Duke - Jan - Feb 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/jan-feb-2004 en Big, Bold, “Buck” https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/big-bold-buck <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>&nbsp;</p> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Durden: writing the book on J.B." src="/issues/010204/images/lg_qa3.jpg" style="height:454px; width:300px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Durden: writing the book on J.B.&nbsp;Les Todd.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>James Buchanan Duke built an industrial empire, powered the Piedmont, and endowed a university. He was a big man with big ideas, and he invested heavily in them. Robert Durden, emeritus professor of history, talks about “Buck” Duke's life and ambitions in <em>Bold Entrepreneur: A Life of James B. Duke.</em></strong></p> <p><strong>You have written four books on the Duke family. Why this one now?</strong></p> <p>I came to realize that I had not done full justice to James B. Duke in The Dukes of Durham. I learned more about him when I wrote the history of the endowment [Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas: The Duke Endowment (1924-1994)] and even more when I wrote the history of the Duke Power Company [Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Duke Power Company (1904-1997)]. So that suggested to me that there were angles to him that I had not really developed.</p> <p>I was interested in the Duke family's relationship to the university, but Buck (I'll call him Buck since he's dead. People called him Mr. Duke throughout his life. It was a much more formal time, you know.) only becomes involved in Trinity College during the last decade of his life. In order to keep the family focus, I had to skimp on the most interesting moments in his life, things that didn't unfold in Durham and thus shifted the focus, like the formation of the British-American Tobacco Company.</p> <p><strong>We learn much about Duke's professional success, but do we know what he was like on a personal level?</strong></p> <p>Not a whole lot is known about Buck Duke's personal life. And actually, one thing that rather struck me was something I never came across. I never found any evidence of his exploding in anger. If he had a temper, he didn't show it. He seems to have been an easygoing, albeit hard-driving, person, and he expected those who worked with him to be the same. We do know that he was very soft-spoken and that he shunned personal publicity. He kept as low a personal profile as possible. I think he was a deeply religious person, like his father, but he didn't flash it; he wasn't flamboyant about it. He wasn't a speechmaker.</p> <p><strong>Duke built his empire on tobacco. Did he smoke it?</strong></p> <p>He didn't smoke cigarettes, just cigars--ironically, the one product he never got control of, since cigars were made by so many small units and didn't lend themselves to the assembly-line process of manufacturing.</p> <p><strong>Duke made his first bold move in 1885 by entering into a deal with Charles Bonsack, inventor of the Bonsack cigarette-rolling machine. What was the significance of the deal for James B. Duke's future success?</strong></p> <p>It was a gamble because the older cigarette producers in Richmond took the view that cigarette smokers would only smoke hand-rolled cigarettes. There was growing cigarette consumption at the time, but they were all hand-rolled, as they had been in Europe. And, as a matter of fact, the early hand-rollers tended to be immigrants, most of them from Eastern Europe. So the Richmond crowd insisted that the American cigarette smokers preferred these custom-made cigarettes. Well, Buck decides that if you could get a cigarette machine that worked, it would be worth a try. He tells Mr. Bonsack, "We'll use your machine, we'll give it a full test, we'll gamble that American smokers will buy the machine-made cigarettes, and in exchange we would like a special rate." And that's exactly what happens.</p> <p><strong>After building--and then, by order of the Supreme Court, dismantling--the American Tobacco Company, Duke put his money in hydroelectricity. Why did he make that investment?</strong></p> <p>Duke was a firm believer in industrialization. He was convinced that it was the only path to a "New South," although he never used that term. At the time, however, hydroelectricity was a new industry. It only got started in the 1890s and a lot of people were scared to death of it. When Buck approached mill owners about powering their mills they'd say, "No way! We're not going to bring electricity in here and kill our workers!" But Duke saw the potential it had to help industry and provide jobs.</p> <p>At one point, I don't know exactly when, he came to realize that he was never going to make as much money out of electricity as he did out of tobacco. But he stuck with it, because I don't think that at that point making money was what he really cared about. He saw hydroelectric power as the best way to encourage textile manufacturing and as an escape route from poverty. The South had been so poor for so long after the Civil War, and then textile manufacturing becomes this booming thing. So Buck figured, you already have the mills. You just need to power them. So he built his own mills and did exactly that.</p> <p><strong>You mention an "unfortunate line" in the indenture for The Duke Endowment that led many to misinterpret Duke's motives in giving his money to the university. What was that precisely?</strong></p> <p>This is sort of a tricky technical point. Most people, possibly including Buck Duke, didn't fully understand what [then-President of Trinity College William Preston] Few wanted to do. He talked about organizing a great national university. He wanted to organize it around Trinity College and to have a four-year, first-rate medical school, a law school, a divinity school, and, if the funds were available, a business school. But he wanted to keep Trinity College at the center of it. So really Dr. Few was proposing a new institution.</p> <p>And it was Dr. Few who said, in 1921, if we could ever build this national university (and Buck Duke liked to think big, so Few was shrewd in suggesting an ambitious project; Buck wouldn't have been interested in some local regional college), then we ought to give it a distinctive name. Few said, "There's already a Trinity in San Antonio and there are others on the East Coast and all over the English-speaking world. I think we ought to name it Duke University." Well, the lawyer who drew up the indenture inserts this totally unnecessary phrase that if Trinity changes its name to Duke University, Buck Duke would give $6 million to the college.</p> <p>That was totally uncalled for. In the first place, Buck Duke's going to come up with a hell of a lot more than $6 million. He ends up giving about $19 million to rebuild the old Trinity Campus and to build from scratch the Gothic buildings on West Campus and to buy, to start with, around 5,000 acres of Duke Forest. Furthermore, he's going to provide annual support for this new institution from The Duke Endowment. But the newspapers pick up this line and write headlines like "If Trinity Changes Name to Duke It Gets $6 Million."</p> <p>Well, the name change misses the point. It's more than that. It's a new institution. But that phrase was pulled out of the indenture and the story got started that Buck Duke tried to bribe a college to name itself after him. And then the story gets going that Buck Duke first offered his money to Princeton and then later Yale, and God knows how many institutions have come up with variations on this story. And it's false. I mean totally false. Generations of Duke students and faculty repeated it. And the truth never quite catches up with error when the error is amusing.</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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/patrick-adams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Patrick Adams</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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501639 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/big-bold-buck#comments In Media Res https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/media-res <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 height="71"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="100%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><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/010204/images/lg_mediafpo.jpg" alt="Placing Duke in the Center of the News" width="580" height="342" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Chris Hildreth.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td><p class="articletitle">Alex Roland is hearing something odd. "So you're here to talk about Colombia?" says a disembodied voice in his ear. "It's our own secret war, isn't it?"</p><p>"Well, actually I'm here to talk about Columbia the space shuttle, not Colombia the country," Roland responds, his voice carried through a clip-on microphone, his bemused expression multiplied across a bank of television monitors.</p><table width="250" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2" align="right" bgcolor="#999999"><tbody><tr><td class="brwntextpullout" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="22%"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span class="tenpxtext"><a href="media-mentions1.html"><img src="/issues/010204/images/media-mentions.gif" alt="Media Mentions" width="87" height="77" border="1" /></a></span><font color="#336633"></font></font></td><td class="brwntextpullout" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="78%"><a href="media-mentions1.html">Media<br /> Mentions</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Roland is in a TV studio in the basement of the Bryan Center. It's the second day of classes for the fall semester, and the day that a commission led by Admiral Hal Gehman has released its findings on last winter's space-shuttle disaster. Roland Ph.D. '74, a former NASA historian and now professor of history at Duke, gained notoriety when he wrote an eleven-page article for Discover magazine titled "Triumph or Turkey?" that called the shuttle program wasteful, misdirected, and unmanageable. The article appeared two months before the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. Today, Roland has been bombarded by reporters' queries; he's hardly had time to absorb the six-inch Gehman report, which he's sampling in quick glances as airtime approaches.</p><p>The main decorative element in the studio is a blue screen with repeated representations of the university shield. But there are more functional touches--air-conditioning that actually quiets down, rather than whooshing, as it comes on, and facing walls angled so that sound waves won't bounce around. In its self-contained subterranean spot, the studio is a big step up from its predecessor in the Mary Duke Biddle Building, created in the early 1980s to serve the audio-editing needs of the music department.</p><p>Roland jokingly tells a technician to "make me beautiful," and that pretty much is the aim of a rapid-fire exchange between the Duke studio and PBS' NewsHour in Washington: Straighten the necktie. Tighten the shot in the camera frame. Swivel the chair so that he won't seem to lean or slouch. Adjust the color balance--the monitors have him looking a little gray. "Let's dust him up," says Scott Wells, manager of studio operations. A technician pats Roland's bald spot with talcum powder.</p><p>A taped interview with Admiral Gehman leads off the NewsHour, followed by a three-way conversation with host Ray Suarez, Roland, and Donna Shirley, former manager of NASA's Mars exploration program. Roland makes the point that the advice of the Challenger commission was largely ignored. He adds that the shuttle is a complex machine that, unrealistically and now tragically, has been expected to meet conflicting demands. Wrapping up the interview, he questions whether NASA can fix itself without external oversight and says the time is ripe for a broader national conversation: "Since the end of the Apollo program, we've continued to have a manned space-flight program but no avowed, explicit national policy of why we're sending people into space."</p><p>As he's untethered from the mike, Roland notes his surprise at the relatively small amount of disagreement between him and Shirley, who did not toe the NASA party line. "I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get a fight out of that."</p><p>If he hasn't quite achieved media-star status, Roland is representative of a rapidly growing presence in the media of Duke faculty experts. You see them on CNN, commenting on civil rights in terrorism-wary America. You read them in The New York Times, discussing mental health on Indian reservations. You hear them on NPR, talking about restoring the wetlands of Iraq.</p><p>This burgeoning media presence presumably adds to Duke's name recognition. But the frequent mention of Duke by the media "is important on its own terms," says David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications. "Duke has insight to help inform the public debate on issues ranging from Iraq to Enron," he says. "Of course, as we engage this debate, audiences learn what we actually do here at Duke. Whether it's a student or faculty member thinking of coming here, a donor, a journalist, or someone else, they'll see for themselves the scholarship and activity that makes Duke so exciting."</p><p>The dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment, William H. Schlesinger, is pretty excited about media contact. Last spring he wrote in the school's magazine that "academics should make every effort to translate their findings, and their best interpretation of the state of the science, so that the public can understand it.... Indeed, when taxpayer money has supported our research investigations, one can argue that we have the responsibility to go public with our findings." As one component of his school's annual review of faculty members, Schlesinger now asks them to document their efforts in "public outreach, education, and media." For his part, Schlesinger--who has contributed op-ed columns on the thinning ozone layer, higher mercury concentrations in fish, the case for higher gasoline prices, and the ties between global warming and exotic diseases--says that one of the reasons he sought out the deanship was the opportunity it presented to bring science before the public.</p><p>Scott Silliman, a veteran of everything from the call-in shows on National Public Radio to the op-ed pages of national newspapers, says he considers media work an extension of his teaching. "In my area--national security and national-security law--I am painfully aware that there is a lot of ignorance out there. A lot of folks don't really understand the issues. That's particularly true with the 'war on terrorism' and what we're doing at Guant·namo Bay. So I take every opportunity that I can to be interviewed, as long as I feel that the interview is going to help further public knowledge."</p><p>Through his own media appearances, a law-school colleague, Michael Byers, is working to further public knowledge across borders. On a warm fall morning, Byers, who is also director of Canadian studies at Duke, is fighting off sleepiness as he enters a less imposing space than the Bryan Center, a small radio studio alongside the News and Communications office. He's there for an appearance on The Current, a current-events program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Byers, dressed in shorts, is just back from some avid lap swimming--meant to help clear his mind and collect his thoughts, he says. He puts on earphones, sits down in front of a microphone, and jots down some talking points.</p><p>At 8:20, Cabell Smith, radio and TV manager for News and Communications, is still working out the correct signal-synchronizing configuration. "I like to live dangerously," he says. At 8:30 on the dot, the host, Anna Maria Tremonti, introduces the program with a teaser about "Cut Piece," a Yoko Ono show in which the artist cuts her clothing into pieces and asks spectators to send the clips to loved ones. Then she brings on Byers to discuss the political evolution of Paul Martin, the current finance minister for Canada, who is about to take the helm of the federal Liberal Party and, presumably, the office of prime minister. How important is the personal chemistry between the leaders of the two nations? Byers argues that economics trumps chemistry: The financial ties between the U.S. and Canada are "unmatched anywhere else in the world."</p><p>"The trick," Byers observes afterwards, "is to pretend you're just talking to one person. I just went live in front of one or two million people, including my parents and my grandmother."</p><p>Every day Duke professors are reaching readers and listeners in the millions. This enviable track record of purposeful publicity points not just to communications technology but also to institutional trajectory. "The reality is that Duke is now widely recognized as one of the great universities of the world," says John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. "That means that when there is good news about Duke, we are likely to get lots of attention. When there is bad news about Duke, we are likely, again, to get lots of attention."</p><p>Part of Duke's "maturing process," as he puts it, has been "coming to grips with our newfound prominence. One of the things I've so admired about this place over time is how it's learned to be comfortable with that. Like everybody else, we don't want our dirty laundry airing on news pages. That's a cost that comes with being prominent. And on balance, I don't see it as a big problem, because, on the other hand, there is so much positive being written about our faculty and students all the time."</p><p>Duke's frequency in the media reflects the faculty's research agenda as much as it reflects the university's luster. In mid-October came word that a research team led by Miguel Nicolelis, a Duke professor of neurobiology, had taught rhesus monkeys to consciously control the movement of a robot arm, using only signals from their brains and visual feedback. The Washington Post called the findings "science fiction-like" and added that "the technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal-cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others today do with their hands."</p><p>Duke officials knew that the Nicolelis story was big--"the single most important research story to come out of Duke," according to Dennis Meredith, who specializes in science and technology research for the News and Communications office. An advance news release was sent out selectively so that the most important and influential science reporters could reach Nicolelis in advance of the media maelstrom. Some 700 media representatives, identified by Duke Medical Center's communications office as wanting Duke-related material, later received the release. A series of video segments offered to television stations featured Nicolelis summarizing the research, a colleague discussing its implications, scenes of paralyzed patients undergoing rehabilitation, and an explanatory animation. Sound bites were posted on Duke's website so that radio stations could download descriptions from Nicolelis and blend them into their own broadcasts. And the news was fed to other websites, notably EurekAlert!, which reaches 4,500 science journalists, about half of them from outside the United States. The result was "viral," as Meredith puts it. "A really good story like this begins the process of marketing itself, spreading itself."</p><p>In a single afternoon, Nicolelis did three back-to-back radio interviews in the Duke radio studio, with Public Radio International, KCBS in San Francisco, and the BBC World Service. The New York Times cited the research over two consecutive days. Within hours of its release--timed to coincide with publication in The Public Library of Science, a new scientific journal that makes articles available free of charge--the story straddled the world. It appeared in New Scientist and The Scotsman in the United Kingdom, Independent Online in South Africa, CBC News and The Toronto Sun in Canada, the Hindustan Times in India, the China Daily, the New Zealand Herald, Al Jazeera, and CNN International, along with hundreds of newspapers and television and radio stations in this country.</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><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/010204/images/lg_SusanAlberts.jpg" alt="This is CNN: zoologist Alberts discusses baboons as good fathers " width="580" height="232" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>This is CNN: zoologist Alberts discusses baboons as good fathers.<span style="text-align: -webkit-right;"> Jim Wallace.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Even Comedy Central's The Daily Show found the idea of monkeys manipulating robot arms irresistible. On the mock news broadcast, comedian Lewis Black suggested that it signaled the end of human civilization: "We can defeat the monkeys. We can defeat the robots. But not at the same time!"</p><p>David Jarmul of News and Communications says the university shouldn't be driven by publicity for publicity's sake. "Everything that goes on in the communications realm should have a larger strategic purpose. We should be promoting the values of the university, communicating what Duke stands for as an institution."</p><p>Those institutional values, in Burness' view, include openness. "I believe we serve the university best by serving the news media well. It's in Duke's enlightened self-interest to work effectively with the media." Invariably there will be negative stories, he says. "One of the questions you always have to ask when you have a negative story is how to keep it a one- or two-day story as opposed to a one- or two-week story. The best way to do that is to be direct, to be honest, to be transparent in discussing it."</p><p>He offers an example from several years ago, when a federal oversight agency shut down research on human subjects at Duke Medical Center. The shutdown hinged on technical violations of research protocols. It's clear that Duke was chosen for the punitive action because of its high profile, Burness says. At the same time, the shutdown was limited to only four days because the university's response--in its dealings with the press, as well as in commitments from the medical center--was widely seen as facing up to the problem.</p><p>Duke officials have also come to realize that communications technology and instant name recognition can cut both ways. The velocity of information transfer is "one of the things we need to think about all the time," says Burness. "People are able to get information instantly. But it can be inaccurate information."</p><p>A case in point occurred last winter after Duke literature professors organized a film series showcasing movies from Iraq, North Korea, and Iran--the three countries branded by President Bush as "the Axis of Evil." The series also featured films from Cuba, Syria, and Libya, dubbed "rogue states" by Washington. Selections included romantic comedy, family drama, science fiction, and World War II action. The organizers created a catchy title for the series--"Reel Evil"--and that label, with the accompanying logo, made it stand out from all the familiar film festivals.</p><p>Duke sent out a news release, originally pitched to arts editors. But as it turned out, the series garnered more political notice than comment from the cinema community. In fact, Duke communicators had set in motion a media firestorm. Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature and co-curator of the film series, was interviewed extensively. She told CNN that the aim was to "show the fundamental disparity between the representations we see in the global media and those attempts at self-representations by directors around the world."</p><p>What happened next illustrates the electronic echo-chamber effect: Stories on the festival ran on National Public Radio in this country, and in newspapers and radio stations in Britain, Canada, Brazil, Italy, and elsewhere. Something that calls itself "the independent Kurdish web portal" picked it up. So did Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk-show host, for whom the film festival confirmed the worst, liberal-leaning tendencies of America's campuses.</p><p>Just this fall, a media frenzy followed word that a Duke fraternity, Sigma Chi, had promoted a "Viva Mexico" party with invitations that looked like expired green cards and a mock border-patrol checkpoint at the door. Campus protesters fixed on the party as evidence that Duke has ignored its Latino students. Duke's Chronicle covered the controversy; from there, Durham's Herald-Sun picked it up, and then it became wire-service copy. MSNBC's Abrams Report gave it prominent play. Host Dan Abrams '88 called the party "stupid" and "in bad taste" but saw the protest rally as a "politically correct overreaction at my alma mater." The events earned mention on the online Drudge Report, which provided a link back to The Chronicle. The Chronicle website had more than a million hits in the course of a single day.</p><p>At the same time, the presidents of a Latino living group, along with the senior-class president, were sending e-mail messages to national media, Latino press outlets, Latino organizations, and college newspaper editors at other campuses. The subject line was purposefully "incendiary," as one of the organizers puts it: "Racial incident at Duke University."</p><p>If they weren't exactly incendiary, the Women's Initiative findings this fall painted a less-than-satisfying campus scene. University communicators worked to give the study wide exposure, and it showed up in places ranging from The New York Times to the Harvard Crimson. Sometimes those accounts placed campus-climate problems in a larger cultural context, and sometimes not. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen wrote that being a female undergraduate at Duke means following a "prefeminist" credo of " 'effortless perfection,' in which young women report expending an enormous amount of effort on clothes, shoes, workout programs, and diet. And here's a blast from the past: They're expected 'to hide their intelligence in order to succeed with their male peers.' "</p><p>Because this was a Duke-derived story with implications beyond the confines of the campus, it was a surefire bet that it would have national resonance. But would Duke be celebrated for its self-scrutiny or criticized for putting a problem front-and-center? The media-relations quandary illustrated by Quindlen's column brought back memories from just over a decade ago, when a segment on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes focused on self-segregation among college students. The correspondent made it clear that Duke was the only campus to cooperate in the reporting effort. So Duke earned points for candor. Still, the portrayal of racial dynamics at Duke was discomfiting to some--including some prospective students.</p><p>"The general value system of a university should suggest that it's unafraid to discuss controversial issues, even when those issues may be perceived as affecting us negatively," says Burness. "It's important to provide some context, some understanding as to why a university has taken a particular action or why it has to defend a particular faculty member's right to say something or do something. Universities occupy a very special place in society. This is one of the few places where controversial issues are discussed openly and where all points of view are invited."</p><p>"A lot of people who do public information for colleges and universities have a hard time figuring out what makes a good story," says Sally Rimer, an education reporter for The New York Times. "But I'm really impressed by the Duke operation. These people are former reporters, and they're really good at what they do." Burness wrote to Rimer last summer to alert her to the Women's Initiative. He stressed that it could be considered part of a national dialogue on the issue of women in higher education. Later, a News and Communications office staff member, Kelly Gilmer, a former reporter for the respected St. Petersburg Times, worked with Rimer to set up telephone interviews, suggest contacts within and beyond Duke, and provide statistics relevant to understanding the context. Rimer says one of her Times editors commented that the Duke news release was so sensitive to news imperatives that it could almost have been published intact.</p><p>The days are long gone when campus communicators might distribute a news release broadly and await a response expectantly. A more targeted approach is represented in the daily "Rapid Response" meetings, which aim to pitch news tips to the media. There are standard, commercially provided contact lists for reporters covering beats ranging from war issues to sports law; also, the News and Communications office tailors its own roster of contacts.</p><p>In early September, several News and Communications staff members squeeze into an attic-level conference room and fuel themselves with Diet Dr Pepper. A few of the day's national newspapers are slapped onto the table. There are a couple of asides about having missed "the big story of last week," the kiss between Madonna and Britney Spears.</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" 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/010204/images/lg_michaelbyers001.jpg" alt="Radio play: Byers, Canadian studies director, talks to the CBC about potential prime minister" width="580" height="280" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Radio play: Byers, Canadian studies director, talks to the CBC about potential prime minister. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jim Wallace.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Associate Director Keith Lawrence, who leads the meeting, mentions a more elaborate version of the regularly refreshed news tips, a list of Duke experts for the upcoming September 11 anniversary. Among the themes: American cities after September 11, the concept of a national memorial to the victims, a divinity school professor's "Ten Suggestions for Preaching After a Catastrophe," gauging the American public's tolerance of casualties in Iraq, the U.S. and the Muslim world, and the impact on civil liberties of the "war on terrorism." Already, based on those tips, Jacob Vigdor of public-policy studies was part of an Agence France-Presse story about Americans having been jolted out of a false sense of security; Katherine Pratt Ewing of the cultural-anthropology department was in the Boston Globe on how September 11 gave cities and towns a new chance to establish a community-building tradition; and Frederick Mayer of public-policy studies appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Dallas Morning News, discussing the economic costs of the terrorist attacks.</p><p>Blake Dickinson '87, a senior writer, reels off a list of hot-button environmental issues, including more snowmobiles in the national parks and more resource-extraction activity in wildlife refuges. Lawrence notes that James Hamilton in public policy has written about the Environmental Protection Agency and might be mentioned to the media. He asks a communicator from the law school, Jonathan Goldstein, to think about professors who might speak out about proposed changes in medical-malpractice awards. Dickinson cites an editorial supporting toughened financial-disclosure requirements for attorneys in publicly traded companies. Goldstein says the law school's much-quoted James Cox can expertly tackle that theme. Cox is in Denmark for several weeks but is reachable by e-mail.</p><p>Senior writer Sally Hicks proposes getting a scholarly take on the death of actor Charles Bronson. Does it represent the passing of a certain type of action hero? And she brings up the media buzz about the "metrosexual" phenomenon--the widespread incorporating of fashion qualities associated with a gay sensibility. She says she'll track down John Clum, head of theater studies, who recently wrote a book on images of masculinity in the movies.</p><p>Rapid response means responding to media interests as well as anticipating those interests. That's where ProfNet comes into play. It's an example of communications technology operating on principles of marketplace supply and demand: Reporters and freelance writers post queries, and publicity operations nationally join in the "rat race," as Lawrence describes it, to get media attention for their experts. Queries from ProfNet come by e-mail several times a day. On a recent day, the Cape Cod Times was "looking for an expert to speak about the potential benefits and drawbacks in genomic medicine"; the South Florida Sun-Sentinel was after experts on "pressure-treated lumber, which has been the subject of controversy lately"; Newsday wanted to explore "the problem of grandparents who interfere in their adult children's lives"; and the New York Daily News asked, "Can Sharon Stone be a sex symbol at forty-five?"</p><p>Susan Alberts, assistant professor of zoology, is about to appear on CNN as a result of another exercise of communications technology. Alberts was part of a research team that found that male baboons give preferential protection to their own genetic offspring, despite the fact that multiple males may mate with each female in a troop. That discovery is significant because it suggests that the fathering instinct might be more fundamental to primate evolution than previously believed.</p><p>CNN's chief science news correspondent, Ann Kellan, who has done science reporting at Duke before, is now a remote presence--by speakerphone--in Alberts' office. Alberts is gingerly walking around an array of camera lights. Studio manager Scott Wells and technical supervisor Tom Wilson have brought in the lights and the camera and rearranged Alberts' bookshelf as a backdrop. A set of thick binders and a big, bright box labeled "David MacCauley's The Way Things Work" are now out of range; books with titles like Darwin's Descent of Man, Private Life Histories and Socioecology, Foraging for Survival, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, and Quantitative Conservation Biology will form the backdrop. "It's not even my office anymore," she says. "It's a jungle."</p><p>There's some discussion about whether Alberts should give up her jacket in the interest of projecting informality. Wells suggests that the jacket should stay on: "It gives us a lapel to hang the mike on." "Does my hair look okay?" Alberts asks. "This is one of the few times I can actually ask a man that."</p><p>Alberts sits across from Cabell Smith of News and Communications. Smith is someone for her to look at while she's talking--a kind of silent proxy for the remote Kellan, who, after editing, will appear to be engaging with Alberts on the scene. Right after the CNN interview, Smith will do his own interview, which he'll package into a video news release. He'll also get Alberts to do a voiceover commentary on the researchers' field footage of the baboons; CNN will run some of the footage along with the interview.</p><p>Kellan asks about the research and the researcher: Just how do adult baboons intervene on behalf of threatened young baboons? How do they recognize their offspring? Was Alberts surprised by her findings? What's the next stage in her research?</p><p>At the end of the interview, Alberts says, "Can you tell I've never done this before?" In fact, she showed herself to be a composed and knowledgeable interview subject. She expresses concern about the projected minute-and-a-half length of the segment. "I'm not sure a sound science story can come through in that time," she says. Smith assures her that, by TV standards, a minute and a half is a long time. "This has been really exciting," Alberts says. "I'm going to call my mom."</p><p>Scott Silliman has long since passed from nervous news novice to self-assured stalwart on the media must-call list. Silliman is director of the Duke Law School Center for Law, Ethics, and National Security and a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force. Since the start of the war on terrorism two years ago, he has done several hundred interviews. On a fall day consumed, like so many, with national-security news, Silliman is being interviewed on The Connection, a National Public Radio interview and call-in program from WBUR in Boston. Silliman's topic is the sexual-assault scandal in the Air Force Academy; the previous night, he was on another WBUR show, The Point, talking about the treatment of prisoners in Guant·namo Bay.</p><p>Just after the broadcast, Lindsay Miller, an associate producer with The Connection, explains what makes Silliman such a good expert for radio. "The expert has to be genuinely knowledgeable in his field and able to communicate it out loud, in a way that can be understood by the typical NPR listener. That listener may be really interested in the subject but isn't necessarily informed about it. We're often looking for that big-picture person who can help put events into a broader context."</p><p>Miller says her team talks about "wanting people who are ready to play, meaning they can kick that theme around, talk back and forth with the host and then with our callers. Some of the coolest things happen when the guest and a caller have a conversation. There are plenty of skilled professors, but some of them come across as if they're giving an academic paper, pointing out every nuance and hedging every statement."</p><p>Duke's location can be an asset when the program looks to book experts, she says. "We certainly try to reach out beyond Harvard. We don't want to go to one well all the time, because there are so many important and significant people elsewhere, and we're enriched by a range of voices." She also notes a technical virtue offered by Duke, the on-campus presence of a radio studio. "That certainly makes our life easier. We want a guest in a studio. It's a subtle audio thing, but the sound on a phone is different from studio sound, and if you're relegated to listening over phone lines, it's going to grate on you after a while."</p><p>For his part, Silliman says that the interviewing routine, for which he prepares with the same care he brings to his teaching, doesn't make his life easier: "You can't just walk into a studio and say, well, I didn't read today's paper, so don't ask me those questions." Still, he is wary of being questioned outside his expertise. He offers the example of a radio program that sought him out after the Israeli government threatened to displace Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. He declined the request. "If you start becoming an expert in everything, you become an expert in nothing. I don't want to be saying things where I don't think I can speak with authority."</p><p>Particularly in Silliman's area of expertise, reporters tend to be well-informed. (He did tell a local reporter that she would serve her readers better if she did basic research; she had begun an interview by asking him what the Geneva Convention was.) His only sour media foray, he says, was with Fox News on the theme of the war on terrorism. Silliman wanted to focus on substantive policy matters; Fox was more interested in his take on a presumed personality clash between a senator on the Judiciary Committee and the attorney general.</p><p>Silliman shares that story, between interviews, at a media-training workshop that draws about fifty faculty members to the depths of the divinity school. Fellow presenter Sally Hicks, from News and Communications, notes that the media encounter doesn't conform to the thorough and thoughtful academic routine of researching, writing, and revising. "Avoid jargon," she says. "Think through the few points you want to make, and bring in the relevant fact or anecdote." Think of the encounter as a teachable moment, and handle the poorly conceived or off-point question as you would in a class discussion: Guide the interviewer back to the point you're aiming to drive home. Never say, "No comment."</p><p>Richard O'Dor, who coaches Duke's debate team and is a lecturer in public policy, demonstrates mannerisms--tapping a pen, twirling some strands of hair, adjusting eyeglasses, tilting one's head at an unusual angle, staring disconcertingly, pivoting in a swivel chair, engaging in "chaotic, erratic eye behavior"--that can distract viewers of a television interview. "Be yourself," he counsels. "Don't role-play a person doing an interview."</p><p>A couple of professors ask about the downside of media exposure. Might their colleagues see them as showboating, perhaps evolving into a figure like Cornell's Carl Sagan, who came to be perceived within scientific circles as more of a popularizer than a working scientist? Burness, the senior vice president, says that faculty members will have to strike an appropriate balance, depending on where they stand in their career and how they define their scholarly focus.</p><p>Burness observes that the university and the media share a basic goal: "a mission to get to the truth and expand public understanding." He acknowledges that the two communities "don't necessarily talk very well together," that it can be a difficult task to educate reporters about the context behind a complex issue, and that a faculty is "filled with healthy skeptics and cynics."</p><p>But for all those who are skeptical or cynical about the media, there are many more who would identify with the scholarly sentiments of Provost Peter Lange. He tells his colleagues at the workshop, "As a faculty member, I love to have other people talk about my research."</p></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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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">Placing Duke in the Center of the News</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501678 at https://alumni.duke.edu Hammer Time for Habitat https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/hammer-time-habitat <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">Lauren Shea, a freshman from Fairfax Station, Virginia, has never met Ted and Kristen Katroscik of Durham. She doesn't know what they look like, whether they are tall or short, thin or stout, black or white. She doesn't know how old they are, whether they listen to jazz or bluegrass, whether they root for Duke or Carolina.</p><p>In fact, Shea only knows one thing about the Katrosciks: They need a house to call home. That was all it took to rouse her out of bed early on a Saturday morning to join some fifteen other students on the eight o'clock shift for Blitz Build Duke, a combination house- and consciousness-raising project organized by three seniors in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity of Durham.</p><p>The project's name hints at what its organizers hoped to accomplish. Blitz Build Duke involves assembling hundreds of volunteers, then scheduling them in back-to-back shifts to construct a house on an accelerated schedule. In this case, though, the house was to be started on a site on East Campus, in front of the East Duke Building. Over a ten-day period, members of the Duke community, primarily students, would pitch in to complete about 40 percent of the structure, including the roof and all of the exterior and interior walls. The house--1,104 square feet, three bedrooms, and one and a half baths--would then be moved to its permanent location at 1015 Berkeley Street in Walltown, two blocks north of campus. Duke students and other volunteers would continue to work on the house until it is completed, sometime in January.</p><p>"I heard about Blitz Build from a friend, and I thought it would be a nice way to spend a Saturday morning," says Shea, who is using bright orange, button-top nails to secure sheathing that will act as a moisture barrier around one of the window openings. "I thought it was pretty incredible students could actually build a house for someone. It's something I've always wanted to do."</p><p><br />Many students stay beyond their allotted time slot, and still others try to sign up for additional shifts. By the time the on-campus part of the build is over, more than 250 volunteers will have worked on the house--almost all of them students. That is just what the organizers were hoping for when they decided to start the house on campus. The project was viewed, as one organizer puts it, as a way to "jumpstart" students, and freshmen in particular, into engaging with the Durham community through volunteer work.So many students have signed up to volunteer that, on Saturday, work shifts were reduced to only an hour each. Shea signed up for the eight-to-nine shift, but it's nearly eleven and she's still there. "What time is it?" she asks, and then, without waiting for an answer, returns to the nail she is trying to drive into the wall. She concentrates hard, gripping the hammer with both hands.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="8" 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/010204/images/lg_habitatblitz291.jpg" alt="Skilled sawer: senior Johanna Von Hofe " /><p class="caption-text"><p>Skilled sawer: senior Johanna Von Hofe. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jim Wallace. </span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Blitz Build Duke began as a project in a leadership class taught by public policy professor Tony Brown last year. It was the brainchild of Kat Farrell '03, who entrusted it to three juniors--Mandy Anderson, Taylor Hayden, and Kate Henderson--to carry on after she graduated in May. "By putting it on East Campus, we have this really easy way to get kids involved and get them excited about a project, and then have them move off campus and continue that work and that excitement in Durham," says Anderson. She was volunteer coordinator for the project; Henderson took care of marketing and public relations, and Hayden was in charge of raising the $44,000 it took to build the house. "We realize Duke students are very involved," says Hayden, "but sometimes they need a little push to expand their involvement. Or maybe we pull in some who are on the fringe."</p><p>The construction was timed to coincide with Founders' Day weekend activities and intended as both a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nannerl O. Keohane's presidency and a symbol of her administration's commitment to being a good neighbor. "This was a concrete way to give back to the Durham community and to celebrate her gift to us as a prime leader in the Duke-Durham relationship," says Sam Miglarese, assistant director of Duke's Office of Community Affairs. "To me, there's power to symbol, and I think the greatest feature of this whole project is its symbolism."</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td height="71"><table width="99%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr align="center"><td colspan="3"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><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/010204/images/lg_084803414blitzbuild456.jpg" alt="Three by two-by-fours: Mandy Anderson, left, Taylor Hayden, and Kate Henderson, the seniors who organized the Blitz" width="580" height="281" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Three by two-by-fours: Mandy Anderson, left, Taylor Hayden, and Kate Henderson, the seniors who organized the Blitz. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jon Gardiner.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><p>Duke's Blitz Build defies its name at first, starting out at a leisurely pace--the adagio movement in a symphony--then reaching a crescendo of shrieking saws and crashing hammers. Hammers are a visual and aural leitmotif: Dozens and dozens of them are arranged in white plastic buckets like bouquets of strange, steel-headed flowers. Students drawn by the activity--what one observer dubs the Tom Sawyer effect--fish a hammer out of a bucket and begin. "Some of them come out here, they've never had a hammer in their hands," says Worth Lutz '55. "But they keep on doing it till they get it."</p><p>Lutz, one of the founders of Habitat for Humanity of Durham, is a "geezer," Habitat-speak for the group of retired men and women who are regular volunteers. He was on the site nearly every day of the build, as was Krista Gates '03, who works for Habitat as an AmeriCorps volunteer. "The students have been great--just the enthusiasm," says Lutz. "They come out here really wanting to work. It's been a little difficult keeping them all busy."</p><p>Most of the students have never built anything, and that's where the geezers come in. "If you've got a few people who know what they're doing, you can help a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing," as Tommy Murrah, Habitat's construction supervisor for the build, puts it. Kenzie Brannon, a Habitat geezer, age seventy-five, and a retired salesman, is showing Ankur Manvar, age eighteen, a freshman from Atlanta, how to hold a hammer. Manvar keeps wanting to choke up on it, his slender brown fingers gripping so tight that his knuckles lodge in the "V" created by the twin prongs of the peen. "Hold it back near the end," Brannon tells the student, "and hit with steady, solid swings, not just taps. Let the hammer do the work." He calls out in a steady rhythm, as Manvar swings: "Hit the head. Hit the head. Hit the head."</p><p>On Monday, the official start of the build, the grassy site is unremarkable and virtually unchanged--nothing there but a few cinder blocks and a small pile of lumber. Tuesday, a handful of people, mostly geezers, straighten and augment the cinder blocks into short columns that will serve as the house's temporary footings; a few more work on leveling the grassy plot they've been allotted for the build. The bare outline of the house begins to emerge. Wednesday, the plywood sub-flooring is done, and the geezers lay out the walls, in preparation for an onslaught of students scheduled to begin work the next day.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="8" 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/010204/images/lg_084803414blitzbuild469.jpg" alt="raising the banner" width="300" height="450" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Raising the banner. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jon Gardiner.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><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/010204/images/lg_0764034-14move83.jpg" alt="Moving experience: Alvin Johnson, above, hauls the house home" width="580" height="277" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Moving experience: Alvin Johnson, above, hauls the house home. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jim Wallace.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>"Over two dozen homes have been built through the Habitat-Duke partnership," Keohane says in her speech. "Most impressively, during the last decade alone, over 1,000 Dukies put in more than 4,000 hours working on Habitat houses." She introduces the Katrosciks and then helps them and the volunteers with what Habitat veterans call "the glory work," raising the last exterior wall. As it goes up, the Katrosciks step into the doorway, their beaming faces framed by the raw two-by-fours.</p><p>Later that afternoon, most of the dignitaries have gone. But a few, like Peter M. Nicholas '64, chair of the board of trustees, have stayed behind to help. He is up working on the roof, making Anderson extremely nervous. "God forbid a trustee would fall off the roof," she says. The build is crawling with students at one point--more than a hundred. "Too many," says Lutz. The front of the house is studded with orange and blue button-top nails. "We had to find something for them to do."</p><p>Before noon on Sunday, virtually all of the work has been done. The students, geezers, and other volunteers have spray-painted their signatures on the unfinished exterior walls of the house, all of which will be covered by siding in the weeks to come. On Tuesday the mover will come to survey the job. Ten days later, the house will be taken on a brief ride through the stone pillars of East Campus, down Main Street, along Broad, right on Englewood, right on Berkeley, to its resting place, near the corner of Berkeley and West Knox. Students have already put their names down on the volunteer list for Saturday work shifts that commence once a professional mason has finished building the foundation.</p><p>But that's in the months to come. On Founders' Day weekend, Scott Stevenson, a regular Habitat volunteer, is gazing up at the half dozen Duke students who have just finished tacking down black roofing felt. They are celebrating by having their photos taken with geezer Delbert Tuell. Stevenson says, more to himself than those around him, "I'm looking up on the roof, and I'm thinking where those kids are going to be in fifteen years and what kind of impact they can have."</p><p>Bob Calhoun, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Durham, thinks he knows. "By going out and helping build a Habitat for Humanity house, I think that instills some qualities of citizenship that those students will take with them when they leave this community. I think that the experience of working with people of different social and economic classes is an opportunity out in the community that helps broaden their horizons, their view of the world. I think they get an opportunity to see that--in spite of someone's point of origin, someone's economic status--once you get to work with them, get to know them, there's a lesson of just basic humanity: We're all people; we've all got the same issues in life. Just by good fortune or accident of birth, some of us have more resources to address those issues than others."</p><p>Mandy Anderson is elated with the way this has gone, but she, too, is thinking about the long run. "We're building a house! It's really exciting, but only if that energy carries over. I think that the key to this being a great success is sustainability. So we're really working with underclassmen already, trying to find some people who might be willing to head this up for next year."</p><p>For the Katrosciks, the success is in the house they can now walk through. There's the living room, they point out; there, the bedroom. They'll use one of the extra bedrooms for guests. "How did it feel when they raised the wall?" a Chronicle reporter asks Ted Katroscik. "It felt like home," Katroscik says simply. For the students who helped build that home, it felt like the neighborly thing to do.</p></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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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_habitatblitz240.jpg" width="620" height="872" alt="&quot;geezer&quot; Delbert Tuell instructs volunteers. Jim Wallace." /></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/zo-ingalls" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Zoë Ingalls</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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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">Community Construction</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501675 at https://alumni.duke.edu Jousting with History https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/jousting-history <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>Doug Knight calls them the dark years: a troubled time of soul-searching and redefinition that followed hard on the heels of his forced resignation as Duke University's fifth president and turned into a permanent break from his lifelong commitment to an academic career. Swept up in the roiling political and social currents of the late Sixties, the Yale-educated scholar and former president of Lawrence College found himself exiled from a community that had brought him emotional sustenance and intellectual joy since he was a child.</p><p>The memories of what had happened at Duke were so painful that Knight could not bear even to visit a college campus--not even for the graduation of his third son. He was neither the first nor last university president to suffer from the chaos of the period. In fact, more than seventy colleges and universities lost their chief executives in the late Sixties and early Seventies, including Rice, Penn State, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Civil-rights and antiwar protests on campuses led to riots, arson, and, at Jackson State and Kent State, the deaths of students.</p><p>But, in some significant ways, he and the institution itself--not just the times--were out of joint. Despite Knight's exceptional academic pedigree and his ambitions to make Duke a nationally recognized institution, his leadership drew harsh criticism from conservative alumni, student activists, and powerful trustees. He proved to be no match for the forces that led to his resignation in 1969: entrenched, behind-the-scenes power struggles that had forced out Duke's third president, Hollis Edens, only three years before; The Duke Endowment's unprecedented financial and political authority over and meddling into the university's affairs; the nonviolent yet disruptive Silent Vigil of 1968; the takeover of the Allen Building by black students the following year, during which reactionary Durham residents with shotguns circled the campus, and state police arrived with tear gas; the bomb scares and death threats.</p><p>In another era, Knight might have left a legacy of erudite gentility. Instead, he was "thrown into waters he couldn't swim in, and there were quite a few sharks swimming there with him," says William Anlyan, chancellor emeritus of Duke Medical Center. Terry Sanford, who followed Knight as president, brought to the job sharply honed negotiating skills and political experience as governor of North Carolina. Sanford's sixteen-year run as Duke's president eclipsed Knight's many accomplishments.</p><p><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_knight102fpo.jpg" alt="1968: Students protesting the death of King march to the President's House with a list of demands" width="300" height="219" border="1" /></p><p>Students protesting the death of King march to the President's House with a list of demands; Knight invited them in, but negotiations stalled.</p><p>Photos: Duke University</p><p>In a new memoir, The Dancer and the Dance (Separate Star, Inc.), Knight explores how the forces that shaped the national debate manifested themselves during his tenure at Duke. "My whole training and experience to this point had been based in a concept of the university and of liberal education totally grounded in mediation, critical discourse, civility, and the restraint of uncontrolled dogmatism," he writes. "Now I found that I was required to set all this aside. As a result, I spent--overspent--my energy where I did not want to put it, and so the action of the late Sixties was for me a divided action. I was pulled between what I knew the university needed over the decades and what the times demanded immediately. It was a schizophrenia with only one inevitable outcome, and I would reflect on its meaning for years, always in the recognition that my whole career had put me in a place and point of time from which there was no honorable escape."</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_097128721x01lz.jpg" alt="The Dancer and the Dance" width="215" height="322" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Time has healed some of the deepest wounds. Enduring relationships with Durham friends and colleagues helped, he says. So did writing a cathartic chronicle of his presidency and the era, Street of Dreams: The Nature and Legacy of the 1960s, published in 1989 by Duke University Press. Last April, Knight and his wife, Grace, came back to Durham for the renaming of the President's House, which was built under Knight's leadership. Now called the Douglas M. and Grace Knight House, it was designed by Alden Dow, a protÈgÈ of Frank Lloyd Wright, and is used to entertain thousands of guests a year.</p><p>At the dedication ceremony, President Nannerl O. Keohane remarked that Knight "is and was a poet and scholar, and the breadth and sensitivity of his thinking informed not only his public pronouncements as the CEO of a rollicking, feisty, ambitious Southern institution of higher education, but also the work he undertook behind the scenes as a collaborative leader and administrator."</p><p>Despite the messy ending to his tenure as Duke's fifth president, Knight launched an impressive number of initiatives. When Ernest Brummer's widow donated much of her husband's collection of medieval art to Duke, Knight made a home for it by transforming an old science building on East Campus into the Duke Art Museum. The move was not without controversy; some in the Duke community criticized the initiative from both financial and philosophical standpoints, arguing that the university shouldn't spend money on something as frivolous as the arts. But Knight recognized the collection's importance and quietly persisted.</p><p>Knight also oversaw the addition of a phytotron and a hyperbaric chamber, and construction of a major wing for Perkins Library that increased capacity more than fivefold. Convinced that the men's and women's campuses should be better integrated, he proposed creating a transition between the two by adding student housing, now Central Campus.</p><p>On the academic side, Knight established the joint M.D.-J.D. and M.D.-Ph.D. degrees, the School of Business Administration, and interdisciplinary programs in biomedical</p><p>engineering and forestry management. He secured an $8-million, Ford Foundation matching grant, the terms of which required the university to approach fund raising in a more sophisticated and strategic way. It worked: During his six year term the university brought in $195 million in gifts and grants, triple that of the entire preceding six-year period.</p><p>Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans '39, Hon. '83, the great-granddaughter of Washington Duke, attended the naming ceremony for the Knight House. She says she is a "great admirer" of Knight. "Doug had not been honored in a way that he should have been, and a great deal of credit goes to Nan Keohane for recognizing his contributions to the university."</p><p>During Knight's presidency, Semans served on the boards of trustees of both Duke University and The Duke Endowment. She says it is hard to imagine in this era of twenty-four-hour media coverage the level of secrecy and the number of back-room deals that were the norm at Duke and other institutions at the time. The relationship between the university and The Duke Endowment was particularly complicated because of the overlap in governance on the institutions' trustee boards, as well as Duke's position as a designated beneficiary of the Endowment. From the moment he was inaugurated, "Knight was in a bad situation made worse by the crossover of power" between the two, says Semans.</p><p>In Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas: The Duke Endowment 1924-1994, Duke history professor emeritus Robert F. Durden chronicles the establishment and growth of the charitable trust created by James B. Duke. A bylaw passed in the mid-Thirties during William Few's presidency called for at least three Endowment trustees on the university's executive committee. As a result, figures such as Norman A. Cocke and Thomas L. Perkins simultaneously served on the boards of Duke University, The Duke Endowment, and Duke Power Company and exerted tremendous personal and political power. Cocke and Perkins were among those on the executive board of the university's trustees who were instrumental in forcing Hollis Edens to resign as president of Duke after a bitter internal dissent over his leadership led by chemist Paul Gross, Edens' vice president for education. (During Terry Sanford's administration, there was a deliberate move to put distance between the two boards. At Sanford's request, the composition of the university's board of trustees was reconfigured to include alumni and students. In addition, Endowment chair Archie Davis recommended that Endowment trustees should not also serve as trustees of any of its beneficiaries, which include academic institutions: Duke, Davidson, Johnson C. Smith, and Furman.)</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_knight.jpg" alt="Man and manuscript: Knight today, at his desk" width="375" height="406" border="1" /></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center">Man and manuscript: Knight today, at his desk</td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"><span class="pulloutcredit">Photo: Rebekah Wade</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p><p>Although Knight was aware of the situation that had led to Edens' resignation when he accepted the job at Duke, the presidential search committee told him that the internal wrangling had ended. In retrospect, Knight says, it was clear that, even though there were people "who were desperate to believe the worst was behind us, the terrible virus of conflict was still in the university's bloodstream."</p><p>When Knight was named president, the public mood was upbeat and excited. The respected academic's pedigree included serious scholarship, administrative expertise, and a genuine love of learning. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1921, Douglas M. Knight was an only child. After his father's death five years later, he and his mother moved constantly to be near various relatives. By the time he entered junior high school, Knight had attended thirteen different schools.</p><p>Education was his harbor; he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy at fifteen and earned his bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, each in only two years. He married Grace, whom he had met his freshman year, and taught eighteenth-century literature as a member of the Yale faculty from 1946 to 1953. He gradually became immersed in various administrative posts. At the request of the dean, Knight worked on the Ford Foundation's faculty grant program to provide fellowships for senior faculty members. He was later named by the president as executive secretary of a committee to review educational programs in the arts and sciences.</p><p>In the fall of 1953, at the age of thirty-two, Knight was approached by Lawrence College (now Lawrence University) in Appleton, Wisconsin, which had just lost its president, Nathan Pusey, to Harvard University. Knight decided to walk away from an assured future at Yale to take on myriad responsibilities and pressures at Lawrence. His starting salary was $11,000 a year, twice what he had earned at Yale, and he would go on to serve as Lawrence's president for nearly a decade.</p><p>Looking back, Knight characterizes his Yale and Lawrence experiences as "intoxicating in pace and variety." But such rapid advancement would have repercussions in the years to come. "Upon reflection, I see the degree of luck involved in the events that took me so far so fast," he writes in The Dancer and the Dance. "I see the inevitable egotism that encouraged my acceptance of this frenetic life. And I see the possibility of conflict, the almost inevitable backlash against so much visibility and success."</p><p>As Duke University sought a replacement for interim president Deryl Hart M.D. '64, who had been installed after Edens' departure, Knight became an obvious candidate. A respected scholar and gifted administrator, Knight appeared to possess the perfect blend of aptitude and ambition. Another plus for the members of the search committee: Knight's two immediate predecessors at Lawrence had been recruited to lead Ivy League schools. "The securing of a man with the character, qualifications, and attainments of Dr. Knight gives me some pride in personal and institutional accomplishment," wrote Hart on the occasion of Knight's selection, "since the combined and fruitful efforts of the entire university committee over the past two and a half years have enabled trustees to take the time necessary to bring their search for a new president to such a satisfactory conclusion."</p><p>Knight was inaugurated in 1963. His self-proclaimed mandate was to make Duke "one of the greatest universities in the world." Knight, Grace, and their four sons were embraced by many in the Duke community, who saw the new president as pivotal to transforming Duke from a regional gem into a strong national presence in higher education.</p><p>The honeymoon period was brief. Despite his professional credentials and graceful civility, Knight soon found himself pulled into the explosive social movements of the Sixties. The first five black undergraduates to attend Duke had matriculated the fall before Knight came, and there were still people within the university community--trustees, alumni, students, and faculty members--who vehemently resisted integration. Three months after the Knight family arrived in Durham in August 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot. And the ongoing, upper-level management tangles continued to be a distraction.</p><p>Early in his post, certain members of The Duke Endowment executive committee gave Knight a list of people they wanted him to fire. The list included the provost, the executive secretary to the president, and the business manager, among others. Knight refused, which didn't sit well. Neither did his recommendation that the university broaden its funding base so that it was not so dependent on The Duke Endowment.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="8" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_dknight06.jpg" alt="Campus icons: the president and the philanthropist" width="375" height="537" border="1" /></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center">Campus icons: the president and the philanthropist</td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"><span class="pulloutcredit">Photo: Duke University Archives</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>William Anlyan, a surgeon who came to Duke in 1949 and is credited with making the medical center a major national institution, recalls meeting Knight in late 1962. "Doug was a humanist who was probably too gentle for the times," says Anlyan, whose own memoirs will be published by Duke Press next fall. Throughout Knight's presidency, Anlyan served as a personal friend, a professional colleague and, when Knight's health took a drastic turn for the worse at the close of the decade, as his medical advocate. "Doug felt as though he needed to please everybody every day. I didn't realize what a shock it would be to have him followed by Terry Sanford, who slept well if he pleased 50.1 percent of the people."</p><p>No matter how taxing his presidential responsibilities, Knight found solace in his teaching. Every other year, he taught a two-semester course in the European epic tradition; the first semester covered Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil, Dante, and the Divine Comedy. The second semester included Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, War and Peace, and Ulysses.</p><p>David Guy '70, M.A.T. '77, now a writer, recalls Knight's brilliant intelligence and genuine enthusiasm for his subject. Standing at the front of the room smoking a cigar, Knight would ask students general questions about the text they had read and then help them probe the deeper subtexts and themes. "It was amazing to watch his mind work, because the epic tradition covers so many subjects--art, religion, politics," Guy says. "I remember reading War and Peace and thinking to myself that I could never be a writer. But Knight showed us how epics built upon ones that had come before. That course had a huge influence on me."</p><p>In the late Sixties, two events took place on Duke's campus that marked the beginning of the end for Doug Knight. The first followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Overcome by despair, students sought to make meaning of the loss by marching to Durham's wealthy, white, Hope Valley neighborhood. They hoped to persuade residents of the importance of King's death and to show solidarity with the black community. William Griffith '50, dean of student affairs, knew that many in that conservative neighborhood owned guns, and so he persuaded the students to go instead to the nearby Duke Forest community, where many sympathetic faculty members lived. "If you can't communicate your issues with your own family," he said to them, "how will you be able to communicate them to others?"</p><p>The group gathered and decided that its march would begin with a stop at the Knights' house in Duke Forest. They carried a list of eleven demands, including the creation of a black dorm, a fully accredited department of Afro-American studies, and "an immediate end to tokenism of black representation in university power structures." Tipped off that the group was en route, the Knights were ready when it arrived. They opened their doors and invited the nearly 250 students inside, out of the dark. The evening dragged on. A small group of student leaders negotiated with Knight while others sang songs and chanted protest slogans. The next morning, with negotiations stalled, the students left the house. Knight says he realized that, even though he agreed with many of the students' demands, the office of the president as it was then structured allowed him "authority but no power."</p><p>Students returned to the main quad for a memorial service in Duke Chapel, followed by what became known as the Silent Vigil--four days and nights of peaceful protest that attracted as many as 2,000 students and faculty members. Among their demands: that all nonacademic employees be paid the federal minimum wage and that a committee of administrators, faculty members, students, and workers be established to design a method of collective bargaining for the workers. (Local #77 was the union working on behalf of Duke's nonacademic employees and was involved in the vigil early on.) After long hours of delicate negotiations, the vigil finally ended when Wright Tisdale, chair of the board of trustees, announced that Duke would boost nonfaculty employees' pay to bring the university in line with the minimum wage of $1.60 an hour.</p><p>Meanwhile, Knight, who had been hospitalized eight months earlier with a severe case of hepatitis, suffered a relapse. After speaking at the Chapel memorial service, he was on the verge of collapse. His physicians strongly advised him to leave campus, and he went with his family to their vacation house on nearby Kerr Lake to recuperate.</p><div> </div><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_inauguration03.jpg" alt="Legacy of leaders: Knight, left, and Sanford flank the new president at Keohane's inauguration" width="580" height="308" border="1" /></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center">Legacy of leaders: Knight, left, and Sanford flank the new president at Keohane's inauguration</td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="right"><span class="pulloutcredit">Photo: Les Todd</span></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Critics saw Knight's absence from campus as an attempt to dodge his responsibilities by concocting a medical emergency. But he wasn't the only one whose health suffered. Shortly after his declaration to the students about wages, Tisdale was admitted to Duke Medical Center to be treated for exhaustion, according to his son, Norwood "Boyd" Tisdale '68, M.A.T. '70, J.D. '75.</p><p>"I have always had a lot of respect for Doug Knight and felt that he was damaged so badly that he might never recover," William Griffith, who was assistant to the provost at the time of the vigil, wrote in Duke Magazine in 1998. "But I always felt that he was the right person at the right time. Knight was a very sensitive person; he was an administrator but also a poet and a scholar. He was sensitive to what was taking place. You really needed someone who had a feeling for the community, and I think he did. He had a special empathy for Duke."</p><p>The Silent Vigil turned criticism of Knight from a murmur to a din. A large faction of university constituents used him as a scapegoat for Duke's growing ills. Similar protests were happening all over the country, but there was a feeling among some of the older alumni and others in the Duke community that such lawlessness should never be allowed to take place on Duke's genteel grounds. Some of the same players who had covertly orchestrated Hollis Edens' departure were now pushing for Knight's. Anlyan recalls that, on more than one occasion, he and Barnes Woodhall, dean of medicine, were approached by some members of The Duke Endowment who wanted the men to help "get rid of" Knight. "We told them we were not going to play that game," Anlyan recalls.</p><p>Knight recuperated over the summer and, when classes started that fall, he felt strong enough to resume his hectic pace. But Knight faced the nadir of his Duke presidency less than a year later. Civil-rights activist Dick Gregory had scheduled a February campus visit to speak about black power. Swathed in what he calls his "white liberal innocence," Knight invited Gregory and sixteen black students--the capacity of the table--for dinner. The appointed time came, and, instead of dinner guests, Knight received a harsh note saying that if all could not come, none would come. Gregory's talk that night was characteristically provocative. Two days later, on February 13, 1969, dozens of black students took over the Allen Building, renaming it the Malcolm X Liberation School.</p><p>Carrying canisters they claimed were full of gasoline, the students blocked off all the entrances and negotiated through the windows with other students, faculty members, and administrators. Knight, who was in New York, flew back immediately. The standoff went on all day, with neither the university nor the students willing to capitulate. As dusk approached, there were reports of armed Durham residents circling the campus.</p><p>Concerned about the potential for bloodshed, Knight scheduled an emergency faculty meeting and asked the governor to approve the deployment of state police to make certain that violence wouldn't erupt after dark. Some faculty members sympathetic to the students' cause tipped them off that police were being called in and helped ferry them safely away. As the crowd of supporters and onlookers who had gathered in front of the Allen Building surged forward, police deployed tear gas.</p><p>Knight faced bruising criticism for his actions in the days and weeks that followed. Opinion was divided between those who thought his decision to call in state police was unwarranted and heavy-handed, and those who saw the black students' behavior as evidence of the danger of integration and thought that Knight should kick them out of school for good. The alumni office received so many caustic letters about Knight and the black students that it was impossible to reply to them all. "Dump Doug" bumper stickers showed up on cars. Knight received death threats, and a security guard was assigned to patrol the grounds of the President's House. He recalls the nightly ritual of touring the yard with the guard at one in the morning before going to sleep, both men armed with pistols, making sure no one was hiding in the shadows.</p><p>Knight's family was deeply affected as well. To keep them safe, Doug and Grace sent their four children away in the evenings to sleep at friends' houses. One night, Knight recalls, Tom, who was twelve, looked up at his parents and said, "I don't like this going away from home."</p><p>By April, members of The Duke Endowment board, the university trustees, alumni, and others in the region were publicly expressing displeasure with Knight's leadership. The handwriting was on the wall. As Robert Durden notes in Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas, "When a number of trustees pressed for a specially called meeting where Knight's resignation could be formally demanded, [new university trustee chair Charles B. Wade Jr. '38] successfully took on the painful task of persuading Knight to resign before he could be formally asked to do so."</p><p>Exactly six weeks after the takeover of the Allen Building, Knight resigned, saying that he had an obligation to protect his family from "the severe and sometimes savage demands of such a career." When news of his decision reached the university community, Mary Semans recalls, one young woman turned to her and asked sadly, "What have we done to him?"</p><p>Even before he left the Duke campus, Knight was offered and accepted a position at RCA as the vice president for education. He later became the president of Questar Corporation, which makes optical lenses with a variety of applications. In 1982, he became chairman of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and oversaw the awarding of thousands of graduate fellowships. Involved again with higher education--though at a remove--Knight found meaningful work, while recognizing that each passing decade continued to alter the ways college campuses were run. "It was in these years, after all, that the corporate model became a truly aggressive influence in university design," he writes. "Equally it was a time when the great university financial campaigns began to perpetuate themselves, when the bidding wars began to create a new generation of wandering scholars, a time when the issues of political correctness began their divisive and litigious career."</p><p>Now living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with Grace, he has found a way to view his presidency--indeed, the whole first half of his life--with quiet acceptance. "We can see now, looking back, how different things were in the Sixties," says Knight. "The important thing to note is that, in spite of all the disruptions, we got so much done."</p><p class="byline">Booher '82, A.M. '92 is assistant director of the Hart Leadership program at Duke's Sanford Institute.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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_dknight13.jpg" width="700" height="481" alt="Douglas Knight, Duke&#039;s fifth president" /></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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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 tumultuous tenure of Douglas Knight, Duke&#039;s fifth president, was characterized by entrenched, behind-the-scenes power struggles and an emerging era of student civil disobedience.</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501674 at https://alumni.duke.edu Ship of Schools https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/ship-schools <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">As a gale blows outside and fifteen-foot swells buck Makulu II through the pitch-black night in the southern Caribbean, a frantic voice crackles over the ship's radio, rousing the crew from its slumber. A nearby ship is having trouble steering, and the captain needs assistance.</p><p>Ashley Wells '96 and the rest of the Makulu crew battle the squall as they try to motor toward the ailing vessel. But the sea is too choppy and the ship too far away. When word comes that the other ship has lost its rudder, Makulu gives up the chase. As they resume their westward course, crew members count their blessings that the storm didn't do them in, as well. A tugboat sent by Colombian authorities rescues the crew of the drifting ship, which is abandoned after efforts to tow it to port fail.</p><p>"We made it through okay, but we were lucky," Wells says with a nervous laugh, recalling the January 2002 incident.</p><p>Wells knew she had signed on for adventure when she enlisted for the crew of Makulu two years ago, and flirting with disaster in stormy waters off Aruba was just the beginning. During the first two years of the sailboat's planned three-year circumnavigation of the globe, she has had to elude pirates in the Red Sea, confront the aftermath of a terrorist bombing in Bali, face Islamic restrictions on women in Oman, and visited dozens of spots most people couldn't find on a map--all so inner-city students could expand their horizons.</p><p>Makulu II's voyage is sponsored by Reach the World, a nonprofit organization in New York City that helps teachers make better use of technology in the classroom, while introducing students to different cultures. The organization provides technology and curriculum consulting for twenty-five classrooms in grades three through seven, most of them in impoverished New York neighborhoods. Through Reach the World's website, students and teachers are able to follow the travels and travails of Makulu II, a forty-three-foot Nautor's Swan sailboat, and its crew. In the various ports of call, Wells and her fellow crew members use satellite e-mail and digital and video cameras to document their experiences, serving as the "eyes and ears" for those back home. Photographs are posted on the site; the ship's log, which crew members take turns contributing to, is updated every Friday; and there is a "track Makulu" option, where students can click on world maps to chart the boat's course.</p><p>"A main issue that I faced in motivating my students was a problem I dubbed the 'fifteen-block radius,'" says Wells, who taught language arts and social studies to seventh-graders in the Bronx for two years after graduating from Duke. "Most of my students operated within the confines of a fifteen-block radius that encompassed their apartments, their school, and the stores where they shopped. Seldom did they travel beyond this radius, so they did not see the relevance of learning skills and information that were not directly applicable to their lives."</p><p>That's the wall Reach the World hopes to break down. The six-year-old organization receives financial and technical support from dozens of corporations and foundations and has an advisory board that includes the likes of newsman Walter Cronkite and underwater explorer Robert Ballard. It also joins with Columbia University's Teachers College to provide graduate students direct experience with educational technology.</p><p>"We're trying to open disadvantaged students' minds to possibilities and, at the same time, close the digital divide by having them and their teachers work more with computers and the Internet," says Reach the World's founder, Heather Halstead, who skippered Makulu around the world from 1997 to 1999.</p><p>Wells never felt constrained by a "fifteen-block radius." When she was in the seventh grade, her parents took her and her two brothers from their home in San Anselmo, California, on a yearlong sojourn, spending six months sailing up the East Coast and another six touring Europe in a Volkswagen van. The trip instilled in her a wanderlust, and she studied in Germany for a semester while at Duke, where she majored in English and German. She later taught in Germany for a year through a Fulbright Program teaching assistantship. Her experiences abroad deepened her belief that travel enhances education; as she puts it, they taught her the virtue of "extending learning beyond the four walls of the classroom."</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 375px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_fatuhivamarquesaslandfa.jpg" alt="Makulu II in the Marquesas" width="375" height="499" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Makulu II in the Marquesas. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© 2003 / Noah Berger.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>A group of fifth-graders in Newark, New Jersey, built scale models of Indonesian houses based on measurements provided over the Internet by Makulu crew members who visited a village in the Asian island nation. Other students have learned how to calculate latitude and longitude on maps, have conducted climate and geological studies, or have been introduced to the real-life settings described by Homer in the Odyssey--all through e-mail correspondence or by checking out the Reach the World website.</p><p>Each September, before setting sail on the next leg of their voyage, Wells and her colleagues have visited the New York classrooms, helping to create a connection between the students and the crew, who, she says, become "characters in an unfolding adventure story" for the kids the rest of the year. "The students' familiarity with the crew acts as a bridge to connect them more personally to the places we visit, and our adventures bring the world alive for them in a way that textbooks cannot," she says. "While they may still call French Polynesia 'French Polyester,' they know that it is located in the Pacific Ocean and that the crew had to sail twenty-three days in open ocean to get there."</p><p>Jennifer Brinkmeier, a technology coordinator for the Newark school last year as part of her graduate studies at Columbia's Teachers College, says, "The learning that occurs with real-life projects is ten times what it would be from a lecture or reading a book."</p><p>As curriculum director aboard Makulu, Wells is the primary contact for teachers and works with them to ensure that the crew's activities in port match up with lessons in the classroom. She researches upcoming destinations, sets up live Internet chats between New York and the ship, answers student e-mail messages, and doles out assignments to her mates to gather information and photos in response to teacher requests. When Makulu stopped in Sri Lanka last January, for example, teachers asked that the crew send back information on Buddhist culture and architecture, growing and harvesting tea, and the legend of King Solomon's mines. They delivered every lesson within four days.</p><p>"We spend only a few days in each port," Wells says. "We have to get gas and supplies and make repairs. We usually have a number of requests from teachers to check on something for their class, so we have to divide and conquer to make sure we get everything done."</p><p>In many ports, she also arranges for the crew to visit a local school and talk to students so that they can send more information back to New York. Some visits are set up in advance through contacts. Others are the result of happenstance. Wells discovered a school in Borneo when she and another crew member were walking down the street in a town called Kumai and noticed a sign with the school's name, English Make Good Fortune, posted outside. "A mob of Indonesian children poured out of the small building and beckoned us inside so they could practice English conversation," she recalls.</p><p>On a typical school visit, Makulu crew members explain the purpose of their voyage to the students, trace the boat's route on a globe they've brought along, and then pop a DVD into a laptop computer to show a movie in which Bronx students give a tour of their school and describe a typical day there. Then it's time for the local students to answer questions from a list put together by their Bronx counterparts: What subjects do you study? What do you eat for lunch? What chores do you do at home? What do you want to be when you grow up?</p><p>While a blast on a conch shell summons students from recess on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia, and entire schools in Islamic countries observe daily fasts during Ramadan, most students crew members meet are typical adolescents who like to eat pizza and fries and watch Leonardo DiCaprio movies, says Wells. "It's almost more important for the students in New York to see how similar these students are as how different they are." Still, she says she is fascinated by the differences: Marquesan students in the South Pacific practice traditional carving techniques; in the San Blas Archipelago, a group of tiny islands off the coast of Panama, youngsters perform acrobatic tricks on palm-tree jungle gyms.</p><p>Wells says she is also encouraged by the universally positive outlook of the students she's met. When the crew visited Cairo during the height of the U.S. war with Iraq last spring, they found that students there were more interested in finding out about Makulu's trip and life in New York than in expressing any anti-American sentiment.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" 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/010204/images/lg_egyptschoolvisit2.jpg" alt="Wells with class in Egypt" width="580" height="247" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Wells with class in Egypt.<span style="text-align: -webkit-right;"> © 2003 Noah Berger.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Those experiences make up for the occasional intolerance the crew members have had to confront, Wells says, such as a terrorist bombing of a Bali nightclub last fall shortly before Makulu arrived at the Indonesian port. The crew members, who began their three-year journey two months after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, weren't deterred, she says. They felt that it was important to students there and back home that they go.</p><p>Kelly Vaughan, who teaches sixth- and seventh-grade science in the Bronx, says the crew also has built self-esteem among her students by serving as role models. "Kids like to have more adults in their lives. To have the crew take an interest in what they're learning and interact with them--it's different for them than dealing with parents or teachers," Vaughan says. "The girls, especially, like the fact that Makulu is run by Ashley and other women, and they want to be like them."</p><p>"Makulu" is Zulu for a large, imposing woman--three of the four crew members happen to be female--and she's just as demanding a part of the crew's job as teaching. In addition to pulling two, three-hour shifts at the helm each day at sea, crew members are responsible for repairs like welding or sewing torn sails. "When I got on board the boat, common sense was really the only skill I had in terms of repairs and boat maintenance," Wells says. "But I have since learned the finer points of varnishing, how to replace hatches, caulk leaks, fix and maintain the heads, change the oil, rewire twelve-volt fixtures, install gaskets, and service winches."</p><p>Erin Myers, the captain of Makulu II, says that Wells is always forging ahead, noting she usually is the first one up each morning, banging around in the galley to make coffee or grab a soda before plunging into work. "Ashley challenges herself in all realms," Myers says. "On passage, you are just as likely to find her reading up on West African history as marine weather forecasting. In port, she is quick to make new friends and find a school for us to visit, and she will remember everyone's name."</p><p>When the ship sails back into New York Harbor in May 2004 to complete its circumnavigation, Wells will have charted some 30,000 miles across three oceans and six seas, stopping in more than forty-five countries. She will then have to face a challenge not encountered in any of them: re-adapting to a landlubber's life. She had planned to pursue an M.B.A. at Vanderbilt University before joining the crew of Makulu. Now, she says, the corporate life is out of the question. Instead, she may look for a job in journalism, where she can meet different people, or she may help Reach the World expand beyond the occasional circumnavigation.</p><p>"There are so many different types of lifestyle," she says. "I grew up being groomed to find a good job, and everything else would fall into place after that. But I've seen a number of people make a lifestyle choice and fit their career around it. I like the freedom that kind of decision offers."</p><p> </p><p class="byline"><em>Burns is a freelance writer in Raleigh, North Carolina.</em></p></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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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_SpinnakerPacificPassag.jpg" width="620" height="345" alt="Wells, stateside. © 2003 Noah Berger." /></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/matthew-burns" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Matthew Burns</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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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">Circumnavigation as Education</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501672 at https://alumni.duke.edu Lessons in Leadership and Ethics https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/lessons-leadership-and-ethics <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="631"><p class="articletitle">The Fuqua School of Business is forming a $5.1-million center that will create inventive courses and materials, conduct conferences, endow distinguished professorships, and support research and training on leadership and ethics. As part of this initiative, Mike Krzyzewski, Duke men's basketball coach, will join Fuqua's faculty as an executive-in-residence at the center, teaching and writing on leadership and ethics during the basketball off-season.</p><p>The Fuqua/Coach K Center of Leadership and Ethics (COLE) was announced in October during the opening session of the Coach K and Fuqua School of Business Conference on Leadership on the Duke campus.</p><p>Fuqua Dean Douglas T. Breeden says he expects Duke's Center of Leadership and Ethics to be a "path-breaking place" where the leading thinkers and corporate executives from around the world will come for training and to advance key leadership and ethics issues. "It will influence the way students, academics, corporations, governments, and nonprofit organizations view leadership and ethical foundations of business and policy in the twenty-first century."</p><p>"We are delighted that this center's founding partners include many of Duke's most prominent business leaders," Breeden says. "Corporations are increasingly being questioned regarding their leadership. Failures to lead ethically have resulted in serious breaches in public confidence and support. Today's competitive environment and global economy require managers at all levels to have strong leadership skills. We have the opportunity through this center to address these issues."</p><p>Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics will work closely with COLE through the George C. Lamb Jr. Professorship, newly created by his wife, Elizabeth, in her husband's memory. It will fund a scholar at Fuqua who will have an active affiliation with the institute. The institute will also work with Fuqua students on projects focused on moral courage and leadership.</p><p>The center will develop business-school cases and teaching materials on leadership and ethics, create short, nondegree courses for Fuqua Executive Education, serve as a global library for leadership writing and research, give research grants to faculty members at Fuqua and other schools, and sponsor leadership conferences each year with Coach K and Fuqua students. It will also sponsor a lecture series on leadership and ethics.</p><p>Allan Lind, the Thomas A. Finch Professor of management, and associate professor Sim Sitkin will serve as the center's faculty co-directors when it officially opens in January.</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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501670 at https://alumni.duke.edu Icons Away! https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/icons-away <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2" height="15"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" width="49%"><table width="18%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_december.jpg" alt="--" width="198" height="267" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">It finally hit me on a Saturday morning during my junior year at Duke. I was on the phone with my parents, in tears because I didn't seem to fit the mold of a female student on a college campus, when I suddenly realized--I didn't even want to any more. I was tired of trying to be perfect at everything I did. I was tired of feeling that I had to play my role as the "good female." I was tired of watching men championed for their weekend escapades with different women, while watching women chastised for similar behavior.</p><p>Most of all, I was tired of being reminded repeatedly that my role as a female student had been defined for me long before I set foot on campus. In the classroom or at the lunch table, I often felt as if I were expected to sit quietly and nod as the men argued about politics or sports. At parties, it seemed that my assigned role as a woman was to be attractive, wear minimal clothing, act dumb, and drink excessively. Somehow, I was expected to maintain a status quo that favored men over women and caused great harm to both. And above all else, I wasn't supposed to question this unwritten social code.</p><p>During my senior year, though, I was presented with an opportunity to examine this code--an opportunity to find out whether my observations and experiences were shared by other females. I found out I was not alone.</p><p>I was asked by President Nannerl O. Keohane to chair the undergraduate committee of the Duke Women's Initiative, an extensive project launched to examine the status of women at Duke. Our committee was charged with assessing the role of gender in the academic and social lives of Duke students. We conducted twenty focus groups, speaking with hundreds of male and female students throughout the campus. The results were troubling. We quickly found that most women with whom we spoke were dissatisfied in varying degrees with the gender expectations that are placed upon them--on campus and in the broader world.</p><p>Many women, for example, said they felt under intense pressure to achieve academically and socially. They believed they had to be at once smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and to do it all with no visible sign of effort--to live lives, as one student described it, "of effortless perfection." For me, the quest for perfection had known no bounds, even if it sometimes meant sleeping only four hours so I could squeeze in class, studying, a party, hitting the gym, and keeping up with friends, all while appearing unstressed and happy.</p><p>Other women talked about the roles they were supposed to play in their relationships with men. Female students, it seemed, get more attention from members of the opposite sex when they "dummy up," acting needier and less intelligent than they are. As difficult as it may be to believe, some women at one of the pre-eminent universities in America believe they must downplay their intelligence or risk intimidating--and losing the attention of--men.</p><p>Apparently, they're right: Men who participated in the focus groups agreed that women students can get more attention by appearing less intelligent. Many men said they felt more important and needed when women acted this way. I wasn't surprised. During my undergraduate years at Duke, I was lucky to have a lot of close guy friends. I had asked them, "Would you want to go out with a woman who acted like this?" Although they would be apologetic, some of them said they would go right along with the stereotypes.</p><p>The women in our focus groups also talked about many other aspects of gender that characterize life on university campuses today: the prevalence of a near-anonymous "hook-up" culture between men and women, acquaintance rape, alcohol abuse, and excessive concern with weight and body image. In one focus group, a senior told us how a small frozen yogurt had become the standard dinner among her peers and how she felt guilty for wanting to eat an actual meal. Her story struck a nerve, as I had also done the frozen-yogurt diet when I arrived at Duke my freshman year, losing fifteen pounds in about three months. It wasn't necessarily a conscious effort to lose weight but, rather, an attempt to fit a mold of what I and other women once considered "normal" at Duke.</p><p>Many women said they had never thought about gender issues before. The roles and expectations they experienced left them deeply conflicted and prevented them from living the lives they truly want to live. Yet these forces, these unspoken expectations, were so pervasive that few women challenged them or could even imagine a life without them. As I look back now, I realize how powerful these forces had been in my life, too. When I first came to Duke, I was like most other freshman women, seeing no option other than to play into them. The combination of studying abroad my junior year and simply maturing socially and academically allowed me finally to see outside this "freshman wall" of expectations.</p><p>I was very fortunate to have the advice and support of my parents and friends as I began to have these feelings of wanting to break out of the norm. When I was on the phone with my parents, in tears, that Saturday morning junior year, they could easily have said, "Go and fit in." But they were so supportive. My dad kept telling me that it was okay to question these things--it was part of becoming mature.</p><p>And that's the good news from our research: The same women who have been quietly fitting in are now questioning and challenging these ideals. The women in our focus groups thanked us for the opportunity to discuss these issues and bring them to the forefront. Many said it was the first time they had talked about the impact of gender in their lives.</p><p>I am proud of Duke for having the courage to take a hard look at the lives of its students. The report from the Women's Initiative, released in September, is a gift to universities everywhere, an opportunity for all students to rethink and to challenge these roles and expectations. One of the most powerful conclusions that I drew from my involvement with the Women's Initiative was the notion that only with efforts from both men and women can we break down long-standing guidelines for how women "should" live their lives.</p><p>Can a college woman today be healthy and strong while trying to live up to the idealized body images that today's media tell her she should have? Can she pursue her own dreams while trying to live a life of "effortless perfection"? Can she display her intelligence without intimidating men?</p><p>We should be working together to establish roles for women that have no inherent limitations. Instead of asking if a woman can meet our society's gender expectations, we should instead create a society in which these expectations no longer exist.</p><p class="byline">Grey '03 is a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University.</p></td></tr></tbody></table></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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/emily-grey" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Emily Grey</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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501669 at https://alumni.duke.edu Creativity: The Paper Behind the Process https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/creativity-paper-behind-process <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">Novelist Anne Tyler '61 calls her work a set of lies: "You set out to tell an untrue story, and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does." If that is the case, then Duke is home to fifteen intricately spun, novel-length lies crafted by Tyler, each with its own handwritten manuscript, typed drafts, and galley proofs, as well as published editions in various foreign languages. Rounding out the collection known as the Anne Tyler Papers are professional correspondence, literary reviews, and manuscripts of short stories.</p><p>At Duke, Tyler studied writing under Reynolds Price '55, who recognized her talent and introduced her to his own literary agent.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_biblo1.jpg" alt="--" width="250" height="326" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Tyler says she does not do outside research for her books but rather the "inner" research of getting to know her characters. In a 1989 letter to freelance writer Phyllis Rowe Willrich, Tyler explained, "About starting a book: Generally I begin with the characters, and, often, with characters in a very specific scene that unaccountably presents itself in my mind."</p><p>As a prewriting exercise for her 1974 novel, Celestial Navigation, she sketched out her characters' boarding house (at right), labeled their bedrooms, and established a timeline of their major life events, acquainting herself with them even before they took form on the page.</p><p>To a researcher, these diagrams and notes offer valuable clues to the author's creative process. Equally revealing are Tyler's drafts, written in longhand--always with the same style pen on unlined paper.</p><p>Once questioned about this ritual, she responded, "Since I really seem to [write] by ear, if I'm typing I can't hear as well."</p><p>The Anne Tyler Papers are one of several literary collections by alumni authors in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. Other collections include the papers of James Applewhite '58, A.M. '60, Ph.D. '69; Fred Chappell '61, A.M. '64; Josephine Humphreys '67, Hon. '94; Peggy Payne '70; Reynolds Price; and William Styron '47, Hon. '68.</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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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">Selections from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501668 at https://alumni.duke.edu Forum: January-February 2004 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/forum-january-february-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"> <p> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"><strong>Latin America Laments</strong><p class="articletitle">As usual, I found my May-June 2003 issue of Duke Magazine interesting and informative. Due to my personal involvement in business activities in Mexico, I was especially attracted to the items about Latin America [<strong><a href="../050603/startup1.html">"South American Start-Up," May-June 2003</a></strong>]. During my seven years of travel to Mexico, I have come to appreciate the similarities in the dreams of their developing middle class to our own, while noting the huge difference in their graciousness as hosts--for example, how many times would a U.S. host apologize for his poor quality of Spanish?</p><p>However, in response to a long-ago question of whether I could live in Mexico, I had to be honest. The level of poverty and corruption was too much for me to handle on a permanent basis.</p><p>The corruption seems to go hand-in-hand with bureaucracy. This was clearly identified by Mr. Bauder and discussion of the tramitÈs, but there is a bigger distinction from our standards than the punishment. A young Mexican law student explained to me: "In Mexico, we also consider it wrong to accept bribes. The difference is that we don't see offering one as bad." Even though the current government is strongly pursuing a reduction in both of these problems, they need a societal change to overcome the attitude that bargaining with a policeman is a coveted skill.</p><p>As to the poverty, progress is being made. However, the change will be slow. I am fearful that Mexicanos are too impatient and don't see the level of improvement that has allowed Mexico to keep a relatively stable peso during some tough economic times. The complex challenge for their federal government involves the practical efforts of increasing the variety and stability of Mexican industry, while overcoming the continued partisanship of a society founded on a multitude of fractional interests. Unlike the limited number of technical personnel mentioned in Bolivia, much of Latin America has a well-educated work force. The problem is the limited number of positions.</p><p>As U.S. citizens, we need to recognize that Latin America offers more than resort areas and cheap labor. These people are both our neighbors and brothers. As we continue to investigate options for a widened trade region, we need to realize that stabilizing our own economy will require strengthening these potential markets. We also need to recognize that our efforts to raise the quality and production standards in Latin America don't need to stifle the creative nature that could be the source of innovation.</p><p class="articletitle">Tom Marks '79 (via e-mail)</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Team Spirit </strong></p><p class="articletitle">I thoroughly enjoyed Jim Young's article on Duke football ["<a href="../070803/football1.html"><strong>Blue Devil Football: First and Long," July-August 2003</strong></a>]. I entered Duke in September 1937, so you know that the next four years were the golden years of Duke football. And to have been there when Bolo blocked the punt that beat Pitt. And the fact that the 1938 team was unscored on. Unbelievable! My father and I even came back after I'd graduated to see the 1942 Rose Bowl game in Durham.</p><p>My wife and I lived in the Wilmington, Delaware, area, where I worked with DuPont and where many Duke alums also settled. I always enjoyed introducing two of our closest friends to strangers as "a couple of dumb football players from Duke," both CEOs of major chemical companies. Werner Brown ['42] majored in chemistry (as did I) and became CEO of Hercules Chemical. Bob Barnett ['42, J.D. '48], after the war and a law degree, became CEO of Imperial Chemical Industries America. They are still in the Wilmington area, and we still keep in touch.</p><p>You will not find my picture with the 1941 basketball team in the Hall of Fame under the stands at Cameron. I've been trying to get the athletics department to put a note saying: "Bob Moyer was in chem lab when picture was taken." No luck so far.</p><p class="articletitle">Bob Moyer '41 <br /> Durham, North Carolina</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">The article by Jim Young, <a href="../070803/football1.html"><strong>"Blue Devil Football: First and Long,"</strong></a> and the <a href="../070803/depfor.html">letter from Gael Marshall Chaney '73, "ACC Asides,"</a> are very germane, as we begin another fall football season.</p><p>As a kid in the Philadelphia area, I remember with anticipation the start of the football season, since members of my family and father were "Penn men," and they all had season tickets to Franklin Field. In those days, Penn did very well on the gridiron, even playing Duke during the year that I was at the Wharton Graduate School.</p><p>At Duke, as an undergraduate, I recall anticipating the football season and all it entailed, and it was again brought to the surface--the excitement, the after-game dates and frat parties. Under Wallace Wade and Bill Murray, we were not winners all the time, but there was an atmosphere that does not exist with the present Duke football regime.</p><p>Why can't Duke attempt to leave the ACC and apply for membership within the Ivy League of Dartmouth, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Brown, etc.? I think schedules in this league can also include crossovers with the Navy and Army, among others. This relationship would no doubt lead to a more competitive season, and fit into the academic requirements of the university. Also, Penn on the football field would be no pushover.</p><p>Of course, what this would do with the other sports programs such as basketball might create a problem. But students come to Duke for the academics, not the sports, anyhow.</p><p class="articletitle">Joseph S. Cooper '50<br /> Fearrington, North Carolina</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">I hate to write to you with a complaint, but the recent article on Duke football really disturbs me. To give up on football and suggest that we leave the ACC and move to a conference where we can compete just disturbs me. If Wake Forest can compete in the ACC, why can't Duke?</p><p>The thing that disturbs me the most is that, with this article, it would appear that our alumni magazine is promoting such a move and using a political science professor who obviously knows very little about the sport to make the case for such a move. I know that we have to suffer through all of those games we are losing, but to throw in the towel and say we can't compete! I can't imagine our great university taking such a position; even if some liberal-arts professor thinks that, it doesn't mean the alumni magazine should lend him credibility by quoting him. Did I miss something? Maybe the next article will be more positive and constructive.</p><p class="articletitle">Reggie Chapman B.S.M.E. '56 <br /> Greensboro, North Carolina</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">The article on Duke football in the July-August issue was interesting and well-balanced, but it failed to address one important issue. That is--the number of football-scholarship recipients who are thereby taking places of more qualified students (even children and grandchildren of alumni).</p><p>William G. Bowen and Sarah Levin's book Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values points out this importance to smaller elite institutions. Swarthmore recently dropped football for just this reason.</p><p>We'd like to see a poll of alumni.</p><p class="articletitle">Kay Dunkelberger Hart '43, A.M. '50 and Tom Hart '44, J.D. '50<br /> Redding, Connecticut</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">Having experienced Duke basketball back in the short-shorts, mid-Eighties before Dickie V turned it into a three-ring circus, I can attest to the unifying power of sports on a college campus where nearly everyone had their pet cause. It always appeared to sports-minded students like me that suffering through bad football was the penance to be paid for competing at such a high level in basketball.</p><p>We understood that it took only fifteen or so scholarships to field a top-ten team, or twenty to field an excellent soccer team, and so on. Furthermore, most of these guys seemed to be able to hack it academically, albeit with help from academic "advisers." But did we really want seventy to eighty football players, eating up gobs of scholarships and funding and taking many slots from the academically or artistically gifted? This is why Duke fought the ACC expansion. They know it is impossible in the long term to compete with the Miamis and State U's without seriously compromising the university's mission.</p><p>But, at least in the short term, there will be an effort to save face and compete, while trying to work out some agreement with other selective, smaller universities who are also playing homecoming escort-service roles in their respective conferences. A Division 1-AA schedule makes too much sense not to pursue for the Dukies of the college football world. This alumnus would rather be competitive and win football games at a slightly lower level while not sacrificing the academic and cultural standards that Duke has worked so hard to achieve.</p><p class="articletitle">Jon Simmons '87<br /> Indianapolis, Indiana</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Sad</strong></p><p class="articletitle">I was saddened to read that the <strong><a href="../050603/depgaz4.html">Oak Room was closing after all these years</a></strong>--it holds many fond memories for me, as a Duke graduate and mother of three Duke students. What saddens me most of all, though, is the fact that it's being turned into the new home for the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life, to give the LGBT center a more prominent place on campus.</p><p>I find myself wondering where the Christians are, those believing in biblical Christianity. Have we all been silent so long that our deeply held beliefs are considered irrelevant? Of course, I know Duke has long been a center of "political correctness"--</p><p>I guess it just is hard to miss, how deeply the roots of this "political correctness" go, when the aforementioned center replaces a nostalgic place like the Oak Room! I mourn for the traditional Christian principles upon which the university was founded.</p><p class="articletitle">Janie Risch Fortney '61<br /> Southport, North Carolina</p><p class="articletitle"><em>The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture is moving into the Oak Room's former space. The Center for LGBT Life is moving into the Mary Lou Williams Center's former space, in the basement of the Union Building.</em></p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Voice of Reason</strong></p><p class="articletitle">I just finished reading <a href="../070803/depgar.html"><strong>"L'Affaire Pre-Blair" ["Under the Gargoyle," July-August 2003]</strong></a>. It's a great piece and recalls for the university community something it needs to remember: [former Vice President for University Relations] Bill Green was and is a remarkable man. I remember so many times during my time as board chair when Bill's quiet words and considerable wisdom kept me from falling deep into some boiling kettle.</p><p class="articletitle">Neil Williams '58 (via e-mail)</p><p class="articletitle"><em>The correspondent is a former chair of Duke's board of trustees.</em></p><p class="articletitle"><strong>Ruling on Rules</strong></p><p class="articletitle">Upon opening Duke Magazine today, I was troubled by the first thing I read there <strong><a href="../070803/depquq.html">["Quad Quotes," July-August 2003</a></strong>]: associate professor Ruth Day's comment: "Rules? Pah! Rules are like wishbones: Break them and the magic begins."</p><p>I would hope that the comment was made in some sort of creative context, as in "Think outside of the box, people." It seems unlikely that Ms. Day would consider it "magical" if her students threw water balloons in her classroom, or if she collided with a vehicle whose operator arbitrarily chose to drive on the left-hand side of the road.</p><p>Still, in an era when lack of personal discipline contributes heavily to the failings of our secondary schools, and liberal, anti-authoritarian thinking prevails on campuses today, it is disheartening to contemplate just how eager young minds might interpret and embrace Ms. Day's apparent nonconformist philosophy.</p><p>Furthermore, it strikes me that leading off your magazine with her remark is tantamount to endorsing it.</p><p class="articletitle">Phil Clutts '61<br /> Charlotte, North Carolina</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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 2004</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501667 at https://alumni.duke.edu Allyson Duncan J.D. '75 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/allyson-duncan-jd-75 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><p class="articletitle">Lawyers for alleged September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui argue that testimony from Al Qaeda members held by the U.S. government could vindicate their client. Prosecutors for the Justice Department reply that making such witnesses available would compromise national security. Who will resolve the matter?</p><table border="0" cellspacing="8" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/010204/images/lg_aduncanrgb.jpg" alt="Allyson Duncan J.D. '75" width="275" height="477" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Allyson Duncan J.D. '75 could play a major role. As the newest member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Duncan is eligible to sit on the three-judge panel that was to hear the government's latest appeal in December.</p><p>The Fourth Circuit is also the Court of Appeals for another high-profile terrorism-related case, Yaser Esam Hamdi v. Donald Rumsfeld (Hamdi is the American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan and is being held in a military brig in Virginia).</p><p>"She is going on that bench when she will be able to offer a compassionately conservative voice to their deliberations," says A.P. Carlton, president of the American Bar Association and a former colleague of Duncan's at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP.</p><p>Duncan, a Republican, won't discuss specific cases, nor her jurisprudence.</p><p>Of her new position, she says, "I find it awe-inspiring." But, she adds, "It's not a role that I sat down and thought about assuming or pursuing."</p><p>Neither did she set out to gain the breadth of legal experience that won her the respect of colleagues and approval from North Carolina Democrats and Republicans (the two parties had failed to agree on a nominee for the court of appeals for over a decade, until President Bush nominated Duncan in April). "Pure fortuity," she says.</p><p>It was fortune, then, that landed Duncan, three years out of law school, at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she rose through the ranks to become the commission's acting legal counsel under then-chairman Clarence Thomas. (She later testified before Congress that she knew of no impropriety in his relationship with Anita Hill.) Her Washington reputation served as the launch pad for her career in North Carolina, where she served, in turn, as a law professor, state utilities commissioner, state appeals court judge, and partner in Kilpatrick Stockton.</p><p>She broke barriers along the way. Duncan was the first African-American woman to serve on the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the first African American to be elected president of the North Carolina Bar Association. And now, she is the first African-American woman to sit on the Fourth Circuit court.</p><p>"It's a significant distinction," says Duncan, adding that she looks forward to the time when her kind of career path is no longer considered remarkable for black women. To that end, she plans to "nurture law clerks and get them accustomed to the fact that this is a norm."</p><p>Otherwise, she says, she is not out to make history. To prepare for her first cases, her plan is simple: "I will read what arrives, until I am confronted with something that requires additional research." That is challenge enough; she places her hand on a two-inch-thick stack of papers on a corner of her desk and notes, "This was yesterday."</p><p>Duncan, a self-described "tortoise," has experience plodding through legal challenges. An early one came at Duke Law School. "I spent the first year being convinced I was not cut out for it," she says, "not because I didn't like it, but simply because I didn't think I had the aptitude or the discipline. At one point I sought counseling, and I thought I should probably just quit."</p><p>"Then I thought, 'Well, I'm here, let me just sweat it out and see where this goes,' " she continues. "I just constitutionally dislike giving up."</p><p>Good thing--because, Constitutionally, she has plenty of challenges ahead.</p><p class="byline"><em> Todd '98 is a freelance writer in Durham.</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="2004-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, January 31, 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/james-todd" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Todd</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/jan-feb-2004" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 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">Taking the Fourth</div></div></section> Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501666 at https://alumni.duke.edu