Jan - Feb 2002 Issue

  

 

In ancient Bedouin parable suggests that if you let a camel stick his nose in your tent, before long, the whole camel will be in the tent. The phrase "the camel's nose" is another name for the usually fallacious reasoning known as "the slippery slope," in which one event is deemed to lead inevitably to another. With President George W. Bush's decision in August to allow the limited use of embryonic stem cells in federally funded research, the phrase "slippery slope" was in common use in academe.

 For Stanley Hauerwas, 2001 was quite a year. Hauerwas, Gilbert T.

To catch a glimpse into the harried life of a Duke graduate student, ask Audrey Odom '96 about her wedding weekend. Odom, an M.D.-Ph.D. student, describes how after she and her British fiancé, Antony John--a Duke graduate student in music--set their wedding date for early May, she learned she had been chosen to receive the prestigious Weintraub award for excellence in graduate study in the biological sciences.

The trip to Gombe Stream National Park begins with a flight to Dar es Salaam. From there, you take the train some 700 miles, a journey punctuated by stops in every small town and sometimes halted altogether by a derailed car or engine breakdown. After forty-plus hours, you arrive in the fishing port of Kigoma and step aboard a water taxi outfitted with a small outboard motor. Often, it is brimming with chickens and goats, oil drums, luggage, and people.

Six of us are bunched together in a small blue boat, enjoying a cool breeze under the relentless Venezuelan sun. A maze of islands surrounds us, little green gumdrops whose reddish-brown shores slope steeply into forested interiors. Powered by a moody Yamaha motor, we chug our way toward Chiguire Island, a smidge of dry land named after the giant aquatic rodents that hang out there.

 Duke has joined the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and is delaying the renewal of its contract with New Era Cap Company, the latest steps in Duke's continuing effort to promote safe working conditions and fair labor practices for apparel workers.

 

 

  

  Futhey: new v.p. at OIT

 After more than two decades of work by faculty and administrators, the drama program has attained departmental status, and is now officially recognized as the department of theater studies."It signifies for many that theater is now a fully embraced academic discipline at the university," says Richard Riddell, chair of the new department.

 Award-winning journalist and author Tom Wolfe, whose daughter Alexandra is a Duke senior and whose book-in-progress is set on a college campus, will deliver the 2002 commencement address on Sunday, May 12. Announcing Wolfe's selection, President Nannerl O. Keohane cited Wolfe's "well-justified reputation as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of American culture."

 Between them, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings have brought in more than $500 million in box-office receipts, and counting. What explains the appeal of these fantasy tales?

 François Boucher, the eighteenth-century French artist, objected to the natural world because it was "too green and badly lit." Boucher populated and illuminated a painted world in a way that made the natural world more interesting and comprehensible--which isn't a bad mission for a university magazine (leaving aside the baroque sensibilities).

 With the start of the new semester, we asked seven students: What book that you'd been longing to read did you indulge in over winter break?

 

 After September 11, there were many responses from students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Whether throwing fund-raisers for the United Way or the New York Fireman's Fund, selling flag pins and ribbons on the Bryan Center walkway, attending forums and classes, or holding vigils of peace or remembrance, the Duke community came together to work for others.

  Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture By Barbara Ching Ph.D. '90.Oxford University Press, 2001. 186 pages. $22.

 By Joe Martin Ph.D. '72Novello Festival Press, 2001. 253 pages. $21.95.

  In honor of its founder, Raymond D. Nasher '43, the Nasher Foundation of Dallas, Texas, is giving $2.5 million to support the new art museum at Duke. President Keohane announced the gift at a groundbreaking ceremony for the museum.

 If you were in the right place at the right time, you could sit courtside to watch the Blue Devils play. When the nation's number-one ranked men's basketball team took to the road, alumni affairs' clubs program arranged pregame parties and lined up tickets in Chicago, the Meadowlands, Charlotte, and Tallahassee. Outside of Cameron, it was the hottest ticket in town.

 Jane Gaines, professor of literature and director of the program in film and video, has been named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Gaines has been awarded a research grant to study and write about the women who made movies during the silent film era, between 1895 and 1920.

  Gustav Holst's The Planets inspired ballet choreographer Antony Tudor to write Planets in 1934. Nearly seventy years later, the Duke Dance program has received a $10,000 grant from the National College Choreography Initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to reconstruct two sections of Tudor's ballet.

 Adkins: a collection of personal stories of disordered eating now basis for a play.

 

 Patients who test positive for the presence of a specific biochemical marker of heart-cell death in their blood but who do not exhibit other risk factors for future heart attack should be treated as higher-risk patients, according to a new analysis by cardiologists at Duke Medical Center.

 She's a Star, 1998, a limited edition of fifteen by Sande Wascher-James.

 Letrozole, a new cancer drug (tradename Femara), worked better at shrinking breast cancer tumors than did the front-line breast cancer drug tamoxifen among a group of postmenopausal women with estrogen-positive tumors, according to a study coordinated by a Duke Medical Center physician.

  Off to Oxford: graduate student Campbell.