Jan - Feb 2004 Issue

 Only about 10 percent of Duke students are hogging 90 percent of the capacity of Duke's residential student network (ResNet), Duke computer network analysts have found. Quite often, these gigabyte gluttons are using "peer-to-peer" (P2P) file-sharing programs to download the collections of music or their favorite bootleg movies.

 While the cover story documents Duke and the media, it's clear that the university's high profile in the press reflects (and furthers) its impressive trajectory--a trajectory that signals the ambitions and astuteness of Duke's leadership. So it's appropriate, if not entirely intentional, that this issue also focuses on presidents.

 

 Reading ListWe asked participants in the Coach K and Fuqua School of Business Conference on Leadership: What is your favorite book about leadership?

  

 

 

 

 With the blessing of President Nannerl O. Keohane, the Academic Council endorsed the goals of a new faculty-led coalition looking to reform collegiate athletics.

 

 Using only signals from their brains and visual feedback on a video screen, rhesus monkeys have been taught by a team of Duke Medical Center researchers to control, consciously, the movement of a robot arm in real time. The monkeys appear to operate the robot arm as if it were their own limb, say the scientists.

 

 Lawyers for alleged September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui argue that testimony from Al Qaeda members held by the U.S. government could vindicate their client. Prosecutors for the Justice Department reply that making such witnesses available would compromise national security. Who will resolve the matter?

 

 

 

 The Fuqua School of Business is forming a $5.1-million center that will create inventive courses and materials, conduct conferences, endow distinguished professorships, and support research and training on leadership and ethics. As part of this initiative, Mike Krzyzewski, Duke men's basketball coach, will join Fuqua's faculty as an executive-in-residence at the center, teaching and writing on leadership and ethics during the basketball off-season.

As a gale blows outside and fifteen-foot swells buck Makulu II through the pitch-black night in the southern Caribbean, a frantic voice crackles over the ship's radio, rousing the crew from its slumber. A nearby ship is having trouble steering, and the captain needs assistance.

Doug Knight calls them the dark years: a troubled time of soul-searching and redefinition that followed hard on the heels of his forced resignation as Duke University's fifth president and turned into a permanent break from his lifelong commitment to an academic career. Swept up in the roiling political and social currents of the late Sixties, the Yale-educated scholar and former president of Lawrence College found himself exiled from a community that had brought him emotional sustenance and intellectual joy since he was a child.

Lauren Shea, a freshman from Fairfax Station, Virginia, has never met Ted and Kristen Katroscik of Durham. She doesn't know what they look like, whether they are tall or short, thin or stout, black or white. She doesn't know how old they are, whether they listen to jazz or bluegrass, whether they root for Duke or Carolina.

 

 

 

 Trustees have given the go-ahead for two building projects: a major expansion of Perkins Library, the main West Campus library that was built in three stages between 1928 and 1968, and a second building for the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

 

 

    Durden: writing the book on J.B. Les Todd.  

 

 A yearlong study of the status of women at Duke has found that students, graduates, and faculty and staff members continue to face lingering stereotypes and prejudicial expectations about what they can accomplish. The Women's Initiative Steering Committee report, released in September, offers an in-depth, and sometimes troubling, picture of the lives of Duke's undergraduates, graduate and professional students, faculty members, em- ployees, alumnae, and trustees.

 Ava LaVonne Vinesett, who received the 2002 Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, is an assistant professor of the practice of dance. She shares her thoughts on dance as transformation and information.

 

 

 Candylandlords: Lauren, left, and business partner, Rubin.

 

 

 

 Richard H. Brodhead, dean of Yale College and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University, is Duke's ninth president. The announcement was made December 12 by trustee chair Peter M. Nicholas '64.

 Career Corner: Answers and InformationAfter two years in banking, I'm looking to switch careers to something that involves more contact with people. How can I write a résumé that doesn't typecast me as "finance"?

 

 

 Bruce A. Karsh '77, president of a Los Angeles-based financial management firm, has been elected to Duke's board of trustees, the university's thirty-seven-member governing body. He began serving December 1.