Mar - Apr 2012 Issue

It’s a balmy, sun-drenched afternoon in late January, the kind of day when golfers will skive a couple hours to play a round or two. But up in the study room of the Karcher-Ingram Golf Center—a stately facility behind the Washington Duke Inn that serves as home base for the Duke golf teams—sophomore Laetitia Beck isn’t even looking outside. Instead, she is poring over a psychology textbook, her white earbuds buzzing with the sounds of pop music from her other home, Israel.

Jimmy Soni is having a bit of a thrill ride. Then again, Jimmy Soni has had a lot of thrill rides. The twenty-six-year-old alumnus was recently named the new managing editor of The Huffington Post, and he couldn’t have done it without Duke.

In the fall of 1947, three Duke roommates had an idea to launch a campus radio station. Using a turntable and microphone balanced on a desk in their Kilgo Hall dorm room, Ethelbert “Sonny” Elmore Jr. ’50, Archie Mathis Jr. ’51, and Edgar Hillman Jr. ’49 played records and broadcast news to their classmates. Naming their station WCDC (“We Cover Duke Campus”), they pitched it to the Duke administration, hoping for financial backing.

From out of the dusk on a gorgeous autumn day, two men, both shirtless, run toward me. Bright leaves drift down from the trees, carpeting the ground beneath our feet as my friend and Duke colleague Priscilla Wald and I enjoy our weekly walk around the Al Buehler Trail, a three-mile forest path that encircles the Washington Duke Inn. The men are about the same height, maybe in their mid-thirties or early forties, and running faster than seems possible while navigating tree roots, casual walkers, and all-terrain baby carriages. Their vigorous grace makes me smile. They smile back.

© Glenn Bartley/All Canada Photos/CorbisFrom a low branch of a towering oak in Duke Forest, a cardinal belts out his signature cheer, cheer, cheer, tweeee. There’s a twetwe-cha, cha-cha-cha, twee-chaaa from a well-camouflaged song sparrow and the tu-a-wee-wuwe of a brown-breasted bluebird. The forest is alive with springtime conversation, and although it’s early morning, it feels a bit like a Saturday night at a bar.

Moments after Brad Brinegar told the staff of McKinney advertising agency that it would be moving from Raleigh to Durham, six employees came to him with some version of the same question: “Why are you giving me a death sentence?”

Matthew Hastings didn’t need a huge particle collider to split an electron. Instead, the Duke physicist did it virtually, with the help of several massive supercomputers.

Anxiety is in the air. Or certainly in cyberspace.   In early February, the Duke thread on a popular website for college applicants, College Confidential, was active with expressions of uncertainty. Hey, someone posted, I have a high-school GPA around 4.3, performed in nine theater productions, won five awards for French, produced a documentary on homelessness, tutored in calculus, and swam on the varsity team for a year. “I know that Duke is very hard to get into and my chances aren’t great, but I was just wondering if you thought I could get in!”  

It’s rare to see students out of bed at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, but East Duke 209 was packed beyond capacity for the opening lecture of “Flamenco Alive!: New Research in the Vital Art of Flamenco.” Perhaps it was the anticipation of the following weekend’s performance by the Flamenco Vivo dance company—or the promise of a master class led by Carlota Santana, Flamenco Vivo’s artistic director— but this was one academic symposium that got people on their feet.

Arisaema sikokianum. W.L. Culberson Asiatic Arboretum.

Alone on a stage, senior Alison Kibbe has just finished speaking about feeling alienated for Christian beliefs, while at the same time feeling judged by other Christians. Naomi Riemer ’13, who has been listening intently, speaks up.“By the end of your monologue, you need people to realize that you’re not criticizing Christianity, but you’re criticizing the people who use Christianity to be selfrighteous,” she suggests.

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans ’39, Hon. ’83—lifelong philanthropist, civic leader, humanitarian, and great-granddaughter of university namesake Washington Duke—died January 25 at the age of ninety-one. A service in Duke Chapel the following Monday was standing-room daughter of Benjamin Duke, and Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., a general in the U.S. Army who later served as ambassador to Poland and Spain. Through her parents, Semans was introduced to the only, as family and friends paid tribute to the remarkable arc of Semans’ life and her indelible legacy of service.

As a freshman member of Hoof ‘n’ Horn, Nathaniel Hill had a minor role in Sweeney Todd, the first collaboration between the musical group and the departments of music, dance, and theater studies in a decade. Smitten with the scope of talent around him, he imagined someday bringing a show of his own to the stage.

Growing up on Long Island, Laura Gentile was immersed in sports from a young age. She attended U.S. Open golf tournaments with her father, and while still in grade school played goalie as her two older brothers practiced their street hockey slap shots. At Duke she was captain of the varsity field hockey team twice, and she continues to be an avid Blue Devil fan.

What does a yearbook wish for on its hundredth birthday? Well, mostly just to keep on going.In an era when many universities have cut their yearbooks or put them online, The Chanticleer—which celebrates its centennial anniversary this year—remains committed to its thick, glossy form. The small team of students and advisers who assemble the annual edition argue that the permanence of a printed book remains important, even—and perhaps especially— given the rise of social media sites like Facebook.

By day, it’s a mild-mannered library, filled with studious but zombie-eyed denizens who prowl its stacks in strict silence. But on one night in late February, Perkins Library rolled out its secret identity.

Michael DiLeo attended Duke during the late Sixties, when the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and other social upheavals led to student protests that rocked college campuses across the nation. “It was a crazy time in the world,” says DiLeo. “Perhaps because of that craziness, many of us formed particularly strong bonds in college.” At graduation, he and five other classmates, despite heading in different directions to graduate school and the Army, made a pact to buy land together and ultimately start a school.

For Andrew Leon Hanna '14, solidarity isn’t just another buzzword; it’s a generational imperative. In a closing ceremony at the 7th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris, Hanna and 210 other conference delegates became temporary flag bearers for a country not their own. For Hanna, who chose to carry the colors of Sierra Leone, the act was a profound symbol of “how much of the same boat we’re in,” he recalls. “Beyond any difference, we’re all people seeking the same things.”

Anyone who follows the news will recognize the schizophrenic character of public discussion of American higher education. On one hand, its research universities are “the envy of the world.” As James Fallows of The Atlantic and David Brooks of The New York Times, among others, have noted, they are one of the few strategic advantages the nation has in a global economy driven by creativity and technological innovation.

Asilent protest by around forty students on Martin Luther King Jr. Day turned a spotlight on an unpublished academic study, underscoring the delicate contours of discussions involving race at the university.

Before coming to Duke in 2008, Stephen Kelly spent twenty-eight years in the U.S. Foreign Service, holding diplomatic posts on four continents. Nearly a decade of that time was spent in Canada, where he worked on issues involving energy, trade, and border management.

Noted journalist Fareed Zakaria will deliver Duke’s commencement address during graduation ceremonies on May 13. Zakaria, an editor-at-large for Time and columnist for the Washington Post, hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS, a news program on international and domestic affairs, on CNN.

When a few dozen students and faculty members gathered last fall for the first meeting of Duke’s Neurohumanities Research Group, neuroscience professor Michael Platt welcomed them by acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries of the fledgling discipline. “If you’re wondering what neurohumanities is, so are we!” he said.

On his first day at Duke, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey A.M. ’84 was mistaken for a priest. Given that he was recently named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and wears a chest full of medals for his military service—it’s a mistake not likely to happen again.

It won’t surprise anyone that the new Duke Cancer Center contains the most advanced technology around for diagnosing and treating cancer. Some of the standout features of the $235 million facility, however, are decidedly low-tech. The center includes a meditation room, a shop for fitting wigs and turbans, a vast resource center to aid patients’ research, and a rooftop garden where patients can receive chemotherapy treatments—just a few of the elements designed to cater to cancer patients’ comfort and personal reflection.

Charles Dickens’ first novel, commonly called The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), sent the memorable characters Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller on a series of comic adventures through picturesque England. The book—a first edition of which is held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library—also launched Dickens into prominence. The author, whose 200th birthday will be celebrated this year, became the publishing phenomenon of the Victorian age. His novels crossed boundaries of class, gender, and race to become worldwide favorites.

Only a hardy few of Duke Magazine’s readers were around when the university hired its first campus barber or published its first yearbook. If you’re one of them, David Goldstein wants to talk to you.

At Duke, “anxiety” is hardly an unusual word. But where does anxiety disorder come from? How about schizophrenia? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Depression?These questions drive Ahmad Hariri’s course “Looking Inside the Disordered Brain,” which begins its third iteration this coming fall. While the course tends to attract biology and psychology stu- dents, Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, insists that the sub- ject matter is intended for a broad audience.

The days after the September 11 terror attacks—a period of high stress and anxiety for most Americans—turned out to be a relief for at least one group.Whales in Canada’s Bay of Fundy experienced less stress during the period after the attacks, when ship traffic came to a standstill, according to new research from the Nicholas School of the Environment. The research team relates the change to reduced noise from ships during the temporary lull.

When Don Young needed a biopsy to test for prostate cancer, he was ap- prehensive about the procedure. But he got some help from an unexpected source.Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1975, the extreme racial segregation of many American cities led George Clinton and the funk band Parliament to record “Chocolate City,” which contrasted several cities with nearly all-black populations with their “vanilla suburbs.”What has happened since is nothing short of remarkable, says Jacob Vigdor, a Duke professor of public policy and economics. “America’s neighborhoods are much less seg- regated than they used to be, and we need to appreciate the story of how it happened,” he says.

Born in Charlotte in 1911, Romare Bearden moved with his family in 1914 to Harlem, where he spent much of his adult life. He studied at the Art Students League of New York under George Grosz in the 1930s, and for much of the next three decades, he worked full time at the New York Department of Social Services, leaving only nights and weekends to paint.