May - Jun 2002 Issue

 

  When the Woman's College merged with Trinity College of Arts and Sciences in 1972, many of its alumnae, and students felt a bit disenfranchised. Where was the sense of closure to an institution that graduated its first class in 1930, the final recognition of an experience that produced an impressive group of scholars and leaders?

 

 

    At May's commencement ceremony, President Keohane always cites the graduates earning teacher certification. The lives of everyone, she observes, have been touched by teachers in elementary and secondary schools. It's a theme that defines a new book titled, a bit preciously, I Remember My Teacher. Teachers make a difference--usually not in knowable or predictable ways, but certainly in important ways.

 -Ranked in the top 20 this season, Duke's women's rowing team finished second in the varsity four at the ACC Rowing Championship; coach Robyn Horner was named ACC Coach of the Year. Crew members Joanna Hingle and Katie Lakin, both juniors, were named to the nine-member All-ACC team.

 What do faculty and administrators look forward to reading now that summer's here?Ann Marie Rasmussen, associate professor of Germanic languages and literature, has turned from her "Attending to Literature" close-reading course for the MALS program to attend to her own reading list--kept close at hand on her Palm Pilot for easy reference.

 Looking to raise the profile of academic integrity issues on campus, a committee of faculty members, students, and administrators is trying to simplify and unify the university honor code and judicial processes.

 You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements," wrote British author Norman Douglas. But as associate professor of history Sydney Nathans will tell you, ideals are far from static, and the tenor and substance of ads have changed radically over the past 150 years. Consistently, research on advertisements provides a magnifying glass for the juniors and seniors who enroll in his social and cultural history course.

 In April, Duke mailed acceptance letters to 3,059 top high-school seniors, from every state and dozens of nations, vying for admission to the Class of 2006. The mailing brings the university's total offers of admission to 3,565 students, including 506 early-decision applicants accepted in December. Duke is targeting 1,616 of the accepted students for enrollment this fall.

 

 Four Duke students with a record of success in undergraduate research have won Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships, which recognize excellence in science, mathematics, and engineering. This year's recipients are Dave A. Chokshi, Rebecca C. Ahrens, David G. Arthur, and Andrew G. Taube.

 

 

 

 Liber Chronicarum, 1493 Text by Hartmann Schedel

 Brass acts: Dorfman and Froot at ADF.

The roots of teacher preparation and education run 150 years deep at Duke--deeper than the name, deeper almost than the school itself. In 1851, Union Institute was re-incorporated as Normal College, and the school began awarding degrees for teaching in the public schools.

During my last month in Japan, I bought my first Japanese T-shirt from a store in a crooked alley in Nagoya. The shirt has a die on the front, with three faces visible: two boasting the stars and stripes of America, the other bearing the proud red dot of Japan. America covers the front and side; Japan is on top, slanted.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a teacher. I guess my desire grew out of the fact that I had great experiences with outstanding teachers in the public schools of Charlotte, North Carolina. I loved learning about history in junior high and high school and I decided that I was going to become a high-school history teacher. I even wrote one of my essays for admission to Duke about my desire to become a teacher.

Boston's Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) hardly looks like the high-tech secondary school of the future. Housed for now in the upper floors of the city's oldest synagogue, MATCH is not crammed with flat-screen LCD monitors and tangles of Ethernet cables. Its staff does not tote PDAs or digital walkie-talkies. Its TV studio consists of little more than a couple of donated laptops and some used lighting equipment.

Stan, a virtual patient currently programmed to replicate a truck driver, is in poor health. He's sixty-one years old, overweight, drinks too much, and exercises too little. And on this particular morning in a treatment area at Duke Medical Center, he's about to suffer a far more serious problem. With the click of a mouse, he's given a tension pneumothorax—a punctured lung.

Part of a yearlong celebration of 150 years of teacher preparation at Duke, the summit brought current Secretary of Education Roderick Paige together with former secretaries Lamar Alexander, William Bennett, Lauro Cavazos, and Richard Riley. While the secretaries brought various experiences and ideologies to the table, the meeting was notable as much for its point of agreement--public education needs fixing--as for the civil disagreements about accountability and testing.

 Timothy Pyatt '81, who has directed the nationally known Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, returned to Duke as university archivist on March 1. He succeeds William E. King '61, A.M. '63, Ph.D. '70, the founding university archivist. King, who served thirty years, left the position at the end of 2001 and is completing a six-month sabbatical leave before fully retiring.

 

 Award-wining journalist and author Tom Wolfe told Duke's newest graduates that, contrary to what many pundits may say, their future is bright. "It's not a jungle out there. It's more of a honeymoon safari." At the May 13 graduation exercises marking the beginning of that safari, degrees were conferred on 1,608 undergraduates and 1,956 graduate and professional-school students. The Wallace Wade Stadium crowd numbered more than 15,000.

 Three Duke historians--John Hope Franklin, Gerda Lerner, and Anne Firor Scott--have been selected to receive the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Service Award. The three are the only scholars to receive the award this year.

 

 The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving Duke $30 million to support a new science facility and another $5 million for student life-initiatives, President Nannerl O. Keohane announced at the May meeting of the university's Academic Council, the faculty governance body.

 

 

    Ambassador Jordan: sensitive to Saudis.  

 Halfway through a course on modern Arabic literature and culture last fall, Danielle Squires, a senior, made a joke. "Let's go to Beirut," she said. Professor Miriam Cooke responded: "If you write up a proposal, I'll make it happen."

 Researchers at Duke Medical Center and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have found a biochemical pathway in muscle cells responsible for generating many of the beneficial effects of regular exercise.

 

 The Academic Council of the faculty has approved new guidelines for relationships between supervisors and employees and between faculty members and students. The Duke policy does not prohibit such consensual relationships and does not include punishment for engaging in them. Instead, it addresses the conflicts of interest created by such relationships and focuses on steps the supervisor or faculty member should take to eliminate the conflict of interest.

 Managing Editor, The Advertising and Society Review Research Associate, Cultural Anthropology at Duke since 1993, Ph.D. '99

 

 

 

 

  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.

   Four in a row. A fourth consecutive ACC Tournament championship for the men's basketball team. Four NCAA Tournament games in a row for the women, and a spot in the Final Four.

 

  Duke Medical Center will receive a gift of $11.5 million from Herman and Ruth Albert of Purchase, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, to create an eye research institute and fund lung cancer genetics research.