Fall 2016 Issue

Jon Spelman, 74, a storyteller, avid hiker, and wilderness lover, meditates on trees and aging.Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies. 

Robert Coffey, executive director of Duke Dining Services, remembers taking the decisions that years of meetings and student focus groups had yielded and presenting them to the West Union builders. “I remember the designer saying, ‘Fire pit? NitroCream? Really? You want do to this on a college campus?’ ”

As the founder, president, and chief executive officer of Afaxys Inc., her mission-driven, social- business enterprise, Ronda Dean, Weekend Executive M.B.A. ’92 brings a wealth of knowledge to the table: She has more than twenty-five years of healthcare industry experience and a decade of executive-level work in public health.

When Jillian Popadak worked as a consultant for KPMG Financial Services, she wondered why, in academic literature, governance was often perceived as a good thing.Her perspective was that regulations at a particular company were not one size fits all. “Government intervening often led to perverse outcomes,” she says.

Ryan C. McDevitt grew up in a prosperous Detroit suburb. He went off to college in the 1990s and came back to an area on the decline.It was quite a case study in economics. The Motor City’s mystique was unravelling as foreign competition and automation left the American car industry decimated.And it was right up McDevitt’s alley. An assistant professor of economics, he specializes in empirical industrial organization, using data to study how markets are organized and how firms compete with one another.

Sean Lilly Wilson M.B.A. ’00, the owner and self-described chief executive optimist of Durham’s Fullsteam Brewery, participated in Fuqua’s inaugural class of Mentored Study in Entrepreneurship. The experience, he says, gave him real-world insight.“I could take what I was learning in business school and apply it to a fast-growing, dynamic start-up environment,” he says.

Duke research spawns bills to correct the expense of racismResearch by a professor at the Fuqua School of Business has inspired the introduction of a second bill in Congress aimed at eliminating racial inequity in the higher education bond market.Professor Bill Mayew found historically black colleges and universities pay more to float bonds in the market than other schools. He found evidence race was a factor in the higher costs.

The logo for Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has been around for thity-five years, nearly as long as the school itself. Painstakingly hand-drawn by an art director at Benton & Bowles, courtesy of Roy J. Bostock ’62, then a member of Fuqua’s board of visitors, the mark had become challenging to use, as it did not render well in digital channels.

Why do you volunteer for Duke? I volunteer for Duke because I can’t say no to you. Like so many of our alums, I love Duke. I’m a first-generation student. Duke helped me find my voice. It opened up to me possibilities of what my life could be like. It helped me figure out what I wanted it to be like—and I want other students to be able to come here and have the same experiences I’ve had. What has been your favorite volunteer role over the years?

THE CATALYST: In 2008, global-health professor Eve Puffer was a postdoctoral candidate at Duke and taught a small elective seminar on mental-health issues around the world. When she returned to the university in 2012 after conducting fieldwork in Kenya, interest (and concern) regarding global mental health—throughout academia and particularly at Duke—had exploded. Today, the course has two variants: One version (GLH660) exists for graduate students, and Puffer teaches a forty-student course to undergraduates.

Class of 2020, this ceremony marks a great transition. Your childhood is over and a new life begins. By the powers vested in me, I now proclaim you a student of Duke University. Or let me reach for a stronger word: I now proclaim you a citizen of Duke. Let’s think what difference that word makes.

An autumn update from Jack Bovender ’67, M.H.A. ’69 and divinity school professor Ellen Davis, chair and vice chair, respectively, of the presidential search committee. Where has your work taken you so far?

To some, the word “Alaska” may evoke a Roosevelt-ian dreamland of an unforgiving Arctic and the ever-present opportunity to wrestle for your life against a bear. The four-week Duke in Alaska summer program is quite different, yet proper bear safety is a necessity.“One of the students texted me a picture of a [warning] sign just adjacent to campus saying a black bear and her two cubs had been sighted,” says Jon Shaw, a biology professor at Duke who led the inaugural summer in Alaska. “It’s a reminder that this isn’t like walking through Duke Forest ….”

Finding the right wordsCarlos Rojas, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, has translated to English numerous works of award-winning Chinese novelist Yan Lianke. His latest translation is of the 2013 novel The Explosion Chronicles; here, Rojas explains the various considerations that go into the process of translation.

Tonight, coming off a loss, the Duke women’s team is tasting the sick humor that makes soccer a sometimes infuriating game—at halftime, they’ve outshot their opponents twenty to one, but they hold just a one-nil lead.

When MUYINATU LEDIJU BELL Ph.D.’12 lost her mother to breast cancer, a life cut too short set Bell on a fast-track to helping patients get more accurate diagnoses sooner.The MIT undergrad spent her time at Duke developing a noninvasive imaging technique that is now being used to get clearer ultrasound images—helping doctors diagnose myriad conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular issues at earlier stages and giving patients a better chance at surviving.

Enrique Fernández de la Puebla Otamendi M.B.A. ’12 shares the experiences that led him to launch a regional group:On Orientation Day at the Fuqua School of Business in 2010, I remember professor Blair Sheppard telling my M.B.A. class that our experience could be “transactional or transformational.”

The extraordinary lives of the Duke family have inspired many endeavors— often artistic, occasionally fictional. Some efforts, like the television dramas about Doris Duke’s life, take great liberties in their effort to dramatize personal lives and can be unflattering or simply untrue. In 1964, however, a play was written intending to honor the Dukes— specifically to honor James and Benjamin Duke’s partnership with president William Preston Few and the subsequent creation of The Duke Endowment and founding of Duke University.

Who should America's next president include in his or her cabinet?We suggest a few Blue Devils worthy of consderation.Vice President: Ken Jeong ’90. If Veep has taught us anything, the vice president merely needs to be entertaining; Jeong, the funnyman who starred in both Community and The Hangover, fits the bill. And if the candidates’ health is a concern, it can’t hurt to have Jeong, a licensed physician, close to the Oval Office.

Three Duke mainstays rememberedLongtime history professor Raymond Gavins was a pioneer his whole life. The first African American to graduate from the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as well as the first African American on the history faculty at Duke, he focused his scholarship and teaching on the struggles faced by many, including himself, during the Jim Crow era.

In her Santa Monica office, Amy Gravitt ’95 has a collection of television-show keepsakes one might expect to adorn the work space of an HBO comedy chief. There, on a stand in front of the TV where Gravitt watches dailies of the network’s shows, is the Louisville Slugger that actor Danny McBride used to hit out his frustrations when he played failed pro-baseball star Kenny Powers on Eastbound & Down.

The lovely white brick cottage, one block from campus, with a rose garden out front and firethorn twining a filigree against the chimney, looked like a house where Jane Austen might live—perfect for an aspiring novelist. Every time I drove past I couldn’t help but let escape a sigh of longing and recognition: One day this would be my home; I just knew it. So, four summers ago, when my husband and I heard through the grapevine that 713 Anderson Street soon would be on the market, we made our offer.