, colorful care facility--the first "kids only" building built at Duke--brings all pediatric medical and surgical specialty services and laboratory services together in one location.
ettling a civil-rights complaint filed in 1996 by a disabled student, Duke has agreed to overhaul dormitories, classrooms, sidewalks, and other facilities to make the campus "fully accessible" to people with disabilities. The university has also agreed to pay a total of $32,500 in civil and compensatory penalties to the student, Selene Faer Dalton-Kumins '97.
ith a $10-million grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, an ethics program at Duke is now an institute. The Kenan Institute for Ethics will serve as a focal point for the intellectual exploration and practical application of ethics in the classroom and everyday life.
uition at Duke will increase 3.5 percent next fall, its lowest increase in more than thirty years. Duke's trustees, meeting in February, approved the increase, while reaffirming the university's long-standing policy of need-blind admissions, guaranteeing to meet the demonstrated financial need of each student, and approving actions to liberalize some criteria used to determine that need. The board also endorsed a plan to increase expenditures for undergraduate financial aid by 4.3 percent, to more than $31 million.
ntil recently, the work of the intensely private photographer William Gedney was largely unknown. Now the range of his output has been captured in a website produced by the Digital Scriptorium and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, which houses the archive of Gedney's work.
uke students are among the impressive ranks of winners of major scholarship awards, including the Truman, the Luce, Mellons, and Goldwaters.
iological science was the topic in February when Duke trustees approved the merger of the botany and zoology departments. The merger, effective July 1, creates a department of biology, which will be one of the largest departments at the university with forty tenured and tenure-track faculty and an estimated 700 undergraduate majors.
etters went out in March to twenty-eight companies from Duke's licensing agent, canceling the right to manufacture and market clothing and other products with Duke trademarks because the firms failed to disclose the locations of factories making the products, or provided incomplete information.
recent spate of gifts have provided funds for faculty chairs, scholarships, and Perkins Library.
Six faculty members are new recipients of endowed chairs through the university's Bass Program for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, a $40-million initiative recognizing faculty who are gifted teachers as well as scholars. The new chairs are the result of a $10-million challenge gift by Anne and Robert Bass. Under the challenge, donors may endow a full professorship with a gift of $1.125 million, with the Basses contributing the remainder of the $1.5 million required for the endowment. The Basses have also established three professorships in their own name.
Janet Smith Dickerson, vice president for student affairs at Duke since 1991, will become vice president for campus life at Princeton University, effective July 1. At Duke, Dickerson was responsible for planning, management, and budgetary oversight of undergraduate and graduate student affairs, including counseling, career services, residential life, and community service. She led efforts to improve diversity in the workforce, to create an alcohol policy and education program, and to improve wellness and mental health services. James Clack, director of Counseling and Psychological Services, will serve as interim vice president for student affairs while a search is conducted for Dickerson's replacement.
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