May - Jun 2009 Issue

Modern moves: Pilobolus dancers perform with chairs in Rushes. Paul B. Goode

In a new online collection, video interviews with twentieth-century cultural icons like Louise Nevelson, Oscar de la Renta, Frank Gehry, Romare Bearden, and Chuck Close, among others, are now available from the Duke library. The 130 interviews—conducted, conceived, and directed by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel—were originally broadcast on network and cable television from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Duke University Archives

Work in progress: McCullers' Wedding takes shape. Les Todd

Duke University Archives

Repose: "Budapest, 2003," from Williams' The Bathers series. Jennette Williams

History repeats itself: Andrew Bevan '10 and Page Stephens '09 flirt in Fledermaus, left; Ionesco's Exit the King, below, proves as relevant today as when first performed in 1962. Jianghai Ho

Illustration of a buckyball © Michael Freeman/MedNet/CorbisSpherical carbon molecules known as buckyballs may be able to keep the nation's water pipes clear in the same way clot-busting drugs prevent arteries from clogging up.

Duke is launching a suite of new mobile applications that will enable students, visitors, and faculty and staff members to browse the campus events calendar, access campus maps, check live sports scores, and view top videos from iTunes

William Chafe. Les ToddIn 1984, American involvement in Vietnam was a mere nine years in the past; the Watergate scandal, only ten; and the social upheavals of the late 1960s, little more than a decade and a half.

My lunchtime interview for this editorship—a distant time ago, in 1983, when "dining" and "Durham" hardly belonged in the same phrase—was over a plate of barbecue. To push a metaphor tastelessly, those first impressions of barbecue had some resonance with my first impressions of Duke: It was alluringly unusual but essentially ill-defined.

Laney Funderburk '60, retired associate vice president for alumni affairs and development and director of the Office of Alumni Affairs, received the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District III Distinguished Service Award for 2009.The award, presented at a regional conference in Atlanta in February, honors service to CASE, a professional organization for those working in educational advancement.

In a down economy that grows more uncertain with each passing day, the Class of 2009 will face special challenges upon entering the job market after graduation. But at the beginning of the year, the Duke Alumni Association (DAA) gave them two opportunities to get informed, and ready, for what lies ahead.

In a letter sent to members of the Duke community in early March, President Richard H. Brodhead enumerated adjustments the university will make in the coming months in response to a contracting economy.Citing a 20 percent decline in the university's endowment in late 2008, and a concurrent decline in philanthropic giving, Brodhead acknowledged that Duke will have to operate from a smaller financial base.

John H. Dailey, a Durham native who began his law-enforcement career at Duke, returned to the university in April as the new chief of police. Since 2001, he has been assistant police chief at North Carolina State University. Dailey succeeds Robert H. Dean, who retired last year. Craig Henriquez B.S.E. '81, Ph.D. '88, professor of biomedical engineering and co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering, was elected chair of the Academic Council in February.

It's striking, and a little disconcerting, that current undergraduates were not even born when Duke Magazine was started. Across the years, though, Duke students have been enduringly interesting to be around. We invited six students with a variety of outlooks and experiences to talk about particular aspects of campus life today. Some of their themes, like the persistent appeal of Duke basketball, will have a familiar resonance, though informed by a fresh perspective; others, like the pervasive reach of information technology, would have seemed fantastical twenty-five years ago.

Full circle: At naming of Alumni House in his honor, Forlines. Megan Morr

Bill BambergerThe recent salmonella scare has raised a specter of fear around the peanut. But, every day, many people face a more common danger: a severe allergic reaction.

As news headlines continue to focus on the fallout of the economic crisis, Duke's theater studies spring performance of Eugène Ionesco's 1962 play Exit the King could not have come at a more opportune time, according to director Ellen Hemphill, assistant professor of the practice of theater studies.

More than 100 faculty and staff members, students, and members of the Muslim community from Duke and the Triangle gathered in early April for the official opening of a Muslim Life center at Duke.For Duke's Muslim chaplain, Abdullah Antepli, the new center—a clapboard house on Swift Avenue between East and West campuses, near the Freeman Center for Jewish Life—represents "one of the most happy, joyous moments of my life,…a dream come true."

As more Americans enter old age, they face challenges staying active and healthy. A new drug being studied at Duke has the potential to keep them strong later in life.Capromorelin, a compound developed by Pfizer, can help the body release more growth hormone and, as a result, prevent frailty. Older adults do not produce as much growth hormone—which regulates metabolism and aids in the building of muscle mass even after adolescent growth has been completed—as younger people do.

Two former colleagues at The Washington Post will be working together again at Duke. Philip Bennett, managing editor of The Post, will join the Sanford Institute's DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy (DWC) as the new Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the practice of journalism and public policy. Sarah Cohen, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and database editor at The Post since 1999, will assume the title of Knight Professor of the practice of communications and journalism at the DWC.

Good Humor Bar on Park Avenue (model), 1971, Claes Oldenburg, U.S. Fabric, vinyl, Plexiglas, foam, and polyester. 64 x 31 x 121⁄2 inches. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill III P '04.

Over the past five years, top-tier U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies have moved their clinical trials overseas at an accelerated rate, raising questions about ethics, quality control, and even the scientific value of their findings.In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers at the Duke Clinical Research Institute found that the trials are increasingly being conducted in developing nations in Eastern Europe and Asia, where participants are often poorer and less educated than their U.S. counterparts.

John Hope Franklin, who died March 25 at the age of ninety-four, was a hero to me, a cherished mentor and colleague—but, above all, a person who exemplified what it means to marry scholarship to a passion for justice. John Hope (as he liked to be called) lived through the tragedy of racial oppression that ruled America for most of the twentieth century. Born in 1915, he witnessed the infamous Tulsa race riot of 1921, when arsonists burned down his father's law office.

Picture this: Scrapbook of architectural ideas for Duke includes sketches of buildings from Princeton University, left, and the University of Chicago, center, as well as Brown and Few's itinerary and other details of their 1924 trip.

In its inaugural issue, May-June 1984, Duke Magazine committed itself to conveying Duke's "intellectual dynamism." If the 1980s constituted Duke's adolescent phase—Duke's figuring out what it could be—the 1990s brought the university into dynamic adulthood. The magazine mirrored the transition.

One publication is interestingly entwined with the history of Duke Magazine—mental_floss, cofounded by 2001 graduates Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur and the subject of a Duke Magazine feature in 2004 ("Son of Einstein: Mad Magazine Meets Smithsonian"). Pearson is on the Duke Magazine Editorial Advisory Board; Hattikudur was in the seminar taught by the magazine's editor.

Since its launch twenty-five years ago, Duke Magazine has identified itself with the values, aspirations, and intellectual intensity of a great university. Despite its stature and achievements, Duke is constantly asking hard questions of itself, constantly reinventing itself, constantly anticipating shifts in what we learn and how we learn. In that forward-looking spirit, we asked twenty-five Duke leaders and scholars to project ahead twenty-five years and imagine what life will be like in the year 2034.