May - Jun 2001 Issue

 

In 1968, as a gift for his eleventh birthday, Tom Rankin received a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was a miniature version of the old-fashioned machine his paternal grandfather used for listening to classical music on the family farm near Louisville, Kentucky. That Christmas, with some encouragement from his elders, Rankin concealed the recorder’s microphone in a poinsettia plant on the living-room coffee table.

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A hot stone embedded in the middle of my belly. That’s what the nagging ache felt like when it asserted itself abruptly one evening—a distinctive new addition to the repertoire of usual gastric phenomena I’d experienced over decades of stomach ownership. Like anyone else’s, at one time or another the old tummy has felt queasy, nauseated, acidic, cramped, gassy, growlingly empty, pleasantly full, and Thanksgivingly overstuffed.

   

James Joseph has a word to describe those who take their concerns about private morality and wield them like a weapon against individuals. He calls them “virtuecrats.” And while the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa is as concerned as anyone about ethics and morality—more concerned than most, actually—he is just as concerned that the focus on private virtues be matched by an equal emphasis on public values.

Last semester, a longtime Duke professor had an academically unsettling experience. For a freshman seminar, he had assigned a paper on the writings of Louis Armstrong. One of the fifteen papers that came back to him didn’t seem quite right. It was “beautifully written,” he recalls. But it dwelled on the generic topic of jazz and American culture. And it came from a student who hadn’t exactly performed with distinction in class.

 

 

 

 

 

  

  Friends and colleagues of Norman L. Christensen Jr., departing dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, are establishing a $1-million scholarship endowment in his name that will be used to provide scholarships for Nicholas School students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Larry Moneta, associate vice president for campus services at the University of Pennsylvania, is Duke’s new vice president for student affairs. His selection follows a national search involving a hundred candidates. Moneta succeeds Janet Smith Dickerson, who assumed a similar position at Princeton University last July. James Clack, director of the university’s Counseling and Psychological Services, has been interim vice president since Dickerson’s departure.

 Duke students have won North America’s most prestigious event of its kind for undergraduates, the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, for the third time since 1993. A separate team was also a top placer, for Duke’s fourth year in a row, in the illustrious Mathematical Contest in Modeling, sponsored by the Consortium of Mathematics and its Applications.