Sep - Oct 2003 Issue

From Boston to San Diego, from Seattle to Miami, thirty-one "send-off" parties, held from June to August, welcomed new students into the Duke family. Organized and sponsored by the clubs and alumni-admissions programs in Alumni Affairs, the Duke Alumni Association, and the Development Office, these events were attended by nearly 2,000 incoming freshmen and their parents, current students, alumni, and, in some cases, Duke administrators.

With this summer's qualified affirming of affirmative action, the Supreme Court capped a quarter-century of legal opinions. Back in 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the court found that a quota system for medical-school candidates was unconstitutional. But it endorsed the idea of considering race among other factors in college admissions.

Hailed as the most diverse ever, with a record-breaking number of international students, the Class of 2007 came to campus in August. Of the 1,635 enrolled, 374 are in the Pratt School of Engineering.More than 35 percent are minorities: 18 percent (288) are Asian, 10 percent (163) are black, and 7 percent (115) are Latino. Native Americans--American Indians, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians--make up 0.2 percent of the freshman class.

Our cover story looks at affirmative action not as a legal or policy concern but as something that students think about and live with. Many of the students who assembled for a magazine-sponsored conversation expressed ambivalence about race-sensitive admissions. Others said they have been hurt by racial stereotyping. And most questioned whether the object of affirmative action--a campus that goes beyond simply recognizing differences and fully embraces them--is within easy reach.

For the record, Edwin and Terry Murray would probably not consider their childhood asthma anywhere near as debilitating as Daredevil's blindness or Iron Man's bad heart. Still the brothers' health was bad enough to restrict their activities and require weekly trips to the doctor. On the way home, their mother stopped at the neighborhood pharmacy and gave them each a quarter to spend.

Next to a hulking mass of twisted steel splayed on the floor of a hangar-like building outside Washington, D.C., Frank Gayle keeps a haunting picture from September 11, 2001.

Some Duke graduates are watching with interest as the Atlantic Coast Conference fights a lawsuit brought against it by the Big East, a rival college athletics league. For Erik Albright, it's more than a spectator sport.

This summer produced a career milestone for James D. Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor at Duke Law School. Boyle received the annual World Technology Award in Law for his work on the theory and practice of protecting the "intellectual ecology" of the public domain--the ideas and expressions that are free for all to use or build upon.

For its 2003-04 Broadway at Duke series, the Duke University Union will present Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; three hit Broadway musicals, Fame, Saturday Night Fever, and Kiss Me, Kate; and a preview of Little Women—The Musical, a new work on its way to Broadway. The series is sponsored by the Broadway at Duke Committee, a student organization responsible for everything from selecting the events to contract negotiation to audience services.

Pop QuizSavage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol's first-hand examination of public schools in the U.S., comparing the educational experience in poor urban areas with that in wealthier suburbs, was selected as the summer reading assignment for incoming freshmen. We asked them: How did you like the book?

National Geographic, the gold standard of global photography, recently featured in its Explorers Hall in Washington the sort of shots it doesn't typically run in its own pages. The images were taken by photographers with fingers just long enough to reach the buttons and faces more likely to be in front of the lens than behind it.

 The Madonna Interceding for Souls in Purgatory1762-1769Francesco Fontebasso

Nine years ago, Luke Dollar ’95 was chasing lemurs with a dart gun and a burlap bag. Then a rising senior, he was a fledgling member of a Duke Primate Center project in Madagascar’s Ranomafana rain forest, where he caught and “processed” the creatures, taking anatomical measurements and teeth casts.

From the threats of SARS to bioterrorism-by-smallpox, the world's population has become far more vulnerable in recent years to deadly attacks by marauding microbes.

 

Sporting a fire-engine-red, wing-collared shirt with his name stitched above the left breast, David Arthur looked more like a bowler than anything else. But this was April, and he had made it to the computer-programming equivalent of the Final Four. The Blue Devil was in the midst of a late comeback against a Swedish sensation.

History courses tend to take on the seismic and sweeping.

The appointment of the Reverend V. Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church is a historic moment for mainline Protestantism in America and for more liberal interpretations of Christianity, say Mary McClintock Fulkerson, a professor in the divinity school, and Kathy Rudy of women's studies.

Plug in a device. Pour in a reagent. And now, Duke is asking its researchers to do something else: check whether they are using equipment or materials that may pose legal problems. In the aftermath of a federal case involving Duke, the rules by which academic researchers may use patented technologies have tightened.

  Illustration by James Yang

 Photo:Chris Hildreth

I do not think it will be profitable for me to give further advice which will not be followed. The conference is yours and you will naturally constitute it as you choose. I must of course reserve the right to see the final list of those invited and to decide then whether my own presence is worth while." So went W.E.B. Du Bois' RSVP to Booker T.

 New DAA President Sales: " It's an awesome responsibility". 

Memorial services were held in Chapel Hill and Atlanta for three generations of the Brumley family who were killed in a plane crash in Kenya on July 19. All twelve family members, including five Duke alumni, as well as the two pilots, were killed when their chartered plane crashed into a mountainside.

Roy. J. Bostock '62 is heading a thirteen-member committee to search for the university's next chancellor for health affairs, who also will serve as the president and chief executive officer of the Duke University Health System. Bostock, a founding member of the DUHS board of directors, retired from Duke's board of trustees in July after twelve years of service, including the chairmanship of the trustees' business and finance committee.

 

Merel Harmel

During the months of June and July, East Campus is enlivened by the sound of lively African drums warming up American Dance Festival participants, who land solid, flat-footed on the Earth, their movements synchronized by the emphatic pulsing of the beat.

Hunting Midnight By Richard Zimler '77. Delacorte Press, 2003. 512 pages. $24.95. Last of the Amazons By Steven Pressfield '65. Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2003. 416 pages. $13.95, paper.

Last fall, Stanford President John Hennessy and I wrote a joint op-ed article on intercollegiate athletics.

Duke received $296,827,306 in charitable gifts during 2002-03, more than $32 million--or 12.2 percent--above last year's total. Some 84,648 donors, 44,327 of them alumni, gave to the university.

 Ironclads: Currier & Ives' Terrific Combat Between the Monitor 2 Gun

Meeting in May, the Duke Alumni Association's board of directors witnessed via video the success of Duke's Neighborhood Partnership Initiative, received an update on the early stages of selecting the university's ninth president by members of the search committee, honored retiring officers and board members, and welcomed a new leader.

A block behind home plate at the old Durham Athletic Park, close enough to smell the hot dogs on game day but too far back to snag a long foul ball, sits the office of an unusual start-up business. The converted tobacco warehouse is just north of Durham's downtown loop road. But, like the trailblazing company it houses, it's far enough off the beaten path that part of the street leading to the entrance is gravel.