Duke - Sep - Oct 2011 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2011 en Kicking Up Her Heels https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/kicking-her-heels <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"><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 275px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 275px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/DAA-Alumni-Scholar.jpg" alt="Putting Trials to the Test" width="275" height="367" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption" style="width: 275px;"><strong>Cristante:</strong> Second-generation Dukie.<span class="photocredit">Deirdre Christante ’88</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">This past spring, Caitlin Cristante traveled to Ireland with the Charlotte Catholic High School marching band, for which she played oboe. The group held concerts at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and St. Nicholas Church in Galway, marched and performed in a St. Patrick’s Day parade, visited the Cliffs of Moher, and viewed the<em> Book of Kells</em> at Trinity College Library in Dublin.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">You might think that coming home after such a stimulating experience would be a letdown. But Cristante barely had time to collect her luggage before she received a text message from her mother that eclipsed the thrill of Ireland.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Catie, I have news!” wrote Deirdre Mc- Cartan Cristante ’88. “You got into Duke and you got a FULL RIDE!”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">That’s how Cristante, the middle child and only daughter of Deirdre and Frank Cristante, learned she had been selected as the Duke Alumni Association’s (DAA) Alumni Endowed Undergraduate Scholar for the Class of 2015.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Established by the DAA in 1979 to recognize the academic and personal achievements of children or grandchildren of Duke alumni, the scholarship includes four years of tuition for students with demonstrated financial need; a summer academic experience such as study abroad; and invitations to attend a variety of educational, social, and cultural programs throughout their four years on campus.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“While I was growing up, I always rooted for Duke,” says Caitlin Cristante, who is also a championship Irish dancer (her mother is Irish). “But I didn’t really have a perception of it until I visited the campus with my older brother when I was in eighth grade. It was gorgeous, and I could tell even then how motivated all the students were. From that point on, I always pictured myself going to Duke.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cristante’s older brother ended up enrolling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also applied and was offered a scholarship. Duke was her top choice, she says, so she would have matriculated even without the DAA scholarship. “But I would have felt guilty, since I also have a younger brother, and it would have been a burden for our family.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">During her first year, she will live in Bell Tower on East Campus and participate in the interdisciplinary Focus Program’s “Exploring the Mind” cluster of courses, the better to expand her growing interest in neuroscience. She also plans to sign up for classics courses and Latin, her favorite subject in high school.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“I don’t really know yet what kind of clubs I might join,” she says. “I’m mostly interested in all the opportunities I see at Duke that I haven’t seen anywhere else, things like DukeEngage. Everyone at Duke seems to be on track for success, so I’m looking forward to being part of that environment and pushing myself to be as great as I can be.” <br /><br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">—Bridget Booher</span></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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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">Irish dancer receives DAA scholarship</div></div></section> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500547 at https://alumni.duke.edu The Problem of Giftedness https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/problem-giftedness <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 flr" style="width: 401 px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 400px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="The Problem of Giftedness" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-hands.jpg" style="height:512px; width:400px" /> <p>Lacey Chylack</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Four boys and ten girls pile out of vans at Duke’s Lemur Center and rally quickly in a mobile trailer, leaving an impression of braces, acne, and plaid. Most have a limegreen badge holder identifying them as students in Duke’s Talent Identification Program (TIP); a few sport electric-orange badges, signifying longevity in the program. The youngest is fourteen; all are considered gifted according to their performances on standardized tests normally reserved for much older kids. “How was your weekend?” demands instructor Erin Ehmke, a primatologist. “We ate a Vermonster in four minutes—that’s twenty scoops of ice cream,” explains a girl proudly.</p> <p>In short order, their written hypotheses and conclusions from last week’s research are returned. Feet are jiggling. Uh-oh. “Okay,” Ehmke says briskly, “Tell me about scan sampling. How does it differ from focal sampling and ad lib sampling?” Hands shoot up, voice tumbling over voice. “Great,” she continues. “Today we’ll be using a combination of these techniques to assess inter-observer reliability. Pick a new partner.”</p> <p>Class has been meeting six days a week to study primate biology by doing what primate biologists do. A week into living and studying together day in and day out, this cadre of students knows one another well. Yet they have to be prodded into switching partners, which is relevant when you’re going to test inter-observer reliability, a measure of how well two scientists’ research data jive in the field. And if such a concept seems advanced for eighthgraders— well, you haven’t met these kids.</p> <p>Armed with clipboards, off they troop to the lemur cages in teams of two, ungainly primates at an awkward adolescent threshold. Now they stand rapt, the icecream eater with one bare leg akimbo, foot on knee in a gesture familiar to flamingos and <em>homo sapiens</em> juveniles. With perfect balance, she remains motionless, silently jotting notes while before her a graceful adult lemur cavorts and leaps half a dozen body lengths to get food. Around her, cicadas rise to a slow crescendo, then relax, and the North Carolina heat begins its inexorable climb. She stands almost beyond time, concentrated, intense, perched.</p> <p>Over on East Campus, economist John Kane watches half a dozen small groups of teens hammer out the pricing implications of supply and demand curves. One kid with an orange lanyard (it’s his fourth summer at TIP) explains a graph to two companions with the help of much gesticulation and a chalkboard; another group discusses Frisbee grips and technique; a smattering of individuals write quietly alone.</p> <p>Shortly, Kane rounds them up. “Now let’s talk about diminishing returns,” he says. Soon he has a gangly guy racing across the room’s diagonal to see how many balls can be moved from one box to another in thirty seconds. Kane adds a second runner, then a third, keeping track of their totals as the crowd shouts out advice. One of the runners trips and sprawls on the floor, getting in the way of the other two. Everybody cracks up. After a certain point, it transpires, more runners don’t help the totals. They need more baskets, not more people. <em>Voilà</em>: the law of diminishing returns.</p> <p>The class will go on to use its new analytical tools to examine the problem of scarce resources as it plays out in minimum- wage laws, farm subsidies, rent controls, trade protectionism, pollution, and welfare programs. One of TIP’s articles of faith is that its students can soak up an entire semester’s worth of college-level material in three weeks. During a break in the action, I ask Kane if he really covers that much. “Actually,” he laughs, “we cover more.” A professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, he has spent every summer at TIP since 1987 and has the T-shirts to prove it.</p> <p>Meanwhile, in a class called “Big Screen, Little Screen,” students are using improv to generate ideas for movies. A girl wraps a boy’s head in a sweater, and a costume is born. “I feel like doing an interpretive dance!” exclaims another, and off she goes. As the groups review their scenarios, screenwriter Rick Dillwood, their “producer,” laughs aloud: “The number of skits that end in mass death is a concern.” This group is mastering idea development, experimenting with story, character, dialogue, and setting as they work on their scripts. Soon the class will vote on which to cast, shoot, edit, and screen at the end of its three weeks.</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 alt="Do you see what I see?" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-tip.jpg" style="height:232px; width:350px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Do you see what I see?:</strong> During a Nasher Museum excursion, TIP students paired off for visual-exploration exercise. Dr. J Caldwell</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Through its residential program at Duke and related programs at eight other sites, TIP offers dozens of courses, spanning topics from the molecular biology of cancer to how material properties change at the nanoscale. The material is tough and edgy, representing some of the trendiest fields in higher education. And the kids are up to the challenge, eighth-graders ready for college material. These campers have emerged from a region-wide talent search that began with a pool of some 70,000 students who accepted an invitation to take the SAT or ACT as seventhgraders. TIP annually honors the 25,000 highest scorers in state and regional ceremonies and invites an even more select group of about 2,000 for a special recognition ceremony on Duke’s campus. It’s this group—the top 3 percent of the top 3 percent—that receives an invitation to TIP’s three-week summer programs.</p> <p>Experiences targeting the gifted are important in ways that many people don’t think about. As intellectually robust as these students may be, at some level every fourteen-year-old is delicate, and the precocious, talented, and brilliant are no exception. In fact, they may have it worse. As long ago as 1926, when Columbia University’s Leta Hollingworth codified her pioneering research in the book <em>Gifted Children</em>, educators have known that in mainstream school settings extremely bright students can fall idle. According to a 2003 study by Case Western Reserve University psychiatrist Sylvia Rimm, children testing as gifted comprise 10 to 20 percent of high-school dropouts—who may be bored, hypersensitive, depressed, misunderstood, ridiculed, frustrated, isolated, unpopular, or socially inept.</p> <p>There is contemporary research on adolescent substance abuse and giftedness, underachievement and giftedness, aggression and giftedness, depression and giftedness. And yet barely half of America’s gifted learners are getting the services they need to stay engaged in the classroom, according to a 2002 report by former teachers James Delisle and Judy Galbraith.</p> <p>Part of the problem is that giftedness remains a controversial subject. Battles have raged over whether to test children for achievement or potential (e.g., SATs vs. IQ tests); over whether to test them against a body of knowledge or against each other; over “treatments” favoring enrichment or acceleration (e.g., field trips vs. skipping grades); and over performance gaps in gender, race, native language, and socioeconomic status.</p> <div class="media-header top2"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Case study" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-class.jpg" style="height:432px; width:670px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Case study:</strong> TIP instructor Don Donelson leads students through an exploration of clinical-trial advocacy.<br /> Megan Morr <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>TIP was founded thirty years ago with a bias toward action. The program was conceived by then-provost Bill Bevan A.M. ’43, Ph.D. ’48, Hon. ’72; Bob Sawyer, then director of Duke Summer Programs; and educational psychologist Julian Stanley, whose research project on mathematically precocious youth had led to the formation of Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth in the 1970s. The inchoate TIP had modest expectations, aiming to secure a regional talent-search monopoly in the Southeast, while leaving most of the country to Johns Hopkins, Northwestern University, and others. In its first year, the program attracted fewer than 8,700 participants, ultimately admitting 151 students to its summer program.</p> <p>One of those pioneering teenagers was Chris Imershein ’90, who ended up using his TIP courses to place out of Trinity College’s distribution and major requirements in math, Pascal programming, computer science, and English. Yet Imershein credits TIP with something that in retrospect he sees as more important: “the whole social aspect of it—the feeling of acceptance, not feeling so weird or out of place.” At the same time it was, he says, the first time he can remember having to struggle with academic work.</p> <p>This year, 71,203 seventh-graders took the SAT or ACT under TIP’s auspices, with 3,183 enrolling in summer programs. “All of the talent-search numbers for the rest of the country combined don’t equal ours,” points out TIP executive director Martha Putallaz, now in her eighth year running the program. Despite declines in education funding nationally, TIP increased its budget by 37 percent since the financial crisis, as federal and state budget cuts precipitated a flood of private investment by anxious parents and foundations. TIP’s own innovations didn’t hurt either: In 2010, 36,000 fourth- and fifth-graders received advice, support, and (for some) face-to-face “Academic Adventure” and independentlearning programs developed by TIP specifically to reach younger kids.</p> <p>Although TIP receives no money directly from Duke, its affiliation with the university helps in other ways, Putallaz notes. Duke’s international connections were critical in launching a pilot program in India, and programs in Singapore and China will debut in 2012 and 2013, respectively.</p> <p>Despite its rapid expansion, TIP’s fundamentals have changed little in the past three decades. It all starts with the talent search: TIP analyzes scores on standardized tests from sixteen states to identify seventh- graders with high academic achievement and invites them to take either the SAT or the ACT. “Once upon a time, the talent search was a game-changer for a lot of families,” says Mark DeLong A.M. ’81, Ph.D. ’87, TIP’s director of operations from 1988 to 1994, “because at last they had evidence they could leverage” with school systems, principals, teachers—and even within the family. Even today, the of ficial notice from TIP is sometimes the first credible acknowledgement parents receive that their child is special and that they are not necessarily pushy, overbearing, doting, or just plain nuts.</p> <p>Thus the Grand Recognition ceremony, held in Cameron Indoor Stadium, remains a big deal. Scott Greenwood, who served as TIP’s chief operating officer for the last ten years, puts it bluntly: “In a society where everybody gets a ribbon for participating, sometimes it’s good to celebrate real achievement.” This year, some 500 students received their medals on a hot Saturday in May, the bleachers abuzz with the conversation of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and siblings, while on the gym floor, the honorees sat in contemplative silence. Most were dressed up, the boys in ties, the girls in party dresses. Several were too shy—or too unsure of why they were there—to articulate their feelings at their auspicious moment.</p> <div id="container-addins"> <div class="sidebar" id="addins"> <p>They were there, of course, because they nailed an achievement test, which TIP officials say is the most reliable indicator of academic talent. From the beginning, TIP has eschewed IQ tests, which have turned out to predict achievement only moderately well, according to Rick Courtright, a TIP researcher who studies education strategies for gifted students. “An IQ test is absent of school subjects. It asks, What’s your ability to reason, to problem-solve, to think logically when compared to others of the same age?” he says. “Then there’s testing for achievement—readin’, writin’, ’rithmetic—where high performance really would be an indicator of that need for differentiation.”</p> </div> </div> <p>Traditional end-of-grade assessment tests aren’t very useful for identifying this group, either. “End-of-grade tests do a good job of measuring a student’s performance on those skills at that grade level. But the ceiling is very low,” says Courtright. “It doesn’t give that fifth-grader who’s ten years old the chance to show he’s ready for pre-algebra.”</p> <p>Educators of the gifted call it a lack of “headroom”: If 1,000 kids in 10,000 achieve a perfect score on an end-of-grade test, how do you differentiate among those 1,000? Which <em>one</em> child in that group is intellectually five years ahead of her classmates?</p> <p>And when you do find that one, what do you do with her?</p> <p>Well-meaning educators of yore might have tried to keep gifted students busy by assigning them extra problem sets of the same homework they had already mastered, or asking them to tutor slower students in the classroom. In 1988, TIP cofounder Bob Sawyer complained in an article for the <em>Journal for the Education of the Gifted</em> that gifted-education curricula were often trivialized, even embarrassingly so. In some ways, that battle has been won. Schools of education now offer master’s degrees in gifted education, and public and private secondary schools nationwide have adopted gifted curricula, hired or appointed Academically or Intellectually Gifted (AIG) liaisons (as in North Carolina), extended teacher certification to include mastery of how to teach the gifted (as in New York), and provided a steady and ever-growing stream of willing participants to the talent searches of TIP and its peers. The resulting programs tend to be not just advanced but experiential.</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 alt="Dusting for prints" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-forensics.jpg" style="height:265px; width:350px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Dusting for prints:</strong> Thomas Patterson, left, and Joseph Zuckerman work on a fingerprint identification activity during a forensics class.<br /> Megan Morr</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Meanwhile, the first generation of TIPsters, now in their forties and at the peak of their careers, has returned to campus with stories, praise—and sometimes even their children. Each year, TIP honors several alumni at the Grand Recognition, making sure future campers take note of the enticing possibilities before them.</p> <p>Take Ben Greenman, a pop-culture editor at <em>The New Yorker</em> and author of several books, including the short-story collection <em>Superbad</em> and the “novel-within-storieswithin- a-novel” <em>Superworse</em>. One of the driest wits in the business, Greenman grew up in Miami and studied writing at TIP in 1983-84, returning as a TA, and graduating from high school at sixteen. Describing fourteen-year olds as “larvae—the good kind of larvae,” he credits TIP with giving him early confidence to pursue his dreams of writing professionally. “As I got older, the thing that always struck me was how generous the faculty was. They gave a lot of time to little kids, and a lot of energy, in helping us to discipline our thought and make sense of this welter in our heads.”</p> <p>Or take Bethany Henderson, a TIPster from 1988-91 and former trial lawyer who left her practice to found City Hall Fellows, a national service corps preparing bright college graduates for careers in local public service. Interns who receive her fellowships get 300 hours of hands-on training in the <em>realpolitik</em> of their home city, helping them figure out who the players are and how policy gets made. Then they take on an ambitious real-world project—using GIS data to get rid of potholes; helping juvenile delinquents reenter the mainstream; increasing local government transparency—and make it happen.</p> <p>For Henderson, TIP was not just about empowering herself but about networking. Fellow TIPsters Ben Farkas, Mackenzie Kaplan Sandler, and Brett Lasher M.B.A. ’04 attended the University of Pennsylvania with Henderson and still keep in touch; TIPster Marni Karlin, counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, nominated her for this year’s TIP alumni award; TIPster Jennifer Chen Hopkins invited her to crash on her couch while Henderson was setting up the Houston branch of the City Hall Fellows; TIPster Sunny Gettinger, a senior manager at Google, reached out to Henderson to offer help when she read about the City Hall Fellows in Florida; and TIPster Andrew Samwick, now a Dartmouth College professor of economics, brought Henderson to his campus in February for student meetings, class visits, and lectures about engaging Millenials in local governance.</p> <p>Or take Amy Abernethy M.D. ’94, who attended TIP in 1983 and 1984. Now a medical oncologist and cancer researcher who serves as associate director of the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, she has written more than 130 publications, twenty book chapters, and two textbooks. Until TIP she felt out of place because “the things that interested me just weren’t the same as [what interested] my middleschool friends back in Orlando.” Suddenly it was okay to like science, and suddenly she was in charge of “making sure that I ate my veggies.” Abernethy still keeps a faded photo from her TIP days hanging on her office wall.</p> <p>As TIPsters who eventually took a Duke degree, Abernethy and Chris Imershein are unusual. Although nearly a quarter of first-year Duke students between 2008 and 2011 had participated in the TIP talent search, most TIP kids never return to Duke. Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions, is quick to point out that while TIP is a great way for young teens to be introduced to Duke, more simply, it’s a way for students to be introduced to qualities that schools like Duke look for.</p> <p>“There are always going to be students who participate in TIP that we’re not going to admit,” he says. “Nor does participation automatically mean we’re going to send them an application, even if they’ve been affiliated for a number of years.” In any case, he says, “the degree to which TIP was seen as a recruitment arm of the university would affect its ability to<em> be</em> an enrichment program.”</p> <p>Ben Greenman’s experience in the 1980s bears out Guttentag’s point. “There were other kinds of programs my friends went to where kids ended up getting a sense that there was something amiss. They were pawns in someone else’s game. I wouldn’t have gone back if I had thought that.”</p> <p>But there is one ulterior motive for nurturing the hyper-smart: Scholars and policymakers are hungry for new research on gifted-child education, and programs like TIP can provide a wealth of data, following the gifted out into the world.</p> <p>“We have demographic and test-score data on over two million kids,” says TIP director Putallaz, “including information from many of them on what college they attended, what they did in college, and what they went on to do [for a living]. Everyone in the gifted world has dreamed of having access to such data.” With research scientists and specialists on staff, she says, “we’re present at conferences in a way we weren’t before. We’re publishing. We’re becoming players in the research field.”</p> <p>This spring, former TIP researcher Kristen Foster Peairs received the National Association of Gifted Children Dissertation Award for work on how peer relationships can shed light on the socioemotional development of gifted youth, and she returns to the program this fall for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. TIP research scientist Jonathan Wai won a 2010 Mensa Award for Excellence in Research on the role of spatial ability in the development of gifted children and adults. And another paper still under review reveals some compelling results— such as that, compared to gifted kids who did not attend a TIP summer program, TIP attendees were more likely to wind up with a National Merit Scholarship or attend a top university, three times more likely to earn a doctorate, and five times more likely to work as an academic scientist. (They also reported working eight or more hours over the weekly average compared to other gifted adults.)</p> <div class="media-header flr " style="width: 365px;"> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 364px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Primate biologists in training" src="/issues/091011/images/giftedness-bio.jpg" style="height:342px; width:364px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Primate biologists in training:</strong> Jessie Feng, left, instructor Erin Ehmke, and Mary Clarke Worthington compare field observations collected during Lemur Center trip.<br /> Megan Morr</div> <div class="media-h-credit">&nbsp; <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <p>Still, for all TIP’s success—cutting-edge research, famous alumni, impressive new ventures, and promising growth—in some ways administrators are disappointed: TIP struggles to keep up with demand.</p> <p>For one thing, despite endowments and gifts that enable TIP to award more than $2 million in grants and scholarships— some merit-based and some need-based— their means are insufficient to meet every student’s needs. That is, the difference in services and support provided to the haves and have-nots, even among the gifted, is worsening. Seven of TIP’s sixty-six employees are assigned to the Next Generation Venture Fund, a flagship program run in tandem with Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth and supported by The Goldman Sachs Foundation. The fund, which targets gifted youth in disadvantaged minority groups, faces an uncertain future when its current funding runs out in three years.</p> <p>And despite expanding internationally and adding partner institutions, TIP can’t serve everybody who can afford it, much less everybody who needs it. For all their extreme selectivity, TIP courses—wherever they are offered—can fill within hours of opening registration, and the waiting list for summer programs, already over 1,000 students, gets longer every year.</p> <p>As each cohort of gifted junior-high and high-school students ages out, larger numbers replace them. “There’s population growth in this region, so more gifted kids are identified than in the past; besides, our brand is stronger so more parents know of us,” explains departing TIP chief operating officer Scott Greenwood.</p> <p>Not a bad problem to have.</p> <p>Back at the Duke Lemur Center, the intensely concentrating <em>homo sapiens</em> juveniles are wrapping up their written observations of fellow primates. They circumnavigate cages for a final view, then at a prearranged signal from their leader reconvene in a tight circle. “We had two self-groomings and a scent-marking at 9:38,” offers Girl- Who-Ate-Twenty-Scoops-of-Ice-Cream. Others vocalize, chiming in. “Any mating behaviors?” asks the instructor.</p> <p>Fourteen adolescents eye each other sidewise. No mating behaviors. “Okay,” the teacher says. “Now go calculate a coefficient of reliability.”</p> <p>They head for the trailer at a trot.</p> <p>– Baerman M.B.A. ’90, whose gifts manifested late, is a North Carolina playwright and essayist.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/giftedness-class.jpg" width="670" height="432" alt="Each summer, Duke’s Talent Identification Program brings some of the nation’s smartest teenagers to campus for a jump start on college-level coursework. But the most important thing they learn may be that they’re not alone." /></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/paul-baerman-mba-90" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Baerman M.B.A. &#039;90</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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501105 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/problem-giftedness#comments Creative Movement https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/creative-movement <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"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 612px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-dancer.jpg" alt="Everywhere you look" width="612" height="381" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Everywhere you look:</strong> Inset, re-creation of medieval church from course that combines humanities research <br /> with visual technologies; Ilka Felsen ’12 performing in dance program’s ChoreoLab 2011 presentation <span class="photocredit">Detail from Wired! historical visualization project</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><div class="articletitle-blogstyle"><span class="homepagebyline"><br /></span></div><div class="brwntextheader-2010">With high-visibility projects like the Nasher Museum, Duke has injected new money and energy into the arts. But its ambitions are greater – to transform the campus culture.</div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Kimerly Rorschach had been director of the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art for a decade when she learned in 2003 that Duke University was searching for a director for its first freestanding art museum. She knew Duke as a leading research and liberal-arts university and had a passing familiarity with its art history program, “but their art museum was not on the radar screen,” she says.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">At the time, Duke’s art holdings were housed in a former science building on East Campus. DUMA—the Duke University Museum of Art—had been formally established in 1969 under president Douglas Knight, yet despite the best efforts of a core group of supporters through the years, it never garnered the attention or support that other university museums enjoyed. The allotted space was so cramped that only a fraction of the museum’s holdings could be displayed at a time; faculty members and students who wanted to see additional works had to make an appointment to view them in storage. When Rorschach came to campus for interviews, a visit to DUMA wasn’t even included on her official itinerary.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Yet Rorschach was intrigued by what was taking shape at Duke. Raymond Nasher ’43, one of the country’s prominent collectors of modern and contemporary sculpture, had pledged $7.5 million—a gift that would eventually grow to $10 million—toward the construction of a new museum. Eminent architect Rafael Viñoly had been commissioned to design the 65,000-square-foot facility. And leading arts marketing firm Resnicow Schroeder Associates had been hired to oversee the museum’s launch.</p><div class="media-header fll" style="width: 212px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 211px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-bergmann.jpg" alt="Everywhere you look" width="211" height="140" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Everywhere you look</strong><span class="photocredit">Marissa Katarina Bergmann '11 </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">“I really didn’t have an impression of Duke being distinguished in the arts, but people were urging me to take a more serious look at it,” recalls Rorschach. “So I did. And even though there wasn’t a track record, I saw a huge opportunity. There was a willingness to make resources available, and a commitment to do something serious. And that was very exciting, because I like building things and making a huge difference. And clearly, a huge difference could be made.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Convinced Duke was serious about its commitment to build and sustain a major museum, Rorschach accepted the offer to become the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum in 2004. The next year, the Nasher opened to the public, and almost immediately it became a literal and figurative example of how the arts can transform a campus—and a campus culture. Since 2005, more than 80,000 Duke students have visited the museum, and faculty members from a range of disciplines—including German, medieval history, Italian, women’s studies, classical civilization, art history, and English—have built museum visits into their curricula.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">While perhaps the most visible representation of Duke’s commitment to the arts, the Nasher is only one piece of an ambitious institutional imperative to make the arts an essential part of the Duke experience. The same year that Rorschach and her colleagues put the finishing touches on the Nasher’s debut, Duke’s senior leadership released a strategic plan listing six key goals. Among them was an aspiration that many observers felt was long overdue: raising the level of the arts on campus through enhanced programming, expanded curricular opportunities, increased cross-disciplinary research, and improved facilities.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“I think it would be fair to say that Duke’s delivery into the arts area, as compared to what you might call the promise of a liberalarts education and the commitment we saw at most of our peer schools going into this decade, was not as good as it should have been,” says provost Peter Lange. “We had arts programs that were well designed and adequate—I wouldn’t use more than that word—for students who were really committed. But we didn’t set out to attract students who were interested in the arts, and we didn’t do anything to motivate students to be committed or to reach out to those who had no arts background.”</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 211px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 211px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-monks.jpg" alt="Dancer, scholar" width="211" height="289" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Dancer, scholar:</strong> New faculty member Thomas DeFrantz, performing “Monk’s Mood: A Performance Meditation on the Life and Music of Thelonious Monk.”<span class="photocredit">SLIPPAGE </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Lange, a political scientist who came to Duke in 1981, says that an institutional commitment to the arts has grown in fits and starts. “It’s been a trajectory,” he says. “I was part of many committees and conversations through the years where we’d say, ‘And then we need to do this or that in the arts.’ But when it came time to allocate money, those [projects] would always fall just below the line” of what would get funding. But with the opening of the Nasher, “we had a breakthrough event. It became our platform for really taking off in the arts. It has changed the way the arts are perceived on campus.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Following the release of the strategic plan, Lange appointed a Council for the Arts to coordinate and expand arts activities on campus. Chaired by Rorschach, the group tracks and promotes collaborations among professional, academic, and student arts organizations, awards a number of collaborative and visiting-artist grants, and assesses the university’s progress toward goals. Lange also appointed music professor and composer Scott Lindroth as Duke’s first vice provost for the arts.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In the five years since, dance became an undergraduate major and its department added courses in theory and practice, and the department of art and art history added visual studies to its name, in part to reflect expanding scholarship and increased student interest in technology and new media. Duke Performances has become one of the region’s leading presenters of traditional, contemporary, and avant-garde music, dance, and theater, drawing more than 33,000 people to its events during the past academic year. (Those numbers include nearly 10,000 Duke students, who have the benefit of heavily discounted tickets through a subsidy provided by the provost’s office.)</p><div class="media-header top2"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 630px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-sound.jpg" alt="Surround Sound" width="630" height="352" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption" style="width: 631px;"><strong>Surround Sound:</strong> Vice provost Scott Lindroth’s multimedia work Awaken, combining live<br /> instrumental and vocal music with continuous video, presented at Smith Warehouse.<span class="photocredit">Anya Belkina</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">The Center for Documentary Studies regained primary sponsorship of the internationally acclaimed Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and expanded its continuingeducation course offerings. The renovated Smith Warehouse near East Campus became home to studio, lab, and gallery space. Certificate programs in various interdisciplinary programs—including Arts of the Moving Image, Information Science + Information Studies, and Documentary Studies—are attracting increasing numbers of students. Visiting artist-in-residence and collaborative arts grants programs have allowed greater experimentation across disciplines—for example, a project exploring technological approaches to interactive dance performances that involved faculty members from the dance program and the Pratt School of Engineering. And Duke’s first M.F.A. program, in experimental and documentary arts, welcomed its inaugural class this fall (see story, page 32).</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Lindroth says that Duke is determined to have its arts culture mentioned in the same breath as its basketball program or medical center. From his office in the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building—built in the mid-1970s and for decades the newest arts building on campus—he cites the convergence of several key factors that can make that happen. “The arts have existed at Duke for as long as the university has, and arts faculty members have always been tremendously committed to mentoring those students who were interested in them. Now we’re seeing that many of our most academically gifted students are looking for an arts experience. This doesn’t necessarily translate into an increase in arts majors, but it does translate into participation in theater productions, people wanting to take dance classes, people wanting to paint and do photography. More and more, we’re seeing that students want to find a way to bring together their genuine passion for the arts, as well as their genuine passion for doing good in the world.”</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 346px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 345px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-printmaking.jpg" alt="Visual nexus" width="345" height="428" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Visual nexus:</strong> Faculty member Merrill Shatzman, whose interests include printmaking, graphic design, bookmaking, and computer arts, works with Chris Manno ’10 on lithography stone in the Smith Warehouse printmaking studio.<br /><span class="photocredit">Jack Edinger</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Lindroth cites student reaction to the inaugural Duke Arts Festival last fall. In response to a call for submissions, he received hundreds of works of art, including photographs, digital art, acrylic and oil paintings, pencil and charcoal sketches, mixed media, and metal sculptures from students majoring in neuroscience, economics, public policy, electrical and computer engineering, biology, and philosophy, among others. The Duke Symphony Orchestra, with more than 100 student members and only a handful of music majors, offers more evidence that Duke students are drawn to artistic opportunities from a range of academic pursuits.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">On a larger scale, arts practice and scholarship are in an unprecedented state of flux, as traditional artistic practices and disciplines are giving way to hybrid art forms and interdisciplinary research initiatives. Lindroth, for example, teaches seminars in electronic music, music theory, and composition while composing music for dance, theater, and video. He’s also interested in exploring the intersection of organic and mechanical systems, such as the intermingling of biology and electronics.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“We’ve been able to hire new-media artists and expand the role of professors of the practice in the visual arts. We hired new dance and theater faculty members who are theater directors and choreographers, but who also have strong reputations as research scholars,” says Lindroth. “The idea is that the arts don’t need to be something that is solely an extracurricular activity, but that it becomes part of broader academic programming on campus—innovative research and intellectual inquiry that is wedded to the practice of the arts.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">One of those new faculty hires is Thomas DeFrantz, who comes to Duke from MIT, where he founded SLIPPAGE, a multidisciplinary arts collective that relocated with him to Duke. A choreographer, dancer, and scholar, DeFrantz designed the theory-and-history curriculum at the Hollins University/ American Dance Festival M.F.A. program and for more than a decade has convened the Black Performance Theory working group, an interdisciplinary discussion group that meets biannually to explore black performance. (The group traces its origins to a oneday conference at Duke in 1998.)</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Everyone, including the Ivies, is interested in dance and performance,” says De- Frantz. “This isn’t the first time someone has come knocking on my door, but Duke has shown courageousness and willingness to take risks. Duke has the resources to provide leadership in areas that are urgent to me and people I’ve been working with for years—aligning the last twentyfive years of cultural-studies work with the next fifteen years of technological innovations. It’s a leap into the void, which is the only way great things happen.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">This fall, DeFrantz is teaching a graduate seminar focusing on issues of aesthetics and ideologies in relation to dance and an undergraduate course on performance and technology. He’s also eager to begin taking advantage of the newly refurbished dance studio space off Hull Avenue near East and Central campuses.</p><div class="media-header fll" style="width: 212px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 211px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-type.jpg" alt="Multiple influences" width="211" height="308" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Multiple influences:</strong> Typographic self-portrait by Justine Tiu B.S.E. ’11, who graduated with a double- minor in visual arts and German.</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">That studio is one of several new (or newly designated) spaces for the arts. The M.F.A. program will be housed in a former carpentry workshop near Smith Warehouse, which during the summer underwent a $1.4 million renovation that kept intact some of the building’s historical infrastructure while creating space for a computer lab and an area for film screenings.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke also invested $7.5 million in the Durham Performing Arts Center, a $46.8 million facility that hosts touring Broadway shows and performers such as Leonard Cohen, Adele, and Elvis Costello, as well as some performances by American Dance Festival and Duke Performances artists. (Duke Performances also ventures downtown for shows at more-intimate venues, such as the Motorco Music Hall, Pinhook, Casbah, and the Carolina Theater.)</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But the biggest boost to highcaliber arts space was announced earlier this year, when The Duke Endowment pledged $80 million for the renovation of Page and Baldwin auditoriums, along with the West Campus Union, the largest single gift in the history of the university. Vice provost Lindroth says that the renovation is another clear signal that Duke is finally backing its aspirations with needed investments. “We’ve had prospective students and parents in the past come to look at Duke and when they saw the facilities said, ‘Well, I guess they don’t take this seriously.’ If you have spaces that are in disrepair, it sends a message. It’s not just about arts space; it’s about the broader campus culture. Page is a place where the community comes together for its most important events, from admissions gatherings to lectures to performances, and yet it is one of the most uninspiring venues on campus.”</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/091011/images/creative-opera.jpg" alt="Out with the old" width="400" height="267" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Out with the old: </strong>In 2008, Duke Opera Workshop presented <em>Die Fledermaus</em> in Baldwin Auditorium, which is undergoing renovations to improve acoustics, upgrade seating, and increase accessibility.<br /><span class="photocredit">Courtesy Duke Arts Festival</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke’s investment in the arts has begun to have an impact on the undergraduate experience as well. During the most recent admissions cycle, a record number of prospective students submitted arts-related portfolios with their applications, including visual art, videos of dance and theater performances, and original film and video projects. Faculty members in the appropriate department evaluate and rank candidates, and those recommendations become part of the screening criteria. If the admissions office has two candidates who are equally competitive in all other areas, a strong arts background can make the difference, regardless of whether the student plans to major in an arts-related field.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Still, Duke is not always at the top of artistically inclined students’ choices for college. Part of that is attributable to geography: Durham is not New York or Los Angeles, after all, and for many aspiring actors or video artists, proximity to an entertainment industry hub is paramount. And among some undergraduates, there is a sense that Duke’s culture has not yet fully embraced its multiplying arts resources.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“What Duke needs most when it comes to the arts is an attitude change, a recognition that going to a show in Scheafer [Theater] can be as enjoyable as going to a basketball game in Cameron—but of course an attitude change may be the hardest to come by,” says sophomore Andy Chu. Chu didn’t consider Duke’s arts offerings when applying, but he reassessed his career path after being drawn to the array of opportunities he’s found. This fall, he’s participating in his first professional theater production through Durham’s Manbites Dog Theater, cofounded by Duke professor of the practice of theater studies Jeff Storer. He also plans to launch a theater group based on Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, drawing on a class on Boal he’s taking with Keval Khalsa, associate professor of the practice and director of the dance program. He’s decided to declare a major in theater studies and is considering a double-minor in music and Chinese. After graduating, he says, he may pursue an M.F.A. in the dramatic arts.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Like Chu, senior Monica Hogan knew of Duke’s strengths in the sciences and engineering but wanted to find a way to deepen her artistic interests. “I was looking for a school where I could manage to keep a left brain-right brain balance,” she says. “When I pair my academics with an artistic outlet, I have always felt healthier, happier, and better focused in my studies.” She visited Duke and spoke to students involved in the dance program, many of whom were majoring in other disciplines. “That was exactly the type of university I was looking for, so in truth the arts helped define my decision to become a Blue Devil. I wanted a university that would allow and encourage interdisciplinary pursuits.”</p><div class="media-header fll" style="width: 212px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 211px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/creative-music.jpg" alt="Right in tune" width="211" height="140" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Right in tune:</strong> Student chamber music groups, above, perform in the Nelson Music Room; Grammy Award-nominated classical pianist Gabriela Montero, right, works with Ruth Ann Chan ’10 during a 2009 master class.<span class="photocredit">Elizabeth Thompson</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Through her involvement with the dance program, Hogan was part of a twelve-member student dance group selected from thousands of applicants to perform at Summer Universiade—also known as the World University Games—in Shenzhen, China, this summer. The invitation came about through a DukeEngage project conducted last summer by professor of the practice of music Hsiao-mei Ku to introduce arts practices to Chinese students.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Although not an officially sponsored university event, the venture is a good example of how raising the profile of the arts throughout the Duke community can result in unexpected collaborations, says vice provost Lindroth. “The group has someone who does traditional Chinese dance, someone who does ballet, someone who does hip-hop, and they found a way to merge these styles in a show. It’s been picked up by the media in China. At least one of their shows has sold out. And Hsiao-mei Ku, who plays with the Ciompi Quartet, put them in touch with the organization that books tours for the quartet in China, so they are performing all over the country.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Part of the challenge for Lindroth and his colleagues is making sure that Duke can meet the growing student demand for arts-related academic courses and cocurricular activities. Senior Kim Solow, who serves on the Duke Student Government (DSG) presidential cabinet, says that in her experience there are far more students wanting to explore the arts through introductory classes than there are spaces available. At the start of the fall semester, for example, intro classes in photography, acting, and documentary film and production were all full. Many of these are seminars of eight to ten students, which provide greater hands-on opportunities but fill up quickly.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“In my experience, the faculty members are outstanding and passionate, but restricted course offerings and limited resources— such as cameras and film production equipment—exclude many from exploring these fields,” says Solow, “and that creates the perception of exclusivity. That perceived exclusivity will remain a hurdle to the general appreciation of the arts at Duke.”</p><div id="container-addins"><div id="addins" class="sidebar"><p class="bodycontent-2010"><span class="articletitle-blogstyle style1"></span>Solow is doing her part to promote a stronger arts community for all students. As director of arts advancement for DSG, a new position, she plans to work with the Career Center to enhance opportunities for Duke students to pursue careers in the arts. She’s also hoping to help the admissions office include more about the arts in campus tours.</p></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Provost Peter Lange says he is pleased with how far Duke has come in the five years since the strategic plan made the arts a top priority, but he emphasizes that “we’re not all the way there yet. But Duke has a commitment to a liberal-arts education, and the arts are fundamental to that: the sensibilities the arts build, the qualities of visual and auditory perception that the arts enhance and, increasingly, the way that the arts intersect with technology.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“If you are really committed to the kind of education we want to deliver, you can’t do the arts as an afterthought.”</p><a class="onlinetitl" href="http://dukealumni.com/alumni-communities/deman/deman-weekend">Get a firsthand look at the campus arts scene by attending the DEMAN (Duke Entertainment Media and Arts Network) Weekend November 4-5.</a></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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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-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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501104 at https://alumni.duke.edu Putting Trials to the Test https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/putting-trials-test <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: 375px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 375px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/trials-maze.jpg" alt="Putting Trials to the Test" width="375" height="556" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><span class="media-h-caption"><span class="photocredit"> © ImageZoo/Corbis </span></span></p></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">It was a nondescript setting to convey the drama of life and death—a Food and Drug Administration conference room in Silver Spring, Maryland. Over two days in late June, testimony came from breast-cancer patients, spouses of those who had succumbed to the disease, oncologists, medical administrators, and patient-advocate representatives. They had assembled to debate the fate of Avastin, the best-selling cancer drug in the world, but one whose effectiveness was now in doubt.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">One speaker characterized the views of some medical experts, including some of those present, as “undignified, beyond the norms of a civilized society, cruel, and unnecessary.” Another called the decision on a course of therapy “a personal question for each patient” not meant to be decided by others. A third insisted that “for a fairy-tale ending, we need our Avastin.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">When Avastin was first considered for approval in treating metastatic breast cancer in 2007, Gary Lyman, a professor of medicine at Duke, was a member of the FDA’s Oncology Drugs Advisory Committee. “We were pretty enthusiastic about it at that time, and we granted the drug conditional approval,” he says. That’s essentially an accelerated path to market, with the proviso that the drug company must return within a specified time period showing additional data from clinical trials. “So they came back in 2010, and we were, unfortunately, very disappointed. The follow-up on the original study showed no impact on overall survival.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The panel then took a second vote, which was twelve to one, withdrawing approval of Avastin; Lyman’s vote was one of the twelve. Given the options of either granting or withdrawing unconditional approval—in this case, the FDA wouldn’t allow for an in-between option—Lyman saw no other course. Clinical trials had shown that the drug did not, on average, make patients live longer. They also pointed to side effects, such as increased risk of internal bleeding, high blood pressure, and heart failure.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">While emotionally fraught and medically contentious, the panel’s recommendation on Avastin showed a typical reliance on clinical trials, which are a core part of the FDA’s process for approving new drugs. Researchers widely agree the evidence from clinical trials is a better guide to medical care than a doctor’s own experience. But they also acknowledge that clinical trials aren’t always structured to deliver the most medically meaningful results. And that has led some—including some in the medical profession—to question how clinical-trial data are interpreted and deployed in medical practice.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Understanding clinical trials begins with understanding what they are not. And they are not large-population observational studies, such as studies on the risks of smoking. In the 1940s, researchers used a combination of hospital records and interviewing to make the now-familiar link between smoking and lung cancer. Similar observational studies have been done around cell-phone use and brain cancer, so far, with ambiguous results—in part because memories of exposure to cell phones (or anything else) can be biased.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Clinical trials test drugs in four phases: Phase I, the initial phase, is limited to a small group and usually tests whether a drug can be safely delivered and how people will react to it; Phase II looks at more subjects to better gauge the drug’s effects on the particular disease or disorder; Phase III, with preliminary evidence that the drug is effective, enrolls an even larger group and compares the drug with a placebo or with standard treatment; and Phase IV refers to the period after the drug has been licensed and marketed. Researchers aim for “clinical equipoise”: In advance of the trial, they should be uncertain about the preferred treatment, even as they can envision risks and benefits with the control group and the experimental group alike. The trials are usually double-blind, so neither the patients nor their doctors know which treatment regimen they’ve been assigned.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In Lyman’s view, the process worked well with Avastin. “There are a few examples in medicine where randomized trials are either unethical or impractical. But the randomized trial remains the gold standard. We all recognize its value for the drug-approval process, for the end stage of drug development.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But to Kimberly Blackwell ’89, an associate professor of medicine at Duke and a breast-cancer specialist, the Avastin turndown is hardly something to be celebrated. Blackwell says she has patients who, for years, have been kept alive on the drug.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“We talk a lot about personalized medicine,” says Blackwell. “To me, personalized medicine is getting the right drug to the right patient, or the right procedure to the right patient. But our clinical trials have been designed for population-based outcomes, to improving survival for a population of patients without the requirement that we know exactly who is going to be helped and who isn’t. And then to say that the drug should not be available to the individual patient—well, the individual patient’s benefit was never meant to be studied in these trials.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">If the FDA upholds the decision to withdraw support of Avastin for treating breast cancer, “it sets a new standard,” Blackwell says. “We’re not going to see another first-line drug for another ten years, at least.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Clinical trials fuel the work of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), which, with some 1,200 employees, calls itself the largest academic clinical- research organization in the world. Its director, cardiologist Robert Harrington HS ’93, says, “We’re trying to ask and answer questions that give the practitioner a body of knowledge based on good, quantitative information.” The largest part of the DCRI—which includes Duke faculty members in clinical practice and in areas such as biostatistics and epidemiology—is devoted to designing and carrying out clinical trials.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">DCRI associate director Eric Peterson, also a cardiologist, says that what’s on the horizon is mining medical data collected in large clinical registries, potentially for hundreds of thousands of patients, and figuring out which patients did better or worse with a particular treatment—all without an expensive, formal, randomized study. For now, though, he says, “there’s no question that medicine has been made better by the requirement to have these clinical trials, and we have better evidence now about which therapies work and which therapies don’t than at any other time in history.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Even as they’ve been refined in concept, clinical trials have a long history. Back in the eighteenth century, the British Royal Navy, which sent sailors out to sea for a year or more at a time, looked to rein in the devastating impact of scurvy and conceived what was, in effect, a clinical trial for that purpose. “They randomized ships to receive or not receive extra fruits and vegetables,” Peterson says. “And lo and behold, it seemed that if they could get fruits and vegetables, they wouldn’t develop this horrific disease.”</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/091011/images/trials-art.jpg" alt="Putting Trials to the Test" width="325" height="515" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div><span class="photocredit">© Images.com/Corbis</span></div><div class="media-h-credit"> </p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">For decades, clinical trials were based in university medical centers. Beginning in the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies outsourced many of their trials to larger, private networks, so-called contract research organizations (CROs). And now, trials increasingly are moving outside the U.S. “Some of that is reflective of the fact that many of the common diseases are global diseases,” says the DCRI’s Harrington. “Heart disease is certainly a global disease. Cancer is a global disease. Well, why not study them globally? And particularly from a big pharmaceutical company perspective, they don’t want to just sell their products in the U.S.; they want to sell their products globally. So why not make these trials global?”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In a 2009 essay in <em>The New England Journal of Medicine</em>, Harrington and DCRI colleagues observed that clinical trials abroad allow companies to overcome regulations on compliance, documentation, and training that they may find burdensome. The cheaper costs of overseas trials may be a particularly powerful incentive: This year alone, because of patent expirations, the drug industry will lose control over mega-medicines with combined annual sales of some $50 billion.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">This past summer, a study in the <em>Journal of the American College of Cardiology</em> underscored how global trials can challenge conventional health-care wisdom. Duke cardiologist Christopher O’- Connor A.H.C. ’87, M.H.S. ’94 and his colleagues pooled results from clinical trials—with a total of some 9,000 participants—and found that Americans with heart failure may benefit less from standard medications than patients in other countries. Beta blockers cut deaths among non-U.S. patients by 36 percent; there was no statistically reliable drop among U.S. patients. The factors behind those national differences are, for now, mysterious.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As more trials move overseas, ethically minded oversight is a major concern, Harrington and his colleagues wrote in their essay. “Wide disparities in education, economic and social standing, and health-care systems may jeopardize the rights of research participants.… In some places, financial compensation for research participation may exceed participants’ annual wages, and participation in a clinical trial may provide the only access to care for persons with the condition under study.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Irrespective of a trial’s location, researchers wrestle with how best to protect their subjects. Ross McKinney HS ’82, a professor of pediatrics who directs the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at Duke, says informed-consent protocols nationally are a work in progress. Most investigators communicate clearly, he says. But sometimes informed-consent documents can reflect the sensibilities of lawyers or insurance companies more than the interests of patients, he adds, with the result that they “obfuscate and confuse.” He’d like to see streamlined language that would give potential subjects “a fair, quick assessment of the risks and benefits of the research so they can make a good decision.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It can be tough for clinical-trial subjects to get beyond what McKinney calls a “therapeutic misconception.” As he puts it, “Even when you go through a careful informed-consent process, there is still an assumption that the doctor is working on the model of the traditional patient-physician relationship, which is a fundamental caring relationship. The research physician is still working in the patient’s best interest, but that research physician is also working in the interests of the study, because he or she wants to make a contribution to similar patients in the future. So the doctor in this role is something other than just the patient’s advocate.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">One doctor familiar with the role of treating the youngest patients is Daniel Benjamin HS ’01, a pediatrics professor and faculty associate director for the DCRI. He says it’s only been in the past dozen years or so that the FDA has approved drugs with a specific focus on children. Benjamin leads a network for pediatric trials; supported by the National Institutes of Health, it oversees off-patent studies, that is, studies of drugs that are not proprietary to drug companies.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Typically, most of your surprises in pediatric-drug development are around what dose to use,” he says. “Children’s kidneys develop differently. Their livers develop differently. Their skin integrity, their gut absorption, their body surface—they’re all different from adults. Even when you know what you’re doing in adults, it’s impossible to extrapolate it down to children. What’s that right amount? And is it different for a twelve-year-old going through puberty who weighs two or three times his ideal body weight, when all your original dosing studies were in twentyfive- year-old healthy males of ideal body weight?”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Historically, he says, the view was that children are too fragile for trials. “The consequence here was that every child became an experiment of one. And you never were able to learn from your experience. Ultimately, you were just taking a vulnerable patient population and making them more vulnerable.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The DCRI’s Eric Peterson makes the point that small samples— whether of small children or adults—are not ideal in clinical trials. “I can do a study on this narrow spectrum of patients with this one therapy versus no therapy, as an example, and find that this therapy is good,” he says. “But when I extrapolate from a narrow band of healthy, young, non-complex-disease patients, and I apply the results to patients in my own practice who are older, sicker, and have lots of other issues, I might find that the therapy works very differently.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">That concern over sample size has been a recurring theme for Robert Califf ’73, M.D. ’78, vice chancellor for clinical research and director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute. Califf founded the DCRI in 1996 and led it for ten years. (The DCRI grew out of the Duke DataBank for Cardiovascular Diseases, which is still active.) He says, “There are a lot of reasons to do small clinical trials, like understanding biology, or the very early phase of drug development, when you need a sense of whether there’s any evidence that you’re hitting the target. But the vast majority of clinical trials are too small to really give you anything useful, at least with regard to informing about what treatment is best.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cardiology, “probably more than any other field, has moved further in using randomized evidence to drive what we do in practice, as opposed to just doing what we thought was the best thing for patients,” Peterson says. He gives an example from studies of patients whose hearts produce extra beats, or premature ventricular contractions (PVCs). A class of drugs effectively blocked those extra beats. But it was only when they were tested in a large randomized trial that the PVC blockers were found to increase mortality.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Califf can recall, as recently as a decade or so ago, “being in these raging debates with people from medical schools who said that if you just understand biology, you’ll know what to do as a doctor. Having a doctor’s opinion is better than nothing. But in deciding on treatment, it is nowhere as good as having the right clinical evidence.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Last winter, Califf was widely quoted around his work in directing the largest study ever done on heart failure. The study looked at nesiritide, which had been approved after small studies in carefully selected patients. It seemed to soothe a particular symptom of heart failure, a drowning-like sensation in which the lungs fill with fluid. Still, the drug had fallen out of use. That was because small studies seemed to indicate an increased risk of kidney problems and an increased death rate.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Califf’s study enrolled patients at 450 participating hospitals around the world who had heart failure and difficulty breathing. They were randomly assigned to get an infusion of nesiritide or saline. The results contradicted those earlier findings about the drug: that it was effective, and that it had safety issues. As Califf told<em> The New York Times</em>, “To me, the really important message is that the drug got very widely used for reasons that are incorrect, and then it got bashed for reasons that are incorrect. Unless we do these kinds of large clinical trials, we are engaged in a comedy of errors.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The validity distinction between small and large clinical trials shows how the laws of probability can come into play, says Peterson. “So if I do a trial and I run it in 100 patients, and I find it has a 20 percent benefit, and then I run it in another 100 patients. Will I get exactly that 20 percent, or will I get 10 percent or 30 percent?” He uses the analogy of flipping a coin ten times. On average, you should get five heads and five tails, but the results can vary widely. If you flip it 100 times, you’re much more likely to get closer to that 50 percent mark: An anomalous result is more likely to come from a small-scale exercise.</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 325px;"> </div><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/trials-tubes.jpg" alt="Electric: Ge Wang makes sure all systems are go before final concert of the season." width="325" height="489" /></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke has hardly been immune to questions surrounding clinical trials. Over the past year, the clinical-trial results that most occupied the university centered on cancer researcher Anil Potti. More than two dozen biostatisticians and cancer researchers had called into question the validity of Potti’s findings on the relationship between genetics and cancer treatment. Last winter, Potti resigned from his positions in the medical school and the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. The three clinical trials based on his research were suspended and ultimately terminated.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Among observers of clinical trials, it’s the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and academic medical centers that has brought some of the most consistent criticism. Last winter, ProPublica, an investigative news website, compiled compensation disclosures from seven drug companies in 2009 and 2010, totaling $258 million. In North Carolina, sixteen doctors were paid more than $100,000 by drug companies; several were identified as practicing with Duke Medicine. One Duke doctor was reportedly paid $240,150 over two years by drug companies. This past May, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> reported that a Duke thrombosis specialist and faculty member in the Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine division of Duke Medicine encouraged the FDA to delay approval of generic versions of the anti-clotting drug Lovenox. According to the article, he had received more than $260,000 from the company that manufactures Lovenox.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Ross McKinney, the Trent Center director, says it can be problematic when industry is “the primary driver”—as it typically is—behind the testing of drugs. He mentions the notorious case, from seven years ago, of the anti-arthritic drug Vioxx, whose manufacturer sat on data that showed the drug contributed to heart attacks. “The primary motivation for industry is to build a market for their product. The primary motivation for academic doctors is to take care of patients.” Still, he says, the collaborative relationship between industry and the academic community “can give you good science.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Drug companies, if they control the data, can choose to withhold results that they’re not happy with. At the DCRI, says Harrington, its director, “we will not sign a contract that does not allow us to have independent access to the data, and I mean the entire set of data. And we will not a sign a contract that does not allow us the full, independent right to publish the information.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">As he sees it, “If one is looking for villains in the relationship with industry, it’s not hard to find them. There are examples of industry behaving egregiously, and there are equally bad examples of clinicians behaving egregiously. But there’s also the opportunity to take the expertise of the individual investigator and couple it with the product-development expertise of a company, to do some good things in collaboration that ultimately would be good for society. The challenge is knowing where the boundaries are.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But researcher bias can be unconscious, quite apart from any rewards system. Some years ago, a metaanalysis looked at clinical studies of acupuncture. The studies conducted in the U.S. showed very little effect from acupuncture; those conducted in Asia showed appreciable benefits. McKinney makes a comparison to fans of Duke and the University of North Carolina watching a basketball game between the rival teams. “Say you are in a sports bar, and you watch a Duke player put himself in a perfect position and a UNC player run over him. The question is, was it a block or a charge? Half the audience says, ‘It’s a bad call.’ Half the audience says, ‘No, they got it right.’ Same data, same information. It’s all about how you process that information.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In the clinical-trials arena, processing information often means a tilt toward favoring positive results, says Duke’s Gary Lyman, editor-in-chief of the journal <em>Cancer Investigation</em> as well as an adviser to the FDA.“It’s so much easier to embrace something new that looks exciting than it is to step back and say, ‘You know, we were mistaken, it’s not that good, or it’s not good at all.’ It’s the same with the Avastin issue. Even if the FDA comes out and says, ‘We don’t believe the science is there now, and we can’t approve it for this intervention,’ it’s going to be very hard to convince oncologists. It’s going to be very hard to convince patients who think their life is dependent on the drug, even if the data don’t support that.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><em>JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association</em>, has delved into researcher bias. (Eric Peterson of the DCRI is one of <em>JAMA’s</em> editors.) One early study published in the journal, from the late 1950s, reported that 97 percent of the articles published in a given year found the tested drug was performing safely and effectively. A more recent study showed that scientists presented with identical (mock) clinical trials found one weaker in significance than the other—based solely on the fact that one trial arrived at a positive conclusion and the other at a negative conclusion.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In McKinney’s view, clinical trials will never be definitive in the course of medical treatment; medicine always will be part science, part art. “People are not simple and clean, as clinical trials would have it. They’re complicated,” he says. One complicated human being would accept a nagging cough as a side effect to control blood pressure. Another would find it an unattractive tradeoff. One complicated human being would take antipsychotics even if it produced weight gain. Another would find the thought untenable.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Among those right now feeling the consequences of clinical trials is Marcia Gilbert, a thirty-year resident of Charlotte and an occasional patient of Kimberly Blackwell, the Duke breast-cancer specialist. She received a diagnosis of breast cancer more than sixteen years ago; after a period of remission, her cancer was found to have metastasized just over seven years ago. “When I asked the surgeon what I should expect from this long-term, he said I’ll be lucky to be alive in five years. He was, thank the Lord, way wrong on that.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Gilbert has been on Avastin, the disputed breast-cancer drug, for more than two years. She’s tolerated Avastin much better, she says, than standard chemotherapy: “It’s allowed me to live a good quality of life. It’s felt like the dangers are minimal, and the side effects can easily be monitored by the patient and the patient’s doctor.” The clinical-trial findings that question the drug’s safety and effectiveness don’t square with her own experiences, she says. She’s concerned that with those findings, insurers will back off paying for Avastin for breast cancer. The yearly costs of $90,000 or so would be impossible for her or most future patients to absorb, she says. She also wonders whether the FDA’s decision against approval, following years of expensive research and clinical trials, will discourage drug makers from pursuing new therapies in the future.</p>Gilbert talks about simple pleasures: leading a Bible-study group; escapes to the beach in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina; visits to sons in New York and Charleston. “I’m doing well enough,” she says. “I live kind of a small life. What’s important to me are family, friends, relationships. I feel blessed to have lived a life of loving and being loved. And I want to live it longer. I’m not ready to leave yet.”</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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/trials.png" width="620" height="265" alt="" /></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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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">While a doctor&#039;s own experience is one guide to medical care, the evidence from clinical trials may be a better guide. But how much better?</div></div></section> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501100 at https://alumni.duke.edu Kathy Cunning Shearer '69 and Rees Shearer '68 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/kathy-cunning-shearer-69-and-rees-shearer-68 <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><table width="99%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td> </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><span class="articletitle brwntextheader"></span><span class="articletitle brwntextheader"></span><div class="media-header top2" style="width: 518px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 518px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_mini_shearer.jpeg" alt="Kathy Cunning Shearer ’69 and Rees Shearer ’68" width="518" height="296" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><span class="media-h-caption"> </span><span class="photocredit">Bill Phillips</span></p></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">In 1971, Rees Shearer was serving as a Vista volunteer in Georgia when he got a New Year’s greeting from his draft board stating he had sixty days to find an alternative service job to fulfill the requirements necessary to maintain his conscientious-objector status. So, on short notice, he moved to rural Washington County, Virginia, to start a craft cooperative with his wife, Kathy Cunning Shearer. That was the beginning of a lifetime commitment by the couple to preserve and improve the quality of life in southwest Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Experiences at Duke helped awaken the Shearer’s interest in constructive social change, they say. Classroom professors opened their eyes to the tragedy of the Vietnam War and human-rights issues, and the peaceful Vigil at Duke in the spring of 1968 showed them that civil group action could effect positive change. (The Vigil, prompted by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., focused on better pay and treatment of Duke’s black service workers.)</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The craft cooperative, known as the Cave House and located on Main Street in Abington, brought the quilting, woodworking, and pottery skills of mountain folk—including the newly formed Holston Mountain Artists—to a wider market and increased their incomes. It became an important stop for tourists visiting the legendary Martha Washington Inn and Barter Theatre.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">By the mid-’70s, the Shearers were living on a small farm, keeping bees and raising goats, rabbits, sheep, and ducks. To this they added their own batik cottage industry, while raising their young son. As they lived this “back-tothe- land” experience, their desire to be involved in the economic and political life of the community mounted. Rees helped educate county residents about American policies affecting Central America and other peace, justice, and energy issues. Kathy worked with a local welfare-rights group of lowincome women and collected oral histories from farming people.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Starting in 1977, citizens in nearby Brumley Gap, Virginia, found themselves fighting a hydro-electric pumped storage dam—a project that would have flooded their valley. Rees worked with the citizens on their “Not by a Dam Site” campaign, which combined mountain folksiness with Bible verses as residents of the small valley hand-lettered Old Testament warnings on sheets of plywood planted in their yards. Eventually, the power company abandoned the project.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Some years later, while working as a school counselor, Rees learned of a plan to privatize Interstate 81 in Virginia and turn it into a $13 billion eight-lane conduit for tractor trailers. It took seven years of grassroots campaigning, but the company proposing the project withdrew and the project collapsed. He also started an advocacy group for an electric-powered rail alternative to truck fleets. His organization’s website—www.steel interstate.org—is now the networking site for a national rail revival movement.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Kathy has worked for many years with families in remote, impoverished areas. A major part of that work was directing the Indoor Plumbing Project for a four-county area. At the end of the twentieth century, nearly 350 homes in Dante, the former headquarters town of a major coal company, were still discharging raw sewage into the local creek. Home by home, she worked with the residents and local officials to devise a plan to install a public sewer and bring the plumbing up to standard.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">During this project, she grew close to the families in Dante, and they poured out their life stories to her. Realizing these were stories worth saving, she began collecting them along with all the photos that people had begun pulling out of dusty shoe boxes. The result was the voluminous oral history, <em>Memories of Dante: The Life of a Coal Town</em>, published in 2001. The success of that book was followed by two more oral histories written, edited, and published by Kathy on the state’s towns of Cleveland and Wilder. Kathy established Clinch Mountain Press to handle her publications as well as other fiction and nonfiction works on mountain life.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The Holston Mountain Artisans craft cooperative marks its fortieth anniversary this year, a testimony to the Shearers’ enduring contribution to the quality of life in southwest Virginia.</p><p class="byline">—Bill Phillips</p><p class="pubtitle">Phillips ’67 is a lifetime North Carolina resident involved in education, folklore, home building, writing, and photography.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><a class="onlinetitl" href="http://www.viswasubbaraman.com/"><br /></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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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">Crafting Social Change</div></div></section> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501099 at https://alumni.duke.edu President Wilson's United War Work Campaign https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/president-wilsons-united-war-work-campaign <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><td valign="top"><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/091011/images/091011_depgal2.jpeg" alt="Building morale" width="670" height="362" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Building morale: </strong>United War Work Campaign scrapbook.<br /><span class="photocredit">Special Collections Library, Duke University </span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">On September 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson wrote to Raymond Fosdick, coordinator of the War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities. The end of the war was in sight, and it was estimated that the demobilization of nearly four million U.S. troops would require at least two years and a staggering sum for programs to maintain morale. Wilson requested that aid organizations pool their resources on a massive single campaign to raise funds for soldier-morale programs “in order that the spirit of the country in this matter may be expressed without distinction of race or religious opinion in support of what is in reality a common service.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Seven organizations—the YMCA, YWCA, American Library Association, War Camp Community Service, National Catholic War Council (Knights of Columbus), Jewish Welfare Board, and Salvation Army—set out to raise $170 million during a one-week fundraising drive in November 1918. With a nearly $1 million operating budget, a National Publicity Committee was formed and chaired by Bruce Barton, a magazine editor who was an official with the YMCA. All media would be employed: print, outdoor advertising, leaflets, stickers, lapel pins, radio spots, motion-picture shorts.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The resulting United War Work Campaign was a resounding success, raising more than $203 million for soldier-aid programs. It was hailed in the press at the time as the largest fundraising event in history.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History—part of Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library—holds a copy of the Work Campaign scrapbook, containing a collection of fundraising and morale-boosting materials produced for the multi-institutional drive. The scrapbook includes more than twenty color posters, along with handbills, brochures, stickers, song lyrics, newspaper ads, and cartoons. Among the topics addressed are women’s wartime work (“The Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun”) and the promotion of various aid services. Common slogans included “Back Up the Boys” and “Morale Is Winning the War.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The campaign also may have been the launching platform for one of America’s most successful advertising agencies. Ad men Roy Durstine and Alexander Osborn worked on the campaign alongside Bruce Barton. In early 1919, the three men founded Barton Durstine & Osborn, which merged in 1928 to become Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) and rapidly grew to be one of the largest and most respected advertising agencies in the U.S.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><span class="pubtitle">—Richard Collier Jr.</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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501098 at https://alumni.duke.edu Forum: September/October 2011 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/forum-septemberoctober-2011 <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"><a href="#laughing">Still Laughing </a> • <a href="#nixon">Nixon Lives On</a> • <a href="#football">Football's Failings</a> • <a href="#labor">Labor Lessons </a>• <a href="#drilling">Drilling for Answers</a> • <a href="#kudos">Kudos</a><p id="high" class="articletitle"><strong><a id="laughing" name="laughing"></a>Still Laughing </strong></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_depfor_1.jpeg" alt="July/August 2011 Cover" width="134" height="173" />The history of Duke’s humor magazines [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/issue/july-august-2011" target="_self">July-August 2011</a>] evoked powerful memories for me because a major part of my life at Duke was devoted to the <em>Duke ’n’ Duchess</em>. In 1942, as a freshman, I delivered the <em>D’n’D</em> door-to-door in the dorms. When I returned to campus in 1946 after World War II military service, I signed on with editor Chan Hadlock as a writer and gofer.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I think the <em>D’n’D</em> may have gone into hibernation for a couple of years during the war, and Chan was heavily engaged in bringing it back to life. He had been an Army combat photographer during the war and had journalistic experience with military publications. I learned a lot from Chan on writing humor and how to put a magazine together.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Pete Maas ’50 succeeded Chan as editor, and the magazine gained popularity on campus. I worked with Pete and followed him as the 1948-49 editor. I liked the way Chan and Pete had developed the magazine and did little to change it during my tenure. Art Steuer ’51, the 1949-50 editor, was more innovative and developed some engaging ideas that brightened the pages.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The next editor, Walt Wadlington ’51, had worked closely with me and Art and had good promise of continuing the existing policies, but alas, a minor lapse in judgment swept the <em>D’n’D</em> into oblivion.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The loss of the <em>D’n’D</em> saddened me because we had put a lot into making it a thoroughly professional publication with good writers and talented cartoonists like Clarence Brown ’47. I would have loved to see the offending edition and make my own assessment of its lack of taste, but existing copies were not allowed the light of day. I’m glad at least one copy was preserved in the University Archives.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I’m proud of the magazine we produced in the late 1940s and wish future Duke humor writers and editors creative success…and good judgment.<br /><span class="pubtitle"><br /> Bob Wilson '50<br /> Boca Raton, Florida</span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"> </p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Kudos to Aaron Kirschenfeld and <em>Duke Magazine</em> for the cover feature on the history of humor magazines at Duke. Back in the late 1970s, Duke (and other schools, no doubt) had undeveloped interests when it came to humor publications. In its quest to be similar to other top colleges, it wanted to have one. It also wanted the material to be relevant to Duke, yet not embarrassing; the publication would be similar to and competitive with humor published at other top institutions, but never coarse or controversial. These competing standards have caused the likes of <em>The Harvard Lampoon</em> to become entirely independent of Harvard. As the article notes, some others, such as at Duke, simply were shut down or disappeared.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Regarding <em>Pravda</em>, the magazine article may give the impression that <em>Pravda</em> was the work of a few people— in fact, it was a large and devoted group, with much support (overt and covert) from students, faculty members, alumni, workers, and folks at other publications.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The Duke Composition Shop was never “fooled” by <em>Pravda’s</em> staff (we really weren’t that clever!)—people at the comp shop had first warned us that folks from <em>The Chronicle</em> had been found “snooping around” the <em>Pravda</em> materials as they were being offset. (This was confirmed when <em>The Chronicle</em>, which then had dominated the Pub Board, shamelessly published an article that described the provocative materials they had spied.) After an administrator on the Pub Board then warned us of plans to seize the <em>Pravda</em> galleys, and to attempt to delay their release until after the semester had ended, people at the Comp Shop had recommended a photocopying service that we had ended up using.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The Pub Board’s charter back then had stated “no publication will be censored, either publicly or in private.” To clarify, our “bad faith” was in our decision not to allow the seizure plan to proceed with <em>Pravda</em>, and accordingly not to engage in an <em>ex post facto</em> debate with the Pub Board on whether their intentional delay of a publication was censorship.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It was a painful experience, but I think we learned more from the Duke <em>Pravda</em> saga than in any college class. <br /><span class="pubtitle"><br /> David Woronov '82<br /> Boston</span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p id="three" class="articletitle"><strong><a id="nixon" name="nixon"></a>Nixon Lives On</strong></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_depfor_2.jpeg" alt="May/June 2011 Cover" width="134" height="173" />As University Archivist at the time of the library debate, I was amazed that no one inquired about any Nixon records on hand [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/issue/may-june-2011" target="_self">May-June 2011</a>]. For starters, the campus archives has Nixon’s handwritten paper from his legal ethics course. Then there are interesting files regarding student employment through New Deal-sponsored programs, and his application to the FBI and correspondence with Dean [Claude] Horack about employment after graduation. Clipping files compiled over the years contain revealing, littleknown aspects of his life easily viewed at one place. Duke has a Nixon Library of sorts waiting to be consulted. <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">William E. King ’61, A.M. ’63, Ph.D. ’70 <br /> University Archivist Emeritus <br /> Lake Junaluska, North Carolina</span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"> </p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Reading your estimable article on the Nixon Library reminded me that it was my late wife, Darcy, who first articulated the key distinction between the library and the accompanying buildings, et al.—the distinction that opponents of the project then made the heart of their successful case against the project. At one of the first meetings of faculty and others wondering what, if anything, to do, she said, “I’m for the library but against the gift shop.”<br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">David L. Paletz <br /> Professor of political science <br /> Durham </span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"> </p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Your article on the Nixon Library was definitely the funniest thing I have read in years. Obviously, President Sanford was no historian, or he would have learned from the 1960s and the ’70s. I was delighted to learn that my old major department, zoology, and Dr. [Peter] Klopfer played a significant role in the “revolution.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Congratulations on such a well-researched and entertaining piece. <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">Larry L. Farmer ’57 <br /> Lynchburg, Virginia<br /></span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p id="four" class="articletitle"><strong><a id="football" name="football"></a>Football's Failings </strong></p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Your symposium on college sports [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/issue/july-august-2011" target="_self">July-August 2011</a>] was of special interest to this rabid sports fan. The comments by Nancy Hogshead- Makar [’86], my advisee in the early 1980s, were especially insightful. However, the discussion failed to recognize sufficiently the underside of Division I football.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">With a few notable exceptions (Duke, Stanford, Penn State, and some others), Division I football is a sewer. A quick scan of recent news about USC, Ohio State, Auburn, Oregon, Colorado, Georgia Tech, and even UNC reveals that striving for victory trumps even the loosest standards of academic institutions. If, as seems likely, Duke decides to go “big time” in Division I football, the consequences are predictable: ever lower admissions standard for prized recruits and, possibly, even the creation of new majors (e.g., “general studies”) for them. Another likely side effect is that Duke players will more frequently appear in the “crime columns” of sports pages.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke has won many NCAA championships: four in men’s basketball, six in women’s golf, and one each in men’s soccer and men’s lacrosse. It has done so while continuing to rise in the rankings of the world’s great universities. Is it worth risking that success in a search of Division I football glory? <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">Ole R. Holsti <br /> George V. Allen Professor <br /> Emeritus of international affairs <br /> Salt Lake City</span><span class="byline"><br /></span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p><span class="articletitle"><strong><a id="labor" name="labor"></a>Labor Lessons </strong></span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I was interested to see that some writers were upset that a Duke history professor defends labor unions in her lectures [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/forum-july-august-2011" target="_self">Forum, July-August 2011</a>]. On the basis of my twenty-eight years as a university professor, I feel confident recommending to them that if they will restrict their children’s coursework to a business school, the youngsters are unlikely to encounter any sustained critique of laissez-faire capitalism. And, any day now, that philosophy is bound to save the world. <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">Susan P. McCaffray A.M. ’79, Ph.D. ’83<br /> Wilmington, North Carolina</span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p><span class="articletitle"><strong><a id="drilling" name="drilling"></a>Drilling for Answers </strong></span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010">By the author’s own conclusions, they find “no evidence for contamination of the shallow wells near active drilling sites from deep brines and/or fracturing fluids” [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/fracking-findings-0" target="_self">Q&A, July-August 2011</a>]. Maybe higher concentrations of natural gas found in the shallow reservoirs are a result of the higher concentrations of natural gas in the deeper reservoirs, and that is precisely why gas wells are drilled in those areas.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Why would anyone want to drill a gas well in an area with a low concentration of natural gas? <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">Rob Jacobs ’84 <br /> President, Classic Hydrocarbons <br /> Fort Worth, Texas</span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p><span class="articletitle"><strong><a id="kudos" name="kudos"></a>Kudos </strong></span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duke has long been one of my favorite alumni magazines, and I love its design. But your most recent cover [<a href="http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/issue/july-august-2011" target="_self">July-August 2011</a>] is simply knock-your-socks-off brilliant. <br /><br /><span class="pubtitle">Gigi Marino <br /> Editor, Bucknell Magazine</span></p><hr align="center" noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%" /><p class="furtherhead"><span class="articlesubtitle2">Send letters to: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.edu. Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. </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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501097 at https://alumni.duke.edu Glen Duncan '80 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/glen-duncan-80 <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"><table width="99%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td> </td><td align="right" valign="bottom"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top" height="1093"><span class="articletitle brwntextheader"></span><span class="articletitle homepagetitle"></span><div class="media-header top2" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_mini_duncan.jpeg" alt="Glen Duncan ’80 " width="670" height="446" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><span class="media-h-caption"><br /></span><span class="photocredit">Karen Duncan</span></p></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">When an eighth-grader in Louisiana tried to locate an official state flag to bring to a hunter-safety training session, he quickly realized that there were multiple versions flying on flagpoles all around the state. There was some consistency—most featured a white pelican with its young in a nest, with the state motto, “Union Justice Confidence,” inscribed below—but there were many discrepancies from one design to the next. The student, David Joseph Louviere, eventually persuaded legislators to pass a bill in 2006 that outlined requirements for an official state flag.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The task of creating the new flag fell to Glen Duncan ’80, communications director for Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge and an expert in marketing and branding. Duncan volunteered for the project thinking it would be a straightforward task. “Most images show the pelican spilling its own blood to feed its young, which is a perfect symbol— especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—of our state making sacrifices for the sake of its citizens,” he says. He recruited Curtis Vann, an accomplished wildlife artist and former governor of the southeastern district of the American Advertising Federation, to join him, and together, the two persuaded then Secretary of State Jay Dardenne, whose office was responsible for carrying out the law, to hand over the reins.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">What Duncan thought might take a few months turned into more than a year of research into ornithology (the particulars of pelicans); PMS colors, fonts, and typefaces; the history of legislation related to the state’s seal, which informs the flag design; religious symbolism in the flag’s imagery; punctuation (or lack thereof) in the state motto; and modern flag reproduction standards so that manufacturers would be able to produce a new design easily and consistently.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">In the summer of 2010, Duncan and Vann presented their research findings to Dardenne, including the report they’d written, “A Modern History of the Louisiana Pelican Flag; or a tale of the surprisingly difficult quest for the ‘official’ state flag.” They also included an assortment of style samples with various design options. Dardenne solicited additional feedback from his legal advisers, staff members, and the state archivist. That fall, Duncan and Vann got the green light to finalize the artwork and digital files so that all state flags manufactured in the future will be uniform. (The law does not mandate that existing flags be replaced; therefore, the new official flag will be implemented over time, as older flags wear out.) The new flag was unveiled at the swearing-in of Dardenne as lieutenant governor this past November.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Earlier in his career, Duncan worked as an exploration geologist for Amoco; earned a master’s in journalism and became an environmental reporter; and launched a public-relations and video production corporation, creating projects for clients such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. He is currently the president of the Southern Public Relations Federation, a 1,300-member network of public-relations professionals from Alabama, North Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Duncan occasionally travels around the state talking to various history and civic groups about what he learned about Louisiana history in the process of designing a new state flag. He says he is constantly on the lookout for the official flag. “I recently spoke to a Rotary group and right across the street was one of the new flags,” he says. “I also use it as an opportunity to encourage people to get involved in their community and become ‘citizen volunteers.’ You never know what will happen when you offer to help someone.”<br /><br /><span class="byline">—Bridget Booher<br /></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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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">Making It Official</div></div></section> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501096 at https://alumni.duke.edu Confessions of a Lab Rat https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/confessions-lab-rat <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: 612px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_depobs.jpeg" alt="Pricked, dazed, scanned, zapped" width="612" height="421" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption style1"><p class="media-h-caption"><strong>Pricked, dazed, scanned, zapped: </strong>Research-study participant Ilgunas prepares to slide inside an MRI machine.<br /><span class="photocredit">Les Todd</span></p></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Over the course of my graduate education at Duke, I was zapped by electrodes, pricked by needles, dazed by pharmaceuticals, and I can even say that I shared three of my four primary bodily fluids. While it may sound like I spent my time exploring the shady side of the student body, I actually got paid to do these things.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I was a lab rat—a research-study participant. I took part in some twenty-five studies that would pay, typically, $10 to $20 an hour to participants willing to undergo cognitive tests, pop experimental pills, and have their brains scanned in MRI machines. And for much of my college career, I was willing—at least until I did an experiment with an anti-seizure pill that caused a harrowing, drug-induced nightmare involving my sinking into a pit of quicksand.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">But with graduation around the corner— and a mere $330 in the bank and no job lined up—I needed some quick cash. So I came out of lab-rat retirement and signed up for eight studies in my last nine days at Duke.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">My first couple of studies were easy enough. I’d receive $10 an hour to take a series of cognitive tests such as connecting dots and navigating through mazes on paper. Things took a turn for the weird, though, when I did a study with Duke’s Social Sciences Research Institute. A researcher led me into an empty room with a computer at the far end. He told me to fill out a questionnaire and memorize an instruction manual from the 1940s as best I could—which seemed like the most boring task ever assigned to a human being. (Since this study is ongoing, I’ve altered some minor details so as not to compromise the results of future experiments.)</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">On a table next to the computer was a curiously placed stack of pictures of buxom B-list starlets flashing come-hither smirks. I tried to stay focused on the manual, but every few seconds, my eyes would wander over to the pictures.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The room was eerily quiet, giving me liberty to swivel my index finger into my right nostril, trying to dislodge what felt like a crusty arrowhead. But then I paused—with finger still hooked in nose—to eye the walls, wondering if someone, on some television screen somewhere, was watching.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">After I finished reading the manual, the researcher came in and—much to my horror— revealed that he had been videotaping me. The real purpose of the experiment had to do with self-control, not memory. If I gave him permission to view the video (which I did, hesitantly), he would watch it to measure how much time I spent doing what I was supposed to be doing on the computer rather than looking at the pictures.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Despite the discomforts and embarrassments, research participation, in ways, is an ideal job because it’s the antithesis of a real job. There’s no punch card, no boss, and you get to decide when you want to work and when you want to sleep until 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Plus, all the experimenters give you warm smiles and some version of a kind-hearted thank you for your “contribution to research.” Whenever they’d thank me, I’d—for a moment—beam with pride and bask in the reminder that, yes, I <em>am</em> a good person, and, yes, I <em>am</em> providing a useful service. But really, I only cared about getting paid. I never felt the glow of a “job well done” or fulfilled from having done a “good day’s work”; rather, I felt desperate and dirty, like I’d just sold a kidney to pay a gambling debt.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I’d done most of my experiments, over the years, with the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC), whose members perform nearly 2,500 scans a year (about 70 percent with Duke students). Since 1998, BIAC has been doing research on cognitive disorders such as autism, depression, and Alzheimer’s. Researchers recruit people with a variety of these disorders to perform tasks in an MRI scanner, but they also need a control group of disorder-free participants.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">For my final experiment, I signed up to be a part of the control group for an experiment on schizophrenia. At the lab, I emptied my pockets and took off my belt. I walked through a metal detector and stood warily in front of the MRI machine. It was humming, buzzing, and glowing— a bagel-shaped portal that has enough magnetic power to suck steel hand tools out of one’s grip from several feet away. It seemed alive.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I lay vampire-like on the bed as a technologist strapped a breathing belt around my waist and clamped a pulse detector around my left index finger. She also hooked up an eye tracker on my plastic helmet that collects data when pupils dilate. I stuffed plugs into my ears, and she packed a pair of headphones snugly against the sides of my face so that she and the researcher could talk to me from another room. On my stomach, she placed a box with four buttons and a squeeze ball that would sound an alarm if I wanted to be pulled out.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Don’t fall asleep,” she instructed.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“I’ll do my best not to,” I assured her.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“You better not. You don’t want me to come get you.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It costs BIAC $440 to run the machine for just an hour, yet as one of the researchers told me, seven out of twenty-five sessions are wasted, largely because participants have a hard time staying awake. The other major problem is that if a participant moves his or her head more than four millimeters, it could wildly distort the scan. Participants must remain perfectly still. For two hours.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The technologist rolled me into the scanner slowly. I could feel my arms—already pressed tight against the sides of my torso—rub against the walls of the machine. My heart thumped, and I gasped for air. It seemed inevitable that, in moments, I’d be squealing for someone to get me the blank out of there, but as I settled into the shadowy confines of my sarcophagus, the panic passed.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Directly above my eyes was a tilted mirror on which I could see a projection of a computer screen, controlled by the researcher in another room, where she and the technologist watched my brain. When the study began, I was shown a photograph, followed by a series of random images that I was to try to memorize. After that, I’d see just one image. My task was to click a button if I recognized this image from the previous series. As the sequence repeated, the initial photographs rotated among ordinary images—such as a fireman standing by his truck—and disturbing ones, such as a mutilated dog, a clubbed protestor, or someone pointing a gun at me.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">All the while the machine droned, pulsed, and squawked as it took thirtyfour pictures (or “slices”) of my brain every two seconds. Sometimes it sounded like a phone ringing or Super Mario dropping into a sewer pipe. Other times, there was a heavy thumping that made me feel as if I were trapped inside a stereo speaker playing techno.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Every time they showed one of those terrible photographs, I was so jarred that I had far more trouble concentrating on the next series of images. This was, I’d later learn, an expected response: While emotion and working memory are located in different parts of the brain, their processes can interfere with one another. And when a schizophrenic sees a disturbing image, it can trigger a maladaptive emotional response, making it difficult for them to encode memories. The images of the changes in oxygen level in the blood in my brain would be compared to those in schizophrenics so researchers could highlight the exact site of abnormalities in the schizophrenic’s brain.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Two hours and hundreds of images later, the technologist rolled me out and thanked me for my “contribution to research.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">I can’t say if it was because I’d made $391 or because writing this essay had forced me to learn more about the studies I was participating in, but upon reflection, as I slid my belt through my jeans loopholes and dropped my keys into my pocket, I believe I did feel the dim glow of a job well done and the fulfillment of a good day’s work.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><br /> —<span class="pubtitle">Ken Ilgunas </span></p><p class="bodycontent-2010"><span class="pubtitle">Ilgunas A.M. ’11 is currently living in Coldfoot, Alaska, and writing his book,</span> Vandweller: One Student’s Attempt to Get out and Stay out of Debt, <span class="pubtitle">about his experiences<a href="http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/dukemag/issues/050610/depsnp.html"> living in a van while enrolled at Duke</a>.</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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 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">A graduate student becomes a willing—if not always enthusiastic—subject in multiple experiments</div></div></section> Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501095 at https://alumni.duke.edu Music 138S: Music and Noise: The Social Life of Sound https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/music-138s-music-and-noise-social-life-sound <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;"><img src="/issues/091011/images/091011_depsyl.jpeg" alt="Voices of the Rainforest" width="244" height="244" border="0" /></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">Cameron Indoor Stadium is famously cramped, hot, and humid. Yet Louise Meintjes says the Cameron experience would be completely different without its one-of-a-kind sound.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“Architecture contributes to the way a space gets used,” she explains. “Often, we discuss it only in terms of the visuals, but the acoustics of Cameron Stadium seem crucial to its character.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Meintjes, professor of cultural anthropology and music, discusses this “aural architecture” as part of her multidisciplinary course “Music and Noise: The Social Life of Sound.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Introduced just a few years ago, “Music and Noise” is part of a series of courses combining cultural anthropology and music, a growing field of study called ethnomusicology, which is the class’ central focus, in addition to musical structures, such as concert halls, theaters, sports stadiums, and churches, and the social aspect of recording music.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">“The recording studio [is] like a microcosm of the world outside, in terms of social relationships, race, class, gender, language,” says Meintjes, recalling a 1992 trip to an apartheid-era South African recording studio in which multilingual music producers played arbiters between sound engineers and the musicians with whom they could not communicate. “People play different kinds of roles because of the skill sets they bring, but the sociology of it is just as important.… There were all these plays of power over who had creative control, and it had a lot to do with social hierarchies in the context of South Africa in the 1990s.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The same recording session prompted Meintjes’ interest in recording as an aspect of sociology and compelled her to design a course around it. Among the students’ early assignments is to define noise; at first they’re asked to discuss noises they “wish would go away.” Another assignment is to design a “sound walk,” a path one could trace and gather the essence of East Campus (the classroom is inside the Biddle Music Building) by means of aural intake.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Meintjes describes a major challenge of the class as finding a central point for students to discuss their knowledge of music and listening. Everyone, she says, listens differently. While this means a vast platform for discussion, it can also mean that common ground is difficult to find. The students, however, learn to speak each other’s musical languages and help each other “listen in different ways.” Meintjes also helps students understand the sociology of listening and recording, recalling in particular a visit to last semester’s Nasher Museum of Art exhibition “The Record.” “One student wrote about the fact that he had never played a record before,” she says. “I realized…I could use the changing experiences of students in helping them think about how listening is socialized.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">While Meintjes’ class covers a variety of topics and their relation to sound, the core concept, she says, is simple. “The course is about how we learn through our ears,” she explains. She wants her students to leave with “a sense of the pleasures of listening, the politics of listening, the history of listening, and the potential of listening.” <br /><br /><strong>Professor</strong><br /> Louise Meintjes is a graduate of the University of Texas–Austin, where she earned a master’s in music and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. She has written one book, <em>Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio</em>, and is working on her second, <em>Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Song, Dance and Masculinity in the Post Apartheid Struggle</em>. <br /><br /><strong>Prerequisites</strong><br /> None <br /><br /><strong>Readings and Recordings</strong><br /> Zimbabwe: Shona Mbira Music by Rounder Records; Voice of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of the Kaluli People by Rykodisc Records; various articles and CD tracks <br /><br /><strong>Assignments</strong><br /> Weekly attendance, short writing assignments, midterm test, final quiz, and research paper or sound 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="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Saturday, October 1, 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/sep-oct-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501094 at https://alumni.duke.edu