Summer 2020 Issue

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

From the minute I arrived in the United States from Nigeria as an international student, my instinct was to look for an African community—a restaurant, a mosque, an association. And in the African diasporic community, I found happiness, a sense of belonging. However, as a photojournalist, I wondered why so many of us Africans leave home. What was the pull to the United States or to Europe? I was aware of the many turbulent times we have faced in our different African countries, but I always wondered what would happen if we stayed in Africa. Could we build the continent of our dreams?

I am writing two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, as protests against white supremacy take place across the country. Many Americans are reckoning with the impact of racism, especially as it relates to American history. I, too, am reckoning with the past, especially here at Duke. There are hard truths to accept in a place where many people feel warmly embraced—a place that many of us love.

Years before COVID-19 turned the educational world topsy-turvy, Douglas Michelman ’82 was concerned about the “homework gap.” Michelman had joined Sprint as the chief communications officer in 2014, and because his portfolio included corporate responsibility, the CEO asked him to reimagine how Sprint could create social impact in a relevant way. They ultimately settled on addressing the divide between those students with Internet service and those who live in homes without reliable service. They called it the 1 Million Project.

One day, a male peer pulled Lauren Hasson ’04 aside and complained to her about how little he was making. “I was stunned to learn that not only was he making exactly what I was making at the time, but he had been hired at 50 percent more,” says Hasson. “That’s 5-0—50 percent more than me—when I was at his level.”

*/ This issue, I’m lending this space to the new DAA president, Mychal Harrison ’01, who has a special message for all alumni. —Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president, alumni affairs In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. famously spoke the words “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Samantha Lowe was hoping to spend her summer at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C. But when the rising sophomore learned that the internship would be canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she logged onto Ask a Blue Devil to ask for help. The Duke Alumni Association platform matches Duke community users who need help with those who can provide advice, internships, and mentors. Lowe sent a message asking whether there was anyone who knew of remote internships related to conservation biology.

People who watched A Parks and Recreation Special, the one-off reunion show about the TV series’ characters coping with the COVID-19 lockdown (it ran in early May), knew they were seeing something remarkable. Sure, the laughs were there: The characters spent the half-hour special addressing their situation in the surreal and witty way that defined the show. But more, as they interacted in one of the videochats that during the pandemic have become omnipresent, they almost constantly reminded each other: Take care of one another. Take care of yourselves.

Mark McClellan is the founding director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration What does the fall season look like with the coronavirus? 

Duke has one surprising place to look for its quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic: the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15.

Protests sparked by police actions. Anxiety over (invented) outside agitators. “Lawand- order” leaders drawn into competing crises. Media accounts—Newsweek, in one case—offering assessments that to be Black in America is to assume “that America is after all a racist society.”