Duke - Nov - Dec 2011 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2011 en Pressure Beneath the Surface https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/pressure-beneath-surface <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"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td> <div class="media-header top2">It’s a scene that would be ideal for an admissions recruiting brochure. On a flawless Carolina morning, with the hybrid tea roses near the Allen Building in full bloom and Duke Chapel punctuating a cloudless blue sky, hundreds of students bustle around West Campus between classes. A student- led admissions tour gathers near Perkins Library. A cluster of prospective applicants takes in the idyllic landscape, listens to the upbeat pitch about life at Duke, and calculates the odds of securing a coveted place in the university community.</div> <p>Yet all around where these hopeful teenagers are standing, there are disconcerting signs that being a Duke student is not so rosily idyllic. In Clocktower Quad, a sophomore is distraught over a poor grade, convinced it marks the end of his career aspirations. In the Union Building’s Great Hall, a young woman wanders through the cafeteria line selecting virtually nothing to eat, too worried that last night’s frozen yogurt put her over her weekly calorie count. In the Page Auditorium offices of CAPS (Counseling &amp; Psychological Services), a constant flow of undergraduate and graduate students check in for appointments or complete self-assessment surveys before meeting with a therapist.</p> <p>Inside Perkins Library, someone stops to look at a wire sculpture, formed like a tree. A sign near a stack of blank note cards invites students to write down their greatest hopes and fears and hang them from the tree. The cards, dangling like leaves, offer a powerful insight to what preoccupies Duke students. Being alone. Finding love. Being a failure. Enjoying life. Disappointing Mom and Dad.</p> <p>Duke is full of young men and women who devote themselves wholeheartedly to classes and community service, who find fellowship with a religious group or camaraderie with a club sports team, who discover their passion for politics or meet their future spouse while they are here. They write and direct plays, invent irreverent cheers, and tutor children in local schools. Yet for many students, the pressures of being in a highly competitive environment—where the “work hard, play hard” ethos is a defining characteristic and achieving effortless perfection is seen as the ultimate ideal—can be a crushing burden.</p> <p>“Not only do you have to be smart, you have to be popular. Not only do you have to be fun, but you have to be creative, and athletic, and artsy, and a good friend, and thin, and pretty. You have to be all these things,” says senior Katy Warren. “Duke students hold themselves to such high standards, so there is this expectation we put on ourselves to be perfect.”</p> <p>During the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, Warren felt that pressure acutely. Trying to keep up with the hyper-body-conscious students around her, she began running for miles every day on a treadmill. She went on a low-carb diet, banishing even fruit from her plate. Once school resumed that fall, she realized that calculating calories and maintaining a rigorous exercise schedule only compounded the stress of coursework and maintaining an active social life. “I realized I was running on empty,” she says. She sought help from a nutritionist and, later, a therapist in her hometown.</p> <p>For modern college students, stories like Warren’s are far from the exception—and in fact they are becoming the norm. From his second-floor office overlooking the Chapel Quad, CAPS director R. Kelly Crace says he and his colleagues have seen a steady increase in students seeking their services. “A lot of the students we see here in CAPS, and who we interact with through our outreach programming, are what we call the marginalized majority,” he says. “They are looking for ways of finding meaning and deep levels of connecting, but they see what they describe as Duke’s superficial culture and think they don’t belong. They tell us they feel alone and isolated, and yet they are the majority.”</p> <p>Crace says that his counterparts at other universities are facing similar case loads. According to a report released this past spring by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) at Pennsylvania State University, nearly a third of college students have sought some kind of mentalhealth counseling before or during college (or both). The report, culled from surveys of more than 25,000 students across the country, shows that today’s students experience high levels of academic stress and social anxiety and that a growing number of them are on psychiatric medication before coming to college. Sixteen percent have considered or attempted suicide before or during college.</p> <p>“Duke students in many ways are an amplification of what we are seeing nationwide among emerging adults,” says Crace, who was director of the College of William &amp; Mary’s counseling center before coming to Duke in 2009. “Physically and intellectually, they are maturing quickly, but the gap between intellectual and emotional maturity is ever-increasing.” Although they have instant access to information, young people don’t always have the emotional maturity to process it and synthesize it in a meaningful way, he says—a fact that is magnified by the pace of their lives.</p> <p>“These students have an internal wisdom that can be nurtured, but the word ‘awhile’ is being gradually removed from the lexicon of our society,” he says. “Reflection takes time, and students, like all of us, can find it hard to carve out that time for themselves. But it’s essential for fostering emotional maturity and wisdom.”</p> <div id="container-addins"> <div class="sidebar" id="addins"> <div class="sdesection" style="display: none;">&nbsp;</div> Crace says the problems that arise from this dynamic can be compounded by factors of college life. Many students simply aren’t ready to be in charge of all the choices in their life—what and when to eat, how much to sleep, how to study, and when to relax. They are prone to poor study habits, unhealthy eating, or excessive drinking, all of which can exacerbate the normal anxiety of being a student. But a significant source of stress, he notes, may come not from what’s wrong with today’s college students, but what’s right with them. <p>“They don’t just want to be successful; they want to be successful in something meaningful. But the competition for those meaningful opportunities has never been greater,” he says. As a result, this generation has a significantly higher fear of failure than previous generations.</p> <p>“People of my generation had faith that if we worked hard and did things the right way, there would always be opportunities for us,” says Crace. “There is no longer that faith. Instead, there is the fear—and it’s based on reality—that they can do everything right and still not attain the goals they set for themselves. When combined with the belief that disappointment equals failure, it’s easy to see how fear can be amplified.”</p> <p>The most natural way people cope with amplified fear of failure, he says, is through over-control (perfectionism) or avoidance and escape (procrastination). “Our work is to help them develop more advanced strategies of managing fear, uncertainty, and periodic disappointment so that their resilience is not compromised.”</p> <p>That’s a challenge for young adults whose lives have been a long succession of academic honors, first-place wins, and topof- the-class standings—accomplishments that help students get admitted to Duke, but that are standard-issue among the student population as a whole. With so much pressure to stand out, asking for help does not always come easily.</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Impossible ideal" src="/issues/111211/images/111211_pressure2.jpg" style="height:422px; width:670px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption" style="width: 631px;"><strong>Impossible ideal:</strong> Duke’s highly competitive culture can lead students to think they have to be perfect in every aspect of their lives. Chris Hildreth <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>In Katy Warren’s case, seeking help with her struggles proved difficult, but ultimately therapeutic. “I mentor other women through Campus Crusade for Christ, and I realized it was hard to serve others when I wasn’t serving myself,” she says. She is now using her experience to help peers who are struggling with the same issues. At her sorority, she led discussions at informal get-togethers where sisters shared triumphs and setbacks, and now the sorority devotes a portion of each chapter meeting to a session called “Elephant in the Room,” when a sorority member shares her personal experiences around a topic such as grief or depression. The group invites speakers from CAPS and other campus resources to provide professional expertise and advice around that topic.</p> <p>“We come to schools like Duke and let ourselves forget how intricate we are as human beings….We whittle ourselves down to a list of traits based on our weight, our attractiveness level, and our GPA, rather than the fact that I have a strong faith, am a great friend, and love to dance,” says Warren. “That’s why I struggled, but thankfully I am gaining back my ability to appreciate my strengths and be more forgiving of my imperfections.”</p> <p>Given the complexity of issues students grapple with, Duke has implemented a community-based approach to student mental health and wellness. Through a Student Affairs initiative called DukeReach, anyone in the Duke community—students, faculty members, residence-life staff, parents— can learn what resources are available to help students in distress. A professor worried about a student’s poor academic showing can use DukeReach to determine whether a student might benefit from the Academic Resource Center’s time-management or peer-tutoring sessions. A student concerned about a friend may urge her to contact the Women’s Center for navigating the psychological, legal, and logistical repercussions of sexual assault. There are also plans to bring the various branches of student health and wellness into a onestop- shop facility, rather than having these offices physically spread all around campus.</p> <p>Duke is striving to make it easier for people who need help to take advantage of those services. Assistant dean of students Amy Powell is the case manager for students whose health, psychological, academic, or behavioral issues require a multifaceted approach and close monitoring. She says that it is common for students with a history of treatment for mental or physical health issues to come to Duke without letting anyone know about their past. "I think parents are still really worried about stigma and discrimination," she says. "We send out a parent newsletter that encourages them to let us know if there are things we need to be aware of so that we can quickly give a student what they need should something come up. But often parents don’t disclose that their child has an eating disorder or depression or ADHD for fear it would create a negative impression."</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Search for meaning:" src="/issues/111211/images/111211_pressure3.jpg" style="height:383px; width:670px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption" style="width: 631px;"><strong>Search for meaning:</strong> The accelerated pace of modern life allows young adults little room for reflection, an essential element for fostering emotional maturity and wisdom. Chris Hildreth <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Kaitlin Gladney ’14 understands the reluctance to talk about emotional and psychological distress. During her freshman year in high school, a classmate committed suicide. “No one saw it coming,” she recalls. “It’s hard to think that a friend could be struggling with something so much that they just lose the desire to live. I will always wonder if there was something I could have done.”</p> <p>The next year, she began experiencing darkening moods and anxiety, but was resistant to the idea that she needed help. “I wanted to be able to snap out of it myself,” she says. “But you can’t just snap out of an illness. It doesn’t work that way.”</p> <p>Drawing on her own experiences, Gladney is creating opportunities for students to be more forthcoming about, and accepting of, conditions that affect them. She cofounded the Duke chapter of the national nonprofit To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA), aimed at students who want to foster conversations about, and broaden support networks for, individuals who struggle with anxiety, depression, self-injury, and other mental and emotional issues. Through TWLOHA, Gladney and the other members of the Duke chapter erected the wire-sculpture tree in Perkins and invited passersby to describe their fears and dreams. They also sponsored “Feeling Out Loud,” an open mike event at the Duke Coffeehouse in early October where students shared their personal stories.</p> <p>They also are reviving the “Me Too” campaign in collaboration with Duke’s Center for Race Relations. The “Me Too” campaign, started several years ago, features posters and signs around campus with an assortment of phrases—“I’m lonely,” “It’s difficult being a woman of color here,” “I’m finally happy at Duke”— with the tag line “Me Too.” The campaign includes a blog where students can share feelings and experiences, with the hope that those online conversations will carry over into the campus community.</p> <p>“The overarching idea is that as human beings, we all struggle at times in our life,” says Gladney. “There may be times when it feels like things won’t get any better but they do. And by sharing your struggles with your friends and family, you’re not being a burden. The people who care about you want to be there for you.” All of Gladney’s efforts remain deeply influenced by her friend’s suicide. “It’s definitely been a big motivator for me to want to be there for other people, because I know what it’s like to get that phone call. I don’t want other people to have to experience that.”</p> <p>It’s an approach that student-health professionals at Duke encourage. While the national model for college counseling centers remains therapeutic triage —assessment, diagnosis, treatment—Duke has augmented its clinical services with expanded Outreach and Development Programming (ODP) efforts. Because mental health, like physical health, is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, nurturing the “whole person” approach to wellness includes workshops on meditation and mindfulness, seminars on building intimacy and trust in personal relationships, interfaith conversations about marriage and sexuality, and presentations on the mind-body connection.</p> <p>The focus on thriving and flourishing— rather than just treating students who seek clinical or therapeutic aid—has begun to show results. When he came to Duke in 2006, ODP assistant director Gary Glass didn’t have a single request from student groups seeking advice or presentations on improving the campus culture around mental-health and wellness issues. Now, those occupy the bulk of the outreach requests he receives.</p> <p>Effective outreach can increase demand for services and improve the chances that students will seek help before they are in crisis mode. The number of students seeking counseling appointments based on a friend’s recommendation has increased significantly— last year, nearly a quarter of clients came because a friend urged them to do so. “One of the biggest things we’re trying to promote is the creation of an empathetic culture where students understand struggle more compassionately, so that they are there for one another,” says Glass.</p> <p>Last year, senior Tyler Donahue and several of his friends in his fraternity were trying to figure out how to be there for one of their brothers who was repeatedly drinking to excess. They recognized that their uncertainty about how to express loving concern was a larger issue that affected what kind of community they wanted the fraternity to be. With CAPS’ guidance, they formed the Brotherhood Initiative to train a small cadre of members at an October retreat in how to handle a variety of issues, from what to do if someone seemed suicidal to how to handle difficult conversations. The second phase of the initiative would involve training the entire membership so that every student in the group would know what warning signs to look for, how to approach a friend, and where to go for additional help. Less than a week before that inaugural training retreat, the friend Donahue and his brothers were concerned about died from an alcohol-related fall.</p> <p>Donahue still gets visibly upset when he talks about the loss. But it’s redoubled his determination to get his peers to understand the importance of expressing concern and love for another student. “The hardest part of an effort like this is that some people see you as being the fun police,” he says. “We’re not here to stop people from having fun. That’s not the goal of this. But we are concerned about people drinking straight out of vodka bottles at every party. We could go on and on with what ifs, but it won’t change the fact that our friend is gone. We can only try to change what might happen in the future.”</p> <p>After a year of grieving and frequent interaction with staff in Student Affairs, Donahue says he sees a willingness among his fraternity brothers to express deep emotions in a way that wasn’t there before. “You hear more guys saying, ‘I love you, you’re my family,’ which is a step in the right direction. Maybe if we could get more people to express those emotions, we could avoid another incident like the one we had.”</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="1" style="width:91%"> <tbody> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/111211_pressure1.jpg" width="670" height="421" alt="In their own words: Samples of notes from a student-led initiative, which invited members of the campus community to share anonymously their fears and dreams in an effort to encourage emotional honesty." /></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/628512" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Education and Classroom Learning</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/bridget-booher" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bridget Booher</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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">Duke students are defined by their ability to excel academically and socially. What many don&#039;t see is the cost of that drive to succeed.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500565 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/pressure-beneath-surface#comments War and Roses https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/war-and-roses <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header top2">IN DECEMBER 1944, amid the snow-crusted mountains of southern Belgium, Wallace Wade happened upon a young infantryman making coffee. Wade, a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s 106th Infantry Division, had been chasing Hitler’s army for seven months, commanding an artillery battalion that had fought the Germans at Normandy and helped force them out of France. But the relentless combat and the encroaching chill of winter were taking a toll. Wade’s men were out of ammunition and low on food. He himself hadn’t eaten in two days.</div><div class="media-header flr " style="width: 301px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl2.jpg" alt="Bowl Durham" width="300" height="139" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Bowl Durham:</strong> In the only Rose Bowl ever held away from Pasadena, Duke (with white stripes on uniforms) faced Oregon State on a muddy Duke Stadium field. A ticket to the game, inset, cost $4.40.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cold and famished, Wade asked the soldier for some of his coffee. A round-faced, stout young man in his early twenties, the soldier poured a cup for Wade and then gathered some food. He didn’t appear to recognize Wade as anything but a superior officer. But as the men chatted, they realized their paths had crossed before. They had met almost exactly three years earlier, on a soggy New Year’s Day in Durham.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Ironically, the day was one Wade often wanted to forget. It had been his final game as coach of the Duke Blue Devils before enlisting in the Army, what was supposed to be the crown on a golden season. Instead, he walked away in disappointment and defeat. The soldier, whose name was Stanley Czech, had been a tackle for the victors that day.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But in another light— one that seemed clearer in the midst of a war half a world from home—the game had been a stunning success, if only for the fact that it was played at all.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cars began to flood onto Main Street as soon as the news reached Durham. Horns blaring, windows rolled open to the late November air, they filled the artery between campus and downtown, forming a slow-moving parade of spontaneous joy. Young men in Sunday blazers piled onto convertible sedans, shouting to each other: <em>Pasadena! Here we come!</em></p><div class="media-header fll " style="width: 301px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 303px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl3.jpg" alt="Mad rush" width="303" height="231" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Mad rush: </strong>Duke’s ticket office was overrun with orders for the Durham game, which sold out in three days.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">In 1941, no one argued about the most prestigious of college football’s bowl games. The Rose Bowl was king. The oldest of the bowls, it was also the most transcontinental, pitting champions from east and west, something that rarely happened in those days. As a result, the game often served as a barometer of regional football power. When Alabama upset Washington in 1926, it helped legitimize the Crimson Tide— and Southern football, generally—as worthy of the national stage.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Sixteen years later, the man who coached Alabama in that game was at Duke, crafting a new legend. Wallace Wade had stunned the sports illuminati when in 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, he left Alabama to coach at Duke, a university with a splendid new Gothic campus, but comparatively little football glory. He quickly changed that, leading the Blue Devils to Southern Conference championships in 1933, 1935, 1936, and 1938. But he had yet to bring a bowl trophy to Durham. His only previous opportunity, the 1939 Rose Bowl, had proved demoralizing: After not allowing a point to be scored against them all season, the Blue Devils gave up a touchdown in the final minute of the game, giving Southern Cal a 7-3 victory. Following the loss, Wade had irked Los Angeles reporters when he declined to shake hands with the Southern Cal player who threw the game-winning pass. Although he denied spiteful motives— he said he wanted to congratulate Southern Cal’s coach first—sportswriters pilloried the coach in print, only deepening the frustration of the trip.</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 226px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 225px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl6.jpg" alt="Collector’s item: A game program" width="225" height="315" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Collector’s item:</strong> A game program</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Wade had hungered for a chance at redemption, and his 1941 team had delivered one. Once again, the Blue Devils had galloped effortlessly through the regular season, winning their nine games by an average margin of thirty points. The Associated Press ranked them second in the country, behind only Minnesota. In Pasadena, Duke would face Oregon State, a team few had expected to contend for a bowl bid. Early on, the Beavers appeared destined to prove their doubters right, losing two of their first four games, before rallying to win five straight and claim the Pacific Coast Conference title.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">And so, as the long procession slinked toward downtown that Sunday afternoon, most Duke fans liked their odds. Students and townspeople began making plans to make the 2,500-mile journey to southern California. One package offered a crosscountry train ticket, hotel accommodations, and a side trip to the Grand Canyon for $181. At the Western Union office, students lined up to send wires home, many of them begging for money to purchase a ticket.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">For the next week, the campus brimmed with festive anticipation. And then it shuddered. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7—almost exactly one week after it rejoiced with news of the bowl game—Duke was thrown into sudden mourning. Teletype machines clattered with horrible details of the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor. As students scrambled for maps to locate the naval base, a solemn reality was beginning to dawn. The U.S. was at war.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Two nights later, students huddled around portable radios to listen to President Roosevelt’s radio address. The speech, calling for national sacrifice in a long, arduous war, hardly struck a mood for football. “College seems rather unimportant now,” remarked Duke student John W. Kennedy ’42, A.M. ’47 to a Durham newspaper reporter, “and the Rose Bowl doesn’t seem very significant.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">There was historical precedent for abandoning sports in the wake of war: In 1918, following America’s entry into World War I, the War Department ordered an early end to the major-league baseball season. The Olympic Games of 1940, scheduled to take place in Helsinki, had been similarly nixed. Some pundits thought college football should follow suit, keeping the nation’s focus squarely on the front. “In the light of this historic and unprecedented crisis,” wrote the <em>Charlotte Observer</em> in an editorial, “the nation needs to turn itself to more practical pursuits than those of any program of pleasure.” Others argued sports were important for maintaining morale and bolstering patriotism.</p><div class="media-header fll " style="width: 301px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl5.jpg" alt="California Dreaming" width="300" height="206" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>California dreaming: </strong>Students celebrated news of Duke’s invitation to Pasadena, only to find out two weeks later there would be no game in California.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">With no official pronouncement on the bowl, Duke went about the business of readying for the game. The team carried on with daily drills the week after Pearl Harbor, expecting to board a train for Pasadena the following Saturday. On December 13, however, California governor Culbert Olson informed Rose Bowl officials that he had received a request from Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commander of the Army’s West Coast operations, to cancel the game. DeWitt thought the game and the Tournament of Roses Parade, which combined drew more than a million spectators, posed too great a security risk, given the Japanese offensives in the Pacific.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">What few in Durham realized was that Duke officials, anticipating the bowl might be canceled, had been quietly planning an alternative. That same day, Wade and Dean William Wannamaker issued an invitation to Oregon State athletics director Percy Locey to play the game in Durham, “either with Rose Bowl sanction or otherwise.” Although groups in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York were similarly organizing offers to host the bowl, Locey was eager to realize something from the school’s first Rose Bowl bid. Durham was certainly a defensible choice: Duke’s football stadium, built twelve years earlier, was the largest in the South outside of the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. And as Wade had so proudly noted in his invitation, “Our climate at New Year’s is usually favorable for football.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">A day later, Locey accepted the offer. Duke might not be headed to the Rose Bowl, but the Rose Bowl was headed to Duke.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl8.jpg" alt="War and Roses" width="670" height="538" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div><span class="photocredit">All photos courtesy of Duke University Archives</span></p></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">They waited in the thin light of dawn, important men, dressed in suits and ties, overcoats, and fedoras. The governor was there; the mayor, too. A few had gone ahead to Greensboro to meet the train at five o’clock in the morning, only to learn its passengers were still asleep. The rest waited at Durham’s Union Station, glancing at watches, straining to hear the sound of an approaching whistle. By 8:15 a.m., when the Southern Pacific Railway engine puffed into the station, 2,000 people crowded onto Church Street, eager to greet their guests from the West.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Just ten days had passed since Durham had inherited the Rose Bowl, but the city had been steeped in preparations for the event. Duke borrowed metal bleachers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State to close in the end of its horseshoe stadium, expanding capacity to 55,000. New grass was planted on the field. At the athletics department, extra workers were brought in to answer phones and process ticket requests, which came flooding in from everywhere. Reportedly, crooner Bing Crosby ordered 271 seats over the phone. The new batch of tickets sold out in three days.</p><div class="media-header fll " style="width: 326px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl9.jpg" alt="Friends and foes" width="325" height="251" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Friends and foes: </strong>Oregon State’s players were all smiles at a Christmas dinner in the West Campus Union, above. On game day, however, Duke’s holiday spirit would turn sour, above.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">The game had won the approval of the Tournament of Roses Association, the bowl’s sanctioning body in Pasadena, meaning it would have all the trappings of an official Rose Bowl. But Wade warned there would be some concessions to the calendar. “We won’t attempt to match the Tournament of Roses spectacle—a show that has been in preparation for fifty years—on two weeks’ notice,” he cautioned. There would be no plans for an elaborate parade, for example. The tournament’s queen would be crowned in a simple ceremony three days before the game.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In lieu of pageantry, Durham’s plan was to pummel visitors with an unrelenting flurry of Southern hospitality. Townspeople wore ribbons on their lapels that read, “Welcome, Rose Bowl visitors.” Nearly every storefront on Main Street displayed a wreath celebrating the event. The arrival of the Oregon State team on Christmas Eve morning was regarded as a critical charm offensive. As the players disembarked, still bleary from their six-day cross-country journey, a local high-school marching band regaled them. Martin Chaves, the team’s captain, was presented with a framed certificate making him honorary mayor for the day. In short order, the traveling party was whisked off for a tour of Duke and breakfast.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">George Bertz, the sports editor of the <em>Portland Journal</em>, wrote that during its week in Durham the traveling party “has been feted to a Queen’s taste.” On Christmas, the players dined on Virginia baked ham and North Carolina sweet potatoes at Duke’s West Campus Union. Durham merchants assembled elaborate gift boxes for each team member containing cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and locally made hosiery. A few nights later, the Chamber of Commerce hosted the visitors for barbecue at Josh Turnage’s restaurant. The Kiwanis weighed in with a New Year’s Eve kickoff lunch. The Beaver players were fed and entertained so often that their coach, Lon Stiner, would joke it was a conspiracy to weaken his team.</p><div class="media-header flr " style="width: 326px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl7.jpg" alt="Undeterred: Durham fans lined up early on New Year’s Day to claim their seats." width="325" height="238" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Undeterred: </strong>Durham fans lined up early on New Year’s Day to claim their seats.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Most in Durham welcomed the distraction from the sobering news of the war. But it would be naive to say the event united Durham in celebration. If anything, the national spotlight brought to the fore a few tensions that welled deep in the city. Duke angered many in Durham’s African-American community, for example, when it initially refused to sell Rose Bowl tickets to African Americans, although the university had made a small, segregated bloc of tickets available for other games. Durham’s black newspaper, the<em> Carolina Times</em>, published an article claiming that Duke would allow Japanese fans into the Rose Bowl before it admitted blacks. Duke eventually reversed its decision and released a few hundred seats for African-American fans.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As the<em> Times</em> editorial suggests, racism against the Japanese and Japanese Americans was also rising in wartime America. With the country determined to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific theater, a tide of fear and paranoia swept over the home front, prompting the government to strip thousands of Americans with Japanese blood of their rights. And football, often imagined as a diversion from war, was not immune from its infections. Two weeks before the game, Oregon State reserve back Jack Yoshihara, who was born in Japan but had lived in Oregon since he was three years old, was told he would not be allowed to play in the Rose Bowl because of government-imposed travel restrictions on Japanese Americans. He was forced to quit the team and later was interned at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. It wasn’t until 1985 that Oregon State awarded him a Rose Bowl ring.</p><div class="media-header top2"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl10.jpg" alt="Packed house" width="670" height="588" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Packed house: </strong>Temporary seats in the end zone and above the permanent stands expanded Duke Stadium’s capacity to more than 55,000 for the event.</div><div><span class="photocredit">Duke University Archives</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">When the day finally arrived, it came bearing bad omens. Most concerning was the weather. Durham woke on January 1, 1942, to a thick blanket of ashen clouds that doused the city in cold, relentless rain. By game time, the temperature barely topped forty degrees. Many fans donned oilcloth table liners to keep the rain at bay. At least one group started a fire in the stands in a futile search for warmth.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The wet conditions did not bode well for the Blue Devils, whose high-scoring, single- wing offense relied on speed and misdirection. By game time, the grass that had been planted just two weeks earlier was a ruddy, muddy mess, bound to slow down Duke’s powerful running game. But the rain may have done more to dampen Duke’s spirit. Jim Smith ’44, a senior end for the Blue Devils, would later remark, “I’ve never seen so much rain in all my life.” The visitors from drippy Oregon, on the other hand, felt right at home. One Beaver player described the day as merely “misty.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Whether because of the rain or not, the game started inauspiciously for Duke. A Blue Devil fumbled the opening kickoff, setting the tone for a sloppy day. Two more fumbles and four interceptions would follow. The turnovers forced Wade’s team to scramble out of trouble all day. And yet they had chances. Just before halftime, a Duke receiver dropped a pass in the end zone, costing the Blue Devils a go-ahead touchdown. Then, in the third quarter with Duke trailing 14-7, All-American halfback Steve Lach ’42 looped around left end for a thirty-nine-yard run. Three plays later, fullback Winston Siegfried ’42 plowed into the end zone to tie the game. It seemed Duke was finally regaining its form. On the sideline, Wade was reminded of now his Alabama team had stormed back to defeat Washington and told an assistant, “It looks like 1926 all over again.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But it wasn’t to be. On the Beavers’ next possession, Oregon State halfback Bob Dethman found Gene Gray open deep in Duke’s backfield. Gray caught the pass, sidestepped a Duke tackler, and raced thirty yards to the end zone to make the score 20-14. The Beavers missed the extra point, but they wouldn’t need it.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke’s offense made valiant work of trying to score in the final period, probing into Oregon State territory on three drives. Each time, the crowd tensed with expectation, sure that the game would finally swing in Duke’s favor. But the stout Beaver defense thwarted every volley. Duke’s defensive line did force a safety, pinning Oregon State’s Don Durdan in his own end zone, to narrow the score to 20- 16. But the score would get no closer. With the seconds slipping away on Duke’s perfect season—and Durham’s glorious moment as bowl host—a last, desperate pass fell into an Oregon State defender’s hands. Duke was out of chances.</p><div class="media-header flr " style="width: 251px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_bowl11.jpg" alt="Game ball" width="250" height="145" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Game ball: </strong>now resides in the Duke Sports Hall of Fame<span class="photocredit">Photo by Jon Gardiner </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">As the game ended, Duke’s All-American center, Bob Barnett ’42, J.D. ’48, stood near midfield, staring at the ground. It was just the fourth time in twenty-eight games as a Blue Devil that he’d tasted defeat, a sour note to finish the opus of his career. Had Duke been cocky? Had they been distracted by the hullaballoo surrounding the game? Wade would blame himself, saying the extraordinary responsibilities of hosting the game took his attention away from preparing his players. But in retrospect, Barnett knew something else wasn’t right with his team.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">When the game was moved to Durham, several players had voiced disappointment. Missing a holiday at home was one thing when there was promise of a train trip to Pasadena, but a glorified home game— bowl or not—didn’t strike some as worth the trouble. Barnett had needed to call a team meeting to sort it all out, and in the end, Wade had granted them five days’ leave to go home for Christmas. “We were just not ready to play, emotionally and mentally,” Barnett told a newspaper reporter in 2001. “We had too much on our minds.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Indeed, as much as the Rose Bowl marked an end for players like Barnett, it also symbolized a beginning. For the first time in a generation, a new year found the U.S. at war, and players on both teams had already begun to contemplate their place in that fight. Wade, an Army captain during World War I, had decided to re-enlist, and he had encouraged his players to follow him into battle. Barnett would enter the Marine Corps on January 21, 1942, and within months, many of his teammates would again be in uniform, united against an enemy far more fearsome than anything found on a football field.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Four young men on the field that day would not survive the war. Duke back Walter Griffith, a sophomore, joined the Marines the same day as Barnett. Eleven months later, he was killed in a battle in the Pacific. Reserve running back Al Hoover dove on a grenade on Peleliu Island in September 1944, trading his life for those of his compatriots. Star tackle Bob Nanni was shot at Iwo Jima in March 1945. Oregon State’s Everett Smith drowned during a landing in the South Pacific.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Gene Gray, whose long touchdown catch and run doused Duke’s comeback hopes, flew more than thirty bombing missions over Germany during the war. He went on to serve as a Navy test pilot in Panama, where, in 1948, a jet fighter he piloted crashed on takeoff. Gray survived, but the fire burned him badly. To save his life, doctors amputated both his arms.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">For others, the Rose Bowl remained strangely present throughout the war, a link to home that had a way of surfacing at fortuitous moments. A few of those instances— like Czech’s hot cup of coffee for a starving coach Wade—might be written off as mere coincidence, something that was bound to happen with thousands of soldiers living and fighting side-by-side every day. But at least one connection between Duke and Oregon State seemed like a higher order of fate.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">That incident happened between Charlie Haynes ’44, a reserve quarterback for Duke, and Frank Parker, Oregon State’s starting guard. Haynes and Parker both led rifle platoons within the 88th Infantry division and were deployed to Italy at the same time. The two soldiers happened to meet on a boat carrying their platoons across the Mediterranean Sea, and they soon discovered their link to the Rose Bowl. They spent the rest of the trip reminiscing about the day they’d spent out in the January rain.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Several months later, in the fall of 1944, Haynes was leading his men up a hill near the Arno River in Italy when he was struck by shrapnel, leaving a wound in his chest the size of his fist. One of the first soldiers to reach him—carrying him downhill to an aid station and almost certainly saving his life—was Frank Parker.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Haynes recalled the story to a newspaper reporter in 1991, shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the game. “If it hadn’t been for Frank Parker, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “I was dying. No melodramatics about it: I thought I was dead.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Years later, Duke’s Jim Smith was asked what playing the 1942 Rose Bowl meant. Smith completed tours in both the Atlantic and Pacific on the deck of a U.S. Navy destroyer during the war, and he was on board the USS <em>Bright</em> when its fantail was slammed by a Japanese kamikaze pilot near Okinawa. He had a quick answer to the question: normalcy. Playing the game, Smith said, sent a message to the world that “we’re still a nation, we’re still here, we’re still going about things.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">We talk sometimes of football in the language of war, with its bombs and blitzes, its aerial assaults and battles in the trenches. But no one confused the battle that took place in Durham on New Year’s Day with the real thing. The bowl was there to entertain, to let people forget for a moment that in other parts of the world helmeted young men fight and die. For a few hours, at least, the only combat that mattered was symbolic. The only wounds were dealt to one’s pride.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The great Iowa halfback Nile Kinnick had drawn the distinction so eloquently in accepting the 1939 Heisman Trophy. Closing his brief remarks, he said, “I thank God I was warring on the gridirons of the Midwest and not on the battlefields of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the players of this country would much more, much rather, struggle and fight to win the Heisman award than the Croix de Guerre.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Kinnick died during a Navy combat training mission in 1943.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As the leaden skies gave way to darkness and the players walked off the Duke field for a final time that New Year’s Day, they understood they were marching toward an arena that kept harsher scores. They were bitterly disappointed, grieving over fumbles and miscues, agonizing at opportunities let slip away. But the sting of their loss would soon fade. In the end, it was sweet victory enough that they had one last chance to play.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><em>Jessica Wood, of Duke’s University Archives, contributed to the research of this story. A collection of Rose Bowl memorabilia will be on display through January 15, 2012, at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of an Archives exhibit titled “From Campus to Cockpit: Duke During World War II.”</em></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><a href="http://library.duke.edu/uarchives/history/histnotes/rosebowl.html"><strong>See additional Rose Bowl photographs, game footage, and other digital materials.</strong></a></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><strong><a href="http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/fromcampustocockpit">View materials on display in the exhibit "From Campus to Cockpit: Duke During World War II."</a></strong></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"> </p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/111211_bowl1.jpg" width="670" height="483" alt="All photos courtesy of Duke University Archives" /></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/author/michael-penn" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Penn</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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">On New Year’s Day in 1942, with the U.S. gripped by war, the Rose Bowl made an extraordinary visit to Duke. Why the Blue Devils lost that day—and ultimately won</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500566 at https://alumni.duke.edu Flagging Faith https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/flagging-faith <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 201px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 200px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_faith1.jpg" alt="Time Magazine" width="200" height="263" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Classic cover: </strong>an old question, still relevant.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">In the spring of 1966, as America was entering a prolonged period of selfdoubting, <em>Time</em> posed a haunting question in a couple of lines of type on its cover. The magazine asked, in a classic, stark, and attention-grabbing palette of bright red letters on a black background, “Is God Dead?” During World War II, the story pointed out, the anti- Nazi Lutheran martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written to a friend from his Berlin prison cell, “We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">More than forty-five years beyond that cover story, with sustained high unemployment, political paralysis, an intractable war or two, and even monster hurricanes, America is not feeling all that robust. While innumerable sermons explore what the endless series of ills signifies about God’s feelings toward America, Mark Chaves, a Duke professor of sociology, religion, and divinity, is more concerned with America’s feelings toward God.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Religion, American-style, is a study in paradox and ambiguity. Chaves notes, for example, that on the one hand, there are relatively few large congregations, and many more people say they attended services than actually did. On the other hand, those large congregations contain a disproportionate share of the churchgoing population, and the very biggest churches have become even bigger.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">And a Chaves colleague, Grant Wacker, says that the historical church-state divide notwithstanding, “almost every reform in American society can be traced back to religious impulses.” From the push for desegregation to the protests against the Vietnam War, “the lines blur between where religion ends and where secular reform begins,” says Wacker, a professor of Christian history in the divinity school and director of graduate studies in the religion department. Speaking of President Obama’s mid-October bus tour through North Carolina, he adds, “Listen to his speech and how it ends. It’s ‘God bless America and God bless North Carolina.’ This is not just Michele Bachman or Rick Perry. This is America, and God is all over the place.”</p><div class="media-header fll" style="width: 226px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 225px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_faith2.jpg" alt="Mark Chaves" width="225" height="338" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Mark Chaves: </strong>documenting a decline in “meaningful attachments to religious traditions.”<span class="photocredit"> Jon Gardiner</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves’ new book, <em>American Religion: Contemporary Trends</em>, which Wacker calls emblematic of the “gift for taking lots of complex data and making it clear and accessible,” draws on two large surveys. They are both based at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago: the General Social Survey (GSS), a snapshot of Americans’ changing attitudes and behavior; and the National Congregations Study (NCS), which looks at American religious congregations across the religious spectrum. The longer-running of the two, the GSS has been conducted at least every other year since 1972. Directed by Chaves, the NCS surveys were carried out in 1998 and 2006-07. All of his findings point to one conclusion, which perhaps isn’t good news for God: No indicator of traditional religious belief or practice is going up.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Back in the 1950s, a striking 99 percent of Americans said they believed in God. Now, the figure is closer to 92 percent. It’s not easy to say something firm about the significance of that decline, Chaves says. “It’s a really good example of an interpretive conundrum. You could look at those figures and emphasize that 90 percent say they believe in God, compare that to rates you get in Europe, and conclude that we remain way more religious. That’s one side. The other side of the argument is that it’s been a steady, if slow, decline since the 1950s. So it’s a little like global warming, in the sense that a very gradual change over a long period of time can produce a major impact.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The U.S. is not Europe: As one commentator observed some years ago in <em>The New York Times</em>, the conventional narrative is that “a battle plan for the war of attrition against religion” began with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, and what emerged as contemporary Europe “is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known.” But Chaves notes that the proportion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has been rising for a long time. In the 1950s, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no religious affiliation. Today, it’s about 18 percent, a minority, but an increasing minority. “The increase probably reflects a growing willingness among the least-religious people to say that they have no religion,” he says, “as well as a decline in meaningful attachments to religious traditions.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">That trend toward lack of affiliation hasn’t been going up in a straight line; it has gone up faster from 1990 to today than it did from 1950 to 1990. There’s a big generational component, Chaves says, meaning younger people are more likely than older people to say they have no religion. And each successive generation seems a little more likely to say that than the one before. “So it’s not just people who used to say they had some religion who stopped saying it. It’s that young people today are saying they have no religion at higher rates than young people before them.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves’ findings dispute some popularly accepted measures of religiosity—notably the assumption, based on polling results, that 40 percent of Americans attend religious services. He pegs the actual figure at 25 percent. The difference represents the gap between how people respond to direct questions about their attendance, on the one hand, and what they note about their behavior in time diaries, or day-by-day listings of their activities, on the other. Congregation headcounts, he says, also point to the lower figure.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“This phenomenon is very similar to what political scientists have discovered with voting,” says Chaves. “People kind of think of themselves as voters and mainly they are voters, but they just didn’t happen to vote in the most recent election. Still, they’ll say they did. It’s the same thing with church attendance. They are trying to answer truthfully what they think the question is really asking. They think they’re being asked, ‘Are you a church person?’ And if they say, ‘No, I didn’t go to church this week,’ they’ll think they’re misrepresenting their identities to the pollster.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Although weekly attendance rates have been relatively stable since 1990, the percentage of those who never attend religious services has increased. Older people have long been over-represented in American congregations, but that over-representation has been exacerbated lately. In the 1970s, frequent church attendees were about three years older, on average, than the general population; today, they are about five years older. Most striking of all, Chaves says, is a steady decline in the percentage of people who report growing up with religiously active fathers—from nearly 70 percent for those born before 1900 to about 45 percent for those born after 1970. “There can be little doubt that Americans are increasingly less likely to grow up in religiously active households.”<br /><br /></p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_faith4.jpg" alt="Spiritual questing and the American landscape" width="670" height="436" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption" style="width: 631px;"><strong>Spiritual questing and the American landscape:</strong> Thomas Cole’s “The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey.”<span class="photocredit"> © Brooklyn Museum/Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves himself grew up in a religious household. His father was a pastor for Presbyterian churches in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Queens, New York. Beginning in third grade and right through high school, Chaves went to Missouri Synod schools in Queens. “At school, we were taught biblical inerrancy and creationism,” he recalls. “Evolution was false. At home, we were neither inerrantists nor creationists. We believed in evolution. I also remember debates with my grade-school teachers about the idea that everything that happened was God’s will. They said yes. I didn’t think so.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As a Dartmouth College undergraduate, he discovered social science as a research assistant to a psychology professor. His main project evaluated the impact of Dartmouth’s off-campus programs on students who participated in them. “I remember being amazed at the power of rigorous social- science methods to help us learn about how experiences like this shape people. And I thought it would be interesting and useful to apply these methods in efforts to understand how religious programs—like Sunday school curricula, youth programs, and mission trips—shape people.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves went on to Harvard Divinity School with that kind of applied focus in mind. He also took a year’s worth of methodology courses at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “I knew from undergraduate days that I wanted to somehow combine social science and the study of religion, and the rest was figuring out exactly how to do that.” He came to Duke in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where he headed the sociology department. As a committed social scientist, he’s prone to stick to his data; he’ll remind a listener, for example, that he’s not a political analyst.</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 426px;"><span class="bodycontent-2010"> <img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_faith5.jpg" alt="Stats" width="425" height="626" border="0" /></span></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">One finding in the data is that Americans have become more accepting of religious diversity and more appreciative of religions other than their own. Increasing religious intermarriage probably is the best indicator of this embracing of diversity, says Chaves, but it shows up in other ways, as well. The percentage of Americans who say they would vote for a Catholic, Jew, or atheist candidate for president has increased dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century, to the point that today almost all say they would vote for a Catholic or Jew, and about half say they would vote for an atheist. (“Not all religions are equally appreciated,” Chaves writes, and he mentions indications of deepening suspiciousness toward Muslims.) Today, three-quarters of Americans say “yes” when asked if they believe there is a religion other than their own that offers a true path to God.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves’ Duke colleague Grant Wacker says that trend is notable among his students. “What has become so key for so many young people is resistance to the notion of exclusivity.” If they are religious believers, he adds, “they can buy the whole package except the notion that we’re right and all the others are wrong. That’s one thing they can’t deal with very well. Historically, of course, most Western religions have had very little problem declaring exclusive knowledge.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">While belief in God has fallen off gradually, confidence in religious leaders has declined precipitously. And that’s the case not just for the Pat Robertson-like leaders whose sometimes extreme pronouncements have pushed them to the margins. (Robertson announced this fall that he’ll no longer endorse political candidates.) The drop is more dramatic for religious leaders than for leaders of other social institutions. In the most recent General Social Survey, organized religion was in the middle of the pack, just above financial institutions and organized labor but well behind the military, the scientific community, and medicine.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">More and more, the American public wants religious leaders to, in essence, stick to their pulpits. Those in the category of strongly agreeing that “religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions” jumped from 22 percent in 1991 to 31 percent in 1998, and then to 38 percent in 2008. “Political moderates and liberals are significantly more likely than political conservatives to disapprove these days of religious leaders’ political involvement,” Chaves says. With the rise of the political right, moderates and liberals would naturally push back against the mixing of religion and politics. But the surveying points to a more complex reality: Disapproval has increased across the political spectrum, including among regular churchgoers.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Such findings don’t quite square with the recent experience of the Reverend Will Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, and for twenty years dean of Duke Chapel and a professor at Duke Divinity School. This fall Willimon joined a lawsuit against aspects of an immigration-enforcement law in Alabama that, among other things, would have made it a crime to transport or harbor people who are known to be in the country illegally. To Willimon and others, the law threatened to essentially criminalize basic parts of Christian ministry. “We’re just trying to help Christians practice their faith,” says Willimon, who adds that many conservative and evangelical ministers aligned themselves with his position.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Everyone writes you a letter when they’re upset about some controversial issue,” says Willimon. “You don’t always think about all those people who languish out of boredom in churches and just wish they could show up some Sunday and have a preacher say something that is interesting. And I did get some touching letters from people saying how proud they are that our church is standing up for people and that’s what we should be doing, particularly in a state with the history of Alabama.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Wacker, who has written on the impact of evangelist Billy Graham, says the ongoing debate over values-laden issues is “vigorous and strident.” It’s a reflection, he suggests, of the fact that neither side is clearly winning. Liberal-leaning religious believers, once agitated over civil rights and Vietnam, are now energized by the income gap in the U.S. and climate change globally. Conservative-leaning religious believers push back against eliminating prayer in schools, the continuing legitimacy of abortion rights, and acceptance of homosexuality.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“The civil rights movement was a big deal for me as a college student,” says Willimon. “When I came into the ministry, mainline liberal Christians were criticized for mixing religion and politics. Then it flipped, and conservative and evangelical ministers were criticized. What I pick up now in my travels is a kind of buyer’s remorse—the realization that these alignments are complicated and that no party is synonymous with the Christian church.”</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 401px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 400px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_faith6.jpg" alt="Aging congregations" width="400" height="267" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Aging congregations:</strong> Attendance at religious services is skewed toward an older demographic.<br /><span class="photocredit">Robert Wallis/Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Willimon’s from-the-field perceptions notwithstanding, Chaves notes a tie between religiosity and political identification. In the 1970s, 19 percent of those who attended congregations weekly said they were conservative or extremely conservative; the figure for those who attended less often was 13 percent. Today, 33 percent of the congregation regulars are in the conservative column; the figure for the not-so-regular congregation participants is 16 percent. As Chaves writes in his book, “Over recent decades, infrequent religious- service attendees have become only slightly more politically conservative while weekly attendees have become much more conservative. The gap between these groups has widened considerably. That wider gap—which political scientists call the ‘God gap’—is the essence of religiosity’s tighter link to political conservatism.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Congregation attendance also tracks with views on social issues such as abortion and homosexuality and church attendance. Around homosexuality, “regular churchgoers and non-regular churchgoers alike have been trending in a more liberal direction,” says Chaves. “But non-churchgoers have been trending much faster in a more liberal direction. For abortion, both groups have been trending in a more conservative direction, with churchgoers trending more strongly.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The God gap may seem to explain why there are now almost two conservative Protestants for every mainline Protestant. But according to Chaves, the overall percentage of evangelicals is not rising; rather, the percentage of mainline Protestants has declined sharply. “This shift is more a story of liberal losses than of evangelical gains. The causes have very little to do with people switching from mainline to conservative groups,” even though conservative denominations do a somewhat better job at hanging on to their youth. He highlights not a God gap, but a fertility gap: Conservative Protestants have more children than mainline Protestants.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Still, evangelical birth rates, too, are declining, and those congregations are losing more of their members now than in the past. The trajectories for conservative and mainline membership, then, may converge.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves does identify one religion-related phenomenon that is clearly on the rise: attachment to what he labels “diffuse spirituality.” Particularly in a younger demographic, a small but growing minority— almost 20 percent of people under forty, up from 10 percent in 1998—describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. It’s difficult to know exactly what the distinction between spiritual and religious means, he says; he considers the spirituality end of the belief spectrum vague, unfocused, and anti-institutional.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The fluid borderlands of belief in America are sketched in writer Jeff Sharlet’s new book,<em> Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithfulness, and the Country in Between</em>. Sharlet gave a reading from the book earlier this fall through Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. One of his chapters begins this way: “I first met Bhakti Sondra Shaye, neé Shavitz, B.A., M.A., J.D. guide, teacher, and adept member of the Great White Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Light, ritual master in the High Council of Gor, universal kabbalist, Reiki master, and metaphysician, at the New Life Expo at the Hotel New Yorker. The gathering billed itself as ‘America’s Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo,’ four floors of alternative spiritual options.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">To Chaves, these individuals may identify somehow with spiritual matters—“whatever that means” —but they are not interested in organized religion. “If this interpretation is correct, then this growing segment of the population is unlikely to reenergize existing religious institutions. Nor will it provide a solid foundation for new kinds of religious institutions or new religious movements.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“It’s still true that the traditional family—two parents with kids—is the main demographic backbone of congregations,” Chaves says. The cohorts now coming of age are “less likely to be married, less likely to have kids, less likely to form traditional households, and all those factors will accelerate the trend toward less religious participation.” But there’s a countervailing force, which is that as people age, they become more religiously active. And the U.S. is skewing toward an aging population. Throughout American history, immigration has helped sustain American religiosity. Immigration policies, though, are caught up in political currents, and it’s not clear whether it will be a growing or diminishing phenomenon in the future.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“So there’s a bunch of moving parts,” says Chaves. “It’s difficult to know how it all plays out. I think the big question is whether we are on the same trajectory religiously as Western Europe, just slower, or whether we are in fact a qualitatively different situation, meaning we’ll remain much more religious.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chaves says he doesn’t have the answer to that question. Maybe it’s something known only to God. Though if God is brought into the picture, almost one in ten Americans would disagree.</p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/111211_faith3.jpg" width="670" height="480" alt="Signs of the times: Bus-shelter ads in Orange County, California, take on a religiously skeptical attitude. Ken Steinhardt/ZUMA Press/Corbis" /></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/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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">Despite persistent faith-based conversation in our political culture, a Duke professor, drawing on extensive national surveys, finds few signs of growth in American religiosity.</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500564 at https://alumni.duke.edu New Evolution https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/new-evolution <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"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header top2">The first genomes to be sequenced revealed something surprising: On a genetic level, we’re not that different from other species—even some very distantly related ones. What makes us human and them not? Biologist Greg Wray is learning that it’s not the genes that matter—it’s the way they are used.</div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Probably the last place you should look for Greg Wray is in his office. You might find him sitting in another professor’s guest chair, talking about sea urchins, baboons, or maybe lichen. He could be teaching a class about dinosaurs. Or perhaps he’s somewhere around the genome-sequencing facility he directs, a suite of high-powered equipment in the Biological Sciences Building that can read through the entire genetic code of an organism in less than a day. His assistant talks to him mostly through cell-phone texts.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">What looks like distracted, omnivorous behavior is in fact a single-minded pursuit. Wray Ph.D. ’87, a fifty-one-year-old professor of biology at Duke, is after a big question surrounding the origin of species, one that has led him to collaborate with dozens of scientists while studying organisms as diverse as great white sharks and fire ants.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“This is the greatest time to be a biologist,” Wray begins during a rare moment in his own office on the fourth floor of the French Family Science Center. Like a lot of professors’ warrens, it’s lined floor-to-ceiling with books. But there is also a large collection of toy dinosaurs and two skulls, one a heavy-browed pre-human, the other a small, crocodile-like caiman. At the level of biology Wray cares most about, all of these creatures are basically the same. “When you drill down to the molecules and the genetics, it’s a lot of the same stuff,” he says. “We use urchins on one hand and primates on the other because they allow us to see different aspects of the same problem.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The “problem” is how a relatively small set of genes—fewer than 25,000 in both humans and chimpanzees—can produce such complex and dramatically different organisms. For that matter, why do humans, with our spectacular brains and versatile digestive abilities, have only a handful more genes than a brainless, one-millimeterlong worm that eats nothing but bacteria?</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The answer that Wray and a growing number of evolutionary biologists are pursuing is that our 25,000 genes are merely sheet music: It’s how that music is played that makes us different. Wray was among the first to argue, and then to document, that evolution acts on those “players”—the sections of DNA that regulate how genes are expressed—making them key drivers of the diversity of life.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">All he had to do was find them.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In 1975, when Greg Wray was still in high school, Stanford biologists Mary Claire King and Allan Wilson compared a sampling of proteins and short portions of DNA from humans and chimpanzees—the best they could do with contemporary techniques—and published the remarkable finding that humans and chimps appeared to be 99 percent the same on the genetic level. This immediately raised an enormous question of how we could be so alike in our nuclei, and yet so different in behavior, diet, intellect, physiology, and body hair. King and Wilson proposed that the expression of genes, their on and off patterns, would account for much of the difference. But the tools just weren’t ready to address that question.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">At the beginning of this century, computerized and robotic lab technology enabled the reading of complete genomes, first for the model species like yeast, nematodes, and fruit flies, and then for pathogens, crops, humans, and chimpanzees. A curious pattern emerged: Huge sections of the DNA didn’t describe proteins, the structural elements and chemical actors that sustain life. In fact, among the 3 billion letters of the human genome, only 2 percent of the DNA was found to code for proteins. Was the rest of the genome simply rough drafts and broken bits left over from the chaos of mutation and natural selection? Surely there had to be more to the system, but it wasn’t easy to see.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Yet a big part of the answer to this socalled “junk DNA” was already somewhat known. Every cell that has a nucleus carries a complete copy of the genome—all of the DNA required to build and operate an organism from fertilized egg to senescence. But all of those genes can’t be active all of the time in every cell; if they were, you’d have fingernails on the palm of your hand and hair on your gums. So it was clear that genes are carefully coordinated to work only when and where they are needed— and to stay quiet and out of the way where they aren’t—a process called expression. Gene expression makes an embryo into a fetus and then an adolescent using just one set of genes.</p><div class="media-header fll " style="width: 351px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_evolution2.jpg" alt="Chaos within parameters:" width="350" height="201" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Chaos within parameters:</strong> Biologists are learning the same gene can perform different functions from species to species and even from cell to cell.</p></div></div></div></div><div class="media-h-credit"> </div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">What wasn’t quite so obvious—until it became possible to look at millions of letters of DNA pretty much all at once—was that gene expression also helped create the mosaic of species around us. Wray was one of the first biologists to argue that natural selection could shape not just the genes themselves, but also the regulatory regions that orchestrate turning genes on and off. He reasoned that evolutionary changes in these “switches” could allow similar genomes to take on a radically different appearance from one individual to the next or one species to the next.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">With a million or so of these switches controlling the expression of genes in interconnected circuits and feedback loops, biology has an exquisite tool for fine-tuning the organism, Wray says. An invading army of bacteria swarming through a cut in the skin triggers a chemical signal that causes millions of the host’s cells to swing into action, cranking out legions of bugfighting white blood cells and raising the body’s temperature. When the infection is defeated, the signal stops, the temperature drops, and the white blood cells dissipate. “The regulatory region of the DNA,” Wray says, “is like a scaffold on which different proteins come and sit down. Different combinations of these proteins turn on or off specific genes. They act as switches that regulate under which conditions a gene will be on or not.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">To see how natural selection might bring such a system to pass, imagine a tiger’s stripes, which are produced by gene expression turning on black pigment in some hair follicles and orange or white in others. If this system of expression didn’t work, the tiger would be without her camouflage and would probably capture fewer prey as a result. That in turn would mean fewer, weaker offspring, whereupon natural selection eventually would take the stripeless tigers out of the gene pool. But this is what biologists call a “just-so” story—a narrative that seems plausible but lacks real data. Wray’s colleagues demanded proof. “The challenge was getting the right kind of data together to convince the community,” he says.</p><div class="media-header fll " style="width: 351px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 350px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_evolution3.jpg" alt="Next-generation science" width="350" height="234" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Next-generation science:</strong> As genome sequencing becomes faster and more sophisticated, biologists like Wray, shown here with graduate students Ashley Troth and Daniel Runcie, are crossing both species and technological barriers.<br /><span class="photocredit">Chris Hildreth</span></p></div></div></div></div><div class="media-h-credit"> </div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">In 2007, Wray’s team finally had some. Through a broad-brush comparison of the genomes of humans, chimpanzees, and macaques, they showed for the first time that more than 500 gene promoters— switches that turn on expression—were dramatically different among the three species. The alterations were well beyond the random-chance change one would find in areas of DNA that didn’t seem to matter, and they were particularly prevalent in genes that affect key differences among these primates, such as the brain and digestion. In other words, selection could be seen in the patterns of expression.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“It’s more about the control of the sequence, not the coding,” says Courtney Babbitt, who joined Wray’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher five years ago to study sea urchins and has gone on to dissect human brains and baboon ovaries in search of gene-expression differences. “The traits that we think are more interesting seem to be selected on non-coding regions.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The study was a statistical tour de force, completed with the help of postdoctoral fellow Ralph Haygood, a physicist and engineer who has turned his considerable math talents to biology. Haygood has since gone off to start his own company to do this kind of analysis, but Wray and collaborator Olivier Fédrigo, associate director of Duke’s genome sequencing facility, are continuing to mine the data for human-tochimp comparisons. In October, they published a paper on a single regulatory difference that may explain why our brain is so much larger than a chimpanzee’s, while our muscles are so much weaker. The key may be glucose transporters, molecules that ferry sugar to provide energy wherever it’s needed in the body. Both chimps and humans have the same assortment of glucose- transporting proteins in our brains and muscles, but because of a difference in gene regulation, we make three times more of one transporter in our brains, and chimps make more of another transporter in their muscles. That translates to more fuel for our hungry brains and more for their hungry muscles.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Wray’s lab was also part of a 2007 paper that traced human lactose tolerance to a change in gene regulation. A single-letter alteration to a regulatory region confers the ability to make lactase, an enzyme for breaking the sugars in milk, into adulthood. “Every mammal can make it, because every mammal nurses,” Wray says. “But we’re the only mammal where individuals seem to be able to do it as an adult.” This is also very recent evolutionary development for our species, having occurred at least four different times among our ancestors in Northern Europe, East Africa, and the Middle East as they settled down with milk-giving domestic animals.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Fine-tuning expression may be a much better way for natural selection to operate, Wray argues. For example, a well-known protein mutation gives some humans resistance to malaria, but it also produces sickle-shaped red blood cells throughout the body, a debilitating anemia. “When the coding gene is mutated, you get those side effects everywhere and at all times that the protein is produced,” Wray says. On the other hand, a different malaria-resistance mutation occurs in a regulatory region, depriving the malaria parasite of the red blood cell protein it uses as a docking site. The protein is only missing in the blood cells; everywhere else it is needed, the body produces it normally. “If you do this through regulation, you can limit those side effects to a very specific set of circumstances. And all the rest of the time, everything’s cool. This mutation is just good, good, good.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But finding more of these brilliant innovations in the DNA won’t be easy. Regulatory regions aren’t in any predictable spots on the long ladder of DNA. They don’t have the recognizable “start” and “stop” sequences that help scientists home in on coding genes. They number “a million- ish,” Wray says, and may come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">For now, regulatory regions are defined operationally, by breaking DNA into millions of pieces to see how expression patterns change. “People have spent their entire careers studying just a couple of these regulatory regions of DNA and figuring out what they’re doing. Now we’ve got a million of them,” says Greg Crawford, an assistant professor in pediatrics and Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy who is working with Wray on pinpointing regulatory regions.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The sequencing core that Wray directs in Biological Sciences is a warm, fifteenby- thirty-foot room filled with machines the size of dorm-room refrigerators that have names like exotic sports cars and cost more than a house in Chapel Hill. A typical “promotor bashing” experiment, which chops up DNA and tests the effect on gene expression, might generate 30 million to 50 million data points in a matter of hours. “Your laptop is not going to be able to handle this,” says Fédrigo, a compact Parisian who runs the day-to-day operations of the core. “The first thing I ask people is, ‘Do you know what you’re going to do with your data?’ ”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">These next-generation sequencing machines are the children of the massive Human Genome Project, which required thirteen years and $3 billion—a dollar for each letter of DNA—to complete, but produced an array of new tools for biological research. The level of human ingenuity and brute force computing applied to this quest in the intervening decade is an evolutionary tale in itself. One of the machines in the Duke core uses a camera adapted from astronomy to pick out color variations among millions of infinitesimal spots of light on a glass slide that indicate whether a particular letter of DNA might be a C or a G. One stretch of DNA may be sampled ten or twenty times and then statistically rectified to reach a conclusion. It’s expensive and difficult, but trivial in comparison to the Human Genome Project. Fédrigo punches some numbers into his pricing spreadsheet and says that given two weeks and about $2,500, he could sequence a mouse genome, with roughly the same number of genes as humans, ten times over. “And I’m going to give you thirty to forty gigabytes of data.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Biologists of an earlier era built their careers on a single model species—the fruit fly, the mouse, the<em> E. coli</em> bacterium, the nematode worm—painstakingly dismantling one creature over and over to figure out what each piece might mean. But the speed and power of next-generation genome sequencing has “opened the door to being able to work with pretty much any organism you wanted,” Wray says. “The time needed to jump in, spin it up, and ask usable questions went from decades to months.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">This also has created a need for a new kind of biologist, one creative enough to cross not only species boundaries but technological ones as well. “We’re in a transition period right now, where the older professors don’t know enough about this, but they can train their students,” Fédrigo says. For example, after joining Wray’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, he had to learn how to write UNIX computer code to make the machines work. “Greg Wray is on the good side. He knows enough. He has never run an analyzer, but he knows the idea of it. He can advise other people on how to do it.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Collaboration is key in this environment, Fédrigo adds. No one person can master both the technical skills and biological wonderment. And Wray collaborates with just about everybody who can help him see evolution through gene expression. “He has this capacity of understanding things very fast and capturing what is interesting when he talks to people,” Fédrigo says. “He can grab the big picture very, very fast. It’s kind of impressive.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“He’s fun to collaborate with,” adds Susan Alberts, the Jack H. Neely Professor of biology. She’s working with Wray on gene expression in a troop of Kenyan baboons she’s been studying for more than thirty years. “He’s easygoing, engaging, responsive. And he has great ideas.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Some of Wray’s adaptability may flow from his unusual upbringing. The son of American missionaries stationed in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, he grew up immersed in nature. “I watched very little TV as a kid,” he says. “I could either go outside and walk around, or I could read. I did both.” Except for eighth grade in Michigan, he studied at international schools that had been British private schools. At one point, he had fifty-six classmates from twenty-five different countries—an experience that may have given him a good feel for collaboration.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">After an undergraduate biology degree at the College of William & Mary, Wray came to Duke for a Ph.D. under sea-urchin expert David McClay, the Arthur S. Pearse Professor of biology, who now occupies the office next to Wray’s in the French science center. His other major influence was Fred Nijhout, who studies developmental biology in butterflies. “I was working on butterflies with Fred and sea urchins with Dave, so I guess that kind of set the pattern.”</p><table width="91%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#999999"><tbody><tr><td class="brwntextpullout" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="89"><a href="images/111211_WrayWay.pdf"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_wrayway2.jpg" alt="Problem at the Plate" width="87" height="77" border="1" /></a></td><td class="brwntextpullout" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="121"><a href="images/111211_WrayWay.pdf">The Wray Way</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="articletitle-blogstyle style1"></span>Wray's cast of research collaborators includes these Duke professors.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The pattern Wray has been pursuing is that Earth’s life is really all the same, despite the differences we think we see between bread mold and a bald eagle. It’s a complex but common language of molecules. “We’re almost thinking of the genome as a kind of grammar,” Wray says. At the molecular level, life doesn’t have the crisp logic of binary code, but it isn’t random, either. It’s something in between, a tangled mess of redundant and crosswired connections that would put Rube Goldberg to shame. Genes don’t just turn on and off, they operate at different levels, changing expression from minute to minute, from organism to organism, and even from cell to cell within the same organism. It’s chaos within parameters, and that’s what makes it so resilient and relentless, like a weed-filled lot.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“It is very hard to picture,” says Fédrigo. “We’re very binary and linear in our way of thinking, and [biology] is multidimensional. I think our human brain is not ready for that yet.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">And yet, we try. The diagrams biologists are developing to keep track of all of these interactions look for all the world like an integrated circuit or a pipefitting diagram for an oil refinery. The mechanisms of expression are a network of interlocking switches—what a logician or electrical engineer would call gates. “We know some of them wink on and off over evolutionary time, and those are probably modulating relatively small details, whereas others are probably absolutely essential,” Wray says.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The search for meaning among the interactions of a million or more switches in an organism may soon make the Human Genome Project seem trivial. But the biologists of the next generation are going to understand the origin of species in ways Charles Darwin wouldn’t have dreamed of. And perhaps they’ll be able to see human health and behavior in an entirely new way. Greg Wray’s name probably will be sprinkled liberally throughout that literature.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Grant applications and publication lists often portray a researcher’s career like a string of pearls. “Mine’s more like a charm bracelet,” Wray says, hurrying through a basement corridor of the biology building to his next meeting. “The beads don’t match.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><em>- Bates is director of research communications in Duke’s Office of News and Communications.</em></p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/111211_evolution1.jpg" width="670" height="434" alt="More alike than not: Evolutionary biologist Wray explores why we’re so different from animals such as the chimpanzee despite having mostly similar genes. [photos: Chris Hildreth]" /></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/author/karl-leif-bates" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Karl Leif Bates</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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500563 at https://alumni.duke.edu Theorica Pantegni, Total Art of Medical Theory https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/theorica-pantegni-total-art-medical-theory <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> </p><!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table class="pge-content" width="" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><div class="articleTitleBlock"><div class="articletitle-blogstyle"><span class="articlesubtitle-blogstyle"></span><em><br /></em><em></em></div><div class="articleUtils"><!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --> <!-- AddThis Button END --></div></div></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header top2"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 640px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_depgal2.jpg" alt="Building morale" width="640" height="504" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Medieval medicine:: </strong><em>Theorica Pantegni</em>, the leading medical textbook of its day.<br /><span class="photocredit">Duke University Archives </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Before the printing press, the persistence of the written word depended on the meticulous work of scholars and monks, who translated and copied early texts by hand. While many of the translated texts were religious in nature, Western Europe's burgeoning interest in science during the Middle Ages fueled demand for Latin translations of ancient scientific and medical texts as well.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Surviving examples of these translations are exceedingly rare, and because they are written by hand, no two are alike. Consider this copy of <em>Theorica Pantegni</em>, or <em>Total Art of Medical Theory</em>, from Duke's History of Medicine Collections, part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Originally written in Arabic by the tenth-century Persian writer al-Majusi, the <em>Pantegni</em> was translated into Latin by a Tunisian merchant-turnedmonk known as Constantine the African (ca. 1020-1087). Duke's copy is one of the few remaining versions of the <em>Pantegni</em> known to exist. Written in red and black ink, the manuscript is bound in a volume along with a number of separate but related works, including a tract on medicinal waters and a poem, "De Urinis," with commentary.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Most medieval manuscripts are not dated, making the exact age of Duke's copy of the <em>Pantegni</em> hard to pin down. It was believed to date from the thirteenth century, but a group of scholars who examined the manuscript last year came to a different conclusion. The team—which included leading experts in the history of medicine, the analysis of medieval manuscripts, and medieval intellectual traditions—places the manuscript's writing in the early twelfth century.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Knowing the date of such writings is critical to understanding their intention, use, and context in history. That is particularly true in this case. As the first comprehensive medical encyclopedia in Latin, <em>Theorica Pantegni </em>became the leading textbook for the study of medicine in the earliest European universities—which were just being founded around the time this copy was transcribed.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><span class="pubtitle">—Rachel Ingold<br /><br /> Ingold is curator of Duke Libraries' History of Medical Collections. </span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><a href="http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections"><strong>http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections</strong></a></p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">Selections from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500562 at https://alumni.duke.edu Fracking Findings https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/fracking-findings <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"> <!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table class="pge-content" width="" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td> </td></tr><tr valign="top"><td class="text"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 150px;"><img src="/issues/111211/images/091011_depfor_1.jpeg" alt="July/August 2011 Cover" width="134" height="173" /><br /><div class="media-h-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">I am a Duke grad and the cofounder and CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corporation in Oklahoma City. I helped start Chesapeake in 1989 with an investment of $50,000, and today the company's value exceeds $35 billion. We are the nation's second-largest natural-gas producer and the world's most active driller of new wells. In addition, we have hydraulically fracture-treated (fracked) more than 99 percent of the 16,000 wells we have drilled since 1989, more than anyone in the world. I give you this information to establish my credentials for what I say below.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Chesapeake disputes the findings of Duke's <em>Nicholas School's study, Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing</em> [Q&A, July-August 2011]. In April 2011, the authors of the study met with Chesapeake geologists, petrophysicists, environmental scientists, and engineers and were shown summaries of more than 7,000 data sets we have collected over the last few years in Pennsylvania that showed measureable methane (i.e., natural gas) in 22 percent of the water sources sampled <em>prior</em> to any of our drilling operations, directly refuting the contents of the study. The existence of methane in the freshwater column in northeastern Pennsylvania has been known for decades and has been dealt with by state agencies and residents with the use of treatment systems to vent the methane. Please visit <a href="http://www.energyindepth.org/durham-ball/">Energy in Depth</a> for a complete refutation of the study.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Despite clear evidence of a flawed protocol and results, one of the coauthors, professor Avner Vengosh, continued to promote the challenged findings in the Q&A and added more unsupportable claims. Direct quotes by professor Vengosh include: "…and nobody knows exactly what is the chemistry of these fracking fluids…"</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In fact, in Pennsylvania the material[s] used to hydraulically fracture the shale formation are reported directly to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and also voluntarily by Chesapeake and other operators to a publicly available chemical disclosure registry at www.fracfocus.org. Of course, 99.5 percent of these materials are sand and water.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I am also concerned about the kind of "science" being pursued here. According to the study: "Compared to other forms of fossil-fuel extraction, hydraulic fracturing is relatively poorly regulated at the federal level. Fracturing wastes are not regulated as a hazardous waste under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, fracturing wells are not covered under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and only recently has the Environmental Protection Agency asked fracturing firms to voluntarily report a list of the constituents in the fracturing fluids based on the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act." It concludes, "Greater stewardship, knowledge, and—possibly— regulation are needed to ensure the sustainable future of shale-gas extraction."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">This allegation is more political science than physical science. I find it curious that, having ventured so far afield from their areas of academic expertise, professor Vengosh and his colleagues failed to note that neither the federal government nor the State of Pennsylvania places any regulations or quality standards for the drilling and design of drinking- water wells—a fact that would be far more relevant to the findings of their sampling than proximity to natural- gas drilling locations.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It was clear to us from the onset of our meeting with the Nicholas School team that their real goal was to attack all forms of natural-gas drilling, presumably so that the supply of natural gas would decline and therefore the price of natural gas would rise and their beloved "green fuels" could become somewhat less uneconomic than they are today. The reality is that the U.S. is now the world's largest naturalgas producer and greater use of America's clean, affordable, and abundant natural gas is the best solution to wean our nation from its addiction to dirty coal and dangerous foreign oil.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The relentless and ongoing politicization of education, teaching, and research at Duke is sad and lessens the institution's relevance and value for all Duke alumni— past, present, and future.<br /><span class="pubtitle"><br /> Aubrey K. McClendon '81 <br /> Oklahoma City, Oklahoma<br /><br /><br /></span><strong><em>The Nicholas School research team responds:<br /></em></strong>In May this year, we were part of a research team that published a paper in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)</em> showing that some shallow drinkingwater wells near shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and New York were contaminated with methane gas. Prior to its publication, our study underwent rigorous scrutiny by independent scientific reviewers, who found that the work met <em>PNAS</em>'s high standards for accuracy and objectivity. After our study was published, The Department of Energy's subcommittee on shale gas safety commissioned by Secretary Steven Chu called our paper "credible." We stand by our findings.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As scientists, we neither support nor oppose shale gas development. That is why we traveled to Chesapeake headquarters a month before our study's publication to share our findings with them. At the meeting, Chesapeake presented a slide that stated "measureable methane was found in 22 percent of the water sources sampled <em>prior</em> to any of our drilling operation." Our study found similar patterns. Water samples from 24 percent of our background samples (wells located away from active shale gas wells) were found to have methane concentration consistent with Chesapeake's data.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">However, we also found that wells located less than a kilometer from active shale gas wells typically have a <em>much higher</em> methane concentration and <em>different</em> geochemical and isotopic fingerprints. That is the heart of our science, and it is not refuted by the Chesapeake analysis or by the data provided on the website Mr. McClendon refers to.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">We welcome the opportunity to work with all stakeholders in this issue. Sharing data would be a good place to start. Having access to the details of the 7,000 data sets Chesapeake has for Pennsylvania, along with access to their samplings from thousands of wells, would fill in existing data gaps and help scientists, industry, policymakers, and local communities work together to make informed decisions.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Shale gas development may bring prosperity and provide unique opportunities in the U.S.; our goal is to make it as safe and clean as possible. That is our only agenda.<br /><span class="pubtitle"><br /> Avner Vengosh<br /> Professor of Geochemistry and Water Quality<br /><br /> Robert B. Jackson<br /> Nicholas Professor of Global<br /> Environmental Change<br /> Nicholas School of the Environment</span></p></td></tr><tr><td class="text"> </td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500561 at https://alumni.duke.edu Brooms Up! https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/brooms <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"> <!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td height="71"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header top2"><div class="media-h-credit"><div class="media-header top2"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 640px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_depobs.jpg" alt="Pricked, dazed, scanned, zapped" width="640" height="428" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption style1"><p class="media-h-caption"><strong>Collegiate Quidditch: </strong>Duke players vie to regain possession of the quaffle during a match against N.C. State.<br /><span class="photocredit">Megan Morr</span></p></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon in October, 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Duke lines up opposite N.C. State on a somewhat remote West Turf field, downhill from Koskinen Stadium. A few onlookers dot the sidelines, not quite sure what they're about to see. A whistle blows, immediately quieting the chatter among the teams.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">"Brooms down!" the referee shouts, and all the players take a knee. "Eyes closed!" he booms, and every head drops, even the ones on the bench. The referee gives a quick nod to a player off to the side clad in a yellow shirt, yellow socks, and a peculiar yellow tail, who then takes off running and disappears. "The snitch is loose—brooms up!" the ref bellows, and the players mount their brooms and charge into the middle of the field, where a volleyball and two blue dodge balls lie, waiting to be grabbed.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Welcome to Quidditch.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Quidditch, for the uninitiated Muggles out there, is a sport based on the game from the Harry Potter books. First brought to life at Middlebury College in 2005, the sport has expanded exponentially, mostly at colleges, but also at high schools and communities around the world.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Though the players can't fly, its basic rules and jargon are straight out of Hogwarts. Chasers fight for possession of the quaffle (the volleyball) and toss it past the keeper into one of three hoops for ten points. Beaters throw bludgers (the dodge balls) at any player, forcing them to run back to their team's hoops before returning to eligible play. The seekers chase the snitch—a person with a tennis ball in a tube sock hanging out of the back of his or her pants—who can use any tactics imaginable to prevent being caught. When it's all going on at once, play roughly resembles a mishmash of rugby, dodge ball, and flag football—all done while straddling a broomstick.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">After five years of competition, Quidditch became formally organized in 2010 with the incorporation of the International Quidditch Association, which recognizes more than 300 teams. Along the way, Duke joined the movement. But it didn't catch on overnight.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Mia Lehrer, a senior majoring in earth and ocean sciences, had heard about college Quidditch before her freshman year. Someone had posted an MTV video about Quidditch on the Duke Class of 2012's Facebook page, and a lengthy thread ensued about forming a team at the school, whose neo-Gothic architecture conveniently resembles Potter's Hogwarts. Lehrer, who loved all of the Harry Potter books except for the fifth (too dark), took the initiative. The first year was "disheartening," she says. "No one would come to practice," and she didn't have the time or patience that starting a new organization requires. The following year, everything would change, when Chloe Rockow came to Duke.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Rockow, an effervescent blonde who seems more suited to pompoms than broomsticks, is the team captain and president. Now a junior, she stands on the sidelines, hollering, "Bludgers down! Two bludgers down! Beaters, go after the seeker! Come on, Duke!" Three years ago, as a lonely freshman in Jarvis obsessed with Harry Potter, Rockow had contacted Lehrer about the team. "Chloe said, 'I love paperwork,' and I said, 'Hello, vice president!'" Lehrer says. By her second semester, Rockow helped Quidditch get approval for funding from the Student Organization Finance Committee. But Rockow insists that the real turning point was the following fall, when 251 students signed up at the freshman Student Activity Fair and about eighty showed up to the first practice. The rest of the money for equipment comes from personal contributions of students and families, and strong T-shirt sales.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">"We get made fun of a lot less than you'd expect," Lehrer says. "Quidditch is all about having fun and not taking yourself too seriously." When the team practices on the Main West Quad, it's common to see bystanders snapping photos. Junior Rebecca Kuzemchak, Quidditch vice president, enjoys the exposure. "Usually at least one or two people will ask, are you guys real?" she laughs.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Back on the field, an N.C. State player has collided with a Blue Devil and comes crashing down. She doesn't get up. The Quidditch pitch falls silent as both team captains and the referee run over. "She got a broom to the head," Rockow tells me, but she doesn't seem too worried. Sophomore Kirsten Walther, one of Duke's players, is a lifeguard and is taking EMS classes. Walther rushes from the sidelines to assess the injury while Rockow dispatches two other team members to get ice from Wilson gym.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Her nonchalance stems from the fact that incidents like this happen somewhat frequently. At the collegiate level, Quidditch is co-ed and full contact. (IQA's coed policy is known as Title 9 ¾, meant to evoke both Harry Potter's Platform 9¾ and the gender-equity mandate Title IX.) There are no shin guards and no padding. Mouth guards are accepted, and bespectacled players can wear goggles, but that's about it. Most players can point to Quidditch-related scars and bruises, and one Duke member broke her collarbone during practice. Now students fill out waivers when they join the team. "It's like boot camp," Rockow says.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cameron Kim, a Duke sophomore who is the director of referee development for the IQA and a self-described "huge Harry Potter nerd," admits that safety measures are a growing concern for the evolving rulebook. "Players are getting bigger, stronger, better, and smarter. The sport will just get more intense," he says.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke hopes to step up its game to match. At practices and games, team members constantly urge each other to play more aggressively and not be afraid to tackle. "Watching the World Cup stream last year, we were blown away by the athleticism," Rockow says. This year, twenty-eight students hopped on a bus to compete at the World Cup, held in November in New York.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The trip proved to be a bonding experience, which players say is as much of a draw as the competition. The team regularly brunches and travels together, and last year they hosted a Yule Ball in the Great Hall that welcomed visitors from Georgia to New York. "I was looking for really cool people not in the typical Duke drinking scene, and it's the best group of friends," Kuzemchak says. "Last year, things really got off the ground," she starts to say, when Rockow jumps in, "That's my favorite Quidditch pun ever!"</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It's also an accomplished group off the pitch. Lehrer's senior thesis on pre-Cambrian geology will be published and presented at a conference. Kuzemchak is on the executive board of the Honor Council and received a commission from the university for a drawing and painting installation in front of the Von Canon rooms of the Bryan Center. And Rockow is a public policy TA, is the executive vice president of Duke Republicans, writes for Duke's conservative magazine, and is president of Roundtable, the largest selective living group on campus.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As the sport grows, more players are arriving with previous Quidditch experience. This year's team boasts a graduate student who played at St. Mary's College in Indiana, as well as a freshman who helped found his high school's eighty-member intramural club in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">"We're keeping the legacy alive," Kim says. "The first generation of Harry Potter readers are now young adults, and they'll soon have kids who will read and play. The sport stands on its own—more and more people are into it for the sport and less about the books."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">After several tense minutes, the N.C. State player finally stands up and is walked off the field. The game resumes. A few young men have wandered over from a nearby soccer practice to watch the game. "I'd feel terrible doing that to a girl," one of them says about the tackle. "Nah, I like the co-ed physicality," another one jokes. "This looks more fun than I thought."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">N.C. State goes on to win the game, and then the following game in the match. Duke looks disappointed, but Rockow isn't discouraged. After all, Quidditch is about having fun. And there's still a match against UNC-Greensboro to sharpen the team's skills before the World Cup. After a quick hands (and brooms) in, the Blue Devils line up and shake hands with the Wolfpack. They walk off the field together in the late afternoon sun, with just a hint of magic trailing in their wake.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><br /><span class="pubtitle">—Elissa Lerner</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">The Harry Potter generation brings a new sport to Duke</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500560 at https://alumni.duke.edu Documentary Studies 104S - Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/documentary-studies-104s-medicine-and-vision-documentary-photography <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"> <!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 244px;"><span class="bodycontent-2010"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_depsyl.jpg" alt="Voices of the Rainforest" width="225" height="339" border="0" /></span></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">When Duke Medical Center pediatrician John Moses '78 wanted to understand better the lives of the young parents he saw in his clinic, he turned to a tool he hadn't learned to use in medical school: his camera.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Long interested in photography, Moses had taken a class at Duke with documentary photographer Alex Harris and spent a year documenting the plight of migrant workers in the Southeast. In the late 1980s, he again picked up the camera, traveling around North Carolina to photograph teenage parents and their children in their homes. The photographs were compiled in an exhibition and a book titled <em>The Youngest Parents</em>, but their biggest impact may have been on Moses himself.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">"As a doctor, I didn't feel like I had learned all I needed to know about that particular group of patients through my traditional medical education," he says. "For me, it was important to leave the clinic and use a camera to explore that issue."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In "Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography," Moses strives to pass along the same lesson. Students spend weekly lectures discussing the work of notable documentary photographers, but most of the time is devoted to taking and sharing their own photographs. A semester-long project requires each student to follow and document a particular subject related to medicine or public health. Past topics have included plastic surgery, sports medicine, and weight-loss clinics. Throughout the assignment, Moses encourages students to interact with the subjects they are photographing, which leads to better pictures—and a deeper understanding of the hopes, fears, and motivations of the people they are photographing.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">While the course is open to all undergraduate students, it draws heavily from premed majors—which is fine with Moses. "My secret—or not-so-secret— goal is to introduce photography as a way for my students to think about any number of medical situations," he says. "My long-term hope would be that they would hold onto the perspective that they might gain in my class as they forge ahead with their medical careers."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In that way, the course becomes a subtle invitation for future physicians to think about their interactions with patients—a concept that Moses says oftentimes is overshadowed by moretechnical topics that dominate medical school. His course serves to remind students that both patients and doctors are human and social creatures by nature.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">"The social context in which any of us interface with our health-care system is very important," Moses says. "It's not just a matter of getting the right CAT scan, but of having the right conversation with a doctor."</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But even students uninterested in the medical profession can benefit from Moses' course. One of the challenges for any student, he says, is overcoming a reluctance to approach people he or she wants to photograph, particularly when those people are ill or living in poverty. By the end of the semester, however, many students discover that a camera can provide an entry into their subjects' lives, offering a deep appreciation of what the world looks like through their eyes. <br /><br /><strong>Professor</strong><br /> John Moses, a professor of pediatrics at the Duke Medical Center, has been exploring the intersection of medicine and photography for more than twenty years. His portraits of patients have appeared in several exhibitions and books. He also teaches the course "Children and the Experience of Illness" for the Center for Documentary Studies. <br /><br /><strong>Prerequisites</strong><br /> None <br /><br /><strong>Readings </strong><br /><em>House Calls With William Carlos Williams, M.D</em>. by Robert Coles and Thomas Roma; <em>The Doctor Stories</em> by William Carlos Williams and Robert Coles; <em>A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing</em> by Reynolds Price '55; <em>Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer</em> '82,<em> a Man Who Would Cure the World</em> by Tracy Kidder; <em>My Own Country: A Doctor's Story</em> by Abraham Verghese; <em>The Youngest Parents</em> by Robert Coles, Jocelyn Lee, and John Moses; <em>Big Doctoring in America: Profiles in Primary Care</em> by Fitzhugh Mullan and John Moses.<br /><br /><strong>Assignments</strong><br /> Five to ten photos due every other week for evaluation and discussion; final essay accompanies semester-long photo documentary project.</p><p class="byline">—Aziza Sullivan</p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500559 at https://alumni.duke.edu Debussy in the Dark https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/debussy-dark <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"> <!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 301px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111211/images/111211_depret.jpg" alt="Shy virtuoso" width="300" height="444" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Shy virtuoso: </strong>Program and ticket stubs from Paderewski’s sold-out—and barely visible— Page Auditorium performance.<span class="photocredit">Duke University Archives </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">In October 1930, fire swept through Raleigh’s City Auditorium, injuring no one, but almost completely destroying the building. This presented a problem for Ignace Paderewski. The worldrenowned pianist and composer (and former prime minister of Poland), then seventy years old, had begun his seventeenth and final tour of the U.S.—with a scheduled stop at City Auditorium.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">With a concert date to fill, Paderewski and his agent turned to J. Foster Barnes, Duke’s director of social and religious activities, who offered the recently completed Page Auditorium on Duke’s new West Campus as an alternate venue. The concert was rescheduled for January 8, 1931, and would later be recognized as the first performance in the Duke University All-Star Concert Series, now the Duke Artists Series.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Tickets went on sale New Year’s Day, with prices ranging from $1.50 to $3. They sold out in a matter of days, with seats on the auditorium’s left side in high demand, as they would afford concertgoers a view of Paderewski’s hands. On the afternoon of the concert, 150 chairs were added on the stage itself. These, too, sold out instantly.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Amid a storm that dropped two inches of snow on the area, people traveled from all over the state to see the performer many described as “the greatest of living pianists.” A group of 100 came from Raleigh’s Meredith College, and another 200 came from Chapel Hill. The Chronicle estimated the auditorium crowd at 1,600, with large numbers waiting for unclaimed tickets at the door.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Except they hardly saw him at all. Paderewski, who experienced tremendous stage fright, had required that all house and stage lights be turned off during his performance. So it was that the capacity crowd of music lovers, deterred once by fire and nearly a second time by snow, listened to a virtuoso perform Chopin, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff by the light of a single candle, perched on a Steinway grand piano. There were five encores.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">One of those music lovers was Dorothy Newsom Rankin ’33, whose concert program is in the Duke Archives’ collections. Rankin, an accomplished musician herself, made careful annotations to the programs of the concerts she attended throughout her life. On this particular program, she wrote, “back of stage—shook hands with him twice!!!!!!!” Her seven exclamation points seem appropriate punctuation to what the <em>Durham Morning Herald</em> called “the greatest ovation ever accorded a performer in Durham.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><br /><span class="byline">—Amy McDonald <br /> Assistant University Archivist</span></p><p class="articletitle"> </p><p class="articletitle"> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</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">Star pianist’s performance was a treat for the ears—but not the eyes</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500558 at https://alumni.duke.edu Call for Nominations https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/call-nominations <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"> <!-- #BeginEditable "body" --><table class="pge-content" width="" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="top" height="15"><p class="articletitle-blogstyle">Call for Nominations for Board of Trustees</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The Duke Alumni Association seeks your help in identifying alumni for nomination to the Board of Trustees of Duke University. This ongoing process relies on suggestions from all segments of our broad and diverse alumni community. Nominations are reviewed by the Executive Committee of the Duke Alumni Association’s Board of Directors, which then submits a list of candidates to the Trustee Committee on Trusteeship. For information or to submit names, please contact Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs, at<a href="mailto:trusteenominations@daa.duke.edu"> trusteenominations@daa.duke.edu</a>.</p><p class="articletitle-blogstyle">Call for Nominations for DAA Board</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">To nominate someone for the Duke Alumni Association’s Board of Directors, go to www.boardnom.duke alumni.com and complete the online form. Or you may send names and qualifications (no self-nominations, please) to Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs, Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or <a href="mailto:sterly.wilder@daa.duke.edu">sterly.wilder@daa.duke.edu</a>.<strong> The deadline is March 1</strong>.</p><p class="onlinetitl"> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Wednesday, November 30, 2011</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/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></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/nov-dec-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500557 at https://alumni.duke.edu