Duke - Mar - Apr 2012 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012 en Twin Lives https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/twin-lives <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>It’s a balmy, sun-drenched afternoon in late January, the kind of day when golfers will skive a couple hours to play a round or two. But up in the study room of the Karcher-Ingram Golf Center—a stately facility behind the Washington Duke Inn that serves as home base for the Duke golf teams—sophomore Laetitia Beck isn’t even looking outside. Instead, she is poring over a psychology textbook, her white earbuds buzzing with the sounds of pop music from her other home, Israel.</p> <p>Beck moved to Israel from Belgium with her family when she was six. Her parents, who enjoyed playing golf recreationally, moved to Caesaria, the only city in Israel with an eighteen-hole golf course. They soon discovered their daughter had a natural talent for the game. She won her first Israeli Golf Open at the age of twelve, setting her on a path defined by golf. At fourteen, she left Israel for the prestigious IMG Academies in Florida, where she attended boarding school while working on her game. Last August, she qualified as an amateur for her first Ladies Professional Golf Association event, becoming the first Israeli to play in the LPGA.</p> <p>But it’s not hard to imagine Beck’s life going a different way. Just look at her twin sister, Olivia.</p> <p>While Laetitia Beck works on her putting, Olivia Beck collects border-surveillance information for her unit in the Israeli army. Completing compulsory military service is a rite of passage for Israeli youth, and it is in many ways hard for Laetitia to miss it. When Olivia completed basic training and received a beret marking her entry in the Field Intelligence Corps, Laetitia admits she was jealous. Yet she knows she is representing her country, too, in her own way. “My number one goal is to represent my country and the Jewish people,” Beck says.</p> <blockquote> <p>Last August, she qualified as an amateur for her first Ladies Professional Golf Association event, becoming the first israeli to play in the LPGA.</p> </blockquote> <div class="caption mceTemp draggable">At Duke, Beck’s identity is on display in subtle moments. She keeps kosher on and off the road, and the Duke golf staff has taken a crash course on Jewish dietary laws to accommodate her. “The coaching staff was unaware of kosher dining, that’s for sure,” recalls Rebecca Simons, director for Jewish Life at Duke. Members of the team are also quite familiar with Beck’s penchant for Bamba, a peanut butter-flavored Israeli snack food. “Sometimes they’ll ask about Jewish holidays or Shabbat,” Beck says, “but I don’t really like to talk about politics.” When golf doesn’t interfere, she does her best to make it to Friday night dinners at the Freeman Center for Jewish Life.</div> <p>But Beck has long been both a part of Israel and apart from it. After her victory at the Israeli Golf Open, her parents and coaches explained she had to commit to the sport if she truly wanted to excel. With so few highly competitive golf players in Israel, she knew she would have to leave home to become the player she thought she could be.</p> <p>In Florida, Beck faced a host of trials. At home she spoke mostly French and Hebrew, and she struggled to speak English exclusively. With no family in the U.S., she ended up spending a lot of time alone, focusing on her game, but losing contact with her few remaining Israeli friends. Her golf game was being noticed by college coaches, but she knew little about American universities.</p> <p>“I didn’t really know what college was, about unofficial letters, about the whole process, so I committed early,” she says. Back in Israel, she completed required military examinations and applied to postpone her service until after she finishes her golf career.</p> <p>“The golf program here is great, and I know that I’m getting a good education at the same time. The Duke degree really means something,” she says.</p> <p>Nearing the halfway point of her college years, she says she’s still working on her game—both athletic and social. Like many student-athletes, she finds her friends are mostly people on sports teams, who share the same regimented schedules. Her roommate, Hannah Mar, is a sophomore on the tennis team and a former gold medalist at the Maccabi Games in Israel.</p> <p>&nbsp;“I know I’m kind of different from students here. I don’t want to go out partying and all that goes with it—I just want to play sports,” says Beck. “But it’s hard to meet new people when you don’t have the same schedule.”</p> <p>It can be tough, being stuck between two homes. She laments that her Hebrew has grown rusty, and she doesn’t know many people in Israel anymore, except through her sister. Someday, when golf is done, she hopes to return.</p> <p>For now, though, there is homework to do. Beck shrugs off her bit of melancholy and turns instead to her first assignment for her “Introduction to Visual Practice” course, six hand-drawn variations of a wolf. She’s thinking of giving the wolf a blue eye. It’s the color of her twin lives, the blue-and-white of Duke, the blue-andwhite of Israel. As she puts it, “Now I play for Duke, but when I’m not, I’m wearing the Israeli flag."</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-18T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, May 18, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/030412_depspt1_0.jpeg" width="640" height="427" alt="Border crosser: Israeli citizen and varsity golfer Laetitia Beck at the UNC Tar Heel Invitational last fall. [Credit: Jon Gardiner]" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Laetitia Beck &#039;14 followed golf to Duke, but her life might have taken a different course.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Fri, 18 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502435 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/twin-lives#comments Jimmy Soni '07: Riding High in the Blogosphere https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/jimmy-soni-07-riding-high-blogosphere <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><blockquote> <p>Jimmy Soni is having a bit of a thrill ride. Then again, Jimmy Soni has had a lot of thrill rides. The twenty-six-year-old alumnus was recently named the new managing editor of&nbsp;<em>The Huffington Post</em>, and he couldn’t have done it without Duke.</p> </blockquote> <p>Coming off of a year-long stint in the Washington mayor’s office, Soni could sense he was ready for a new adventure. In April 2011, a Duke alum had tipped Soni off that Arianna Huffington was looking for a new chief of staff. Two weeks later, Soni headed to New York and<em>&nbsp;The Huffington Post</em>, and within a year, he was named managing editor. “It’s like being chief of staff for the entire organization—you help people do their work,” Soni says. “If someone wants an extra intern, you help them get that. If someone has an issue or needs more funding, you help them figure that out. And<em>&nbsp;The Huffington Post</em>&nbsp;is expanding internationally, adding new sections, and investing in new tech and innovation, so it’s a fantastic time to help steward those things along. I’m just a small piece of all of that.”</p> <p>It’s tempting to say that getting there wasn’t easy, but Soni is the kind of person who eats milestone challenges for breakfast and is still hungry. At Duke, Soni managed a robust extracurricular life, chairing the Honor Council, writing for<em>&nbsp;The Chronicle</em>, creating the Duke Political Union, and serving as the vice president of academic affairs for Duke Student Government. Academically, Soni created a Program II curriculum in ethics under the advisement of former director of the Hart Leadership Program Bruce Payne, drawing together history, philosophy, public policy, and economics. “I threw myself into life at Duke,” Soni says. “I used to say, it’s one big buffet, why would I limit myself to the salad bar?”</p> <p>By the time Soni was ready for dessert, his post-graduation options were already expanding. Soni won a prestigious Mitchell Scholarship and completed an M.A. in politics at Ireland’s University College Cork, before joining McKinsey &amp; Company for two years, where he claims he was “a run-of-the-mill consultant.” Nevertheless, he worked on two particularly exciting projects—the first, a six-month research position with the McKinsey Global Institute in Washington, where he got to see “a 30,000-foot view of the economy,” and the second, a two-month intensive education reform project in Bahrain.</p> <p>After consulting, Soni moved to D.C., where a debate partner, Rob Goodman ’05, was working in the office of the House majority leader. They had been working on a book on Cato the Younger, Julius Caesar’s arch nemesis, and wanted to know whether it was a viable project. Through the Duke alumni database, Soni and Goodman found Laura Yorke ’85, a publishing agent, and sent her a sample of their work. Yorke liked it so much she decided to represent the book herself. With jobs in American government fueling the pair by day, and Roman government inspiring them by night, the book was completed within a year and a half. “It was one of the happiest periods of my life,” Soni says.</p> <p>Despite his location change, Soni carries his sunny outlook wherever he goes. As a student at Duke, he worked closely with Judith Ruderman Ph.D. ’76, then vice provost for academic and administrative services, who offered him the most important advice on being a successful leader. “The best of them have a very keen sense of humor,” Soni recalls her telling him. “In a high-stress environment, keep people around you laughing.”</p> <p><em>—Elissa Lerner</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 17, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/030412_depmini-soni.jpg" width="580" height="270" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/elissa-lerner" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Elissa Lerner</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502437 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/jimmy-soni-07-riding-high-blogosphere#comments The Original Wireless https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/original-wireless <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>In the fall of 1947, three Duke roommates had an idea to launch a campus radio station. Using a turntable and microphone balanced on a desk in their Kilgo Hall dorm room, Ethelbert “Sonny” Elmore Jr. ’50, Archie Mathis Jr. ’51, and Edgar Hillman Jr. ’49 played records and broadcast news to their classmates. Naming their station WCDC (“We Cover Duke Campus”), they pitched it to the Duke administration, hoping for financial backing.</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/Retro-Original-Wireless-Program.jpg" style="float:right; height:480px; width:291px" />On October 28, 1947, a committee of Duke deans and faculty members approved the students’ proposal. The station was renamed WDBS, which stood for Duke Broadcasting System, and became an official student organization. After a lengthy search for funding and on-campus space, the station went live on May 15, 1950, broadcasting on 560 AM from a basement room in the divinity school.</p> <p>Programming during the station’s early years included campus news, classical and popular music, a student-faculty quiz show, and a regular panel on campus issues called “Three Dolls and a Guy.” A daily morning segment known as “Flying Saucers” featured the latest rock ’n’ roll hits.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 373px;"> <div class="caption-inner"> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/Retro-Original-Wireless-Station-Old.jpg" style="height:480px; width:373px" /></p> <p>Tune in, turn on: Duke student radio began in a dorm room in 1947, evolved from an AM station to an FM station in 1971, and was renamed WXDU in 1983. Inset, WDBS Program Guide from 1973.</p> <p>- <strong>University Archives</strong></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>In 1971, WDBS purchased an FM license to allow transmission to the Triangle, while the AM station remained the “campus station.” WDBS-FM became known for its eclectic mix of music, comedy sketches, and interviews. Beginning in 1973, the station published a monthly program guide, which itself became an important avenue for student expression. The guide featured countercultural essays and original news stories on Durham politics.</p> <p>In 1980, after a series of administrative changes, the station changed its focus to jazz and classical programming. Three years later, WDBS-FM was sold to Classic Ventures Inc. The Duke AM station moved to FM and became WXDU, which offers a mix of electronic music, world music, jazz, and local bands. Early recordings from WDBS are preserved in the University Archives, ensuring that the early sounds of Duke radio won’t fade away.<br /> <br /> <em>—Jessica Wood Ph.D. ’10,&nbsp;</em></p> <p><em>Duke Libraries</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 17, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/college-radio-wxdu-600.jpg" width="600" height="400" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/campus" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">On Campus</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/students-and-campus-life" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Students and Campus life</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/jessica-wood-phd-10" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jessica Wood Ph.D. ’10</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Retrospective: WXDU - Duke&#039;s Radio Station</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502438 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/original-wireless#comments Running Together https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/running-together <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>From out of the dusk on a gorgeous autumn day, two men, both shirtless, run toward me. Bright leaves drift down from the trees, carpeting the ground beneath our feet as my friend and Duke colleague Priscilla Wald and I enjoy our weekly walk around the Al Buehler Trail, a three-mile forest path that encircles the Washington Duke Inn. The men are about the same height, maybe in their mid-thirties or early forties, and running faster than seems possible while navigating tree roots, casual walkers, and all-terrain baby carriages. Their vigorous grace makes me smile. They smile back. It’s only when we loop past them a second time that something else about their running captures my attention. Avoiding a puddle in the center of the path, the men don’t split, but rather they each veer to the right, their footfalls continuing in unison. They run so close they seem to be touching.</p> <p>Once again, the men smile as they whizz past us. This time we notice: The front runner is blind.</p> <p>Many blind people run, typically with the aid of a sighted guide. Some use a rope or a tether, while others, like these men, rely on interpersonal communication. At the speed they were going, this kind of successful collaboration is no small feat. With its roots, rocks, and uneven terrain, the forest path challenges even accomplished sighted runners, but the pair seemed to navigate it effortlessly. The ease of their partnership intrigued me. Much of my academic work focuses on new models of collaborative learning, and I wondered if these runners might help me understand something about working together across differences in skills and perspectives.</p> <p>The community of Duke Forest runners is small enough that I soon learned the identity of the blind runner. His name is Curt Taylor, and he is a professor of economics at Duke. From his website, I find out that although he is 100 percent visually impaired, he is also a marathoner who has clocked a time of 3:17:20, fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. His running partner is Jeff Wilcox. Jeff’s wife, also an economist, teaches at the Fuqua School of Business. For the past few years, Jeff has been a stay-at-home father, caring for their three young children.</p> <p>We arrange to meet at Curt’s office on the third floor of the Social Sciences Building. In Curt’s office hang photos of his three children, all of whom are sighted. There are bookshelves everywhere, overflowing with cassette tapes of books and articles recorded by assistants and interns over the years.</p> <p>Curt greets me warmly. He looks me in the eyes when we meet, and I notice throughout our conversation that he turns his head toward me when I speak. When I remark about this, he says he learned early that facing the speaker is important in communicating with sighted people. He has also trained himself to hear gestures. He notices the different modulations in a voice when someone is nodding in agreement or shaking her head. He nods, too, at appropriate times, knowing his gestures facilitate communication.</p> <p>Curt lost most of his sight in his right eye to disease when he was two and a half years old. “Late enough,” he says, to “have a visual language.” His remaining eyesight dwindled throughout his childhood, and by age eleven, he was completely blind. When he was twenty, surgeons placed a cornea implant in his left eye, briefly restoring his sight. After six months, however, the transplant failed, and he has seen nothing in the past twenty-three years.</p> <p>When Jeff arrives, the tone of our interview becomes suddenly lively and warm. Jeff has a musical voice and a self-effacing affability that creates instant ease. The conversation turns to running, and I express my appreciation for how they can navigate the forest path so efficiently. Jeff immediately lauds Curt’s ability to run over the tops of the tree roots and boulders at top speed without falling. Most sighted people, Jeff insists, couldn’t pull that off.</p> <p>Although Curt began running in high school, he stopped as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, then took it up again while in graduate school at Yale. During his nine years teaching at Texas A&amp;M, he began to run competitively because, he jokes, there wasn’t much else to do there. He ran in the Houston Marathon twice. He’s since joined various track clubs, and he’s run with many different partners over the years.</p> <p>The chemistry with Jeff was immediate. Curt suggested Jeff keep a hand on his elbow as they ran, and they quickly worked out ways to share information about turns and changes in terrain. Rather than bark out orders, Jeff directs Curt with subtle touches, pushing or pulling Curt gently with his hand to change his course. From the pressure of the touch, Curt senses how far to turn. They talk while they run, chatting about sports, beer, women, and favorite banana-bread recipes. Occasionally Jeff interrupts with a brief update, relayed in their unique shorthand. “Bridge up in two,” for example, means in two steps, be prepared to step up onto a bridge.</p> <p>The interesting thing about this interplay is that they both get something out of it. Jeff’s instructions enable Curt to run safely in the forest, something he much prefers to an ordinary track. In turn, Curt’s strength and marathoner’s stamina push Jeff beyond his triathlete’s limits. Jeff also says there are things Curt notices about people that he misses. He can tell when a pretty runner crosses their path, for example, because he hears people’s voices change as they turn their heads to watch the runner head in the opposite direction. “Those patterns of attention are deep,” Curt says, “but sometimes I don’t think other people notice them as much as I do. For me, they are clues. Most people don’t know what clues they are giving away.”</p> <p>While Curt sees the path through Jeff’s eyes, Jeff sees it anew by seeing it for Curt. The things Jeff does naturally while running—speeding up, ducking a branch, negotiating a ground obstacle—become less automatic because they require attention and communication. He has to anticipate and articulate the challenges, forcing him out of habit. In a sense, Jeff runs a different path with Curt than he would be if he were running alone.</p> <p>It’s the same for me, too. I’ve walked that forest trail probably fifty times, maybe a hundred, but I am seeing only a portion of what there is to see. My perception is colored by my experience, as well as the experience of my companions. When I am walking with my friend Priscilla, a literary scholar with interdisciplinary expertise in genomics and immunology, our conversation often drifts toward her research on genes and germs, or mine on collaborative, interactive digital learning. This is wonderfully enriching for both of us, but I have to wonder what I am missing during our intense conversations.</p> <p>What would I see differently if I ran the path with Curt? No doubt I would discover hundreds of things—a jagged stone or bended branch—that had eluded my vision before. More important, I would learn things about myself, about what I see and do not see, what my own habits of attention make invisible.</p> <p>I still occasionally encounter Curt and Jeff on my walks in the forest. But these days I don’t see a sighted runner leading a blind man through the woods. Curt and Jeff helped me understand the ways we all change one another’s experience in the world. Only when we put our trust in someone else—as Curt has in Jeff, and as Jeff has in Curt—do we really begin to see.</p> <p>—Cathy N. Davison</p> <p><em>Davidson is a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies with Duke’s John Hope Franklin Institute. Her most recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, was reviewed in the September- October 2011 issue of Duke Magazine</em>.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 17, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/runners.jpg" width="580" height="270" alt="Step by step: Curt Taylor, left, and Jeff Wilcox navigate the Al Buehler trail with ease. - Jon Gardiner " /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/students" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Students</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/students-and-campus-life" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Students and Campus life</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/cathy-n-davison" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cathy N. Davison</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">There&#039;s more than meets the eye when two friends hit the trail.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502439 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/running-together#comments Bird Brained https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/bird-brained <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: auto;"> <div class="caption-inner">© Glenn Bartley/All Canada Photos/Corbis</div> </div> </div> <p>From a low branch of a towering oak in Duke Forest, a cardinal belts out his signature cheer, cheer, cheer, tweeee. There’s a twetwe-cha, cha-cha-cha, twee-chaaa from a well-camouflaged song sparrow and the tu-a-wee-wuwe of a brown-breasted bluebird. The forest is alive with springtime conversation, and although it’s early morning, it feels a bit like a Saturday night at a bar. All the guys are puffing out their chests and rolling out their best pick-up lines.</p> <p>For all its cacophony of chirps and trills, the dawn performance is really like one big chorus of “Hey, baby, come check me out,” according to Susan Peters, a behavioral biologist at Duke who studies animal communication. After studying songbirds for thirty years, Peters can hear the birds’ biographies in their melodies. A clear, consistent song is a male songbird’s way of saying he was fed well as a nestling and is now a strong, intelligent adult with superior genetic traits—in other words, a perfect mate.</p> <p>But there will soon be another bird with a story Peters finds even more interesting. As spring turns to summer in the woods and more male songbirds are born, somewhere in those branches a fledgling sparrow or finch will sit perfectly still in his nest. His black eyes blinking, he’ll silently wait. And then, with his beak virtually closed, he’ll whisper a note or two that he’s heard from the birds around him. At first, the sounds will not be quite in tune with the rest of the chorus and instead come out as raspy chirrups and cheeps. But with practice, the juvenile bird will catch on.</p> <p>“It’s very sweet to watch a young male bird making its first attempts at song,” Peters says. A musician herself who plays the piano and other instruments, she can relate to the trial-and-error frustration of learning how to perform a new melody. But as a scientist, she sees the bird’s song—and the weeks-long process the birds must go through to master it—as a tool for understanding how complex behaviors like singing evolve.</p> <p>And it’s not just birds she’s interested in. Peters is one of a growing number of scientists, including several at Duke, who think studying birds can help them understand how the human brain directs complicated tasks such as speech or movement, which may not be nearly as different from a finch learning to warble as once believed. As scientists have learned more about the regions of a bird’s brain involved in singing, they have made surprising connections to the mechanisms humans use to speak and move. There is now promise that birds might offer a model for figuring out human neurological diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.</p> <p>The idea that there are parallels between birdsong and human speech began to emerge in the 1960s. Among the first scientists to make the connection was Peter Marler, a behavioral biologist who studied birdsongs first at the University of California at Berkeley and then at Rockefeller University in New York. By observing and recording sparrows as they learned to sing, Marler showed that songbirds picked up the unique melodies of their species at a critical stage early in life and that, like humans, they depended on hearing themselves sing to get better. Those features of bird communication, Marler wrote in a 1970 article for American Scientist, “may in turn serve to remind us that human language is a biological phenomenon with an evolutionary history.”</p> <p>In the mid-1970s, Marler hired Susan Peters to his lab at Rockefeller’s Field Research Center in Millbrook, New York. Together, they began to explore how baby sparrows learned the chirps and trills that characterize their species’ song. Through careful experiments, they eventually traced, note by note, the birds’ musical progression from those early weak warbles, called subsong, to their first clear imitations of melodies, and finally to mastery and repetition of their species’ song. As Marler had anticipated, the birds’ pattern of development was much like the progression a human infant follows from babble to individual words to sentences.</p> <p>Marler and Peters pursued the birds’ song progression for nearly a decade, by which time a new biologist named Steve Nowicki had joined the lab. Peters and Nowicki began collaborating on birdsong studies and then married in 1986. The couple moved to Duke in 1989, and Nowicki is now a professor of biology, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as dean of undergraduate education. They also brought with them a collection of swamp and song sparrows they had captured in New York.</p> <p>Today, Peters houses dozens of new sparrows in the Biological Sciences Building. The room where the birds live is painted white, with a long row of wire cages along one wall. Each cage holds a single sparrow, along with a perch, a bath, and a trough of seeds. The room is sealed so Peters can control light and temperature, precisely simulating the seasonal changes in daylight and climate. On a day this past winter, the space is strangely silent, except for a few chirps and squawks and the hum of a heater. There are no songs.</p> <p>Songbirds typically don’t sing in the winter, Peters explains as she reaches into a cage and tries to trap a swamp sparrow, an adult male, in her hand. The bird dances just out of reach. She focuses on the bird for a moment and then gingerly corners it, closing her palm around his brown-feathered body. The bird cocks his head from side to side, surveying his situation. His black eyes blink quickly, but he remains calm. Like all males, his chest is plain gray, and he has a cap of streaked head feathers that turn brownish red in spring—or, in this case, when Peters lengthens the days and warms the air in the room to simulate the season. The longer days, she says, initiate changes in the birds’ brains, which spur them to sing.</p> <p>During her career Peters has logged thousands of hours listening to sparrows and other songbirds compose their melodies. These days most of the analysis is done with the aid of software programs that translate recorded birdsongs into sound spectrographs, which create a visual readout of the birds’ songs. Individual notes appear as tiny lines on a horizontal scale, with the length and height of the lines representing the duration and pitch of the note. It’s clear from looking at a few of these graphic representations that there’s a lot going on in a bird’s song that human ears often don’t appreciate. Even the shortest bit of sparrow song reveals multiple notes and precisely timed pauses.</p> <p>But to a bird, those subtleties make all the difference. Swamp sparrows, for example, sing two-second trills comprising identical syllables, each with between two and five notes. In 1989, Peter Marler and colleagues showed that male sparrows perceive even slight alterations in the length and arrangement of the notes. When the birds hear songs that sound different than what they have learned, they get defensive, as if an intruder has invaded their space. To look tough, the sparrows puff out their chest feathers and flap their wings (see story, page 36).</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/030412_birds4.jpeg" style="height:425px; width:229px" /></p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: auto;"> <div class="caption-inner"><strong>Deep thinkers:</strong> Researchers now believe birds have a much greater capacity for complex thought. <p><em>Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>In the first few weeks of life, young birds are listening and making a “mental image” of the sounds they hear, Peters says. At the same time, they are developing seven regions in their brains that they use to sing. Connections in and among those regions will allow a bird to master coordinating his beak movements and vocal tracts to make specific sounds. But this takes practice and maturation. On her computer, Peters pulls up two spectrographs from the same sparrow, one when he was nine months old and one from a month later. The improvement is obvious, with the notes and tune becoming more coherent and consistent as the bird matures.</p> <p>The similarity to a human infant’s language development—from listening to babble to words and phrases—isn’t completely unexpected. Because the basic organization of the vertebrate brain has been well-conserved by evolution, the brains of birds and humans are in some ways quite similar. What is surprising is how far the similarities run. Scientists have found that some birds can solve problems by insight and learn by example, just as human children do. Birds can learn to use tools and even do basic math. Such recent discoveries have guided neurobiologists to probe deeper, exploring the pathways birds and humans use to process information.</p> <p>One such scientist is Erich Jarvis, an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke. Jarvis is another product of the Peter Marler family tree, having studied under Marler’s former graduate student Fernando Nottebohm, who was among the first to identify regions of a songbird brain associated with learning and producing songs. Jarvis and his collaborators made a significant connection between human speech and birdsong in 2004 when they identified a gene called FOXP2—one of the key genes in human speech—in songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds. In humans, mutations to the FOXP2 gene result in severe impairments in the ability to learn to speak, and Jarvis expected it would play a similar role in a songbird’s ability to sing. And it does—in zebra finches, the gene turns on during the critical period for song learning, and when it is blocked, birds cannot accurately imitate their tutors.</p> <p>Jarvis also has studied a gene called egr1, which too is active in all seven regions of the brain associated with singing. But he was surprised to discover that the gene is turned on also in seven areas adjacent to the song-producing regions, where it had a role in making body movements, such as when a bird hops or flaps its wings. The fact that the gene handles both duties suggests that the areas of a songbird’s brain involved in singing evolved from areas controlling movement.<br /> For Jarvis, a professionally trained dancer, the connection of song and motion offers exciting possibilities. He imagines that the same pattern may exist in humans, which could be why, for example, we naturally move and gesture with our hands when we talk.</p> <p>Carlos Botero, a former postdoctoral fellow at Duke and birdsong expert at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, believes Jarvis’ connection of movement, song, and speech is revolutionary, describing the theory as “kick-ass.” But not everyone is sold. Other neurobiologists call Jarvis’ model speculative and say it lacks enough evidence to be widely accepted.</p> <p>The criticisms, Jarvis argues, stem from scientists’ preconceived ideas. “The notion with song learning and spoken language is that the two are something ephemeral. They’re believed to be special and therefore different from anything else. So the minute you call them a motor behavior like learning to walk, or fly, that’s sacrilege.”</p> <p>Jarvis recently has identified other genes that have mutated over thousands of years to allow song-learning birds to control vocalization. He suggests that those same genes may contribute to our own ability to coordinate our mouth, larynx, and lung muscles to speak. “My prediction has been that if the behaviors are similar and the brain pathways are similar, then the underlying genes may be similar, and we are beginning to find that this is the case,” he says.</p> <p>Based on the commonalities of these genes, Jarvis believes he can take them from the brains of a learning species, such as zebra finches, and insert them into the brains of animals like pigeons or mice that do not have the ability to make intricate songs. In the lab, he will try to get those genes working so that they stimulate new connections in the non-song-producing animal’s brain. Essentially, he will try to develop a song-producing system in a species that doesn’t have one. And even if the experiment produces only a feeble note, it will provide compelling evidence for a link between song and muscle movement.</p> <p>A striking example of why that connection could be important comes from a lab just down the hall from Jarvis’ office in the Bryan Research Building. There, neuroscientist Richard Mooney is exploring whether understanding birdsongs—and the brain circuitry behind them—can give scientists new insights about human neurological disorders like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases.</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/030412_birds10.jpeg" style="height:433px; width:350px" /></p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: auto;"> <div class="caption-inner"><strong>Song on the brain:</strong> Using a protein to make nerve cells glow bright green under a laser-powered microscope, scientists are able to observe how the structure of nerve cells in a living songbird’s brain change as the bird learns to sing. <p><em>Courtesy Richard Mooney</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Mooney, the George Barth Geller Professor of neurobiology, has studied the brains of songbirds for almost thirty years to try to understand the neurological roots of learning. In 2009, he helped Susan Peters and Steve Nowicki establish how swamp sparrows tell the difference between correct and altered versions of their songs by placing electrodes into a songproducing region of the birds’ brains known as the high vocal center, or HVC. The team then recorded the birds’ brain activity and behavior as the sparrows listened to altered versions of their trills. The research showed that certain cells in the HVC were highly attuned to slight differences in the length of song notes, firing only when the notes fell within a narrow range of familiarity. This same pattern of recognition, called categorical perception, helps humans recognize subtle sounds in language, such as the difference between “ba” and “pa.” The Duke research was the first to explain the brain activity that underlies that categorical perception in birds.</p> <p>Now, Mooney is focusing on another song-producing region, located in a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. In both birds and humans, the basal ganglia sit behind the eyes, deep within the tissues of the head. Neuroscientists think the brain cells in this area control voluntary movement of limbs and eyes, cognitive thinking, and possibly emotions. Yet, even subtle damage to cells there can severely impair movement, as in the case of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.</p> <p>Scientists are trying to gain a better understanding of how these diseases cause their effects, but researchers are limited by their ability to replicate the disorders in the lab. There are mouse models, in which the animals exhibit the same physical symptoms as patients with Parkinson’s or Huntington’s, including lack of coordination and unsteady balance while moving around. “You can tell that the behavior is abnormal, just like you can tell a person with a given neurological disorder is behaving abnormally,” says Mooney. “But it’s harder to know what’s wrong with the brain, and even more difficult to identify how damage to specific brain circuits produces certain motor abnormalities.”</p> <p>Mooney thinks songbirds might offer a better model. In his next research project, he plans to insert a gene thought to cause Huntington’s disease in the brains of zebra finches, activating it in a part of the basal ganglia known to be important in song learning. His research group will then observe how the gene affects the juvenile birds’ ability to learn a new song or repeat ones they have already learned. Because the team already knows the specific brain cells involved with learning songs, they should be able to trace learning problems to changes in specific brain cells. That, in turn, could suggest how the gene, when activated in our own basal ganglia, affects humans with the neurological disease.</p> <p>Mooney cautions that what happens in a bird’s brain is not exactly parallel to what happens in the brain of a human. But he is confident that the rich understanding scientists have gained in recent years about birds and their songs will ultimately benefit the understanding of our own minds, a revelation that adds a sweet harmony to all those tweets, chirps, and pick-up lines we hear each day at dawn.</p> <p><br /> <em>- Yeager is a science writer for the Duke Office of News and Communications. This is her first story for Duke Magazine.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 17, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/030412_birds1.jpeg" width="690" height="541" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/natural-sciences" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Natural Sciences</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/biological-sciences" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Biological Sciences</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/ashley-yeager" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ashley Yeager</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A sparrow’s song may seem a simple melody, but it’s actually the product of some pretty sophisticated brainwork. In fact, studying how birds sing may give us new insights about our own ability to speak, move, and think.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502440 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/bird-brained#comments Bull Rising https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/bull-rising <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Moments after Brad Brinegar told the staff of McKinney advertising agency that it would be moving from Raleigh to Durham, six employees came to him with some version of the same question: “Why are you giving me a death sentence?”</p> <p>Brinegar, McKinney’s CEO, understood the concern. This was 2003, and Durham hardly had a stellar reputation. The city’s center was a ramshackle version of its once-vibrant self. The redbrick tobacco warehouses that had pumped life into the city’s economy had fallen silent years earlier, when cigarette production moved out of town. Huge swaths of downtown were vacant and in disrepair. It seemed the only thing that earned downtown Durham headlines in those days was its high crime rate.</p> <p>The site Brinegar had chosen for his company was the granddaddy of those broken- down buildings, a decaying former American Tobacco cigarette factory that had been empty for more than a decade. Sandwiched between a car dealership and the then-eight-year-old Durham Bulls Athletic Park and just off the heavily traveled Durham Freeway, the warehouse was an unmistakable eyesore whose blight had become a symbol for downtown Durham’s struggles. It sat close enough to the ballpark that a particularly well-struck foul ball might shatter a warehouse window— not that many were left by the early 2000s. Its insides had been unattended for so long that when construction workers began gutting it, they found trees growing within the walls. In some places, the floors were covered ankle-deep with pigeon droppings.</p> <p>If you’ve been away from Durham for a while, you very well might not believe what you see today at the American Tobacco complex. Eight years after its reopening, the former cigarette factory has become a poster child for mixed-use urban redevelopment, a sprawling, eye-catching collection of restaurants, bars, offices, and shops that, along with several other new projects in the area that followed its lead, has brought about a stunning rebirth of Durham’s core. In many of those renovated spaces, innovative new businesses are taking root, fueling Durham’s surprising new standing as a vibrant, hip center of entrepreneurial activity. A burgeoning restaurant scene—once dominated by fried chicken and burgers—has caught the attention of critics at The New York Times, who last year placed Durham on a list of “41 Places to Go in 2011.” (Locals point out with glee that Durham was mentioned right between Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo.)<br /> In less than a decade, downtown Durham has turned from a place best avoided at night to a destination where growing numbers of people flock to work, eat, or take in a game or a concert.</p> <p>But this renaissance didn’t come easily.</p> <h3>CIVIL COEXISTENCE</h3> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 275px;"> <div class="caption-inner"> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/bullrising_inline_0.jpeg" style="height:365px; width:275px" /></p> <p>Revival: The renovated American Tobacco Campus now features restaurants, an amphitheater, offices, and “Bull River,” a quarter-mile-long river walk. Durham Convention &amp; Visitors Bureau</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>When Mike Schoenfeld ’84 arrived at Duke as a student in 1980, Durham was a small, sleepy Southern city where Duke happened to be located. The city ran on tobacco; its downtown infrastructure of factories and warehouses churned out Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, and Chesterfield cigarettes, fueling the city’s economy and filling its air with the wafting smell of processed tobacco. But the lives of Durham’s mostly middle-class residents and Duke students rarely intersected. Students might occasionally mingle with residents over barbecue at Bullock’s or fried chicken at Pete Rinaldi’s. Hartman’s Steakhouse on Geer Street was long a popular haunt. But when they sought entertainment, they tended to venture out of town, remembers Schoenfeld, now Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations.</p> <p>“The idea of off-campus fun was driving to Chapel Hill, which actually felt like a college town,” he says. “You lived in Durham, but there was relatively little to make you feel like you were in a city.”</p> <p>That’s how it was for much of Duke’s history. While the university had a mostly friendly relationship with its host city, it was a relatively separate coexistence. Of course, many faculty and staff members lived in Durham and participated in its civic life. And there were small-scale efforts at town/gown partnerships. In the 1940s, for example, Duke Chapel helped residents of East Durham after a cotton mill went belly up. Two decades later, medical students set up a clinic in Edgemont, one of Durham’s decaying neighborhoods.</p> <p>But institutionally, Duke largely kept to itself, recalls Jim Wise ’70, a Raleigh News &amp; Observer reporter who has written three books about Durham and its history. “Duke was pretty much its own place,” he says. “Individual faculty or staff members would get involved, join the Kiwanis Club or run for city council, or get involved with the public library or the choral society. But nobody saw a particular reason for the university as such to get involved.”</p> <p>The collapse of the city’s tobacco industry underscored that separateness. In the 1990s, as Duke’s star was rising, Durham’s was falling. American Tobacco pulled out of the city in 1987. Liggett &amp; Myers followed in 2000, leaving several square miles of downtown virtually dormant. Shops pulled out of downtown and headed for the suburbs. Office buildings went unrented. Downtown began to feel like a ghost town.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/bullrising_secondpage.jpeg" style="height:480px; width:320px" /> <p><strong>Downtown bound:</strong>&nbsp;American Tobacco Campus’ “On the Lawn” series draws crowds for live music, movies, dance performances, and festivals. --<em>Chris Hildreth</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>In 1996, Duke formed the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, a flagship initiative of then-President Nannerl O. Keohane to formalize the university’s stake in Durham. Now run by Duke’s Office of Durham and Regional Affairs, the partnership has sparked programs to aid local schools, improve access to health care, and boost home ownership in the twelve neighborhoods surrounding the campus.</p> <p>Around the same time, interest in downtown renewal was gathering steam. Duke leased space in West Village, an office, retail, and housing project just off the downtown loop that was championed by former basketball players Christian Laettner ’92 and Brian Davis ’92. Jim Goodmon, president of Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting, built Diamond View, an office building overlooking the Durham Bulls ballpark. But Goodmon had his eyes on a bigger prize—the American Tobacco complex across the street.</p> <p>Initially, many were skeptical of Goodmon’s plan. “We finally realized this was the one good shot to get something going at American Tobacco—the big, ugly eyesore,” says Tallman Trask III, Duke’s executive vice president. “Duke isn’t going anywhere, and the deterioration of downtown was not beneficial to us.”<br /> Duke couldn’t do much on its own, nor did it want to. The university preferred not to buy property outright because as a nonprofit it would be exempt from property taxes, meaning the city would lose the potential tax revenue from the space. And as much as its leaders agreed with the aims of redevelopment, Duke isn’t in the development business. “We don’t want downtown Durham to be downtown Duke,” says Scott Selig M.B.A. ’92, Duke’s associate vice president for capital assets. “That wouldn’t be interesting. We wanted an eclectic place with a broad economic base.”</p> <p>Ultimately, Duke agreed to lease 100,000 square feet at American Tobacco, but it waited to sign the lease until three for-profit companies had signed on for an equal share of space. That strategy proved helpful in convincing McKinney—which makes ads for national clients such as Nationwide insurance and Sherwin-Williams and gave birth to the Travelocity “Roaming Gnome”—to take the leap. McKinney CEO Brinegar says when employees raised concerns about safety, he pointed to Duke. “Duke can’t afford it being unsafe for its own people,” he told his workers. “They have to make it safe, or they have a big problem.”</p> <p>McKinney soon was joined at American Tobacco by Glaxo and Compuware, a software company run by Peter Karmanos, who also owns the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team. Glaxo has since left, but McKinney and Compuware are still there, along with about sixty other ventures.</p> <p>The rebirth of the American Tobacco campus may be the highest-profile redevelopment project in Durham, but it’s far from the only one. In the past decade, several other warehouses and rundown buildings have been rehabilitated, giving rise to dozens of new bars and restaurants and an explosion of downtown residential spaces. The number of people who call downtown home has risen from just 200 in the mid-1990s to more than 1,500 today. Many live in retrofitted lofts that take advantage of the old tobacco warehouses’ quirky industrial architecture.</p> <p>Duke’s footprint stretches through all this progress. In addition to West Village and American Tobacco, the university has 50,000 square feet of space at Brightleaf Square, a commercial development off Main Street, and houses 500 employees on six floors of the Durham Centre, a fifteen-story building across from the Carolina Theatre. In all, Duke now has at least 1,800 employees occupying more than 500,000 square feet of downtown space. Duke recently contracted to purchase its first downtown facility, the 114,000-square-foot Carmichael Building, where tobacco was once dried and stored.</p> <p>“Duke became that credit-worthy client that let us get so many other projects going,” says Bill Kalkhof, president of Downtown Durham Inc., a nonprofit that promotes area revitalization. “Duke has easily been one of the most influential players downtown and, in terms of leasing office space, the most influential.”</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 480px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/bullrising_vitalsigns.jpeg" style="height:162px; width:480px" /> <p><strong>Vital signs:</strong>&nbsp;Durham Performing Arts Center, left; interior entranceway to artist studios in Golden Belt, center | Batter up: Durham Bulls Athletic Park, right, opened in 1995 and expanded to 10,000 seats for the 1998 season, the year the Bulls began playing in the Triple-A International League.</p> <p><em>DPAC: Szostak Designs, DPAC and Durham Convention &amp; Visitors Bureau; Golden Belt: Chris Hildreth, Durham Bulls: Chris Hildreth</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>The boom in office and residential space downtown has provided a foundation for new cultural and entertainment options, including the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, galleries and artist studios at the rehabbed Golden Belt textile mill, and the Durham Performing Arts Center, which opened in 2008 in a strikingly modern glass-walled building near the Bulls park. DPAC’s 2,800-seat theater has become a magnet for Broadway shows and A-list performers, drawing a total audience of more than a million in its first three years. DPAC’s 2011 attendance figures ranked fourth nationally among performing-arts centers.</p> <p>There’s something else important about all those DPAC showgoers—something just as important to Durham’s renaissance as quirky postindustrial office space: They’re hungry.</p> <h3>FOODIE HAVEN</h3> <p>Collard greens aren’t hard to find in North Carolina. But for this billowy staple of the Southern dinner table to wind up on a plate served at Magnolia Grill, it must have a slight frosted purple tint to its otherwise green leaves. That’s the telltale sign that the green has been exposed to cold.</p> <p>“A lot of old-fashioned Southernistas believe collards become sweetest when exposed to frost,” explains Ben Barker, chef and co-owner of the restaurant. “It accentuates the sugars in the greens.”</p> <p>Ben and Karen Barker opened Magnolia Grill in 1986 at the nadir of Durham’s tobacco age. They set up shop in the old Wellspring Grocery, just down Ninth Street from the beer halls and sandwich shops that bordered East Campus. Their restaurant was different—fancy and pricey with a dedication to local ingredients. But it caught on, and the restaurant’s success would help lay the groundwork for the city’s food revolution.</p> <p>One of the main things Durham had going for it was geography. Get outside the city limits and you’ll find a ring of active farms growing a wide range of fruits and vegetables. Magnolia’s collard greens, for example, come from Brinkley Farms, a family farm eighteen miles north of Durham in Creedmoor. Barker developed a relationship with the farm over several years through the Carrboro Farmers’ Market, where he shops for the restaurant’s produce. (Brinkley also sells at the weekly farmers’ market in Durham’s Central Park.)</p> <p>That chef-farmer relationship is an important aspect of the farm-to-fork movement, which emphasizes fresh, local foods produced sustainably. “It’s not cheaper; in fact, it tends to be more expensive,” Barker says of buying local. “But there’s less waste, and you have an ongoing relationship with the person who planted the seed. And it tastes better.”</p> <p>That combination earned Ben Barker a James Beard Award in 2000 as Best Chef in the Southeast, a top honor in the restaurant industry and one indicator that the Durham food scene was on the rise. Three years later, Karen, the restaurant’s pastry chef, won one. (Note: If the Barkers ever ask you over for dinner, accept.)</p> <p>In 2006, Gourmet named Magnolia Grill one of the top fifty restaurants in the country. But the wealth was spreading. Young chefs, attracted by Durham’s low rents and burgeoning food scene, flowed in. Magnolia itself turned into something of an incubator, training a number of chefs who went on to open their own kitchens. Now the city serves up everything from duck confit at a French bistro to beef tongue tacos from a takeout taqueria to Chinese dumplings and Korean barbecue from trucks that tweet their location each day.</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/bullrising_food.jpeg" style="height:209px; width:480px" /></p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: auto;"> <div class="caption-inner"><strong>Culinary Destinations:</strong>Durham boasts a wide range of eating options including the James Beard Award-winning Magnolia Grill (left) and a growing fleet of food trucks (right). <p><em>Magnolia Grill courtesy of York Wilson; Food truck courtesy of the Durham Convention &amp; Visitors Bureau</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>“There’s no pretentiousness in Durham,” says Sam Poley, a former chef and current director of marketing and communications for the Durham Convention &amp; Visitors Bureau. “You either like it or you don’t, and those who like it don’t care that other people don’t. That’s attractive to chefs.”</p> <p>Durham’s rising foodie profile has not gone unnoticed. In 2008, Bon Appétit tabbed the Durham-Chapel Hill area “America’s foodiest small town.” The New York Times also has written glowingly about Durham’s food scene three times since 2010. One Times article from 2011 declared that from a former “ghost town… an exciting, unexpected food hub has emerged.” Another quoted former coowner of Pop’s and current owner of Six Plates Wine Bar Matthew Beason, who reflected on the days a decade earlier when he drove to the airport to retrieve a weekly shipment of duck confit and pâté from New York. “Now, virtually every place in town makes its own,” he said.</p> <p>As a social issue, Durham residents take the farm-to-fork movement seriously, says Chris Reid, a contributor to Carpe Durham, a local food blog. If it was once a bonus for a restaurant to use local ingredients, it is now practically a requirement, Reid says.</p> <p>“There’s a lot of farmland within thirty miles, so the farm culture in North Carolina is helping fuel the revival,” she says. “With every restaurant that opens now, that has to be the focus. I think we expect it.”&nbsp;</p> <h3>PERFECT TIMING</h3> <p>If, on a sun-splashed afternoon, you sneak out of work a little early for a cocktail or two at Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco complex, you might luck into some live music. Or maybe the hosts of the Durham Bulls radio show are talking baseball at its makeshift studio outside Tyler’s front door. Or perhaps, if you beat the crowd, all you’ll hear is the soft gurgling of the man-made stream that runs down the middle of the campus, twisting this way and that and looping under a pedestrian bridge. The scene is both idyllic and urban, busy and serene. Overhead, the cigarette factory’s original white water tower, 175 feet tall and still emblazoned “Lucky Strike,” strikes a long shadow.</p> <p>If you’ve been around Durham for any length of time, you still shake your head at the turnaround, considering how far this place has come from its ragged years of abandonment. The renaissance has been neither perfect nor complete. Downtown still has its share of vacant storefronts and dilapidated buildings, and too many city residents suffer in poverty.</p> <p>But the progress of the past decade was not an accident, nor was it a product of Duke’s investment, Jim Goodmon’s vision, or the leap of faith taken by businesses such as McKinney. It was a confluence of factors, a three-legged stool of government action, business leadership, and grassroots activism, with each leg dependent on the others for support.</p> <blockquote> <p>“What we had ten years ago was determination, money, and opportunity,” says Trask, the Duke executive vice president. “I’m not sure the opportunity was really there before then.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Or perhaps since. Had the American Tobacco project come along in a rockier economic climate, like, say, today? “It couldn’t have happened,” his Duke colleague Selig says.</p> <p>And the buildings themselves played a crucial role. American Tobacco is a complex of more than a dozen century-old buildings, all used at first to manufacture and store cigarettes. Flush with money at the turn of last century, American Tobacco built them to last, with strong construction and distinctive detailing. They’re huge, wide, and for the most part rectangular— perfect spaces for myriad businesses.</p> <h3>“These buildings worked 100 years ago, they work now, and they’ll probably work 100 years from now because they’re big, open boxes,” Selig says. “It couldn’t have happened without the bones of buildings this well-built.”</h3> <p>Once decrepit and dreary, this complex now buzzes with activity. You can get your hair cut, have a slice at the pizza joint, or learn to make a soufflé at a cooking class at the Art Institute. You can even get married there, at Bay 7, an all-purpose banquet hall sandwiched between the local public radio station and some offices.</p> <p>Across the complex at McKinney, Brinegar remains pleased with his decision to relocate his advertising agency to Durham. The space has worked out nicely. The firm’s 147 employees are spread out over two floors; their old offices in Raleigh had them splayed on five different floors. There, they had space for a single conference room. Now they have a dozen.</p> <p>But there’s something more that has changed since those first days in 2003. When McKinney relocated, Brinegar was the only McKinney employee who lived in Durham, a sole believer in a brighter future ahead. Today, he’s got company: About 100 of the company’s employees now call Durham home.</p> <p><em>- Ferreri is a former reporter for the Durham Herald-Sun and the Raleigh News &amp; Observer. He now writes for Duke’s Office of News and Communications. This is his first story for Duke Magazine.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, May 17, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/bullrising_main_0.jpeg" width="690" height="292" alt="Bull Rising, Durham Bulls Athletic Park" title=", " /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/628511" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Durham and the Region</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/eric-ferreri" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Ferreri</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Photo Credit:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/photographers/chris-hildreth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Chris Hildreth</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A decade of redevelopment has breathed life into downtown Durham. But the city’s remarkable turnaround is about more than bricks and mortar.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502441 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/bull-rising#comments Not So Negative https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/not-so-negative <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Matthew Hastings didn’t need a huge particle collider to split an electron. Instead, the Duke physicist did it virtually, with the help of several massive supercomputers.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 180px;"> <div class="caption-inner"> <p><strong>Illustration above: Fundamental particles</strong>&nbsp;Simulated experiments allow researchers to speculate how electrons might react under different conditions.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>Hastings and a team of physicists designed the model to understand what might happen if an electron, one of the fundamental particles of matter, was broken up. They created a simulated environment of ultra-cold temperatures, near -459 degrees Fahrenheit, where electrons over- come their natural repulsion to each other and begin to cooperate. By placing a vir- tual electron into a quantum fluid, an exotic state of matter where electrons begin to condense, they were able to fracture the electron into two pieces, each with one-half the original particle’s charge.</p> <p>The simulation was the first experi-ent to identify subparticles with partial properties of an electron, opening up new questions about the particles’ capabilities. The unique breakthrough also suggests that physicists don’t necessarily have to smash matter open to see what’s inside.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-04-22T00:00:00-04:00">Sunday, April 22, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/electron.jpg" width="568" height="370" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/natural-sciences" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Natural Sciences</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/campus" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">On Campus</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Seeing inside an electron, virtually.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sun, 22 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498950 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/not-so-negative#comments Admission: Impossible? https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/admission-impossible <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Anxiety is in the air. Or certainly in cyberspace.</p> <p>In early February, the Duke thread on a popular website for college applicants, College Confidential, was active with expressions of uncertainty. Hey, someone posted, I have a high-school GPA around 4.3, performed in nine theater productions, won five awards for French, produced a documentary on homelessness, tutored in calculus, and swam on the varsity team for a year. “I know that Duke is very hard to get into and my chances aren’t great, but I was just wondering if you thought I could get in!”</p> <p>A second prospect was drawn to Duke because “I loved their science labs, and one of the professors there influenced me to explore a new interest in a specific chemistry field. That, and the fact that their 3-D room is pretty awesome.” Another simply observed that “waiting till April”—the traditional time for notifying applicants—“is gonna kill me!”</p> <p>In their earnestness, their nervousness, and their accomplishments, these would seem to be—as New York Times contributor James Atlas put it this past fall—“Super People.” He wondered, “Has our hysterically competitive, education-obsessed society finally outdone itself in its tireless efforts to produce winners whose abilities are literally off the charts?...My contemporaries love to talk about how they would have been turned down by the schools they attended if they were applying today. This is no illusion.”</p> <p>The rampant anxiety around admission to Duke is grounded in some sobering numbers. Applications for the Class of 2016 reached yet another record—around 31,600, up 6 percent from the previous year, following three years when applications surged by a total of 46 percent. The percentage of regular-decision applicants accepted a year ago was about 13 percent; the figure for this year is bound to be even lower.</p> <p>According to Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions, a bigger applicant pool reflects a widely felt necessity: Students need to be hedging their bets. “When counselors could predict what colleges a student had a reasonable chance of being admitted to, a good chance of being admitted to, a slim chance of being admitted to—as long as they understood the landscape, they could feel confident. A student would apply to six or eight colleges and everything would work out well.”</p> <p>Now, he says, for applicants aiming to scale the heights of higher education, the landscape is more uncertain. In recent years, most of the elite schools have seen application-pool increases that mirror Duke’s (though notably for schools in the Northeast, those numbers dropped or leveled off this year). “The more selective a college becomes, the harder it is to predict the particular combination of qualities that’s going to make someone competitive or appealing.”</p> <p>Student anxiety is a theme that’s familiar to Mark Sklarow, executive director of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. It’s a factor, he says, that helps explain the explosive growth of the profession of educational consultants, who work to guide high-school students through the college-admissions thickets. (Another factor, he says, is that high-school counselors are able to spend an average of just thirty-eight minutes a year with their assigned students.) He thinks the membership will double in the next five years from the current roster of 1,000 to meet a growing demand. According to a study by Lipman Hearne, a major marketing and communications firm, 26 percent of high-achieving students hire a consultant in their collegeapplication process.</p> <p>“It’s absolutely true that it’s no longer painful to apply to colleges,” Sklarow says. “When I was going through the process, you had to worry about using Wite-Out on your form. Every college was asking for different applicant information. And an essay topic for one college wouldn’t work for another place. Buteven as it’s gotten easier to apply, the process seems more and more opaque. You just can’t figure out who is going to be accepted and who won’t be.” And that uncertainty, he says, has fed the phenomenon of multiple applications.</p> <p>Echoing Guttentag’s observation, Sklarow says, “I’ve heard consultants talk about advising students to apply to five or six schools. And then they learn that the number is something like twenty. The attitude of the student or the parent is, ‘We thought we needed to apply everywhere that seems like a good match, because there’s no way of knowing what might happen in the competition.’ For a kid who gets just one shot as a college applicant, I can understand how anxiety takes over.”</p> <p>One big contributor to the application surge at Duke is California, now the most-represented state in the current freshman class, with 191 students. Some of the California-based interest, in Guttentag’s view, has to do with California’s budget woes and the consequent decline in state support for the University of California system: Among other impacts, the cutbacks mean larger class sizes, fewer offerings, and higher tuition. (Guttentag earned his undergraduate degree from UC-Santa Barbara.)</p> <p>Martin Walsh, a counselor at the Harker School in San Jose who formerly worked in admissions at Stanford University, points to one local indication of Duke’s popularity: In 2008, Harker, which draws many first-generation American children of Silicon Valley workers, produced eight applications for Duke. The number for last fall’s freshman class was fifty-seven—about one-third of the graduating class. Fifteen were admitted to Duke and three attended.</p> <p>UC-Berkeley, about a forty-five minute drive from Harker, exerts a significant pull; despite its deepening California connection, Duke often loses out to Stanford University, along with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It does well against Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and Georgetown. Guttentag notes that a higher percentage of Duke applicants now than in the past are looking at Stanford and MIT along with the Ivies, particularly the familiar “HYP” threesome. Duke’s yield rate— the rate at which accepted students attend Duke—has remained fairly steady, meaning, he says, that “we are holding our own against tougher and tougher competition.”</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/image-3-admissions.jpg" style="float:left; height:393px; margin:20px; width:273px" /><br /> Walsh says the growth in student interest testifies in part to the efforts of Duke’s regional admissions officer, Samuel Carpenter, and his ability to “make it clear to our students and their parents what Duke has to offer.” On a visit to Duke last spring, Walsh looked up the Duke-attending alumni of Harker to learn about those offerings more directly. “To a person, they were all enjoying their experience. They present Duke as a place with outstanding academic programs coupled with a vibrant student life,” he says. “They haven’t been watching Duke forever. They haven’t been wearing Duke T-shirts since the eighth grade.” Once on campus, though, they’re drawn into a sort of Duke energy field. Among the Dukebased Harker graduates he tracked down was a pre-med student. She was “thrilled” with her academic experience, Walsh recalls, and also talked about painting her face blue and white for a men’s basketball game.</p> <p>Even as the numbers from California and elsewhere have changed in recent years, the The majority of applications are read twice, initially by a so-called first reader, an outsider hired and trained by the admissions office. Applicants are rated on a scale of one to five on six factors: the student’s course selection in high school, grades earned, standardized test scores, school-based recommendations and the alumni interview report, extracurricular activities and accomplishments, and the application essay.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><img alt="" class="media-image" src="/sites/default/files/public/magazine/image-2-admissions.jpg" style="height:392px; width:670px" /><br /> One of Guttentag’s veteran readers, now in her fifteenth year, is Lynn Tocci; during the height of the reading period, in January and February, she’s sifting through application materials thirty to thirty-five hours a week. “The qualities that I look for in a potential Duke student have remained essentially the same,” she says. “That is, intellectual curiosity, a willingness to step out of the comfort zone and try interesting things. Increasingly, kids are presenting a rigorous curriculum and high test scores, so I want to see those intangible qualities that make a Duke student: What are the signs of the quality of their character, what will they do with the enormous academic opportunities at Duke, what kind of impact are they likely to make at Duke?”</p> <p>She adds, “I’m a softie for kids in tough circumstances, kids who are overcoming adversity and who are reaching far from where they began in setting their sights on to Duke.”</p> <p>Tocci and her fellow first readers will hand over applications to an admissions staff member responsible for some section of the country (or the world). The regional officers—who spend much of the fall on the road—have a good sense of a particular region, the high schools that fall within it, and individual school counselors. They’ll go through the reader evaluations, assign their own set of ratings, and designate some as clear admits or denies, sending those on to Guttentag or his associate dean to be “autoadmitted” or “auto-denied.”</p> <p>Guttentag estimates that the top 5 percent and the bottom half of the applicant pool are handled this way. “The strongest applicants and the less competitive or the less compelling ones are relatively easy to identify,” he says. “Almost all of the students who apply to Duke are qualified [to be admitted]. Almost all of the students who apply to Duke, if we admitted them, could move through this institution—academically, socially, and in all of the ways that a person is part of this community—with ease.”</p> <p>When the decision is not simple or straightforward, “you have multiple reads,” he says. “That’s when we talk about them in Admissions Committee,” the group of admissions officers assembled to make the fine-tuned distinctions among strong candidates. “Sometimes we talk about them after Admissions Committee and review them again.”</p> <p>For the current admissions cycle, Guttentag and his colleagues have recalibrated the ratings system. That’s because the pool has become stronger and not just larger: In the current freshman class, a third of the students who took the SAT scored between 1500 and 1600. For that same class, 1,914 high-school valedictorians applied; Duke admitted just 29 percent. “We were at the point where over half of the applicants received our highest rating in terms of the strength of the curriculum,” Guttentag says.</p> <p>The top strength-of-curriculum rating now hinges on “a particularly strong group of courses over several years, a curriculum that is unusually challenging even among students applying to Duke,” Guttentag says. “The kind of curriculum most applicants have is completely adequate. We just felt the need to make a further distinction at the top of the range.” He and his colleagues made a similar adjustment to recognize which applicants clearly have the strongest grades in their class. (More than half of the applicants aren’t assigned a rank in class by their schools.) Getting the top rating isn’t a requirement to be admitted—far from it—but, says Guttentag, “we wanted to understand our applicants better within the context of their schools and the pool as a whole.”</p> <p>November is a traditional time for some sessions of the Admissions Committee. The November gatherings are geared to earlydecision candidates, those who commit themselves to attending Duke if they’re accepted. Regular-decision candidates go before the committee in early March. Guttentag and about a half-dozen colleagues gather over bagels, muffins, and endless coffee. The conference room is assaulted by the inevitable autumnal leaf-blowing, leading Guttentag to joke, “Thank goodness no one is going to overhear us.”</p> <p>One thing that’s clear is that the admissions staff members bore down deeply into the applications. With one of the first they’re considering, Guttentag remarks, “Why did she hit the ball out of the park earlier in high school, and then get nothing but Bs and B-pluses? She either maxed out with her ability or the work has gotten harder.” With a second candidate, the conversation moves on to the significance of a student’s invitation to the junior nationals of a performance competition—essentially “the junior-varsity equivalent,” as an admissions officer comments—and not the senior nationals (“the competition for grown-ups”). There’s discussion around some of the application essay phrasing—for example, “My school is as heterogeneous as milk.” Guttentag observes, “I read a lot of essays that are polished to within an inch of their lives. I always smile when I read an essay that’s a little less polished, and a little more insightful.”</p> <p>The admissions group also engages with a few cases of disciplinary problems in high school. There are issues having to do with alcohol and drugs and one with misrepresenting himself online. Did the student learn from the experience, they ask, or is he trying to escape responsibility?</p> <p>Guttentag and his colleagues spend a lot of conversation time on unusual paths taken. One applicant gets attention for having worked as a volunteer at an injured-horse ranch. Another draws the comment, “A nice kid, but there’s little impact”; a third is described as “balanced but bland.” A fourth is treated with enthusiasm for having bounced back from family hardship at “a school with lots of privilege,” as the regional officer describes it. As someone else’s transcript and recommendations are projected from Guttentag’s laptop onto a conference- room screen, he comments, “Something that Duke students like in their classmates is that they all do interesting things. They all bring different things to the table.” That metaphorical table comes up a lot in their deliberations.</p> <p>Widely distributed honors, such as National Honor Society membership and National Merit Semifinalist status, are generally passed over without comment. So are the usual leadership roles. “Every yearbook needs an editor-in-chief, every team needs a captain, every organization needs a president,” Guttentag says. “But who has been a mover and shaker? Who has made a difference? And you can have leadership and impact without being in a leadership position. We sometimes use the term ‘bridge builder,’ a person who does a great job of bringing people together, of creating a community. And there’s the student who’s fully engaged in an enterprise, the student who’s run with an idea, who’s really sunk his teeth into something.”</p> <p>In their November discussions, Guttentag and his colleagues are sensitive both to what’s in the application and what isn’t there. Teacher recommendations can be especially revealing in that regard. “I love reading between the lines,” Guttentag remarks over a discussion around one applicant. It may be that a teacher is too pressed for time to say much about a student. Or it may be that there’s not much to be said. The committee looks at someone from a competitive high school where 90 percent go on to college. But her recommenders have little to offer on her behalf, beyond the statement that she’s a hard worker. Did she change the tone of the classroom, show herself to be intellectually ambitious, leave a mark on her school that signals her being a high-impact student? She’s deemed solid but not exciting.</p> <p>Guttentag says that when he started in admissions, the model for the desirable student was the well-rounded student. “And then somehow in the last thirty years, the focus shifted. Everybody in admissions stopped talking about the well-rounded student and started talking about the wellrounded class.” For some reason, he says, playing the oboe took on the symbolic status as the particular gap in a class that a college looks to fill—a sought-after quality that is unknowable outside the committee room. “While we always have our eyes open for students who do one thing exceptionally or unusually well, the overwhelming majority of students at colleges like Duke are well-rounded. The energy of a place like Duke has to do with the ability and the inclination of the students not just to do one thing well, but to do many things well. And the truth is that most students applying to—and admitted to— schools like Duke are well-rounded. There just aren’t enough angular students out there to fill our classes.”</p> <p>The “high-impact student” is a favorite Guttentag phrase; another is “distance traveled.” When he talks with guidance counselors, he sometimes mentions the example of two students from different schools, each of whom had taken six AP courses and had done well academically. Should you assume that they represent the same level of achievement? “In fact, one student was the first in her family who was planning to go to college. She was attending a school that offered only six AP courses. And the other student was attending a school that offered twenty AP courses. Not to diminish the accomplishment of the second, but in fact the same curriculum represented two different levels of accomplishment. All these things gain their meaning not in isolation but in the particular context of where a student is coming from.”</p> <p>To those on the outside, “admissions is a black box,” Guttentag says. “People see the input, and people see the output. But they don’t see the process. Generally speaking, the academic credentials make a candidate competitive. But what makes a candidate compelling is a combination of the academic credentials and the rest of the application. And every case is different. In one case it might be an essay that’s the compelling part. In another case, it might be the extracurricular activities. In a third, it might be the letters of recommendation. What it comes down to is figuring out what the student has accomplished within the context of the opportunities and the challenges that he or she has faced.”<br /> People are always asking, says Guttentag, if the size of the Duke pool will eventually stabilize. But increased selectivity doesn’t seem to be discouraging applications. Nor does economic uncertainty. “I remember early on in my career, when college costs were approaching $25,000 and people were saying, ‘Nobody’s going to pay $25,000.’ We don’t seem to have reached the magic number, in terms of costs. I was wondering when the economy went south whether that would affect applications in a negative way. And exactly the opposite happened.” To prospective students and their parents, he says, it seemed clear that the credential of an elite institution would play better in the job market—a variation on “the flight to quality.”</p> <p>Guttentag muses that at some point, maybe the point of a single-digit admit rate, students will conclude, “Why bother?” He says, “In theory that might be the case. But I have a contradictory theory. When admit rates become so low that nobody fully expects to be admitted, the potential psychological cost of being denied diminishes. Then students feel freer to tell themselves, ‘What the heck? Why not apply? Maybe I’ll hit the lottery.’ ”</p> <p>Guttentag says it may take a behavioral economist like Duke’s Dan Ariely to sort out the seeming paradox—why applicants vie for a place at Duke even as the competition intensifies. For his part, Ariely Ph.D. ’98 refers to the coolness factor, or the perceived value of a Duke affiliation. “It’s very natural to gravitate toward a group that we want to be part of,” he says. “If I have any choice in the matter, I want to pick only the smartest, best-looking, and most interesting people I can find.” The Duke “balance of academic and social life” speaks to the wellrounded student, he says. And that’s a cohort that’s easy to identify with. Beyond that, he adds, exclusivity is automatically appealing. “If something is seen as more and more exclusive, the desire to be part of that gets higher and higher.”</p> <p>Guttentag says if the university had infinite resources, he would be sure that every applicant was part of the alumni-interviewing network. And he would be sure that every applicant had no obstacles to making a campus visit: As deeply as candidates can probe Web resources, and as avidly as they can join online discussion groups around campus issues, there’s still no substitute for actually experiencing the place.</p> <p>On an unseasonably and even unreasonably warm February afternoon, 150 Duke prospects and parents fill every seat in McClendon Auditorium next to the admissions office. Admissions officer Morgan Kirkland ’11, who covers South Carolina, Georgia, and Northern Florida, says that after being sequestered for weeks reading applications, she’s grateful for the “human contact.” She asks her audience to shout out where they come from: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Arizona, Alaska, Taiwan, Switzerland.</p> <p>Then she talks about Duke’s unusual opportunities— undergraduate research, DukeEngage, the freshman Focus program, semesters in New York and Los Angeles, a self-designed curriculum as an option. She moves on to Duke’s unusual features—the Lemur Center, the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, the Smart House, the Marine Lab, the Duke Farm. She sprinkles in her own experiences as an art history major, a resident assistant on East Campus, a curatorial intern at the Nasher Museum, and a member of the tenting community in Kville. Her stress is on Duke as a “spirited community.”</p> <p>The students and parents spill out of the hall, all of them identifiable with their “I visited Duke” blue-and-white stickers. They align themselves with one of several student guides. A good-natured Duke sophomore from New York, wearing a “Lin 17” jersey, introduces himself as Jesse and attracts an instant following. As he leads his group down Chapel Drive, he gets the attention of one particularly engaged prospect, a high-school senior from Virginia Beach, Virginia. He’s overdressed for the long stroll through campus with a heavy black-and-white striped sweater. His current interests—subject, of course, to constant revision—are economics and political science. He says he’s waiting to hear from Stanford and Columbia along with Duke.</p> <p>Might Duke be his first choice? “I’m liking what I see,” he says. And what about his chances? “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”<br /> &nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;<br /> <br /> &nbsp;</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-04-16T00:00:00-04:00">Monday, April 16, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/image-1-admissions.jpg" width="670" height="457" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/students" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Students</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/university-affairs-admissions" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">University affairs (Admissions)</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/robert-j-bliwise" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert J. Bliwise</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> Yes <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Not quite—but in today’s hypercompetitive environment, it takes something special to stand out.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502442 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/admission-impossible#comments Zakaria to Speak at Commencement https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/zakaria-speak-commencement <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Noted journalist Fareed Zakaria will deliver Duke’s commencement address during graduation ceremonies on May 13. Zakaria, an editor-at-large for <em>Time </em>and columnist for the <em>Washington Post</em>, hosts <em>Fareed Zakaria GPS</em>, a news program on international and domestic affairs, on CNN.</p> <p>In addition to Zakaria, five others will receive honorary degrees at commencement. They are business and philanthropic leader James Barksdale; Ambassador Nancy Brinker, founder and CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure; twelve-time Grammy Awardwinning singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris; Darryl Hunt, an exonerated former inmate and advocate against wrongful convictions;; and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Richardson.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-04-01T00:00:00-04:00">Sunday, April 1, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/Zakaria_0.jpg" width="568" height="370" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/campus" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">On Campus</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Journalist and five others will receive honorary degrees.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498965 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/zakaria-speak-commencement#comments Dempsey's Duke https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dempseys-duke <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>On his first day at Duke, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey A.M. ’84 was mistaken for a priest. Given that he was recently named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and wears a chest full of medals for his military service—it’s a mistake not likely to happen again.</p> <p>But as the highestranking military commander in the nation, Dempsey is cut from a different cloth. At Duke, he studied English, and he counts poets William Blake and W.B. Yeats as important influences in his preparation for military leadership. He also possesses a wry sense of humor, which he wielded during a return in January to his alma mater.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 480px;"> <div class="caption-inner"> <p><em><strong>Photo above</strong></em><br /> <em>High standards: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey tells students to seek meaning in their lives.</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <p>“People say, ‘How do you like [being the new chair]?’ ” he told an audience in Page Auditorium, “and I say, ‘It’s good. I have my own jet.’ ”</p> <p>Dempsey, formerly chief of staff and commanding general of the U.S. Army, was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October, and he now serves as the principal military adviser to the president and the Homeland Security Council. He leads the military during a significant time of transition, including the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the planned withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and regime change in the Middle East and North Korea. One week before he spoke at Duke, President Obama announced a proposed $450 billion cut to military funding and called for a shift in military strategy.</p> <p>Dempsey spent some time discussing the new direction for a leaner military. But he also reached out to the students in the audience, confessing to his own less-thanstellar essays and reminiscing about attending basketball games and celebrating victories at campus hangouts like Shooters. He then recalled an essay on Blake, which prompted him to reflect on both the effort and outcome of his work.</p> <p>“At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver,” he said. “You’ve got to produce. You’ve got to achieve the outcome that is necessary, or you don’t succeed.”</p> <p>Dempsey finished his speech by imploring students to pursue lasting meaning and value in their lives. “The greatest value in your life is to spend it through something that lives after it,” he said, quoting the late U.S. Army four-star Gen. Donn Starry. “Remember this: In many ways it’s a far higher ideal to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.”</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2012-04-01T00:00:00-04:00">Sunday, April 1, 2012</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/Dempsey_0.jpg" width="568" height="370" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/duke-magazine-staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Duke Magazine Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2012" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2012</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Photo Credit:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/photographers/les-todd" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Les Todd</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">General returns to campus to discuss the future of the military--and a little William Blake.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18498966 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dempseys-duke#comments