Duke - May - Jun 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/may-jun-2004 en The Dope on Snacking https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dope-snacking <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> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="10" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Counter culture: from the early Forties" src="/issues/050604/images/lg_dopeshop1940s-300.jpg" style="height:229px; width:300px" /> <p>Counter culture: from the early Forties, top, to the late Seventies</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr> <td><img alt="to the late Seventies" src="/issues/050604/images/lg_dopeshop1970s-300.jpg" style="height:214px; width:300px" /></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Those of us who attended Duke between 1916 and 1982 have fond memories of a burger, milkshake, or cherry Coke served by "Mama Ruthie" or one of the many other friendly staff members who made the Dope Shop on West Campus a special gathering place to eat, shop for "sundries," or shoot some pool.</p> <p>"Dope," a slang term used for cola drinks, probably came from the once-popular, though mistaken, belief that Coca-Cola contained small amounts of cocaine. At one point, there was a Dope Shop on East Campus, in the Crowell Building, in addition to the one on West, down the dark stairs to the basement of the Union Building. The opening of the Bryan Center, with its array of food services, marked the end of this campus tradition.</p> <p><em>Pyatt '81 is a University Archivist</em></p> <hr /> <p>&nbsp;</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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/tim-pyatt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tim Pyatt &#039;81</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501414 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dope-snacking#comments Career Corner: May-June 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/career-corner-may-june-2004 <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:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <p><strong>I'm a lawyer who's never "taken" to the legal profession. Can I look forward to other career options?</strong></p> <p>A quick survey of the lawyers who returned for Duke's first Career Week last year demonstrates that Duke graduates do many things other than working for law firms. Just from this sampling, there was a senior attorney for the Pennsylvania Coalition against Domestic Violence, a vice president of Northrop Grumman, an interim executive director of the North Carolina Human Relations Commission, the assistant legal counsel for the North Carolina School Boards Association, a workers' compensation judge--and our own Sue Wasiolek, the assistant vice president for student affairs.</p> <p>What your question does not tell me is whether you've "gone off" the law entirely, or simply don't want to work in a law firm, where you have to bill in excess of 2,000 hours a year and never see your family. A couple of our Career Week sample decided to compromise by founding their own firms!</p> <p>Let's assume, however, that simply thinking about having the word "lawyer" or "attorney" in your title (or, for that matter, partner or judge) makes you break out in hives. Are there other options? Absolutely. By definition, you're smart, you know how to think and reason, and you can write well. The trick now is to persuade someone to hire you and pay you enough to satisfy the student-loan collectors or mortgage company.</p> <p>Lawyers who are looking for jobs outside the law often believe that they can do anything, if only given a chance. They also tend to look for salaries equivalent to those they would have made in private practice. Here's where you may have to eat some humble pie. To get your foot in the door, you must plead your case to an employer that you can do the job they need to have done. Sometimes, that means you'll be promoting skills, such as your marketing ability, that require far fewer brain cells than your legal studies.</p> <p>You may also have to consider a salary substantially lower than your peers in the legal world. Ultimately, your educational background may help you do your work better or more efficiently--and many law-trained graduates reach the pinnacles of industry--but there's no guarantee that you'll move ahead more quickly than your peers with bachelor's degrees or M.B.A.s. The good news is that if you really don't want to be a lawyer, you'll be much happier in your chosen profession.</p> <p><em>Curran is the Fannie Mitchell Executive Director of the Career Center, which offers career services to alumni as well as students.</em></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/sheila-curran" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sheila Curran</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501411 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/career-corner-may-june-2004#comments Books: May-June 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-may-june-2004 <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="6" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong><img alt="Voice of America: A History By Alan L. Heil Jr. '57" src="/issues/050604/images/lg_heil_voice.jpg" style="float:left; height:269px; width:183px" />Voice of America:<br /> A History<br /> By Alan L. Heil Jr. '57. Columbia University Press, 2003. 544 pages. $37.50</strong> <p>In this age of satellite radio and TiVo, Internet video and digital cable, it is difficult to conjure up a time not long ago when a crackling shortwave broadcast in the middle of the night constituted the entirety of the media landscape. Or when 450 million people gathered around their radios to listen to man landing on the moon. And it is equally difficult to imagine that such a world still exists, and will continue to be an essential, vital source of information for large swaths of the people on this planet.</p> <p>Both of those worlds are chronicled in great and compelling detail in Voice of America: A History, Alan Heil's account of the often unheralded, sometimes beleaguered, but always proud government agency that was one of the few forces capable of piercing the Iron Curtain. From 1962 to 1998, Heil had a ringside seat for some of the defining battles, and triumphs, of the latter half of the twentieth century. Starting as an apprentice news writer several months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Heil was a jack-of-all-trades at VOA--a brave journalist, an adept politician, and a mentor to many, including this writer. He retired in 1998 as deputy director after a career that included several stints as a foreign correspondent, at a time before satellite phones and e-mail made possible instant communications from the most remote places on Earth. In between, he was a witness to the kind of titanic political struggles that can only be produced by Washington infighting and a proponent of the simple satisfaction of a good story told well.</p> <p>International broadcasting of the kind practiced by VOA and the BBC World Service may yet go down as one of the most important activities of the latter half of the twentieth century. Conceived and birthed in 1942--seventy-nine days after Pearl Harbor--to be a source of news and information for a war-torn Europe, VOA at its peak broadcast more than 1,300 hours a week in fifty-plus languages to a weekly audience of 130 million. Post-Cold War budget cuts and the explosion of media choices have diminished that number considerably. A network of transmitters and relay stations, linked now by satellite and pumping out millions of watts of power from places such as Liberia, the Philippines, and Greenville, North Carolina, sends radio broadcasts to all corners of the globe, with the largest audiences concentrated in those areas with the fewest choices. Yet, an archaic Cold War law prevents VOA from broadcasting to the U.S., though Internet radio has now leapfrogged that small bit of intellectual protectionism.</p> <p>John Houseman, the actor and writer, was VOA's first director and, over the years, an accomplished and eclectic cast of characters called it home. Legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow cast a long shadow over the Voice during his brief tenure as director of the U.S. Information Agency (VOA's former "parent") and NBC Nightly News anchor John Chancellor took time out from his television career to serve as its director under Lyndon Johnson. Generals, college professors, musicians, and actors (Telly Savalas and Yul Brynner were both VOA broadcasters) have all traversed the block-long corridors of the VOA headquarters just off the Mall in Washington.</p> <p>To the casual observer, VOA makes no sense. Here is a government-funded radio station, led by political appointees and staffed, in many cases, by foreign nationals from dozens of countries, some of whom bring their historic rivalries and conflicts to work every day. The station is part of the foreign policy apparatus of the U.S., yet required by law to broadcast reports that are accurate, objective, and balanced. It would seem to be ripe for abuse.</p> <p>But as the book makes abundantly clear, it is the people of VOA who make it a unique and effective organization. In a rare triumph of common sense over political expediency, Heil recounts, it was the journalists of VOA who successfully lobbied Congress to put VOA's strict guidelines for objectivity and balance into law. This, despite efforts by diplomats and ideologues on both sides of the aisle to harness the agency for official propaganda purposes, regardless of the toll it would take on its credibility with listeners who have plenty of experience with state-sponsored media.</p> <p>Some of the most compelling stories in Voice of America: A History are those of the writers and newscasters who made great escapes from their home countries, and who have dedicated their careers to opening up an information pipeline to those same countries. People such as George Berzins, who as a Latvian refugee child in Dresden narrowly escaped death in the Allied firebombing near the end of World War II, and Tuck Outhouk, one of the few survivors of the notorious Cambodian killing fields. Perhaps the most compelling story comes from Isabela and Zamira Islami, sisters who in 1975 fled Albania by evading security guards and swimming throughout the night to the island of Corfu. In retaliation, the Albanian authorities deported their parents to a remote village in the north of the country, where they were held until the regime collapsed in 1990.</p> <p>The highway goes in two directions, too. In 2002, Ali Jalali, the chief of the Afghan services at VOA and a former government official, returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban to serve as the country's interior minister.</p> <p>At the end of the day, though, the Voice of America is still the "voice of America." Broadcasting the news, "warts and all," at a time when many public and private broadcasters eschew good or even basic journalism in favor of entertainment, is an important and laudable goal that too often gets mislabeled, perjoratively, as propaganda. If that's the case, it may be the best kind, because it changes lives and the course of nations.</p> <p>--Michael Schoenfeld</p> <hr /> <p>----Schoenfeld '84, vice chancellor for public affairs at Vanderbilt University, is a former reporter, broadcaster, and chief of staff at VOA. He is a member of Duke Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board</p> </td> <td> <p><strong><img alt="The Amateur Marriage By Anne Tyler '61" src="/issues/050604/images/lg_pg53.jpg" style="float:left; height:256px; width:182px" /></strong><strong>The Amateur Marriage<br /> By Anne Tyler '61. Knopf, 2004. 320 pages. $24.95. </strong></p> <p>Anne Tyler is an anomaly in today's publishing world: a best-selling author who does not take to the promotion trail with a hearty yee-haw! and a twenty-two-town itinerary as each new book is released. She seldom grants interviews, and those only by telephone or e-mail. She writes her books in longhand and then, after all has been put into the computer as a nod to the mechanics of the publishing process, she writes it all out again in longhand, a process, she has said, that allows her to "catch false notes."</p> <p>The intensely private Tyler studied with Reynolds Price '55 at Duke before graduating at age nineteen and heading off to Columbia for graduate work in Russian studies. Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Breathing Lessons, her eleventh, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The Amateur Marriage is her seventeenth novel, set almost entirely in Tyler's hometown and most frequent fictional locale, Baltimore.</p> <p>The Amateur Marriage spans sixty years with economy and precision, moving from 1941 through 2001. Each of the book's ten chapters focuses on a specific, pivotal period in the lives of Pauline and Michael Anton, who meet just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The first chapter so effectively shows the early war fervor that it is hard to realize that Tyler, herself, was then just an infant. The city is in an uproar, an informal parade of young men is enlisting, and the impetuous Pauline jumps off a streetcar and cuts her forehead. When she's brought into the Anton family grocery seeking first aid, Michael dresses the wound with calm detachment, then marches off arm-in-arm with Pauline, who wears a red coat that comes to symbolize how wildly mismatched they are.</p> <p>They squabble over matters large and small; their marriage ceremony itself is momentarily delayed as Pauline panics and tries to back out, citing all the disparities in their natures. Michael's calm prevails, unfortunately, launching a union that survives three uneasy decades before he moves out, again with equanimity, on the night of their thirtieth anniversary.</p> <p>Pauline and Michael produce three baby-boom children, leave the old neighborhood for a new suburb, relocate the store, and upgrade to a gourmet grocery complete with bakery and florist. Flighty Pauline is a stay-at-home mom in Plan A of Elmview Acres, a world apart from the old neighborhood where she accidentally ends up one day: "She entered a hodgepodge of stores and houses, the stores' signs often Greek or Polish or Czech, the houses' stoops scrubbed white as soap bars and their parlor windows displaying artificial flowers, dolls dressed in native costumes, plaster Madonnas with their arms outstretched in blessing. Black-garbed, kerchiefed old women plodded down the sidewalks laden with knobby shopping bags."</p> <p>Two of the children follow predictable, if undramatic, paths. The eldest child, Lindy, however, is a rebel. "Lindy spent her week of suspension watching TV in the rec room--a jagged dark knife of a person sending out billows of discontent from her father's La-Z-Boy." She runs off at seventeen. A few years later, while Lindy is in a San Francisco rehab, her parents are called to retrieve a three-year-old grandson. They bring the boy back to Baltimore without ever seeing their daughter. When she finally returns some twenty-five years later, Michael observes, "Something she wore jingled. She would be the type to favor heavy, non-precious jewelry whose purchase benefited some disadvantaged tribal craftsmen."</p> <p>Through all these years of milestones and heartbreaks and triumphs, Tyler communicates the dailiness of the Anton family with exquisite detail and understanding. Pauline "descended the wooden stairs feeling the faint sense of bereavement that always overtook her when she parted from her girlfriends." "Michael woke unusually late on a Sunday morning to find his bedroom filled with an eerie white glow, and when he rose and looked out the window he saw that the trees had turned into white pipe cleaners and the cars down in the parking lot were igloos."</p> <p>There are no throwaway lines in an Anne Tyler novel. Even the most casual of statements feels carefully crafted. In The Amateur Marriage, it is often Michael whose reflections feel most original. "He believed that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal innocence. He pictured them marching down a city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever--the last couple left in the amateurs' parade."</p> <p>He considers Anna, who will become his second wife: "Her face was a series of ovals, Michael noticed--an oval itself containing long brown oval eyes and an oval mouth without that central notch in the upper lip that most people had; and then there was the smooth oval of her head with the hair turned under so neatly all around. He had never before considered what a restful shape an oval was."</p> <p>Apart from Lindy, whose influence is signified mostly through her absence, there aren't many of the charming eccentrics that populate other Tyler novels. What she's done here is even harder, finding depth in characters who are relentlessly ordinary, the kind of people who in real life so often make only a glancing first impression before quietly melting away.</p> <p>This is literary fiction for people who don't think they like literary fiction--a beautifully crafted novel filled with memorable characters going about the business of everyday life.</p> <hr /> <p>--Taffy Cannon<br /> Cannon '70, M.A.T. '71 is a mystery writer in Southern California.<br /> <strong><a href="http://www.taffycannon.com">www.taffycannon.com</a></strong></p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/writers/michael-schoenfeld" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michael Schoenfeld</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/magazine/writers/taffy-cannon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Taffy Cannon</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501404 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-may-june-2004#comments Power Play https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/power-play <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:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="10" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img alt="The Blacks: A Clown Show" src="/issues/050604/images/lg_blackclownfpo.jpg" style="height:346px; width:225px" /></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Sitting in a dark theater cut off from a bright February afternoon on East Campus, scraggly freshmen and earnest adults aren't sure what they're in for. The white audience members look at their blue tickets and then glance over to the white stubs in the hands of the black people next to them. Then they look back at their blue tickets. They may not realize it yet, but they will be more than just spectators for this Sunday performance of Jean Genet's <em>The Blacks: A Clown Show</em>.</p> <p>The play is ostensibly a nonlinear story of a black man on trial for being a traitor to his race. But the all-black cast disrupts it with improvisation that is designed to get in the audience's face--literally.</p> <p>A character named Village calls a white woman up to the stage to quiz her on three relatively straightforward questions about black history. When she fails to answer any of them correctly, Village screams at her to get on her knees and crawl around like a shackled slave. The woman holds back tears as she crouches down. The audience is frozen and can only manage a gasp.</p> <p>Yet images of slavery and the black-white dichotomy don't dominate the play. Instead, the issue of race merely becomes the conduit for Genet's 1960 commentary on power and corruption. The black members of the audience, in their own moment of powerlessness, are called on to identify themselves by standing up; they are then forced to remain standing for a full minute. A cell phone bursts out ringing from the back of the theater. One of the actors on stage halts the production, steps forward, and threatens to kick the viewer out of the theater. Twenty minutes later, someone else's phone blings and dings, and the actor jumps off stage and escorts the audience member to the door, only to back off at the last minute, saying, "Well, I guess you can stay."</p> <p>Two onlookers have had enough and don't stay. That comes as no surprise to directors Mary Adkins, a senior who is white, and Amy Eason, a senior who is African American. The two had seen a performance of<em> The Blacks</em> last spring while participating in Duke's Leadership and the Arts program in New York. The cast of that show was similarly confrontational, pounding away at audience members for their (assumed) racism. Adkins was particularly offended when one of the New York actors made her and the other white women in the theater shout that they shift their handbags to the other side of the sidewalk when they pass a black man. "I got really pissed off, because I don't do that," Adkins says. "But if you allow that anger to become empathy, and then allow that to become an awareness of what it's like not to have power, it makes you be a lot more careful in the way you treat a lot of people."</p> <p>Anticipating their Duke audience to be equally "pissed off" and confused, Adkins, Eason, and the cast members provide an explanatory "talkback" with the audience immediately after the curtain for each performance, spending almost as much time explaining Genet's convoluted work as drying any tears. And once the puzzled and the awakened alike are finally let out of the small black-box theater, some make their way to a forum with a trio of Duke experts who try to articulate just how a few dozen spectators became utterly powerless for an entire two hours.</p> <p>"There's this idea of the fourth wall, and then we get there and look at one another and, 'What's this?' It's like, 'Catch!' " says Leon Dunkley, director of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, flinging his arms open at his listeners. "You have to show up, and God forbid your cell phone goes off! We are here, and we are present in the play in a way that we're usually not in with plays in general.</p> <p>"So I was wondering, in a play like The Blacks, why it is that we don't need a narrative? Why is it for two hours we can sit in a theater, be forced in and out of time with one another, and we were rapt, we were engaged? So much so, that after two hours of play and a half hour of downtime, we're still talking. After the play is over, the directors come out and are like, 'Here's what the play's about.' So I think that that's interesting, and I think that calls us on where we are and who we are."</p> <hr /></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/matt-sullivan-06" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Matt Sullivan &#039;06</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501418 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/power-play#comments Movie-making in Marakei https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/movie-making-marakei <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"><p class="articletitle">While making the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola watched as his lead actor suffered cardiac arrest, the cost of his sets skyrocketed over budget, and his financial backers threatened to leave him all wet in the Philippine monsoons. Coppola laughed all the way to the Oscars once the movie was finished. But his experience cautioned anyone planning to make a movie in the tropics to think more than twice.</p><p>On my doughnut-shaped atoll of Marakei, where the International Dateline and the equator cross, villagers like to fire up their generators to watch videos sent by family members overseas. For as long as the gasoline doesn't expire, they will watch the same movie several times over. Monotony does not have a word in the Gilbertese language. To an I-Kiribati, if something is good once, it must be a thousand times better with repetition.</p><p>I had been living in this Central Pacific nation of Kiribati--thirty-three coral atolls that form part of Micronesia--nearly two years as a Peace Corps volunteer before falling for the temptation to make a movie. Call it a bad case of island fever that made me forget Coppola's travails, but making a movie seemed a fun way to address a serious health issue in this country: alcohol abuse. The fact that I would be making the movie with fellow amateurs in a place with virtually no electricity, sound-proof sets, or stunt doubles only made me more determined to pull it off. (How do you say "cowabunga!" in Gilbertese?) At the very least, it would be a distraction from the usual midday heat.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Producer's Log: June 2, 2003 </strong></p><p class="articletitle">My wife, Marian, left for America today for health reasons, so now it's just me, the dog, and the movie. Being the dry season, it's a good time to start production, but I'm worried about my Sony digital camcorder surviving the three-and-a-half weeks of shooting. Until now I've only shot home-movie footage, but this full-length feature will require hundreds of shots from different angles, even some shot on the water.</p><p>The camera has only a single, two-hour battery that takes more than an hour to charge on my home's solar panel, and the only other camcorder on the island is broken. Ketia, our storekeeper friend, used to have a camcorder, but recently she lent it to a friend who was visiting the United States. The story goes that it was confiscated at the airport--either an unfortunate Homeland Security act or a convenient excuse on the part of the borrower, who possibly dropped it in the dolphin tank at SeaWorld. It hardly matters, as the bubuti (which loosely means "undeniable favor") required Ketia to lend the camera, and the quick kabara au bure (meaning literally "forgive my sin") demanded she forgive the debt, no questions asked.</p><p>Ketia is married to a seaman who works on a German cargo ship. Sailors' incomes account for a huge chunk of this Pacific nation's revenue and most of the VCRs, TVs, and karaoke machines on Marakei. Often a seaman is gone from his family for more than a year, only to end up giving away more than half of his wages to extended relatives upon his return. "I hate it," Ketia says. "They come by every day with their hands out, and my husband can't say no." For a lot of reasons--but mainly because of a reputation for drinking and toughness--a seaman makes an easy target as the primary villain in our movie.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 14 </strong></p><p class="articletitle">The first scene we film is at the island wharf, a place in the reef that has been blasted away so that fishing boats can dock more easily. Here the hero of the movie, Kiaua, and his friendly four-man gang are planning a hoax. In order to stall the marriage of Kiaua's girlfriend, Rita, to the evil seaman, they'll stage the death of the sailor and dress up one of the gang as the corpse. When the corpse sits up to scratch its back at the wake, participants will scream and run away. Now what could be funnier! Then when the real sailor arrives, they'll think he's a zombie--and run away again!</p><p>Striking the right note of humor in the movie would have been impossible when I first came here. Whenever I told a joke to a group of I-Kiribati, my punch lines were met with stony faces. I found, by contrast, that a person falling off a truck equates to gut-splitting hilarity. Westerners rationalize the seemingly cruel laughter of the Kiribati people by calling it "therapeutic"--gallows humor for a people who have survived scarcity on these coral atolls for generations--but even the most disengaged foreigner finds it hard to bear a funeral in which several people are snickering. The actors tell me they want Western audiences to see the video, but if the movie is ever going to be appreciated outside Kiribati, we'll have to walk a very thin line.</p><p>In addition to humor, the movie must have song and dance. The I-Kiribati like to sing a cappella while cutting toddy (collecting the sweet sap of coconut trees), during church services (mainly Catholic on my island), and during celebrations (a first birthday, a girl's first menstruation, the opening of a new meeting hall). Strong beats on a large wooden box accompany their voices during mwaie, a folk dance that often imitates the movements of birds and may be performed sitting or standing. Though the I-Kiribati are often described as shy in their interactions with one another (you'll rarely hear people from different families argue), when it's time to perform, their shyness goes right out the sides of buildings (as there are no windows, per se).</p><p>My writing partner in this affair is Taake, otherwise known as the Bill Cosby of Kiribati. A former seaman who electrocuted himself and spent six months in a Polish hospital, he is now an elementary-school principal and the funniest man on this island of 2,500. When Taake tells a joke, people actually laugh, and he likes to put together intricate English sentences such as "Indeed, I believe that it is quite necessary I imbibe a stimulating brew this fine morning" when you ask if he'd like a cup of coffee.</p><p>Unfortunately for the movie project, Taake has a day job, so I have to direct the actors bilingually myself until I can find a co-director to help me. My search is made more difficult because the small number of reliable vehicles (bikes, motorcycles, and exactly five trucks) makes it necessary for the co-director to live in this village for the duration of shooting. A bike ride to the farthest village, just ten miles away, can easily take an hour, and the crushed coral threatens puncture with every ride.</p><p>Another wrench is thrown into the works when a team arrives from the capital of Tarawa to inspect all seventy home solar systems on the island. They decide to start with mine. Their team leader introduces himself as Jertz, a German sent by the European Union. He looks at how my system has been jerry-rigged to allow for camcorder charging and shakes his head.</p><p>"This is illegal," he says, clicking his tongue.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 18 </strong></p><p class="articletitle">The Catholic youth are proving to be the backbone of this project. They are all unmarried men and women in their late teens to late twenties who have a sort of limbo status in the culture--too old to be treated as children, but too unattached to be respected as full adults. To cast the movie, Taake and I held an actual screen test for the group, who then divided into teams to find props, locations, and adult actors. Most of the singles on Marakei are bored and glad to help, as there isn't anything resembling a mall here, or even a mall parking lot. The only real hangout is the one-room airport, which is open only the three days a week that a plane is due.</p><p>Unfortunately, many young people abuse alcohol to cope with their boredom. As in the U.S., where about half of all adults have a close family member who is an alcoholic, Kiribati struggles with the social ills of alcohol abuse, including heart and liver disease and domestic violence. Ketia, the storekeeper who can't seem to cut a break from the men in her life, was recently hit over the head with a coconut grater by her drunken brother-in-law. He was fined thirty Australian dollars and ordered to keep his distance, but, according to the culture, she can't go to live with her own family on her home island, even while her husband is overseas.</p><p>In our movie, which we've called Te Maraia or The Curse, Kiaua has to reform his alcoholic father before Rita's father will give his blessing to their marriage. In the end, Kiaua's dad learns that it's his own drinking, not a witch's curse, that is responsible for his life's failures, and he ultimately calls on his family and village to help him keep his vow of sobriety.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_3.jpg" alt="The unhappy couple: Rita, played by Tongauea" width="300" height="202" border="1" /></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_4.jpg" alt="Kiaua; the hero in film's climactic dance competition" width="300" height="202" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"> The unhappy couple: Rita, top, played by Tongauea, and Kiaua; the hero in film's climactic dance competition</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center" height="41"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 19</strong> <br />We're filming the scenes of Kiaua and his dance team, who will take part in an island-wide competition to prove that Kiaua is anything but cursed. One of the dancers, Taratoka, isn't having an easy time of it. He's the shortest twenty-year-old on the island and short of confidence, too. When saying a line, he looks around for help, then looks to the camera as if to say, "How did I do?" Getting one line right requires at least five practices, eight takes, and all the patience the rest of the actors can summon.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 21 </strong><br />The solar-panel situation is stressing me out. Jertz took away my solar battery for a full day to fix one of the posts, and I lost a day of shooting. Today he returned it repaired, but I have to wait for the cover of darkness to defy policy and reconnect the wires. I hastily hook up everything and plug in my charger. All's well that ends well.<br />Almost immediately I begin to smell smoke. The charger is melting! I quickly dismantle everything and begin pacing inside my hut of yarn and coconut branches.</p><p class="articletitle">All is lost. It will take a month to get a new charger from the States, and I have no camera back up. Knowing it to be useless but with nothing better to do, I recheck the simple wiring anyway--and discover that two of the wires were crossed. I had created a repeating circuit. Switching the wires back, I say a prayer and plug in the charger. Like a miracle, the green light blinks.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 22 </strong><br />After the day's shoot, I'm hanging out with Tongauea, the lead actress, and a few of her girlfriends. Tongauea tells me she and her female friends would like to meet my I-Matang (Western) friends "because I-Matang men don't beat their wives." The women around her agree. I tell them it's difficult to generalize, but Tongauea shakes her head. "Marriage is a sadness for a woman here," she insists. I don't know what to say. In the movie, Tongauea's character will reject the seaman as a husband because he's violent and choose Kiaua, the kind one, instead.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 23 </strong><br />I visibly lose my patience for the first time. Kirannata, a talented nineteen-year-old who plays the lead role of Kiaua, doesn't show up for the morning shoot. This isn't completely surprising. We've had to fetch him numerous times when he was late, but this is the first time we didn't meet our footage goals for the day. The I-Kiribati don't show irritation, but they all postponed chores to be here.</p><p>An hour after everyone goes home, I run into Kirannata on the road. I decide to make a strong impression.</p><p>"Where were you?" I ask.</p><p>"In Norauea fishing last night. I couldn't get back in time. The motorcycle broke down."</p><p>I reminded him that he knew about the morning shoot, and that he also knew how unreliable transport can be. Others stop in the road to listen to me rant. Public embarrassment is no small matter among the Gilbertese. It is said that a man once hanged himself after being accused of farting at a party.</p><p>I ask him whether he wants to stop being part of the film and whether he would like to tell his friends the movie won't be finished.</p><p>"Kabara au bure." Forgive my sin. He insists he's in it for the long haul.</p><p>Later, I lend him a watch.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>June 27 </strong><br />It's the last day of filming the dance practice scenes, and Kirannata is the first one there. We wait for someone to chase away the chickens making a racket nearby and tell some small children to please go play their noisy stick game someplace else.</p><p>Things go well for a while, but then a cloud of dread descends on the set as we begin to film Taratoka's lines. It's late afternoon, and I'm beginning to lose the daylight we'll need for the camera. It doesn't look good.</p><p>Yet, on the first try, Taratoka gets it right! Not only that, but he says his lines with gusto. Everyone breaks into applause and offers congratulations. For once I don't even mind the weeklong bout of diarrhea that has begun to make filming a lot more trying. Later I go to the local nurse's station and weigh myself: 139, down fifty pounds since I began this de facto fish-and-rice diet nearly two years ago.</p><table width="264" border="0" cellspacing="11" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="250"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_1.jpg" alt="Video hero's woes: Kirannata as Kiaua, despondent over postponed marriage" width="250" height="168" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"> Video hero's woes: Kirannata as Kiaua, despondent over postponed marriage</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 1 <br /></strong>Time to film on the water. I've been putting it off for nearly three weeks now, but I can't let this calm ocean go to waste. The real problem today is the leaky fishing canoe, which won't carry me in addition to the two actors. So I stand up to my armpits in the surf and hold the camera high. One false move and the last scenes of this movie will go unmade. Talk about a director's cut.</p><p>I'm flashing back to exactly a year ago when my wife and I tried to travel by ship to the capital. The waves were so high then that even the captain delayed setting out for open ocean. We ended up persuading him to take us and three other horribly seasick travelers back to shore, something we never did live down. Call it foolhardy or courageous, the locals never admit defeat at sea. We know three local fishermen who lost sight of land in a storm and drifted for three days. A teacher at my wife's primary school survived for a week with more than thirty other boat passengers. Their only source of drink: juice from dozens of cans of mackerel.</p><p>Today we manage to shoot the water scenes without any of the Waterworld fiasco Kevin Kostner experienced.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 5 <br /></strong>At last we'll shoot the movie's climactic scene, in which Kiaua's dance team competes, and a confrontation takes place between Kiaua, his father, and the evil seaman. We've already asked dance teams in two neighboring villages to take part, and we've made a point of inviting every actor who has appeared in the movie.</p><p>Things go badly from the start. In the first hour, only a smattering of actors arrive. Then the sky grows murky, and it begins to rain. Hard. Soon it's so dark in the meeting hall that even kerosene lanterns don't seem to make a difference.</p><p>The dance groups from the other villages are late; I figure the rain has delayed them. However, an hour after the rain has stopped they still don't roll in. We video what we can and learn that my battery is nearly dead, even though we still have the whole afternoon to shoot. I try to save some juice for the dancers, who surely must be on their way.</p><p>I do what I've learned so well to do here: sit. When it is nearly noon, I see the truck rounding the bend, and my hopes soar. But when it's apparent the truck isn't stopping, I hop up and flag it down. It seems that the driver went to one of the villages first thing in the morning, but when the group wasn't there, he decided to leave and not bother with the other village.</p><p>"I went to your house to talk to you about it, but you weren't there," the driver explains.</p><p>"That's because I was here, waiting for the dancers."</p><p>He shrugs his shoulders. "Talk to the clerk." He drives away, leaving me right where I started three months ago. It was the island clerk--the head island bureaucrat representing the federal government--who nearly blocked the movie from happening in the first place, despite a unanimous vote by the local island council to proceed.</p><p>I pedal back to my house, fuming. Could it be that this movie was doomed all along, and I was too stubborn to see it? Why did fate wait until the last day to drop this load of coconuts on our heads? Finally I remember that it's still the Fourth of July back home, and in a fit of stubborn nationalism, I stick a small American flag on my bike and race back to the set.</p><p>This American initiative, however, will ultimately require a multilateral approach: the youths' leader, Tebukei, searches the island and finds the delinquent actor who plays the seaman. A ragtag dance group finally trucks in from one of the villages. As for the other absent dance group, Taake reminds me that I had captured their act at a celebration a few weeks ago; he persuades me to use that footage, ‡ la B-movie king Ed Wood. The rain has held off. Before the sun sets, all the actors are gyrating to Pacific techno to end the scene.</p><p>Exhausted yet jubilant, I fly to the capital the next day and learn, to my horror, that my camera is incompatible with the Australian video editing systems there. So I fly to the Marshall Islands, where I put our dog on a plane for the States and spend the next few days constructing about half the scenes from raw footage. The rest I'll have to finish when I return to America, but this much at least I'll be able to show on Marakei.</p><p>I'm nervous at first for the packed premiere, but soon my worries go out the sides of the house. The crowd and I laugh in all the same places.</p><p>Before they rewind for the first of countless times, I ask the venerable Taake what he thought of the effort. He clears his throat and says, "As the exquisite scenes unfolded before my very eyes, our movie struck me as somewhat of ... a miracle."</p><p>To which I reply, "Amen!"</p><p class="byline"><em>Larson '93 is an administrator at the Cherokee Center for Family Services in Cherokee, North Carolina. He is working on an English-subtitled version of The Curse.</em></p><span class="text"></span></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/lg_island2fpo.jpg" width="620" height="328" alt="Family portrait: Kinnata, Kirannata&#039;s brother, with wife and son" /></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/eric-larson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Eric Larson</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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">An auteur on an atoll: &quot;The fact that I would be making the movie with fellow amateurs in a place with virtually no electricity only made me more determined.&quot;</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501432 at https://alumni.duke.edu We Apologize https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/we-apologize <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"><p class="articletitle">Who is sorry now? Just about everyone, it seems.</p><table width="40%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_apologies-illustration.jpg" alt=" " width="300" height="409" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">Illustration by Philippe Lechien/ Morgan Gaynin Inc.</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center" height="41"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>Pete Rose is sorry he bet on baseball, and contrition seems a fine criterion for joining that little club called the Baseball Hall of Fame. Bill Janklow, at the time a Congressman from South Dakota, is sorry for speeding, running a stop sign, and running down a motorcyclist. Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law is sorry for not acting more decisively on allegations of child abuse by Roman Catholic priests. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is sorry--"deeply sorry"--for his behavior toward women in his past life as a movie star. Connecticut Governor John Rowland is sorry for inconveniently lying about accepting gifts from state contractors.</p><p>Remember that Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction"? Entertainer Janet Jackson told a press conference, "If I offended anybody, that was truly not my intention." So much for the exemplary bare-basics apology. As cultural commentator Frank Rich noted in The New York Times, Jackson refused to appear on the Grammys broadcast rather than "accede to CBS's demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual 'apology' to the nation for her crime of a week earlier." By contrast, Justin Timberlake, her pop-star partner in that crime, apologized ritually if not convincingly, "looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal's office," in Rich's words.</p><p>Corporations, too, are in an apologetic mood. Putnam Investments is sorry for "the unfortunate actions of a few individuals" whose trading practices threatened to undermine investor trust. Some countries are even sorrier. Late last year, President Svetozar Marovic of Serbia and Montenegro apologized to Bosnia for a war in which some 200,000 people died. That gesture came eight years after the signing of the Dayton peace agreement.</p><p>And in February, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program, made an explosive admission in a televised address. Acknowledging that he had shared Pakistani nuclear technology with other countries (presumably Iran, Libya, and North Korea), he talked about his "deep sense of regret" and his desire to atone for the "anguish" suffered by his countrymen. What about the anguish of those who might find themselves on the wrong end of that technology? Oops. Sorry about that.</p><p>The public apology, like comedic irony, seems inescapable in modern culture. What it signals, though, isn't so much sincerity and repentance as shallowness and self-serving manipulation.</p><table width="1%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_pn001910.jpg" alt="Pete Rose" width="150" height="294" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">Photo:© Neal Preston /Corbis</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center" height="28"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>In classical rhetoric, the apology was a defense of one's actions. That form of apology is given eloquent expression in Plato's Apology, with Socrates on trial by Athenian leaders, some of whom were trying to divert attention from their own conspiratorial tendencies. Socrates shows some disingenuous qualities as an apologist (or self-defender), says Michael Gillespie, a Duke political-science professor who specializes in political philosophy. Socrates laments his poor skills in rhetoric, for example, but delivers a perfectly patterned rhetorical speech. He asserts that he's not an atheist, but he doesn't show support for the gods of the city. He probably could have escaped a drastic penalty had he agreed to philosophize in private rather than in the very public agora. But he never apologizes--in the classical or the modern sense of the word--in his defense, and he even taunts his accusers by declaring that they should support him at public expense.</p><p>According to Duke religion professor Elizabeth Clark, in early Christianity, an "apology" was a speech for the defense of Christianity against pagan persecutors, or later, against pagan intellectuals who denigrated the faith. By that older definition, she says, the apology of Emperor Theodosius was a model. In 390, the citizens of Thessalonica (now a part of Greece) rioted against the garrison of the legion stationed there and murdered its commander. Theodosius sent an invitation for the Thessalonicans to gather for a public spectacle. By his order, his army then proceeded to massacre 7,000 of them. The bishop of Milan demanded that the emperor make a religious confession of guilt and do penance; the alternative was excommunication. Theodosius acceded.</p><p>"We might guess," Clark says, that "ordinary folks were awed to see their emperor doing public penance, meaning he couldn't take the Eucharist and perhaps performed other symbolic deeds indicating his repentance. We know nothing certain about what personal feelings, religious or otherwise, Theodosius might have had. He was known as devout, but with a hot temper that could lead him to rash acts."</p><p>When it comes to modern public apologies, Duke Divinity School Dean L. Gregory Jones M.Div. '85, Ph.D. '88 is skeptical about the extent of true penitence. He calls Pete Rose's acknowledgment of his betting habits just another example of "spinning sorrow." Rose only confessed when it became clearly in his self-interest to do so; his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame hangs in the balance. As Jones puts it in an essay in The Christian Century, "the true test of a person's capacity to attend the truth" involves facing the consequences, regardless of the cost to oneself. Rose, though, hasn't acknowledged that he has any problem to deal with, much less that he has committed to steps that would point to repentance. In the Rose-colored view of the world, coming clean should be enough. That's an embrace of "cheap forgiveness," according to Jones. And something so cheap is not meaningful.</p><p>Jones is particularly troubled by a telling quote in Rose's book: "I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way." The issue isn't simply that Rose has shown no remorse, Jones says. Rather, it is that the onetime baseball great apparently lacks the capacity to do so.</p><p>The Rose episode signals a cultural fascination with the self, Jones says, that obscures the meaning of concepts like sin and repentance--concepts that, properly speaking, should demand reaching deeply into the heart and soul, Jones says. "Too often, these public issues of forgiveness are about how other people have treated me. It's amazing to watch Pete Rose actually trying to spin this into his being a victim: He's been deprived of the Hall of Fame all these years, and, goodness gracious, aren't we supposed to feel sorry for him?"</p><p>Jones finds in Bill Clinton a political parallel with Rose's reluctant apology. Just after Clinton offered his apology for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, Jones wrote about the "shallow ring to the president's plea." Clinton's apology fell "far short of a true confession," he added, and so it didn't merit forgiveness. "Authentic forgiveness requires confession to be linked to truthfulness, contrition, and repentance. The president's apology fails on all three counts." Instead, Clinton tried to shift the blame to a zealous investigator. He didn't acknowledge having betrayed many people with his sexual misconduct and his subsequent deception--his wife and daughter, those aides and friends who put their own credibility on the line to defend him, and the public. And he didn't outline any concrete steps toward changing his life pattern of apparent sexual recklessness.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="8" cellpadding="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_dwf15-489247.jpg" alt="The once-rambunctious Arnold Schwarzenegger" width="580" height="239" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"> The once-rambunctious Arnold Schwarzenegger. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo:© Ken James / Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>To Jefferson Powell, a Duke professor of both divinity and law, the prevalence of the public apology signals a "general leeching out of American life of real substance." It also points to a harsh moralizing tone, a reflexive and malicious sanctioning, that has infected public life. "We have a culture that has a kind of intense moralism about it. But it's a moralism that is divorced from a strong connection to any religious tradition. It looks rather bizarre when we tolerate behavior of all sorts that, according to my religious tradition, is intolerable on the part of public officials--for example, bitter and uncharitable attacks on opponents."</p><p>The public display becomes "an end in itself, which is often accompanied by anger. That's what you have to expect from this brittle, superficial moralism. It serves as a tool of anger rather than a means of reconciliation and forgiveness."</p><p>As both Jones and Powell see it, repentance that doesn't express itself in action is not true repentance. But there's an obligation on the other side: Healthy communities must provide a means of reconciliation. "That's in large measure what my religious tradition is about," Powell says, "finding ways to repair the damage that we all create in our lives and our communities." The dynamic of repentance and forgiveness, for many religious traditions, is part and parcel of moral teaching.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="11" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_dwf15-524089.jpg" alt="Pakistan's explosive Khan" width="150" height="208" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-left;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10px; background-color: #ffffff;">Controlling political damage: from top, Pakistan's explosive Khan, former birthday-party guest Trent Lott, a not-quite-contrite Bill Clinton . </span>© Mian Khursheed / Reuters / Corbis</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_dwf15-314682.jpg" alt="Trent Lott" width="150" height="230" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-left;"> © Steve Liss / Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_wl007587.jpg" alt="Bill Clinton" width="150" height="220" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-left;"> Photo:© Wally Mcnamee / Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>The memorable media coverage of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's tearful confession, Powell says, points to the culture's problem with understanding authentic religious expression. In 1988, Swaggart admitted in a Sunday-morning sermon that he had engaged in improprieties with a prostitute. "It was very obvious from the tone of the reporting that part of the story was about making fun of these people for being so naÔve and foolish as to think that Swaggart was doing anything other than trying to save his own neck. But Christianity doesn't give you any options other than to forgive; that's what Christianity says you must do. That doesn't mean you're being naÔve. And then if the apology was insincere, the reconciliation of the person with God and the community won't go through. It won't go through because the person hasn't genuinely repented, not because people are unaccepting of the apology and unwilling to forgive."</p><p>Other cultures have recent and powerful experiences with forgiveness. "One of the most interesting laboratories in recent years for all of these dynamics has been South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there," says Greg Jones. When he was in South Africa several years ago, he interviewed a number of members of the commission. "One of the things over and over again that they said was, 'Find somebody who is candid, forthright, and truthful.' There's a remarkable willingness on the part of victims' families to be forgiving, to say, 'What we really wanted most was the truth.' And so it opens up a new horizon for a new future."</p><p>Some of what was confessed was "chilling and horrifying," Jones says. Still, the overwhelming sentiment was, "What we really want is the lying to stop, the uncertainty of what happened to my loved one to be finally answered," he says. There are hugely complicated issues, including questions of reparations. But the first step was the sense of responsibility and truthfulness linked to a genuine contrition. There are some white South Africans whose contrition has become manifest by doing work in economic empowerment of black Africans. If it was an issue of murder, you obviously can't make things right by bringing back the murder victim. But you might be able to help others. You can live in a different way."</p><p>Nations, too, can live in a different way. That's been true for Germany since the end of World War II. Among Germans who lived through the Nazi era, there's a denial of individual responsibility, and so of the need for individual apology, says Duke history professor Claudia Koonz, author of the new book The Nazi Conscience. But they have a much different sense of collective responsibility. Germans were caught up at the time in a movement she calls "ethnic revivalism, or ethnic fundamentalism," a celebration of national virtues and national destiny at the expense, it turned out, of a marginalized population.</p><p>Paradoxically, Koonz says, "the active pursuit of major perpetrators of war crimes made those who didn't get accused feel that they had nothing to apologize for." Even Nazi loyalists saw their affiliation as "patriotic" rather than "partisan." Almost none of those put on trial at Nuremberg apologized for their actions.</p><p>"The whole process, from the beginning of prejudice to persecution to deportation to extermination, was gradual," Koonz says. "It looked legal--measures came down one at a time--and individuals incrementally found themselves collaborating, in small ways. That's why the culture of collective apology is so important in Germany: It's because people individually didn't feel responsible, but they feel horrified at belonging to a country that was responsible."</p><p>The German writer Martin Walser has repeatedly urged Germans to adopt a less guilt-ridden sense of national identity. At a ceremony in 1998 where he was awarded the German book trade's prestigious Peace Prize, he declared that he was tired of the "endless parading of shame" and warned against what he called "the instrumentalization of Auschwitz." Still, Koonz says that no country has done more than Germany to apologize for its past and pursue a path of redemption. As one sign of that, she says, Germans remain "intensely interested in the public culture of commemoration." It's a country engaged in "monument mania," as she describes it. "Every town has to have a monument to the Jews who are no longer there. The extent to which every single aspect of every monument is debated in public is really incredible."</p><p>Apologies, redemption, and forgiveness have a resonance in the marketplace. Consumers are ready to forgive companies, but only if they think that an apology is sincere and is accompanied by corrective action. That's the assessment of Gavan Fitzsimons, associate professor of marketing at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. "The work I do shows that, basically, at the moment that the recipients of a message pick up on the fact that you're attempting to persuade them through that message--whether it be an advertisement, a public-service announcement, or an apology--its effectiveness diminishes dramatically. And in many cases, you actually get a backlash, a negative effect." In other words, a business apology might be public-relations spin, but its sponsor certainly doesn't want it to be perceived as such.</p><p>Fitzsimons says that a model corporate apology came in the early Eighties after a presumed psychopath poisoned Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer, ordered a massive recall involving more than 31 million bottles at a cost of more than $100 million, temporarily ceased all production of capsules, and replaced them with tamper-resistant caplets. The company's CEO maintained a high profile throughout the episode. The Washington Post observed at the time that "what Johnson & Johnson executives have done is communicate the message that the company is candid, contrite, and compassionate, committed to solving the murders and protecting the public." With a massive marketing campaign, and a repackaging program, Tylenol staged an impressive comeback.</p><p>A contrary example appeared in the late Eighties. Audi, the luxury carmaker, was confronting reports of sudden-acceleration problems when the transmission was shifted out of "Park." CBS' 60 Minutes featured the story of a mother who had run over her six-year-old son; she insisted that she had had her foot on the brake the whole time. When her claim came to court, the jury found no defect in the car. But that jury finding was almost irrelevant to Audi's standing, Fizsimons says. "Audi's response was, 'It's not our fault, it's basically the dumb American driver who's ramming his foot on the gas and running it into his garage.' They didn't say, 'We apologize for the trouble. We're not sure what's at the root of the problem but we're going to do everything in our power to solve it.' Audi basically disappeared from the U.S. marketplace for about ten years."</p><div><table width="314" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="300"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_u87106076.jpg" alt="Seeking spiritual solace: Jimmy Swaggart faces up to his indiscretions " width="580" height="233" border="0" /><p class="caption-text">Seeking spiritual solace: Jimmy Swaggart faces up to his indiscretions. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© Bettmann / Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Political leaders may suddenly accelerate into the apology mode when their political fortunes are at stake. But that is not their instinct, says Michael Munger, chair of the political-science department at Duke. "People who have that sort of sensibility in terms of fairness are not likely to become politicians. Such people are turned off by the process itself--it's ugly. And even if you wanted to apologize, your advisers would tell you not to. If you put yourself out to be president, and if you are to have any kind of serious chance, you have to be an essentially different kind of person. That involves personal qualities that we wouldn't necessarily think are admirable in other contexts--a kind of resilience, and also an ability to shut out other people's feelings. And for an apology to be real, what you're trying to do is reach out to others and say, 'I care about your feelings.' "</p><p>Reportedly, Vermont Governor Howard Dean, in his run for the Democratic nomination, sought advice from Gary Hart, whose own presidential ambitions were derailed by what was widely perceived as reckless personal behavior. Hart's basic message was: Wimps don't become president. Dean took Hart's message a little too much to heart and later was compelled to apologize after remarking that Democrats should reach out to the population of truck-driving Southerners who display Confederate flags. He had touched on a hypersensitive theme, Munger says, though he certainly was correct in recognizing the need to broaden the Democratic appeal.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_ut0128597.jpg" alt="Seeking spiritual solace: Cardinal Law acknowledges his oversights" width="150" height="212" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-left;">Seeking spiritual solace: Cardinal Law acknowledges his oversights. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© Reuters / Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="left"> </td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Wimps seemingly won't become governor of California either. So Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeded with a rather strained apology to California voters: "Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right.... Those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that." In Munger's view, anyone who was already opposed to the movie actor wasn't won over. Those who supported him but were wavering could take solace in his stated contrition. But it was less an apology than a "framing of the issue," or an explanation that hinged on perceptions of Hollywood behavior.</p><p>That kind of pseudo-apology also seems to shift the blame to overly sensitive victims--those who were somehow "offended." There are two ways to understand such a statement, Munger says. "One is that it's a strategic ploy to try to diminish blame. The other is that it's an honest psychological reaction on the part of someone who is just not capable of thinking of himself as doing wrong. I wonder if some capacity for self-delusion is a requirement for being a politician."</p><p>In electing our politicians, we favor "an absence of self-doubt," Munger says. The greatest characteristic of Ulysses S. Grant, as a Union general, was that "he never second-guessed himself," says Munger. After he took over, "finally, the Union started to win the Civil War. And if he lost troops, well, that's the price we pay. There were at times unbelievable numbers of casualties, and he was quite cavalier about it. But it probably could not have been otherwise." People either give up their positions of public leadership or they become so thick-skinned as to be incapable of apologizing, he says.</p><p>Self-doubt wasn't evident in mid-March, when Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, found himself entangled with an unexpectedly "live" microphone. Kerry was overheard calling his opposition "the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen." He later told a news conference that "I have no intention whatsoever of apologizing for my remarks." Conservative columnist William Safire speculated that Kerry had bought into the view that "apologies are for wimps.... John Edwards just proved that nice guys get great press clips but don't win elections."</p><p>And nice guys can't recast their place in history. The current documentary The Fog of War centers on the endlessly enigmatic Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War. Filmmaker Errol Morris ponders the consequences of McNamara's finally explaining--or apologizing for--his longtime silence about his doubts on the war. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't," Morris muses. McNamara responds firmly that he'd prefer to remain in "the damned if you don't" camp.</p><p>Not only is it out of character for a politician to apologize, it's also rare, Munger says, for a political apology to reverse political fortunes. Trent Lott profusely and repeatedly apologized for his comment that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won the presidential race in 1948. Lott's remarks were seemingly off-the-cuff and clearly meant to hearten the aging senator, and onetime ardent segregationist, as he marked his milestone 100th birthday. Still, his detractors observed that Lott had a track record--supporting discrimination at Bob Jones University, speaking up for the segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, standing against the Voting Rights Act, rejecting several minority judicial candidates. It was that personal history, says Munger, that made the apologies ring hollow and led to his giving up a Senate leadership role.</p><p>"If Bill Clinton had been caught telling a racist joke, he would have been forgiven. That's because people had a lot of experience with him that made them think he's not really a racist. For Trent Lott, it seemed with this episode that he was acting in character. And that is much harder to apologize for."</p><p>It's hard, then, to see a scenario for an apology developing in the White House--though the rationale may be there. In late January, David Kay, chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, reported that no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been found or were likely ever to be found. Kay said that he had "innumerable analysts come to me in apology" as they realized that "the world they anticipated" didn't match the facts on the ground. The New York Times' Paul Krugman titled a column on Kay's findings "Where's the Apology?" But Munger's speculation about the ultimate presidential position is that President Bush "will never apologize, because, if he does, he owes an apology to Saddam Hussein, the U.N., and the French.... I would guess that the Bush line is going to be that Saddam would have developed WMD. It was just a matter of time."</p><p>After all, says Munger, an American business icon, Henry Ford, is said to have lived by the doctrine "Never apologize, never explain." It was an American literary icon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "No sensible person ever made an apology."</p><p>But a public apology can resound in big ways, even in small places. Last November, villagers of the tiny Fiji Islands settlement of Nubutautau wept as they apologized to descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by their ancestors 136 years ago. The villagers and relatives of the missionary were taking part in a ritual intended to lift a curse that, the locals believe, had caused an extended run of bad luck. According to The New York Times, a cow was slaughtered and a hundred sperm-whale teeth were given to eleven of the relatives who made the trip. A fourth-generation descendant of the missionary got a kiss from the village chief, himself a descendant of the chief who cooked the missionary. It seemed that the circle of misdeeds, repentance, and forgiveness was complete.</p></div><span class="text"></span></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/lg_dwf15-489247.jpg" width="643" height="265" 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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The sorry state of remorse: It&#039;s all about me. Maybe it should be about an authentic understanding of sin, repentance, and forgiveness. </div></div></section> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501431 at https://alumni.duke.edu The New Curiosity Shops https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/new-curiosity-shops <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Science is really funny, observed a boy in Liane Carahasen's fourth-grade class at Hillandale Elementary School in Durham. He giggled at the "oops" moment when he accidentally tore the adding-machine tape he was to scroll out for the experiments. With considerable laughing and excited chatter, he and his fellow students were spreading out a dozen or so tapes across the floor of the school cafeteria. Their stated scientific objective: to predict how far rubber-band-powered toy cars would travel along the tape with a given number of winds of the rubber band.</p><p>Another boy decided that science could usefully be observed from many perspectives, even upside down. He allowed the rubber-band-powered car to zip backward between his feet, bending over for a topsy-turvy view of its rapid departure.</p><p>Science can also surprise, as discovered by those who miswound the rubber bands and were startled to see their cars whiz away in the wrong direction.</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td height="71"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="100%" height="13"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" height="13"><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_teach86603019repro.jpg" alt="----" width="193" height="288" /></td><td align="center"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_schw962e6818repro.jpg" alt="----" width="194" height="288" /></td><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 193px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_teach86603001repro.jpg" alt="----" width="193" height="288" /><p class="caption-text">Mixing it up: Pratt senior Venkatesan shapes an instructive eruption with a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano, below; chemists-in-training at Lakewood Elementary School, far left; professors Schwartz-Bloom, foreground, and Halpin at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, center. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photos: Les Todd</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td colspan="3" align="center" height="30"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">And, perhaps most important, science can inspire big dreams. Just ask the girl who announced confidently amid the creative cacophony that she plans to go to Duke and study "trees and flowers and those things up in the sky that are, y'know, like computers." (Later, she decided they were satellites.)</p><p>While to an outsider it might seem that confusion reigned in that cafeteria, to Carahasen the experiments were a successful exercise in a hands-on approach to discovery known as "inquiry-based learning." Her training in applying the technique enabled her to roam the room--observing, asking questions, making suggestions, and gently guiding the learning process. An alumna of Duke's Teachers and Scientists Collaborating (TASC) training program, Carahasen, like hundreds of other teachers across North Carolina, has learned to use this inquiry-based approach to involve children, not only in science, but also in the scientific process itself.</p><p>Led by Gary Ybarra, an associate professor of the practice of electrical and computer engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, and Dave Smith, program director, TASC is a good example of the ways in which Duke's faculty and staff members (and, in some cases, students) are increasingly lending their time and expertise to meet the challenges of K-12 science education. Their involvement stems from the recognition that American schoolchildren are not receiving the kind of creative teaching in science, technology, and mathematics that inspires students to enter those fields, much less to excel in them. The result of this educational neglect, they say, is a nation at intellectual and economic risk.</p><p>The latest comparative international analysis by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ranks the U.S. nineteenth in mathematics and eighteenth in science among nations. The U.S. ranks just below Latvia in math and below Bulgaria in science--not a particularly respectable niche for a country that considers itself a scientific and technological superpower.</p><p>And the latest internal report card also gave the American school system low marks in science and math teaching. As part of "Looking Inside the Classroom: A Study of K-12 Mathematics and Science Education in the United States," published in May 2003, experts observed a representative sample of 364 science and math lessons in kindergarten through twelfth grades across the country. They also interviewed the teachers to understand the teaching philosophy behind those lessons and the source materials used. The authors concluded that, "Overall, 59 percent of mathematics/science lessons are judged to be low in quality, 27 percent medium in quality, and only 15 percent high in quality." As a result, said the study, "the nation is very far from the ideal of providing high-quality mathematics and science education for all students."</p><p>For Ybarra and other Duke faculty members, a key to improving science and math education is developing materials that engage students and training teachers to use them. "Children have a natural affinity for plants and animals, and they also have a natural curiosity," Ybarra says. "If this curiosity is sparked, encouraged, and nurtured in a nonthreatening way, the children develop confidence and independent thinking. That's what we're trying to promote, and, at the same time, increase their appreciation for an understanding of scientific principles." In addition to rubber-band racecars, TASC provides kits that allow children to experience the life cycle of butterflies, the mysteries of dirt, the invisible magic of magnetism, and the physics of roller coasters.</p><p>Besides breaking through to students to pique their interest in science, the program has "broken the logjam for the school districts that have joined the partnership," says Smith, TASC's director. "North Carolina has been trying to reform its science education for years," he says, through a program called Infrastructure for Science Education. "And most of the school systems are eager to go forward, but reach an impasse when they have to come up with the money to buy the kits, the time to train the teachers, and the mechanism to refurbish and distribute those kits. We gave them the solutions to all three problems."</p><p>Another Duke faculty member offers another solution--one that got its creative spark from the students themselves. Eight years ago, as part of her sabbatical activities, Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, tried out the idea of teaching science through pharmacology in Myra Halpin's chemistry class at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. "I told the students that, when I was in high school, we learned about oxidation as the reaction that caused rust. Then I told them, 'Today, I'm going to tell you about how methamphetamine kills neurons. And it's all an oxidation reaction.' They were glued, just glued. And when the bell rang, they didn't get up. They kept asking questions. And Myra said to me, 'Shelly, I think this is going to work. I've been doing this for twenty-seven years, and I have never had them not get up when the bell rang.' "</p><table width="36%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_klenk02460440repro.jpg" alt="Close observing in class: Techtronics program coordinator Paul Klenk employs rolled newspaper " /><p class="caption-text"> Close observing in class: Techtronics program coordinator Paul Klenk employs rolled newspaper "towers" to test super-skyscraper's strength at Rogers-Herr Elementary School</p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"> </td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>This realization inspired Schwartz-Bloom and Halpin to launch the Pharmacology Education Partnership (PEP), which teaches basic scientific concepts like acid-base chemistry and the structure of neurons using examples that fascinate teens: the chemistry of cocaine, how drugs pass through membranes, and how nerve gas wreaks havoc on neurons. They have developed high-school teaching modules with such alluring titles as "Acids, Bases, and Cocaine Addicts"; "Military pharmacology: It takes nerves" (about the biological effects of nerve gas); and "Steroids and athletes: Genes work overtime." They made these teaching modules even more compelling by creating a dynamic PEP website that, besides the lessons and online tests, features vivid computer animations, including chemical reactions and cell structures and processes.</p><p>Another key to PEP's success is creating lessons that involve many traditional disciplines, Schwartz-Bloom says. "Pharmacology is a naturally interdisciplinary approach to science, and K-12 education is crying out for interdisciplinary approaches to teaching. Our modules do just that. The module on nerve gas includes not only the biology, chemistry, and physiology of these compounds, but also the cultural and historical background. I weave into the module accounts of the gas attacks on the Kurds in Iraq and the recent nerve-gas attack in Japan."</p><p>Over the next five years, TASC will hold inquiry-based learning workshops for thousands of teachers from across North Carolina, and will refurbish and sell the program's learning kits to the state's schools. And the PEP program has offered teacher workshops at Duke and at meetings of teachers' associations and is now reaching out across the country to train hundreds of teachers, via a two-way videoconferencing system at the science and math school.</p><p>Schwartz-Bloom says she believes that the rigorous scientific assessment of the PEP program will lead to its broader influence in the educational community. "We are probably the only program in the country doing large-scale testing of the students in the program--4,000 in all--to really quantify that the pharmacology-based approach works."</p><p>In an article in the November 2003 Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Schwartz-Bloom and Halpin reported the results of this careful design and an analysis of the first stage of the program. Their design involved first selecting fifty teachers for initial training in using the lessons they developed. They then randomly divided the teachers into two groups. Half took a weeklong training course at Duke in the summer of 1998 and then, when the school year began, started to apply what they had learned. The other half continued teaching using their normal approach. At the end of the school year, the researchers asked both sets of teachers to give their students a standardized test on their knowledge of biology and chemistry.</p><p>"The key to the study," says Schwartz-Bloom, "was that we tested all fifty teachers' kids the first year--the twenty-five teachers who got the materials and the training, plus the twenty-five teachers who were in the wait-listed control group." During the second summer, the control-group teachers were trained, and they taught using the new methods throughout the next year. Then their students were tested, yielding a comparison of the same teachers' effectiveness before and after PEP training.</p><p>"We got a great 'dose response effect,' which is what we always look for as pharmacologists," says Schwartz-Bloom. "The more modules the students used, the better they performed in biology and chemistry. And the biggest surprise for me was, when I looked at the educational research literature, we outscored all the other programs, in terms of the magnitude of changes. We were far above the level that is considered an excellent result, in terms of the effect of our program." Schwartz-Bloom and Halpin are now using more concentrated workshops, as well as distance-learning technology to train the teachers, and they are currently testing 16,000 students across the country.</p><p>Both programs have benefited from an unusually wide range of funding sources and logistical support. PEP received a $1.5-million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and TASC is funded by a five-year, $5.3-million grant from the National Science Foundation. TASC also benefits from donations by GlaxoSmithKline of warehouse and teacher-training space and shipping costs for the science kits.</p><p>But TASC and PEP are not the only Duke programs designed to make a significant impact on the way science and math are taught in grades K-12. Ybarra has also launched programs to involve Duke engineering students in the classroom as "teaching fellows." In the Math Understanding through the Science of Life (MUSCLE) program, a dozen Pratt School undergraduates spend ten hours a week at Lakewood Elementary and Rogers-Herr Middle schools delivering hands-on lessons with their partner teachers. In the Techtronics after-school enrichment program, Pratt undergraduates give students at Rogers-Herr experience in building devices such as "Mars-roving" robots, AM radios, balsa-wood bridges, and heart monitors.</p><p>A recent Techtronics session might have been titled "Lights, Camera, Surgery!" The session, in which the middle-school students performed "laparoscopic surgery" on shoeboxes, exemplifies how immersed students can become in its projects, says Paul Klenk B.S.E. '01, now a graduate student who coordinates the Techtronics program. For the session, Techtronics mentor Emily McDowell, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering, had adapted a real-life training technique for medical students to give the Techtronics students a taste of what's involved in performing the remote-control surgery. While "ewwwww!" was the squeamish reaction to images of real surgeries shown in the introductory lecture, it quickly gave way to triumphant "yeahs!" as the students mastered their simulated surgical tasks.</p><p>To operate on their shoebox "patients," the students were given webcams, flashlights, and actual laparoscopic surgical forceps--basically tiny clamps on long stalks, operated by trigger-like controls. After inserting the instruments through small "incisions" in the boxes, the students were challenged to loop small rings over nails, remove beads from a curved hook, transfer plastic foam balls from one glass to another, or grasp toy piglets and drop them into a cardboard corral. The neophyte surgeons had to perform these tasks while peering at computer screens showing webcam images taken though small openings in the boxes. The only light source inside the box was a flashlight aimed through another opening.</p><div><p>"I see dead people," joked one student as his partners on the surgical team maneuvered the camera, flashlight, and clamp to clasp a piglet. "Over, over, over, over," chanted another student, coaching his surgeon partner. "Left, left, left, left. No, no, no, no." A third student decided that her team members' success as surgeons demanded a moment of fame. So, she turned the webcam on her partner for an impromptu interview. "What do you think of Techtronics?" she asked. The interviewee responded with a grin and a feigned swoon of delight.</p><p>The students' engagement and enthusiasm is one of the program's most effective teaching tools, Ybarra says. "I really marvel when I see a student eager to use a measuring tape or some other device that extracts a quantity, and I see them doing it with a smile on their face. They're not doing a worksheet, but something meaningful and engaging. If you ask them if they like math, they'll probably say no. But there they are, doing math, not even consciously aware that they're learning new math concepts in the process."</p><p>Both MUSCLE and Techtronics have attracted critical support from foundations and from the university. Their attractiveness stems, in part, from the way in which they are deeply intertwined with Duke's educational mission. Pratt engineering students involved in these programs attest both to the effect they are having on the middle-schoolers and the effect the program is having on them. Says Duke senior Aruna Venkatesan, who works in the MUSCLE program, "We show them how they can use math and engineering principles in practical ways. We let them build bridges with materials like pasta and Play-Doh so they can figure out by trial-and-error what works and what doesn't. I've seen that over the past year the students have really started to enjoy math. Also, since I know Spanish, I can talk to the ESL students, to involve them with the group and give them confidence. One of the ESL students that I work with is really good at math, and so I talked to him about how he could use math in a career like designing cars."</p><p>Klenk, the Techtronics program coordinator, says he is delighted at how much technology the middle-school students absorb. "In building heart-monitor circuits with the kids, we were explaining technical concepts like high-pass filters and low-pass filters; and we were never sure how much of that they understood," he says. "But then at the end of the unit, we had them explain their heart monitors to their parents, and this one boy, Dustin, just nailed it. He explained parts of the circuit board that we had no idea he understood, and we were so excited that he'd remembered all that."</p><p>By the same token, the Duke students participating in MUSCLE and Techtronics learn valuable communication skills, says Ybarra. "Oftentimes, the ability to communicate technical ideas is considered as important as the content itself, in engineering. Because if you can't express your ideas in writing and orally, then the ideas are locked inside of your mind."</p><p>Adds Klenk, "If you can explain gravity or any other basic scientific principle to a middle-school student in a way that they can understand, that really helps you when you're trying to explain your research to somebody outside of your field who doesn't understand what you're doing."</p><p>Developers of both TASC and PEP have found that there is art as well as science to their pedagogy. "It is a real art to develop the skills to foster inquiry-based learning," says TASC's Smith. "A teacher doesn't just learn how to do it in a workshop and then go out and do it. You learn a little bit, practice, come back and learn a little more, then practice some more. It's a real skill for a teacher to look at a student and understand what they understand and what they don't, then set up a challenge for them to work through and take more personal responsibility for understanding."</p><p>Smith emphasizes that fostering inquiry-based learning means teaching the teachers to work in a very different way from the classroom paradigm. "We would have teachers come back after their first experience and say, 'My class didn't seem as focused at first, but, you know, it turned out there was more learning going on.' And that little epiphany was really important for us to get them to have."</p><p>In her outreach efforts, Schwartz-Bloom, like Ybarra, sees a mission that is central not only to science education, but also to the future of American science itself. "We're training the next generation of scientists," she declares. "The U.S. ranks in science and math in the lower third in the world of Western countries. With all our resources and money, we should be up at the top. But we do miserably in science education. If we want the nation's research to move forward in the next generation, we need to make sure that those kids now in K-12 not only understand science but are excited about it."</p></div><div> </div><span class="text"></span></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/lg_klenk02460440repro.jpg" width="620" height="926" 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/dennis-meredith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis Meredith</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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">Using pasta, Play-Doh, and shoebox surgery, professors and students are sparking children&#039;s interest in science. </div></div></section> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501429 at https://alumni.duke.edu Symphony for the Devils https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/symphony-devils <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"><p class="articletitle">On a late summer's afternoon, Harry Davidson gets a call in his office. A prospective student is visiting Duke with his family. He's interested in music. Does the conductor of the Duke Symphony have time to talk? Sure, Davidson says. Send them down.</p><p>The student, it turns out, plays the euphonium. He's not planning to major in music, he tells Davidson; maybe it will be his minor. He's not heading toward a music career, either. "Good," says Davidson. "If you were planning a career in music, I'd say, 'Duke is a great school, but go somewhere else.'"</p><p>Davidson has made his peace with this anomaly. He's a serious musician and demands serious musicianship of his players. But Duke is not a conservatory. Most of his student musicians will go on to graduate or professional schools to become doctors or lawyers or executives.</p><p>A prime example is Psyche Loui '03, his concertmaster last year and a phenomenal violin talent. She was selected to attend the prestigious Aspen Music Festival the summer after her junior year and won Duke's concerto competition her senior year. She played the Vieuxtemps Fifth violin concerto with passion and precision at the orchestra's final concert last spring. Loui is now a graduate student in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.</p><p>Loui and Davidson arrived at Duke the same year, 1999. She had played in youth ensembles in her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, and so it was only natural that she join the orchestra. The rapport with Davidson was immediate, she recalls. "He was an excellent musician to work with, and very approachable."</p><p>Davidson was also accustomed to dealing with professional musicians and conservatory students. He remembers when he came to audition for the job at Duke. He arrived in the hall punctually at 7:00, the orchestra's scheduled rehearsal time. "There was one person there with a violin case. Not till 7:30 were there enough people there to rehearse. You start on time. I couldn't believe it." It was one of the first things he changed when he arrived at Duke and was emblematic of other changes to come.</p><p>When Davidson took over as the Duke Symphony's conductor, he faced a more essential challenge than tardiness. The orchestra was made up primarily of freshmen. As students got more involved in their college activities, many became unwilling to commit the necessary time and energy and drifted away. Loui was among them. "I thought I was too busy," she says. She dropped out in her sophomore year, but Davidson kept up with her. He would run into her on campus and ask, "Why aren't you playing?" He'd nag her gently--"in a nice way," Loui says. Her junior year, she came back.</p><p>She returned to a different ensemble. Her freshman year, she recalls, they had taken on only easy stuff: Bach's "Air on a G String," things like that. By the time Loui returned, Davidson had led his student musicians on to more demanding things. By last spring, the easy stuff was a distant memory. "My senior year, I told the freshmen we had played Bach's 'Air on a G String,' " Loui says. "They couldn't believe it."</p><p>Ian Han, now a junior, also remembers being disappointed in the orchestra when he first arrived at Duke. A violinist since early childhood, Han began playing in youth symphonies in his native Cincinnati in the fifth grade. The orchestra at Duke seemed a little amateurish, he says. The lack of upperclassmen--and thus, players who had a history with the ensemble--limited what it could accomplish.</p><p>But Han says he was impressed with Davidson. The directors he had encountered in youth symphonies didn't have Davidson's commitment. "A lot of youth directors are trying to advance themselves in their careers," Han observes. For many, directing a youth symphony is merely a stepping-stone. "Professor Davidson is very passionate about what he's doing." He encourages his players to understand the music at a deeper level. Under his tutelage, "my appreciation for music has increased," Han says. "He's not a disciplinarian, but he's very serious about what he's doing. People respect that."</p><p>Students responded to the combination of rigor and warmth. "He knew everybody's name, unlike every other conductor I've known," says Loui. The orchestra's growing reputation began attracting more accomplished players. At first, Davidson had to take almost everyone who showed up. For concerts, he nearly always had to bolster the student musicians with professionals from the outside, particularly for obscure instruments like bassoon and harp.</p><p>Those days are gone. Now, at the beginning of the year, there are usually a few flutes that don't make the cut, and even for the uncommon instruments, Davidson says he finds he can be picky. "Last year I actually did turn down a couple of bassoons, which was a really rare thing to happen, and a couple of oboes."</p><p>Han says he has been pleasantly surprised at the quick progress of the orchestra. He notes that for its first concert this fall, the ensemble took on the Bruckner Fourth Symphony, a massive work that might scare even a much more accomplished ensemble.</p><p>The Bruckner, in fact, was a signal of sorts. It said: This orchestra has grown up. One person who picked up the signal was local music critic Roy Dicks. As a regular reviewer for the Raleigh News & Observer, Dicks hadn't paid much attention to the area's college orchestras; his time was taken up with the North Carolina Symphony and other professional ensembles, he says. He had seen a few concerts at Duke over the years, "but they were just doing the standard, easier things, not very challenging, not very interesting."</p><table width="24%" border="0" cellspacing="11" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_davi021904074repro.jpg" alt="Making overtures: the maestro at work " width="300" height="448" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">Making overtures: the maestro at work. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Les Todd</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center" height="41"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"><p class="pulloutcredit"> </p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Then Dicks heard that the symphony was about to perform the Bruckner Fourth. "I said, 'I gotta see this,'" he recalls. As it turned out, Dicks says, he was impressed with the orchestra's performance, but not only for the Bruckner. The first part of the program, about forty-five minutes of music, included some dense Schubert and Mozart pieces that could never be described as light fare; then the audience came back for the Bruckner--all sixty-five minutes of it. "It was quite a heavy program," Dicks recalls. The audience members "probably didn't know what they were getting into." But the orchestra held their attention. "It was quite a wonderful thing to see," he says.</p><p>Dicks' subsequent review for the website Classical Voice of North Carolina went further: "The players gave evidence of extensive rehearsal as they precisely responded to Davidson's every cue, whether building a well- modulated climax or making a sharp cutoff," he wrote. "It was a pleasure to watch Davidson's body language reflect the many moods of the music, never just for show but always deeply rooted in the glories of the score."</p><p>"I think Davidson's made a tremendous impact," says Tonu Kalam, who conducts the student orchestra at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The numbers tell the story." The symphony now attracts between seventy-five and eighty-five players every year. "When he came, it was down to about forty," Kalam says. "He's done a good job providing the students with the kind of experience that is meaningful."</p><p>Perhaps that's because Davidson sees himself primarily as a teacher. Unlike a lot of serious musicians, he did not grow up in a musical family; his teachers were his key to the world of music. Davidson's father was a homicide detective for the city of Cleveland; his mother was a homemaker. "Everyone assumed I was going to be a lawyer," he says. But a teacher at the small private high school he attended offered him free cello lessons, and the idea of a future in law was replaced with a new obsession. "Once I started getting into music, nothing else mattered," Davidson says.</p><p>But he had started late, and, without the years of childhood lessons and practice, his chances of making it as a performer were slim. Then another avenue opened up. When he was in the eleventh grade, he showed up for a rehearsal one day only to learn that the music teacher was absent. "Several of my classmates sort of encouraged me to take over the rehearsal, and it went very well," he recalls.</p><p>"I found I could get music from other people. I had a sort of epiphany--this was something I could do."</p><p>Davidson earned his bachelor's in music in a joint program at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Case Western Reserve University. By the time he graduated, he was conducting several community orchestras. "I never had the angst of looking for a job," he says. "I went right into conducting various groups, and I started entering competitions."</p><p>He conducted several community orchestras, along with the Cleveland Institute's youth orchestra. He then went to Washington State, to lead the Tacoma Youth Symphony. He arrived to find two orchestras that gave three joint concerts a year; about 150 students participated. By the time he left, there were five orchestras and more than 500 students. "We had a summer music festival that I founded. We had a chamber music program, a wind training program, and a Bach festival."</p><p>From Tacoma, he joined the music faculty at the University of Akron and began conducting the university's student symphony orchestra, which had, in his words, "fallen on hard times." He managed to resuscitate that orchestra while also finding time to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra's youth orchestra at Severance Hall. By the time the Duke position became available, in the spring of 1999, he was associate conductor of the Wichita Symphony in Kansas and a professor at Wichita State University, and he had begun to enjoy a reputation as a rebuilder of orchestras.</p><p>But even for a seasoned fixer, there were difficulties at first. "It was frustrating in the early days when there were some very trying rehearsals," he told Dicks, the News & Observer's music critic, in an interview. "Basketball season would come around, and people would just start disappearing because that was the accepted norm. You just have to change the ethos of the situation and that takes time."</p><p>Duke was willing to give him that time, and Davidson has surpassed its expectations, according to observers in the music community. Musicology professor Bryan Gilliam was on the search committee that hired him, and told Dicks last year that Davidson was the first choice for the job. Even so, he was amazed at what the new conductor accomplished. "If someone had told me five years ago that our orchestra would be playing Bruckner, I would have questioned his sanity," he said in the interview.</p><p>Davidson doesn't limit his mission to the student musicians he can push into the stratosphere. He's also passionate about the basic missionary work of his profession. A case in point is the freshman seminar he designed for students who arrive at Duke with no musical background at all. Since he began offering the program in 2001, he's had to turn students away.</p><table width="314" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="300"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 577px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_davi021904092repro.jpg" alt="He stands before his small class, demonstrating the difference between the right-angled precision of the classical and Baroque periods and the more sensual meandering of Gershwin, with its bent, blue notes." width="577" height="246" border="0" /><p class="caption-text">He stands before his small class, demonstrating the difference between the right-angled precision of the classical and Baroque periods and the more sensual meandering of Gershwin, with its bent, blue notes. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Les Todd</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>At a meeting of the class last semester, in a small classroom in the music building, Davidson starts with the basics. Music, he tells the dozen or so students slouched in a semicircle around him, has a vocabulary like any other discipline. Starting and stopping tapes and occasionally jumping up and using the keyboard in the piano in the corner, he plays snippets of Gershwin's "Summertime," Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," Haydn's "Surprise Symphony"--sort of a Top-Forty classical hits.</p><p>Unlike his symphony players, some of the students don't even recognize these classical warhorses. The cream of American high-school graduates lack the musical equivalent of the ABCs. Unlike most professors, Davidson has to start from zero. "I'm not shocked, because I've been doing it too long," he says. "I think with a lot of these kids, they are well-rounded but not as well-rounded as one might think."</p><p>He blames the skewed priorities of American schools. "The whole mechanism now is almost being built to exclude what many people regard as a peripheral activity, as opposed to the core, serious curriculum," he says. "It seems to me that if the school officials would realize that this is a fundamental activity, we would be turning out a lot more engaged kids." Fortunately, for Duke students, Davidson provides an opportunity to fill this gap in their education, and he attacks the task with enthusiasm and verve.</p><p>Like many good teachers, Davidson is just a bit of a ham. He stands before his small class, demonstrating the difference between the right-angled precision of the classical and Baroque periods and the more sensual meandering of Gershwin, with its bent, blue notes. His body mimics his words, standing erect, then swaying woozily as he wilts slowly down into his chair.</p><p>Then he's asking the students to beat out tempos on their desktops. They hesitate, gripped by shyness. "Aw, c'mon," he urges, "You do all these crazy dances." He makes an awkward attempt at an adolescent boogie, and the kids have to giggle. In no time, he has them all conducting.</p><p>It takes different skills to engage those with musical backgrounds and phenomenal talent--like Loui and Han--and the results are often fleeting. There's the rub. Davidson teaches a set of skills that demand enormous commitment to a group of students with high expectations for their futures, including remuneration. Han, a biology major, expects to go on to medical school. He considered a career in music "only briefly, in high school," he says. "It's a tougher road than even medicine," he says. The aspiring professional musician puts in more time, faces stronger competition, and receives a fraction of the pay that an M.D. does.</p><p>Loui, the talented violinist now pursuing graduate work in psychology at Berkeley, says she thought about music as a career, but felt that she had not made the required commitment early enough in her life. "I didn't start practicing five hours a day until college," she says. Most violinists "started practicing five hours a day when they were four."</p><p>Her experience at the Aspen Music Festival also figured in her decision. "I met lots of little kids there who were ten years old. They were already practicing five hours a day and were probably better than me."</p><p>So she decided to pursue psychology. "At least there were no ten-year-old psychologist prodigies," she says wryly.</p><p>But music is still a big part of Loui's life. She's preparing to audition for the U.C. Berkeley Symphony, she's playing chamber music, and she's taken up the electric violin.</p><p>"There are all sorts of ways to have music in your life," Davidson acknowledges. Like Loui, many of his students will continue to play in community orchestras and other ensembles for the rest of their lives. And even if they don't play, he says, they'll be listening. After all, he says, "A lot of the audience for classical music is generated from students who have come into contact with it in a significant way through playing an instrument. Part of the joy of it is the fact that they do it because they want to, and they want to maintain music as a part of their lives."</p><p>That, he says, is more than enough.</p><p class="byline"><em>Rodell, editorial page editor of the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is a former columnist and arts critic for the News & Observer.</em></p><span class="text"></span></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/lg_davi021904075repro.jpg" width="627" height="265" alt="Photo: Les Todd" /></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/susanna-rodell" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Susanna Rodell</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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">Conductor Henry Davidson</div></div></section> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501428 at https://alumni.duke.edu Biotechnology Boot Camp https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/biotechnology-boot-camp <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"><p class="articletitle">Peter Jensen doesn't pretend to be a biotech expert. Although he works for a major pharmaceutical firm, Merck & Co., Inc., in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, Jensen is an electrical engineer by training. So, when he became a procurement manager in charge of buying lab supplies and drug materials for Merck in early 2003, he knew he was in trouble. "I was a fish out of water," he says.</p><p>Then Jensen heard about Duke's Biotechnology for Business program, an intensive five-day seminar offered every spring. The seminar, which organizers bill as the Rolls Royce of science training programs for business professionals, is designed to teach fundamental scientific and technical concepts to nonscientists. Intrigued by the idea, Jensen signed up and flew to Durham last May.</p><p>A week later, tired but still enthusiastic, Jensen drove off to RDU airport a satisfied customer. After day upon twelve-hour day of rigorous classes and labs on such topics as genetics, molecular biology, pharmacology, chemistry, bioengineering, the human genome project, and bioinformatics, he felt as if he could finally understand and appreciate the science behind the life-sciences business. The true test came at the airport as he waited for his flight back to New Jersey. Opening a biotech trade magazine that he had never been able to decipher before, he found that it actually made sense to him now.</p><p>"I knew what they were talking about," he says, still somewhat astounded. "It was amazing the difference that five days make. When I read it before, it was so far removed from my knowledge that I couldn't make heads or tails of most of it."</p><p>Jensen is one of hundreds of midcareer business types who have taken the Biotechnology for Business course since Duke started offering it in 1994. Some forty professionals, or their companies, shell out up to $4,600 a pop each May for the little-known but highly acclaimed program, one of the few of its kind in the world. (This year's program is slated for May 2-6.) The eclectic list of participants typically includes both the expected--biotech and pharmaceutical managers--and some surprises: financial officers, venture capitalists, patent attorneys, private investors, headhunters, and government officials. They come from around the globe: Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Scandinavia, and The Netherlands. "We've had participants from every continent except Antarctica," says Michael C. Pirrung, a chemistry professor at Duke who founded the biotech program ten years ago and still runs it.</p><p>"We thought we would get a lot of CEOs and CFOs from biotech companies, but rarely do we get those executives anymore," says Pirrung. "Most biotech executives have biotech backgrounds these days. So, now we get attorneys who don't have science backgrounds or investment bankers or industry analysts. We also get a lot of people from marketing departments."</p><p>"I think a lot of people are going there to learn enough about the science to connect the dots to commercial applications," says Curt Brewer, a Raleigh business lawyer with no science background, whose firm, Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman LLP, has started working with biotechnology start-ups. Peggy Low, senior vice president of technology for the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, decided to come after watching the Piedmont Triad's pool of life-science firms steadily grow to nearly fifty over the past few years. She thinks the course will give her group a leg up in efforts to entice biotech firms to the Triad and foster a more supportive environment for the companies already there.</p><p>"I really felt I needed a better understanding of what they did," says Low, who has a liberal-arts background and an M.B.A., but little science training. "If I can talk the language, I can better communicate with them and better recruit them."</p><p>As the program participants quickly discover, learning to talk the language is no cakewalk. On an average day, the Biotechnology for Business program consists of six or seven hour-long lectures at the Sanford Institute, plus lab experiments, technology demonstrations, and discussion groups. Program participants also receive custom-made course texts the size of small phone books, detailing all of the material covered in the lectures.</p><p>In the classroom, a team of seven instructors led by Pirrung set a grueling pace. On the first full day, the emphasis is heavily on cell biology and genetics. Haifan Lin, an associate professor of cell biology at Duke Medical Center, and Theresa O'Halloran, an assistant biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Duke instructor, take turns teaching about such weighty concepts as the four basic types of gene mutations and nucleotides and the transcription of DNA.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_tech4690347repro.jpg" alt="Laboring in the lab" width="320" height="478" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"> Laboring in the lab. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Photo: Les Todd</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>"It was morning to night," Jensen says. "There was no chance to get bored. I was calling it 'Bio Boot Camp.' "</p><p>He wasn't the only one. Even experienced biotech professionals sometimes find the sheer volume of information and brisk pace a bit overwhelming. "It's very intense," says Neal Lambert, associate director of marketing, Asia-Pacific region, for Amgen. "Come in and be prepared to be a sponge."</p><p>In fact, participants who think they might get to enjoy a leisurely tour of the flowering Duke campus, a round or two of golf, or maybe just a short nap, usually find their hopes dashed. Instead, like other overworked graduate students, they troop from lecture to lab to discussion, with breaks mainly for coffee or food. The big difference is, these Duke graduate students get to eat sumptuous meals and stay at the luxurious Washington Duke Inn.</p><p>The fourth and last full day of the course, which focuses on stem cells, pharmacology, and trauma and infection, is particularly demanding. By this time, several are shaking their heads wearily, only half-joking when they complain that they have no more room in their brains for any more information. "Overall, it stretched me and almost broke me," quips Bill Schultz, the head of an executive search firm in Madison, Wisconsin. "All my friends say, 'You did what?' "</p><p>Schultz, a self-styled "business administrative guy" never attracted to the life sciences before, went to college before the first recombinant DNA molecule was discovered in 1973. But now, after many years in the computer software business, he's turning to biotech because he sees the same promise there that he once saw in the software field.</p><p>Many participants see the same promise. Intense and highly motivated to get their money's worth in a short time, they often give as good they get. In a horseshoe-shaped classroom at the Sanford Institute one morning last May, students peppered instructor Theresa O'Halloran with questions about DNA structure, interrupted her with comments, and corrected her when she occasionally tripped up on amino-acid names and terms. "Just checking," she said, smiling, when caught once.</p><p>The classroom exchanges also provide some lighter moments as students and instructors occasionally banter over the course material. In one session last May, program participants cracked up as Lin, the cell-biology professor, explained that the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is only about 1 percent, or just ten times the 0.1 percent difference between two people. "There are funny arguments one could make about this," he said, his eyes twinkling. "If there are twenty people on line and there is a 0.1 percent difference between them, the first and last ones we could call chimpanzees."</p><p>The reasons that participants come to the Duke biotechnology program are wide ranging. As might be expected, many, like Peter Jensen from Merck, come to advance their careers and strengthen their companies by boosting their knowledge of core biotech concepts. Whether they have science backgrounds or not, they seek to beef up their scientific and technical expertise so they can earn promotions, swing deals, purchase materials, market products, recruit customers, and generally make more money for their firms.</p><p>"It's going to be helpful in dealing with my clients--senior executives at pharmaceutical and biotech companies," says Joe Melvin, a senior engagement manager at Strategic Decisions Group, a management-consulting firm in Menlo Park, California. "This'll give me a credibility edge. I'll be able to ask more intelligent questions and understand their problems."</p><p>Career advancement and company enhancement are not the whole story, though. Some participants hunger to enter the burgeoning life-sciences industry, with its huge potential for growth and profits. Convinced that biotech will be to the economy in the twenty-first century what information technology was at the end of the twentieth, they aim to hitch a ride, even if they haven't cracked open a biology textbook or lit a Bunsen burner since high school.</p><div><table width="314" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="300"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050604/images/lg_biotech76a.jpg" alt="Scientist at work" width="320" height="481" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;"> Photo: Les Todd</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>Take Timothy Jones, a venture capitalist who runs his own investment firm in Atlanta and could have easily captured the 2003 class award for best schmoozer, if there was such an award. A bicoastal kind of guy who first made his mark in IT and computer software in Silicon Valley, Jones is now seeking to pour capital into the next life-sciences stars because that's where "the smart money" from such computer industry gurus as Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison seems to be heading.</p><p>"For me, the biggest reason was to learn the 'space,' " says Jones, referring to the biotech field in business argot. "You could ask all the geeky questions you wanted." Believe it or not, he adds, he focused so much on learning that "in some ways, I felt I didn't do enough networking."</p><p>Then there are what Pirrung calls "the wild-card people," biotech believers who, even if they have no clue how the scientific knowledge might help them professionally, can't resist signing up for the program. They take the course purely out of their love of the science and their conviction that biotech will be the biggest thing since electricity, or at least the microwave oven. In 2002, he recalls, it was a husband-and-wife team of law professors from the University of Texas at Austin; a year or two earlier, it was the rich, private investor from Hawaii.</p><p>The latest prime example is Jess Wetsel, the head of a sizable, family-run landscape-architecture and maintenance firm in Dallas. Wetsel, who holds a bachelor's in philosophy and an M.B.A., notes that he "stayed a long way away from the science buildings on campus" while attending college and graduate school. Yet, even though he has no intention of switching careers, Wetsel enlisted in last year's course because he passionately believes that biotech developments will transform society over the next few decades.</p><p>"Biology trumps all," he says. "This is an area I believe will fundamentally change our world, like the microprocessor and the steam engine. It's just important and exciting and gee-whiz stuff."</p><p>Despite the course's grinding nature, participants usually rave about it to friends and recommend it highly to colleagues. Such high praise insures a steady stream of new midcareer professionals to the Duke campus every year. In fact, companies and organizations frequently send a second, third, or even fourth generation of staff members to the program. Lambert, who attended with three of his colleagues last May, says Amgen officials have been flocking to the program ever since the company's chief financial officer participated one year and came back rhapsodizing about it.</p><p>Even in last spring's shaky economy, the course attracted a near sellout crowd of thirty-eight participants. This year's program was filled by March 1, a month and a half before the deadline for applications. "I'm confident now that our program has legs," Pirrung says. "I think there's still a tremendous amount of people who need it."</p><p>Like several others interviewed, Melvin says he'd "gladly come back for Biotech for Business II. It wasn't for the faint of heart. But it was exactly what I was looking for."</p><p class="byline"><em>--Breznick is a veteran business writer and editor based in Raleigh.</em></p></div><div> </div><span class="text"></span></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/lg_tech4690315repro.jpg" width="620" height="926" alt="Learning to talk the language is no cakewalk: executives confront a &quot;polymerase chain reaction and gel electrophoresis&quot; experiment. Photo: Les Todd" /></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/alan-breznick" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alan Breznick</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</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">Whether for start-ups or a leg up, an intensive, twelve-hours-a-day, five-day program teaches fundamental scientific and technical concepts to nonscientists. </div></div></section> Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501426 at https://alumni.duke.edu Ending Land's End's License https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/ending-lands-ends-license <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="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><p class="articletitle">Duke has suspended renewal of its trademark license contract with Lands' End, citing complaints about labor practices at an apparel factory in El Salvador that produces clothing bearing Duke trademarks.</p><p>Jim Wilkerson, the university's director of trademark licensing and stores operations, notified the Dodgeville, Wisconsin, clothier of the decision in a March 1 letter. "The most serious of allegations involves the 'blacklisting' of workers who are perceived to, or have actual ties to unions," Wilkerson wrote. Information provided by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and Fair Labor Association (FLA)--two national organizations that assist campuses in monitoring the labor practices of manufacturers--supports these complaints about the Primo S.A. de C.V. (Primo) factory.</p><p>In 1997, Duke was the first university in the U.S. to adopt a code of conduct that requires licensees to agree to independent monitoring of factory working conditions. More than 100 colleges and universities now belong to one or, as in Duke's case, both of the organizations.</p><p>"One of the cornerstones of Duke's Code of Conduct for manufacturers is the requirement that the right of freedom of association and collective bargaining be upheld, and that no discriminatory or retaliatory actions are taken against workers who express an interest in or choose to exercise this right," Wilkerson stated in his letter. "[T]hus far, remediation of these issues by Lands' End has not been timely or adequate.... Despite the ongoing efforts of the WRC and FLA over the past year, progress has not occurred."</p><p>Wilkerson says that Duke values its relationship with the company and would consider renewing the trademark license, but only after a remediation plan acceptable to the WRC and FLA is in place. Both organizations have recommended that Lands' End provide orders to another factory, Just Garments, which employs a number of workers denied employment by Primo.</p><p>"The central issue in this case is the need to remediate the harm that was done to workers who were inappropriately denied employment at the Primo factory," Wilkerson wrote in his letter. "To date, this has not occurred."</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></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="2004-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, June 1, 2004</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/may-jun-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Tue, 01 Jun 2004 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501423 at https://alumni.duke.edu