Duke - Mar - Apr 2003 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003 en NASA's Descent https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/nasas-descent <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="2" cellspacing="4" style="width:206px"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Roland: Is the program spaced out?" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_11.jpg" style="height:405px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Roland: Is the program spaced out?&nbsp;Les Todd.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>You are a critic of the shuttle program. Is it correct to call you a critic of manned space flight in general? </strong></p> <p>After writing the piece for Discover, I concluded that the shuttle program was unsustainable--that is, it was based on an economic model that simply could not work. I said we shouldn't send people into space unless we have something that's worth the cost and the risk of putting them there. So I got labeled as being opposed to manned space flight, and that isn't quite my argument. My argument with NASA has always been: The shuttle was a good idea that just didn't work. What you really need to do if you want to open up space for human exploitation, whether you're sending people or machines, is to have a better launch vehicle. Then, all kinds of things will be possible in space that are impractical now.</p> <p><strong>What is the nature of the unsustainable economic model that you say NASA is saddled with and how did it evolve?</strong></p> <p>Halfway through the Apollo program, funding to the agency started going down, and they were shocked by this. They believed that the United States had committed itself to opening up the heavens, what Kennedy called "the new ocean." But by 1965, when the funding started to go down, the war in Vietnam was heating up, Lyndon Johnson had his Great Society, and there was not a lot of enthusiasm for continuing this "crash program." Apollo was essentially that, to get to the moon as soon as possible and beat the Soviets. So NASA started asking itself in the late Sixties, What can we do to restore our funding? You know, to catch that sort of Kennedy enthusiasm. And they decided then that a manned mission to Mars was the goal that would really spark the American imagination, that would get the money flowing again.</p> <p>But nobody was buying that. So NASA settled on what they called the "Next Logical Step." And that meant, if we're going to Mars, we have to have a space station as a launching platform. And they did the numbers on the space station and found that it would cost as much every year to maintain as it would to put it up. That is, the only way it was going to be practical was if they had a low-cost, routine way of getting to the space station. And, reasonably enough, they thought the problem was that the launch vehicles they were using then were expendable, and if they had a reusable rocket, wouldn't that save a lot of money? So, they started the "Next Logical Step" program of building a shuttle that was cheap and reliable transportation into Earth orbit.</p> <p>So it's been the same program ever since the late 1960s. They started to build the shuttle and they made some rather optimistic projections. They said it was going to reduce launch costs by 95 percent. One of their own engineers told them that was impossible, because half of launch cost is not in the vehicle itself, it's the overhead, it's maintaining the Kennedy Space Center and all the other infrastructure. So, even if you reduced the cost of the shuttle to zero, you could only bring the total costs down by 50 percent. Nonetheless, that was the promise that they made to Congress.</p> <p>Also, that it would amortize its development costs; it would fly so cheaply that it would recover all the money it cost to develop within the first twelve years of operation. Then they started flying it and, as it turns out, it's more expensive to send a pound into space on the space shuttle than it was on the old rockets. And that was my argument to NASA: The shuttle wasn't an unreasonable program. It probably could have reduced launch costs, but when you find out that isn't true, then you've got to stop and face reality. They didn't. They just went right on with their commitment to the Mars mission: "Well, we have this shuttle. Fine. So now we need a space station."</p> <p><strong>Does NASA face serious budget problems now?</strong></p> <p>Yes. And it has, consistently, ever since the shuttle started flying, because it is so much more expensive to fly than they had predicted. To compound the problem, they decided to bowl ahead with what I call "summit shuttle," the space station. If you did a realistic economic model, Congress would never buy it. So they promised them this bargain-basement thing, and, of course, it's late and over-cost and under-specification. They just kept hoping that things would get better. Instead, it's not one but two albatrosses surrounding them, and it's strangling the program.</p> <p><strong>Was the shuttle state-of-the-art when it was created?</strong></p> <p>It's the most sophisticated launch vehicle in the world, but it's so sophisticated that it's not economical or practical or reliable. The reason the shuttle is the size it is--why it has that payload bay, and also why it has the shape it does, with that particular wing form--was to meet Air Force requirements to put up reconnaissance satellites. When NASA was trying to sell the shuttle, nobody was very interested. The Nixon Administration wasn't. Congress wasn't. So NASA went to the Air Force and proposed a deal. They said, "If you agree to support the shuttle and tell the president and Congress that there's a national-security need for it, we'll customize it to suit you, and we'll let you fly on it for less than cost."</p> <p>The Air Force bought on but told them what shape it had to be. And the Air Force used the shuttle quite a bit, but never liked it very much. It was unreliable, always late getting off, always had problems. So after the Challenger accident, the Air Force pretty much got out of shuttle operations. They fly some missions on the shuttle, but mostly they've gone back and developed their own generation of launch vehicles, and now they have a whole stable they can use. Which is what NASA should have. In other words, there should be a range of launch vehicles to choose from, and then for each particular mission you use the one that's appropriate. So, for instance--and I don't think it's a good idea--but if you're taking up a big unit for the space station, then the shuttle makes sense. If you're just flying astronauts up to put them on the space station and to bring others back, it's a waste. It's like driving a big truck when a little Volkswagen would do.</p> <p><strong>Suppose that NASA were to abandon manned space flight tomorrow. Is space technology advanced to the point that the public would embrace it without astronauts?</strong></p> <p>Yes. I think we're already there. NASA's got a satellite that's essentially taking a picture of the whole universe. It's measured the whole universe to the very end. It's an enormous scientific achievement, and, to boot, you can go to a website now and see a picture of the whole universe. It's just staggering. All NASA has to do is advertise that stuff, but they have consistently downplayed their space science and built all of their public relations around the astronauts. They think that the astronaut sells, so that's what they market.</p> <p>And, in fact, the astronauts, what they're doing, what NASA's doing, is pretty dull stuff. For twenty years we send people up, and they fly around in orbit, and they do these silly experiments. They're not pioneering. They're not doing new scientific research. They're not expanding the bounds of exploration or anything. But NASA's perception is that people really like to see people in space. And my argument with them is, if you really want people in space, then build a launch vehicle that makes it practical for them to get there.</p> <p><strong>But you say that no manned vehicle could ever be very safe; they're too complex.</strong></p> <p>I think we would all tolerate a certain amount of risk, if the astronauts were doing something vital. But the astronauts in the Columbia died for nothing; they were not doing anything worth the cost and the risk. The Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon, was up there to push a button on a camera, to take pictures of the desert. We have satellites that do that all the time and do it much better than he could. That was just make-work. To the extent that people want to pay just for the romance of having people in space, sure, that's worth something. I just don't think it's worth the enormous cost that we are investing.</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</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> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502122 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/nasas-descent#comments Two Shades of Blue https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/two-shades-blue <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Duke Archway/UNC-Chapel Hill's Old Well" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_well2230333b.jpg" style="height:486px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Les Todd.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>For one of his opinion columns in The Chronicle, Christopher Scoville, a Duke sophomore, was given a headline that might have constituted fightin' words: "Carolina Blue." The February column centered on the start of his semester. It's a semester that has brought him to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a full-time student--even while he works toward his Duke degree.</p> <p>Scoville is part of an educational experiment. "Unique" is an overworked word, but as an experiment, this appears to fit the definition: one of a kind. In January, Scoville and twenty-seven other sophomore Robertson Scholars--divided almost equally between Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill--switched campuses. Robertson Scholars officials say they are looking to become "a national model for inter-institutional collaboration in higher education."</p> <p>Scoville said in his Chronicle column that he felt a little like the proverbial stranger in a strange land. He began by reflecting on his exposure to Carolina classes: "I managed the first week, albeit with help from every passing, though incredibly hospitable, stranger who thought I was some French tourist." He added an appreciation of Carolina's vibrant campus life, noting that "students congregate midday at the Pit, smack dab in the middle of two libraries, a dining hall, a coffee house, the Union, and student stores." And he celebrated a spirit of social activism. "Students are meaningfully engaged, and their energy is pervasive," he observed, pointing to "protests, petitions, sit-ins, teach-ins, campaigns, and hunger lunches."</p> <p>As they steep themselves in the switch, many Robertson Scholars echo Lisa Stratton's description: "starting all over again as a 'freshman' during my second semester of sophomore year." Stratton, a Robertson Scholar from UNC now at Duke, comes from Greenbelt, Maryland, where she attended magnet schools in creative and performing arts and in science and technology. As a high-school student, she took four years of American Sign Language classes, and she's involved with Carolina's Sign Language club. "I haven't had any negative interactions with Duke students," she says. "That has made a huge difference in my adjustment. Being here has dispelled many of the stereotypes about Duke that I had coming into the switch."</p> <p>Robertson Scholar Sarah Pickle, a Carolina sophomore from Temple, Texas, says she's grateful to her Duke professors for not calling attention to her Robertson distinction. "The students have treated me as if I were a Duke student, though I think my desire for this might be representative of something not so positive that lingers--perhaps a fear of being 'outed' as a public-school or Carolina student." She has run across "negative attitudes directed toward public schools in general" on Duke's campus, not just reflecting the Duke-Carolina rivalry, "which is to be expected." But she's had a series of encouraging encounters with Duke students. "One or two people will reach out, trying to break down all of this Carolina-Duke negativity," she says, adding, "I had harbored the impression that Duke's campus was cold, not as welcoming. I sincerely feel like I've been proven wrong. Those who have reached out have been incredibly warm."While she discerns "less social activism on the Duke campus as a whole," Stratton says, "The students I have encountered here seem genuinely passionate about becoming involved in certain social issues. I think that Duke students are also very self-aware. They know that there are problems with the social activities on campus, and I see a lot of people doing things to try to create a more tolerant, inclusive, united student body." With some of her peers, she is working to put aspects of her Duke public policy class, "Enterprising Leadership," into practice. She is helping to organize student volunteers to donate leftover food from Duke Dining Services to local community shelters, and is investigating how "to make the Duke community more aware of how they can contribute to [addressing] hunger issues in the Durham area."</p> <p>At Carolina, Pickle has been involved in the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the UNC Campaign Finance Reform Alliance. Here, she says she's been "quite a bit overwhelmed with the switch" and preoccupied with "getting my bearings." Eventually she wants to link up with the labor-advocacy groups at Duke. And having worked as a deejay at Carolina's radio station, she hopes to check out Duke's WXDU.</p> <p>The campus switch is a defining feature of the Robertson Scholars program. Launched in 2001 with $24 million from Julian Robertson and his wife, Josie, it finances the students' education and summer-enrichment programs in the United States and abroad. Julian Robertson grew up in Salisbury, North Carolina. He graduated from UNC in 1955 with a degree in business administration, and is the founder and chairman of Tiger Management LLC, the world's largest hedge-fund group. Josie Robertson is a member of Carolina's board of visitors. One of their two sons, Julian Spencer Robertson, is a 1998 Duke graduate.</p> <p>Eric Mlyn, director of the Robertson Scholars program, says "the logistics were very challenging" for the campus switch. "This is the first time anyone had done this." There were "little irritants," involving room assignments, meal plans, course credits, health insurance, and access to student health services. For a time, Duke students at Carolina were faced with having their course registrations denied because of confusion over immunization records. But he says that officials at both universities have been "incredibly supportive," and that the successful switch contributes to the hope that "when the Robertson Scholars graduate, they'll have a warm feeling for both campuses."</p> <p>All applicants to Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are considered for the program. Semi-finalists are identified by the two admissions offices. Finalists are selected by a committee set up by the two universities and invited to both campuses for a finalists' weekend. The four-year scholarships cover tuition at Duke and tuition, room, and living stipends at UNC. They also support summer enrichment experiences.</p> <p>An unofficial symbol of the program--and a major means of promoting ties between traditional campus rivals--is an intercampus bus service. The bus departs hourly on weekdays and is free for anyone holding a Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill I.D. One Robertson Scholar who has achieved avid bus-rider status is sophomore Randall Drain, based this semester at Carolina. He plays on Duke's varsity lacrosse team. "I have lacrosse practice five times a week and games on the weekend, which clearly necessitates good time management and frequent use of the bus," he says.</p> <p>Beyond the bus, which has "Robertson Scholars Program" on its sides, along with the names of both universities in two shades of blue, the program has found various ways to express the collaborative concept. It has fostered, for example, a Web-based art-resources project with a powerful array of art-historical research tools. This winter, the program announced its third cycle of accepting grant proposals for a "collaboration fund," which supports joint Duke-Carolina projects. One-year grants of up to $5,000 go to faculty, staff, and students on both campuses. Past grants have supported, among other endeavors, a course on portrait photography, a Judaic studies seminar for faculty and graduate students, an undergraduate series on space exploration, and a program exploring links between civil liberties and national security.</p> <p>The emphasis on community-service projects, large and small, continued when the Robertson Scholars started participating in the North Carolina Department of Transportation's Adopt a Highway program. They are picking up litter on a section of U.S. 15-501--aptly enough, the road that connects Duke and Carolina.</p> <p>Connections are a continuing emphasis of the program. One of the aims is to create an ethos of community service in its scholars--even as the program works to create a community among the scholars themselves. The program periodically brings together its students informally. Last fall, Robertson freshmen gathered to listen to Duke's president, Nannerl O. Keohane, and James Moeser, chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, talk about how they decide whether to take public stands on contentious issues.</p> <p>As second-semester freshmen, they all enroll in a special colloquium that meets on the two campuses. The instructors are Robert Korstad, who teaches in the Hart Leadership program in Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and historian James Leloudis at Carolina. The syllabus shows a concern with the role of major universities in, and with the texture of, the region. Among the themes are "Duke and UNC at Work in the World," "Birth of the New South," "African-American Life in the Jim Crow South," "The Activist Impulse in the South," "The Multicultural, Transglobal South," and "The Role of the University in the Twenty-First Century."</p> <p>Mlyn says that, with the colloquium and with other aspects of the program, "we want our students to have common intellectual experiences, to meet leading faculty at Duke and UNC, and to begin to think about how their service relates to broader global issues." As he and his colleagues sift through admissions applications, "it's a given with all these students that they're academically gifted," he says. "What we look for are students who have shown a commitment to, or a passion for, service. They have taken on leadership roles in service, not just checked off boxes because it was a high-school requirement. They've stepped outside their schools and started programs on their own, have gathered people around them to sustain those organizations. We look at what the students have done with whatever resources were available to them. We know that students from more affluent backgrounds might have had more opportunities than those from more modest backgrounds. But these are all students who have done unusual things."</p> <p>The most innovative, and intensive, aspect of the program is support for three summers of enrichment activities. For their first summer, scholars do community-service work in the Southeast. Last summer, this first group of Robertson Scholars found themselves in Whitesburg, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Sunflower, Mississippi, among other places. They worked in domestic-violence shelters, trekked into the wilderness with at-risk youth, helped recent immigrants navigate the policies and procedures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, taught and mentored young people from impoverished communities, and led community workshops on e-mail and the Internet.</p> <p>As the program declares in its literature, "meaningful and substantive summer experiences" will help scholars "develop their leadership skills and experience the challenges and rewards of working in a community-service organization." Its organizers are also hoping to build long-term relationships with the sponsoring communities and organizations. Internships, by that model, evolve into enduring partnerships.</p> <p>The second summer engages students with those same issues in an international context. The third summer is an independent-project summer. It's meant to be built around a senior thesis, a documentary project, or some other substantive piece of work shaped with the help of a faculty member or other professional mentor.</p> <p>This summer, the sophomore scholars will travel to South Africa or Cuba. Both countries "provide an excellent opportunity for students to experience rapid and exciting global, national, and local transformation," according to the program's assistant director for summer enrichment, Lisa Croucher. South Africa, she says, "has made tremendous progress in human rights in recent years, but still struggles to remove the legacy of apartheid while it also battles one of the worst HIV/AIDS rates in the world." Cuba, since losing its Soviet support, has been "finding its way in a global economy" she says, but is "still shackled by the U.S. embargo, scrutiny of which seems to increase each day in the U.S. media and political debates."</p> <p>Summer scholars in South Africa will be based in Cape Town, where they will work with local, nongovernmental organizations. One organization is concerned with issues related to HIV/AIDS treatment; another offers dance training to children in underprivileged areas of Cape Town; a third concentrates on biological diversity, genetic engineering, and sustainable development. They will travel to Johannesburg and Pretoria and to Windhoek, Namibia. Kirk Felsman, the Duke faculty affiliate for the Robertson Scholars program, is the program's organizer.</p> <p>Two groups are shaping the Cuban summer: a Cuban sponsoring institution, Casa de las Americas, and a U.S.-based organization, FundaciÛn Amistad, which is dedicated to fostering understanding between the peoples of the two countries. The Havana-based program will draw Robertson Scholars into an adolescent mental-health clinic, a children's performing-arts program, and a United Nations development program.</p> <p>Summers devoted to participating in, and reflecting on, community service are emblematic not just of this new merit scholarship, but also of a new direction taken by the world's most venerable awards. In a report on elite international fellowship programs, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about plans for a Cape Town rendezvous to celebrate the Rhodes Scholarship's centennial. The schedule included visits to AIDS clinics and impoverished townships, talks on "sustainable development" and "black economic empowerment," and a dinner in honor of Nelson Mandela. According to the article, the head of Rhodes House, the trust's headquarters and a base for the scholars at Oxford, "interprets the founder's requirement that scholars practice 'protection of the weak' to mean that they should work for social justice. Community service, while not a requirement, is a typical feature of the successful candidate's rèsumè."</p> <p>For now, focusing less on social justice than on academic demands, Robertson Scholar sophomores have settled into their campus-switch routine. Christopher Paul, a Duke sophomore at Carolina, grew up in Chapel Hill and graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham. This semester, his roommate is a member of Carolina's varsity football team. Paul will apply a current Carolina seminar on "Documenting Communities" to his planned Duke certificate in documentary studies. He's also continuing his study of Chinese, taking a course on literature and philosophy, and studying organic and analytical chemistry--preparation for an environmental-toxicology course that he'll be taking at Duke. "I like getting the exposure to different professors and different teaching styles," Paul says. At Duke, he'll likely concentrate in environmental science, focusing on international environmental policy.</p> <p>Paul finds Carolina an "active campus, socially and politically." By comparison, in his view, Duke boasts a rich geographical diversity but suffers from a lack of socio-economic diversity--and a lack of passion--in its student body. "At Duke, I know everyone who would be considered an activist, whether in the environmental, anti-sweatshop, or antiwar movements. They're all the same people."</p> <p>Christopher Scoville, the Duke Chronicle columnist, draws similar comparisons between the campuses. Carolina students, he says, are "more interested in what's going on around them; they're actively engaged in local, state, and national issues." Scoville, whose bottom lip is pierced with a silver bar, also sees on Carolina's campus a wider spectrum of students. "There are some people at Duke who might think I'm a freak. But at Carolina, there are actually people with blue hair. Alternative lifestyles are a given. That adds a lot to the life of the university. It's refreshing."</p> <p>On the other hand, Scoville says he hasn't found all of his Carolina classes as intellectually substantive or demanding as his Duke classes. For one thing, he's doing far less course-related reading. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he has an academic background that is unusual and international: He grew up in Kansas City and, after his junior year in high school, went to the Red Cross Nordic United World College in Norway for two years. He speaks French, Spanish, and Norwegian.</p> <p>Scoville says he wouldn't have come to Duke without the offer of a Robertson Scholarship. His Carolina experiences, and especially his ongoing encounters there with campus activists, have deepened some of his frustrations with Duke. (His multiple Duke involvements include work with a presidential task force looking at how Duke makes itself more welcoming of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty members, and employees.) Still he says he's drawn to the idea of interacting with students who don't think the way he does. "I don't like to be comfortable; I like to have my view challenged, so I'm glad to be going to a place where not everyone thinks like I do."</p> <p>As he thinks about the Robertson Scholars program, he envisions its evolving into something less structured. It may, he says, be trying too hard to build a community of scholars and an "idealized notion of the perfect summer program." He says, "Our interests are all varied. We are strong and willful, and we all have our own passions, which don't necessarily overlap. It's good that this is not about people thinking and acting the same."</p> <p>Program director Eric Mlyn says he's certain that Robertson Scholars don't think and act the same. But he likes the idea of a group identity. "In that sense we're unlike some other programs. We want them to be ambassadors for collaboration as they get to know each other, across campuses particularly. They're the ones who can show everyone else how much can be gained by being a participant on a sister campus."</p> <p>One quality that Mlyn expects these scholars to gain, or to deepen, is a fervor for "a profound level of civic engagement, whether as doctors, teachers, engineers, or members of the Peace Corps." Already he sees in them "a shared propensity to take risks--and I mean good risks. After all, this program didn't exist when our current sophomores came into it. It was just a series of promises. It took a brave young person, who in many cases had offers from other excellent universities, to join us."</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/blue.png" width="620" height="265" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/robert-j-bliwise" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert J. Bliwise</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A joint merit scholarship program for Duke and Carolina students may become a national model for inter-institutional collaboration in higher education.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502164 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/two-shades-blue#comments An Emerging Imperialism https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/emerging-imperialism <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width:98%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Roman reach: The domain of Emperor Hadrian" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_empiremapbl.jpg" style="height:429px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Roman reach: The domain of Emperor Hadrian.&nbsp;© Bettmann/Corbis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>It's an arresting image, a sculpture marking Imperial Rome's triumphant quashing of a Jewish rebellion during the reign of Hadrian. The emperor has his foot planted on the back of a captured youth. To Hadrian expert Mary T. Boatwright, a Duke classical studies professor, it's an ambiguous image. Is it an unvarnished celebration of conquest? Or is there a hint of angst in the expression of the conqueror? By the time Hadrian assumed the throne in 117 A.D., he was aware that imperial ambitions carried considerable costs for Rome.</p> <p>Ancient Rome has an enduring resonance--especially in these saber-rattling times. In making the case to attack Iraq, for example, the editors of The New York Times argued that "the United States is, and seems likely to remain, a nation whose military might and economic power so outstrip any other country that much of the world has been comparing it to ancient Rome." Today the United States stands as the world's "hyperpower," or hyperpuissance, as the French foreign minister dubbed it. Policymakers moved to force a regime change in Iraq and talk of creating a Middle East friendlier to American interests, conjuring up the specter of a revived colonialism. After all, it was at the end of World War I that the British cobbled together the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul to form an Iraqi state.</p> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 209px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Emperor Hadrian" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_ih065381.jpg" style="height:311px; width:209px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Emperor Hadrian.&nbsp;© Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>The idea of an imperial America is something entirely new, of course. Americans from an early point rejected the example of Rome in its imperial guise for good reason: Rome was a savage and barbaric empire. The British Empire, in contrast, was an example of enlightened rule. Those are all time-honored ideas, textbook givens, and deeply-embedded cultural assumptions. But according to Duke experts, the conventional wisdom surrounding empires doesn't hold up to scholarly scrutiny.</p> <p>As Duke political scientist Peter Feaver observes, it was the Kennedy administration more than four decades ago that committed itself to bearing any burden, paying any price, in furthering the American notion of freedom. Even the most avid supporters of American influence have set limits on how that influence might be exercised, he says. "But maybe we have to bear heavier burdens and pay higher prices than we've been willing to in the past."</p> <p>The Romans might have looked to the warring Greek states for an indication of the costs of empire. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Thucydides offers an account of Cleon, "the most violent man in Athens." Cleon berated the citizens of Athens for greeting the violent suppression of a rebellion with repentance and reflection. Where the historian saw "the horrid cruelty of a decree which condemned a whole city to the fate merited only by the guilty," Cleon saw power wisely applied. He told an assembly, "I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire, and never more so than by your present change of mind."</p> <p>Republican Rome was in fact an oligarchy, Duke's Boatwright points out. Conquest was certainly part of Roman thinking, even in Republican days. It was under the Republic, in 53 B.C, that the Romans invaded the territory that is now Iraq; the territory was ruled by the Parthians, who are ancestors of modern-day Iranians. Rome's legions were defeated. The head of the invading general, Crassus, was cut off and used as a grisly prop in a performance of The Bacchae at the Parthian court. Says Boatwright, "They had on the one hand a desire to be like Alexander the Great, going off and conquering the East, because of the lure of the exotic and of world conquest. On the other hand, it was a horrible place for them to be fighting. They didn't have good communications, they couldn't get food, it was hot, it was dry."</p> <p>The Empire took shape under Augustus, beginning in 27 B.C. At its peak in the early third century A.D., it would comprise not only the Mediterranean region but also Europe as far north as southern Scotland, along with land by the Rhine and Danube. The Parthian debacle was hardly the only cost of Rome's imperial ambitions. Under Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Romans were engaged in warfare to the east, again against the Parthians, and to the north, against the Marcomanni and other Germanic tribes. When they triumphed in 165 A.D., the legions brought back something unwelcome from the east: the plague. The campaigns required Rome to raise two new legions, some 5,000 men each. "To pay for these," says Boatwright, "Marcus Aurelius sold off the crown jewels, robes, and other luxurious goods from the imperial palace rather than raise taxes."</p> <p>Boatwright says that military adventures were rooted as much in strategic and economic considerations as in a raw yearning for conquest. When the Romans subdued the tribes of the Iberian Peninsula, they were interested in tapping local mineral resources and bringing order to the area--not in taming the barbarians. For a long time Rome left Britain alone. Britain was thought to be poor in resources and to pose no serious military threat. Claudius finally annexed Britain in 43 A.D. as a distraction from a series of political embarrassments.</p> <p>After Augustus, Rome generally valued consolidation and stability above expansion, Boatwright says. So Rome built a system of forts, walls, palisades, roads, and aqueducts--all of which were handy for supporting a military presence, and which also promoted civic order in chaotic places. One of the remarkable aspects of the Empire was that Rome was able to create a "Roman" identity wherever its influence was felt. (For that matter, Rome itself was pretty much an amalgamation rather than a concept of cultural purity; the Greek influence on Rome was enormous.) Tombstones from "indigenous" people in provinces along the northern border, for example, show the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus. Such iconography signaled how deeply the provincial populations absorbed Roman values. Conquered provinces and cities adopted Roman laws. But that was a convenience, not an imperative. As the Roman historian Tacitus noted, the Britons, while enjoying the benefits of civil society, "bear cheerfully the conscription, the taxes, and the other burdens imposed on them by the Empire, if there be no oppression."</p> <p>Roman governers were basic to the administrative scene and the imperial scheme. But Rome also recruitied sympathetic local leaders. Tacitus referred to a king of the Britons who "lived down to our day a most faithful ally. So was maintained the ancient and long-recognized practice of the Roman people, which seeks to secure among the instruments of dominion even kings themselves."</p> <p>The Britons, of course, eventually revolted. But nationalistic uprisings were unusual in the Roman Empire, Boatwright says, because Roman rule, if not gentle, was something less than oppressive. Rome was an Empire without elaborate imperial institutions. The Empire's limited aims of maintaining law and order and collecting taxes never demanded any sort of far-reaching bureaucracy. "In places like Carthage and Ephesus, there were communities that governed themselves by their ancestral laws, could speak whatever language they wanted, and could worship how they wished. Now, if they wanted to get political favors, then they might have celebrations of the imperial cult, which acknowledged the power of Rome and the figure of the emperor. But Rome didn't force it on people; Rome didn't have the wherewithal or even the desire to exercise military power over the world."</p> <p>In the Empire, Boatwright says, no one questioned that power was a good thing. But the use of force was considered and not reflexive. Even Augustus, as part of his valedictory to the people of Rome (engraved on two bronze pillars), didn't want to portray himself as power-mad: "I undertook many civil and foreign wars by land and sea throughout the world, and as victor I spared the lives of all citizens who asked for mercy. When foreign peoples could safely be pardoned, I preferred to preserve rather than to exterminate them."</p> <p>The British, as they considered their own stance toward foreign nations, may have seen themselves as enlightened imperialists. Writer V.S. Naipul has argued that the long "British Peace" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries gave India the chance to mature as a nation.</p> <p>Susan Thorne, a Duke history professor specializing in Britain, is skeptical of such assessments. For all the talk of moral duty and a civilizing mission, this was, she says, hardly a benign empire. And it was quick to embrace "historical amnesia," as she puts it, to further the imperialist embrace. "Victorian imperialism was as self-interested as its predecessors. It was distinguished, however, by the humanitarian language with which it was justified. For the Victorians, virtue and interest were not contradictory agendas. And they devoted an enormous amount of ideological labor to their conflation."</p> <p>Missionaries argued that African leaders were not fit to govern because of their refusal or inability to end internal African slavery, Thorne says. "The irony here is breathtaking, considering 'Christian' Europe's centuries-old and only very recently ended involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and West Indian slavery. All the righteous passion that had been mobilized around the recently concluded campaign to free British-owned slaves was now channeled into a campaign to colonize Africa in the name of freedom."</p> <p>A scramble for Africa began around the time that the Second Reform Act was passed in 1867. The act, which was sponsored by Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, gave the vote to skilled working-class men. The extension of the franchise along with the extension of the empire "presents something of a paradox," Thorne says. "You had expanding democratic rights at home at the same time that you see the assertion of imperial domination over populations abroad."</p> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Empire on parade: the British colonies show off their wares, native birds, animals, and peoples" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_104089.jpg" style="height:198px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Empire on parade: the British colonies show off their wares, native birds, animals, and peoples.&nbsp;The Bridgeman Art Library.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>But the apparent paradox reflected pragmatic interests. By the nineteenth century, Britain was no longer the workshop of the world, and its manufacturing sector was beginning to feel the pinch of competition from the newer industrial powers. Adam Smith declared in his Wealth of Nations, "Under the present system of management, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies." Thorne finds that assessment self-serving. "Raw materials, cheap labor, and investment capital acquired by imperialism were a crucial boost to Britain's industrial revolution."</p> <p>In addition to the material benefits to certain sectors of the British economy, imperial adventures secured political benefits for members of the elite. According to Thorne, the imperial project was deliberately advertised on the British home front to distract public attention from pressing social problems. "The gentry-dominated Conservative Party owed its political hegemony during the late nineteenth century to its successful deployment of imperialist appeals to the masses. The white poor at home were 'racialized' by Empire-empowered Social Darwinists, which no doubt retarded the advance of social reforms on their behalf--or ensured that the reforms that were passed were designed more to control than to empower. Social reformers just couldn't compete with colonial bread and circuses."</p> <p>If there was a divide in British political culture, Thorne says, "it was between those who advocated a liberal--in the nineteenth-century sense of the word--civilizing mission to justify imperial expansion, and those who favored a more realpolitik, nationalist, explicitly racist, militarist rationale for imperialism." Much of the intellectual establishment embraced the more savage cultural-superiority themes. And so, in many instances, British imperial rule took on a brutal tone. Thorne mentions, as examples, the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in the West Indies, reprisals in the wake of the Indian Mutiny, and the concentration camps in which thousands of Boer women and children died between 1899 and 1902.</p> <p>In 1865, a colonial governor, John Eyre, was impeached for having ordered widespread reprisals against rioting Jamaicans. Thomas Carlisle and Charles Dickens were both defenders of Eyre, hinging their arguments on the scientific racism of the time. The efforts to prosecute him, led by John Stuart Mill, failed, but he was forced to retire, albeit with his pension preserved.</p> <p>" The 'humanitarians' had to use military means to help the people they wanted to help, and the militarists weren't above claiming humanitarian achievements," says Thorne. "So they would argue, but they also used each other's methods and language. Colonialism was, at its core, a military enterprise. The lie of the 'civilizing mission' is most exposed by the fact that it usually took an army to enforce, to bestow the gift--it happened at the end of a gun."</p> <table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Empire on parade: the British colonies show off their wares, native birds, animals, and peoples" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_hu023474.jpg" style="height:267px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The last viceroy: Lord Mountbatten departed India with Lady Mountbatten in 1948.&nbsp;© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_24.jpg" style="height:472px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Triumvirate of historians: from left, Boatwright on Hadrian, Wilson on America, and Thorne on Britain.&nbsp;Les Todd.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Colonial rule also depended on divide-and-conquer strategies or nation-building, Thorne says. "Much of the British Empire was administered through indirect rule, regime change, finding a faction that would rule in the way Britain wanted them to, installing them, and calling it local self-government. That is a pretty imperious way of operating. I don't think the British state on its own could have held on to its empire by exclusively military means; it required mobilizing indigenous sectors of support. This was also done by fanning, if not creating, ethnic conflicts."</p> <p>" So while the British Empire might deserve credit for twentieth-century success stories, it also deserves some of the blame for twentieth-century ethnic atrocities," says Thorne. That idea is picked up in a recent Atlantic Monthly article in which Christopher Hitchens charts out the trouble spots that remain from imperial Britain's policy of "divide and quit," as he calls it. His list encompasses the feuding over Cyprus between Greece and Turkey, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Indian and Pakistani claims on Kashmir, internal strife in Sri Lanka, and even the collapses in Somalia and Eritrea.</p> <p>To that list, Thorne adds: "British policies contributed to the hardening of the caste system in India and to the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims that resulted in the deaths of millions during the partition of India and Pakistan after 1947. British colonial policies are also responsible for the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The British also benefited from the divisions between Africans, 'coloreds,' and whites in South Africa. I don't mean to suggest that the British invented these divides, much less that they are solely responsible. But they manipulated them to their advantage in ways that have had horrific post-colonial consequences."</p> <p>Though itself a post-colonial creation, the United States was imperialist from its beginnings, says Gerald Wilson, a professor of American history and senior associate dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. It's simplistic to argue that the American colonies were rebelling against British imperialism, he says. "We revolted against British commercial imperialism as expressed in their Trade Laws. In fact, it was not so much the Trade Laws themselves as the fact that England began enforcing them after 1763 that caused the problem. When the Revolution broke out in April 1775, we were not fighting for independence but rather for our 'rights as Englishmen.' "</p> <p>From the founding of the British North American colonies until about 1890--when the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. no longer had a continuous frontier line--American policy was driven by a sense of continuing expansion. A dramatic expression of that interest came in 1804, when Lewis and Clark set out to cross the North American continent from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. The mission, as conceived by President Thomas Jefferson, was to collect information covering everything from geology to Indian vocabularies; it was also meant to locate "the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce."</p> <p>As Wilson puts it, "We felt that we were ordained by God to move across the continent and spread democracy and Christianity. When John Winthrop came over with the first Puritans, he preached a sermon that set the pattern, 'A Model of Christian Charity,' where he said that 'we shall be as a city on a hill, a beacon to the world.' Christianity and democracy were inextricably linked."</p> <p>Such language is mirrored in President George W. Bush's frequent framing of regime change in Iraq as a moral imperative: In his last State of the Union address and, repeatedly, in statements since, he has cited a litany of transgressions by Saddam Hussein, and declared, "If this isn't evil, then evil has no name." The Economist, in a report on American values, suggests a link between "America's religiosity and its tendency to see foreign policy in moral terms." In contrast to Europe--where even moral questions are sometimes treated in narrow technical terms--Americans are prone to believe that "evil exists and can be fought in their own lives and in the world." From moralism at home, then, comes a muscular stance abroad.</p> <p>The explicit idea of America's "Manifest Destiny" became a pivotal issue in the 1900 presidential election. President William McKinley argued for annexation of the Philippines, which had been occupied during the Spanish-American War. His argument was that the U.S. shouldn't cede the Philippines back to Spain or give it to France or Germany. The Filipinos were unfit for self-government, he said, and "there is nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate [them], and uplift and civilize and Christianize them."</p> <p>William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats argued against annexation, saying imperialism was not in accord with American principles of freedom and independence. Annexation would undermine American democracy, and such a step would be contrary to American actions in Cuba. In 1899, anti-imperialism groups came together under the American Anti-Imperialism League. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie financed the group, which drew support from union leader Samuel Gompers, Harvard president Charles Eliot, social reformer Jane Addams, and philosopher William James. The latter referred to America's quest for power as something that would cause the nation to "puke up its ancient soul."</p> <p>From the other ideological direction, McClure's magazine, in February 1899, published the British poet Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden," challenging the country to assume a new role in the world: "Send forth the best ye breed/Go, bind your sons to exile/To serve your captive's need;/To wait in heavy hardness/On fluttered folk and wild--/Your new-caught sullen peoples./Half devil and half child."</p> <p>The period after World War II, in Wilson's view, brought another stage of manifest destiny, which culminated in exporting American culture and products. "Watch TV in any Western European nation and see how much of the programming is U.S.-produced. I remember driving into Athens from the airport and being struck by the number of billboards in English advertising U.S.-made products. These are real examples of commercial and cultural imperialism."</p> <p>If this is imperialism, it's been couched always in "humanitarian" language. The classic statement came with President Woodrow Wilson's commitment "to make the world safe for democracy." In the Caribbean and Latin America, Duke's Gerald Wilson points out, the U.S. worked to topple governments and to secure investments. In the Philippines, there was a vigorous Christian missionary effort, which gave rise to the phrase "benevolent assimilation." At the same time, the Philippines provided a handy refueling station for a growing American navy, which was trying to counter the rising empire of Japan.</p> <p>During the Cold War, the U.S. operated in Europe much differently from the Soviet Union, which installed regimes in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. U.S. policy seemingly was geared to defense rather than conquest and exploitation. Wilson sees "enlightened self-interest" at work. The Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe certainly had a humanitarian side, he says. "But remember that this was [also] prompted by our fear of the spread of Communism in Western Europe."</p> <table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Potsdam, 1945: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin reshape a post-war world" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_E043352.jpg" style="height:328px; width:580px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Potsdam, 1945: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin reshape a post-war world.&nbsp;© Bettmann/Corbis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>The common theme among those thinkers is "American power and the fact that American power is unrivaled--not unchallenged, but unrivaled," says Feaver. For neo-conservatives, the emerging American Empire "is not a Roman Empire of domination, but it does have an imperial dimension to it, in the sense that it's global and it has a transforming effect." So U.S. power might displace the "medieval horror" of Afghanistan or authoritarian Iraq in favor of functioning democracies. Moderate thinkers see "an empire of influence" that can also be a force for transformation, Feaver says. "It's not ultimately dependent on American military might as much as it's dependent on the perceived legitimacy of American values and interests."</p> <p>In Feaver's view, any current-day American Empire is circumscribed. For one thing, the U.S. military historically has been hesitant about engaging in conflicts. And "the U.S. military is very capable, but it's not very large," meaning that it couldn't take on multiple opponents or engage in an endless series of conflicts. Civilians in the Bush administration were the hawks on Iraq, and they had to overcome significant military reluctance. "If the American Empire was the caricature people claim it is, then you would see us doing something about the war in Congo. Three million are dead in Congo, but no one is even talking about it. The point is, America is not talking about global domination. There's a much more strategic element to the choices being made."</p> <p>" There has never been a country enjoying the U.S. power position that has been more multilateral than the U.S.," Feaver says. "People who argue that the U.S. is acting excessively unilaterally are comparing the U.S. to a mythical ideal, not to any historical reality." (The U.S. withdrawal from the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Climate Protocol may have shown bad style, but, according to Feaver, were predictable on the substance of the issues and enjoyed wide support at home.) He says the Bush administration revived the U.N., which had long been irrelevant on Iraq, and--before concluding that the Security Council wasn't prepared to enforce its resolutions--successfully garnered support for a seventeenth U.N. resolution. In attacking Iraq, "the U.S. was at pains to emphasize that it was acting within the context of a multilateral coalition. Debates over postwar Iraq follow the same pattern. In fact, the debate is over which kinds of multilateralism and with what sorts of linkages with existing institutions."</p> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Freedom forces: U.S. troops enter Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's native town" src="/issues/030403/images/lg_360185.jpg" style="height:217px; width:325px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Freedom forces: U.S. troops enter Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's native town.&nbsp;© Partick Robert/Corbis.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>Critics of America's imperial reach have pointed to provocative language in the so-called Bush Doctrine and its use to justify the Iraq war: "anticipatory self-defense" and "pre-emptive deterrence." There's less new in the doctrine than meets the eye, says Feaver. "Maybe the only difference is that the Bush administration is more willing to actually act on these things than the Clinton administration was. But certainly the intellectual pillars for the doctrine were all there in early Clinton national-security strategies."</p> <p>Feaver says it's not surprising that a hyper-powered America finds itself at odds with its allies over issues like confronting Iraq. The U.S. uniquely has a "full toolbox," as he puts it, whereas the Europeans have a limited array of tools at their disposal. So the Europeans regard every problem as requiring international law and international institutions, the only arenas where they can exert influence. The U.S., in contrast, can look to additional tools--namely military options--allowing for "a much more nuanced, flexible strategy."</p> <p>An America that straddles the world also has a unique perception of, and response to, threats. "America thinks the world changed on September 11, and the world thinks only America changed," Feaver says. "Because America is what it is, it has the potential to act on its own perception in a unique way." Much of the friction among allies is "really a friction over risk management." So France, worried about terrorism at home, has a natural interest in avoiding war with Iraq. The U.S., worried about having to deal with an Iraq armed with nuclear weapons, has a natural interest in pursuing a war. "September 11 changed what this administration is willing to tolerate in terms of risk. It's not who cares more about the U.N. or who cares more about peace. It all has to do with very sound recognitions of very different national interests."</p> <p>Not every political analyst is convinced of the soundness and sameness of American foreign policy. A campus forum, held just days after the U.S. military action in Iraq, brought some stinging observations from James B. Duke Professor of political science Robert Keohane. Keohane said that the policy of "unilateral, preventive war" is "full of danger for the future." The Bush Doctrine "implies a new form of imperialism, which is rule by coercion and fear," he said. And that system is unsustainable. "It implies a series of future wars and coercive actions against other countries whose governments we dislike and fear." Iran, for one, wonders if it's the next target of the U.S., which may help explain its accelerating nuclear program.</p> <p>Practicing pre-emption diminishes international organizations like the U.N. and NATO that have "helped create world order for fifty years," ensures "widespread antagonism and resentment toward the U.S. in much of the rest of the world," and contributes to the "continued recruitment of terrorists dedicated to attacking the U.S. and American nationals abroad," Keohane added. "As a result, the U.S. is likely to become more of a garrison state, guarding its borders and using force to protect citizens outside its borders from these fears. In other words, the Bush Doctrine is a recipe for chaos. It will create more threats than it eliminates."</p> <p>Turkey's reluctance to serve as a staging area for coalition forces should provide a useful lesson for the administration, Keohane said. "Turkey is a much more democratic country than it was ten or fifteen years ago. It has a genuinely elected government not controlled by the military. This is the government whose parliament refused, despite the governing body's expressed preference, to vote for U.S. basing rights in Turkey for the war. What this illustrates to me is that a policy of spreading democracy and a policy of empire are inconsistent."</p> <p>Some statesmen as well as scholars are wary of an ever more assertive America. And the temptation is to look to earlier imperial examples. In November, as the Senate was rushing to pass a domestic-security bill, West Virginia's Robert Byrd, the eighty-five-year-old "dean" of the Senate, reminded his colleagues of a "truly great" senator--Helvidius Priscus, a Roman from the first century A.D. One day Helvidius was met outside the senate by the Emperior Vespasian, who threatened to execute him if he spoke too freely. "And so both did their parts," Byrd said. "Helvidius Priscus spoke his mind; the Emperor Vespasian killed him."</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/emerging.png" width="620" height="265" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/robert-j-bliwise" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert J. Bliwise</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A fresh look at history calls into question conventional notions about the course of empires and gives new meaning to the concept of the United States as &quot;hyperpower.&quot;</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502167 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/emerging-imperialism#comments Outbreak of a Dormant Theory https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/outbreak-dormant-theory <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_lilfenn2.jpg" alt="Career shifting: Fenn plies two trades" width="325" height="217" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">Career shifting: Fenn plies two trades. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Jimmy Wallace.</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Elizabeth "Lil" Fenn is probably the only historian now working in academe who lived in a tepee her senior year in college and worked for eight years as an auto mechanic. But Fenn '81 has distinguished herself from her peers in a more significant way than leading an unusual private life. With the recent publication of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, she lays out a painstakingly researched argument that shows how smallpox shaped the fate of the North American continent in ways previously unimagined.</p><p>The book's title makes it sound like a relatively modest treatise of interest primarily to history buffs or fellow scholars. But, in fact, Pox Americana is, well, revolutionary. Fenn shows how the spread of smallpox was inextricably linked to the social, economic, and political currents of the time, from the mission churches in Mexico to the Canada fur trade to George Washington and his Continental Army. She shows how the disease altered the balance of power in North America by decimating certain Native American tribes; how the spread of smallpox was fueled by conditions of war such as increased mobility; and how the disease may even have influenced the outcome of the American Revolution.</p><p>Fenn's scholarship is groundbreaking, according to John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Yale University and her graduate adviser. "The central idea of this project is to demonstrate that groups in North America were linked together in fundamental and earth-shattering ways that were not of their choosing," he says. "And Lil did not have an easy time of it. There was a fair amount of intellectual resistance to what she was doing, because it threatened people in cubbyholes--historians who thought that you should only focus on specific categories like geography or the fur trade or the Revolutionary War. But I knew that she could pull it off, and that this was going to be a really big book."" I really had no idea about the dimensions of this until I started researching my prospectus," says Fenn, who joined the Duke faculty last year as an assistant professor of history. "People are used to thinking about the thirteen colonies or Canada or New Spain as being separate from one another. No one had ever pieced it together before. As I conducted my research, I had one of those light-bulb moments when I realized that this was not just a small outbreak in Western Canada. It was immense."</p><p>Indeed, Pox Americana, which came out in 2001, is in its third printing and has earned two awards for historical writing. As notable as the book has become, however, its evolution was slow and the path toward it, circuitous. Academe was never at the top of Fenn's career choices growing up, even though her mother, Ann Fenn '53, taught junior-high-school social studies and her paternal grandfather taught Chinese at Yale. (Her father worked in personnel management and helped launch off-track betting in New York.) Fenn applied to Duke because it was a compromise between her parents' preference for conservative Vassar College and hers for the less-restrictive University of New Hampshire. Because her knees were shot from playing basketball in high school, she took up crew, waking before dawn for workouts and practice.</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: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_be060772x.jpg" alt="The first vaccination: Edward Jenner used pus from the hand of a dairy maid in 1796" width="325" height="399" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">The first vaccination: Edward Jenner used pus from the hand of a dairy maid in 1796. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© Bettmann/Corbis.</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>She also reveled in her coursework. In the history department, she immersed herself in Larry Goodwyn's course "The Insurgent South" and Peter Wood's "Colonial America." In anthropology, she sought out socio-cultural anthropology courses with Virginia Dominguez, now at the University of Iowa, and courses examining themes of democracy and economic culture with Rob Weller, now at Boston University. One Weller class in particular, "Peasants and Peasant Rebellions," still resonates. "All of the students enrolled were hungry for engagement, for classes with deep, global, historical resonance that illuminated the world as we saw it," Fenn says. "What impresses me as I think back on it was how intensely we thought about things. Weller's class addressed questions that mattered. They mattered then, and they matter today: Why and when do people rebel? How do movements form? Why do they succeed? Why do they fail? From the American Revolution to the civil-rights movement to the international peace movement today, I still think these are really pressing questions."</p><p>With only five people in the class, the group bonded outside the classroom as well. "We called ourselves the Peasant Rebels," she recalls, laughing at the memory. "We actually crashed a conference on peasant rebellions at the National Humanities Center that specifically excluded undergraduates. 'No!' we insisted when they tried to throw us out. 'We're the Peasant Rebels!' "</p><p>Fenn first became aware of smallpox's indelible impact on history when she read about an outbreak of the disease among the Native Americans in the Hudson Bay fur trade; at the time she was conducting research for her senior thesis. Her thesis won the William T. Laprade Prize in History for best honors essay, and she graduated cum laude with distinction in history. During her senior year, Fenn actually pitched her tent in a tepee she'd bought the year before while on spring break in Florida. She lived off Old Erwin Road in a place called Fancytown, a loose cooperative of hippies and sharecroppers.</p><p>" Everybody thinks that I must have wanted to be an Indian or something, but that wasn't the case," she says. "I'm not the type to hang a dream catcher on my rear-view mirror. I had friends in Wyoming who lived in teepees, and I simply thought they were really neat, cheap, functional dwellings. With a wood-burning stove and a floor made of plywood, my teepee was pretty far from the authentic Plains Indian home."</p><p>In its own weird way, her tepee contributed to the success of her thesis. "I rode my bike up 751 in the morning, took a shower in Card Gym, stayed on campus all day, and rode home at night," she says. "And when it got too cold and I got too lazy to chop wood for heat, I stayed even longer, because the library was warm."</p><p>After graduation, Fenn went to Yale for graduate school, earning her master's in history in 1985. She perfunctorily pursued some coursework toward her Ph.D. but became increasingly disengaged from the academic milieu. Even before grad school, she had toyed with the idea of joining the proletariat by becoming a machinist--a holdover, in part, from her Peasant Rebel days. One day, while working on her run-down Datsun 510, she says she realized how much she looked forward to having it break down. That meant she would have to consult the comprehensive service manual--not the cursory owner's manual--to learn how to fix it. Once, while changing the oil, she accidentally poured the Styrofoam tab from the oil container into her engine. Certain that she'd destroyed her car, she called the guys down at the local parts shop and told them what had happened. No problem, they replied, just take off the valve cover.</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: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_be036607xx.jpg" alt="--" width="325" height="231" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© Bettmann /Corbis.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>That moment, she says, was an epiphany. "I saw the innards, the guts of the engine for the first time. It was this miraculous moment.</p><p>I had changed my oil religiously, so there was no carbon buildup or anything. It was beautiful. I started taking classes at Durham Tech and stopped doing my dissertation."</p><p>A few classes turned into an eight-year career as an auto mechanic at Cross Creek BP and Auto Center in Durham, a decision that remains inscrutable to Fenn all these years later. "I have a very hard time identifying what led me to fix cars. Part of it was the sheer differentness. Part of it was the challenge. Part of it was the anticipated satisfaction of finishing a hard day's work. But more than anything, it felt liberating. It freed me from all the expectations--both real and imagined--I carried around with me. That was a wonderful thing.</p><p>" Not only did it liberate me from the expectations tied to class, status, and gender, but it liberated me in a special emotional and psychological way. It made me much more forgiving and less judgmental. I have to credit the guys I worked with for this. They taught me lots about ignition timing and engine controls. But they also taught me that it's okay to love people with whom I disagree deeply. I did not go into automotive repair consciously seeking this, but it is certainly the greatest thing I've carried away from those years."</p><p>The work, says Fenn, was brutal and demanding--but also a lot of fun. "I'd have blisters and smashed hands. People come in on a 98-degree day after having spent six hours on the Interstate, their manifold is so hot it's glowing red, and they want their oil changed now. In time, your back goes out, your knees go out. Almost all the guys I worked with, except the young ones, would get out if they could. There are no health benefits to speak of. You get one vacation a year. And you work every day from 8 a.m. until after dark.</p><p>" On the other hand, unlike academic life, it's a raucous atmosphere to work in. You can play jokes on people, call someone a jerk when they're a jerk, and forgive them quickly. Grudges aren't held very long. I got so used to popping people with my rag that when I started teaching again I had to adjust. In the shop, it's a gesture of affection, but you just can't do that to someone you work with at a university."</p><p>Another advantage to her blue-collar job was that, at the end of the day, she could hang up her rag, go home, drink a beer, and read anything she wanted to read. She also wrote creative fiction and nonfiction during this period and began thinking about tools that fiction writers use to make their work compelling to a general audience and how she might apply them to scholarly work. In 1994, her friend Marjoleine Kars '82, Ph.D. '94 loaned Fenn a novel called <em>The Horseman on the Roo</em>f by French writer Jean Giono. Set in nineteenth-century Provence, the book follows a young Italian nobleman and soldier making his way home from France when cholera begins breaking out all around him. "Giono managed to write really beautifully about something really terrible, and that fascinated me," Fenn says. "It said something very powerful about the human condition."</p><p>To her surprise, she found herself thinking back to her senior honors thesis. "Even as I labored over brake jobs and engine repairs," she writes in the foreword to<em> Pox Americana</em>, "I found myself carried back to the Native Americans whose suffering was described in those Hudson Bay smallpox documents I had read more than a decade before. Eventually I could not stand it anymore. I wanted to write a story of my own, a story about smallpox."</p><p>Fenn says that the timing of her encounter with the book was fortuitous. "I read The Horseman on the Roof when my learning curve in the shop had flattened. I was growing bored, doing jobs by rote, with my hands on autopilot." She contacted Yale, where she had completed all her requirements except a dissertation and one language, to confirm her all-but-dissertation status. Still working at the BP station, Fenn honed her dissertation proposal for about a year, before turning to it full time. Her research was exhaustive and encompassed primary and secondary sources, including books, diaries, letters, journals, and even death records kept by the genealogically-minded church.</p><p>Bit by bit her story came together. She told how George Washington had to decide whether to inoculate his troops after smallpox broke out among the men wintering at Valley Forge. Washington knew that inoculation--intentionally exposing people to the live virus so that they develop immunity--was risky; some would die. But he also knew that, without it, his men would surely die in great numbers. Smallpox was widespread in Europe at the time. A vast majority of British troops had been exposed to the virus while growing up and were, therefore, immune. However, there had been only scattered instances of smallpox outbreaks in the American colonies, and the Continental troops were especially vulnerable to infection. An unchecked outbreak would certainly decimate the army. Washington decided to go forward with what would be the first large-scale, state-sponsored inoculation and quarantine plan. Its success most likely determined the course of the war. The virus was kept at bay, enabling Washington's healthy troops to achieve pivotal victories the following spring and summer.</p><p>Beyond examining smallpox's influence on the course of war, Fenn's research traced the expanding fur trade and proved why, through interactions with traders--Native American and European--it provided a perfect conduit for spreading smallpox. And her investigation revealed a dark glimpse into the scare tactics of white settlers, who used the specter of smallpox to subjugate susceptible Native Americans for years. Her thesis became the launching point for <em>Pox Americana</em>.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_ft0148235.jpg" alt="--" width="325" height="218" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Preventive medicine: vaccinating a member <br />of the 101st Airborne, left, to fight in Iraq. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">© /Corbis.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In a review of the book for the American Scientist, Smith College biology professor Robert Dorit noted that each of the book's historical episodes is singularly fascinating, but that the cumulative effect is profound. "Precisely because the author is a historian," he wrote, "she has captured the fundamental reality of all human epidemics: It's not just the biology, stupid. Instead, it is the interactions between biology and socioeconomic variables (class, privilege, nutrition, crowding, access to medical care) and between biology and historical events (wars, migrations) that determine the real dynamics of infectious disease."</p><p>As it happened, <em>Pox Americana</em> was published only a month after the Twin Towers fell, and Fenn quickly became a much-sought-after--and quoted--smallpox expert. Although her book focuses on the eighteenth-century epidemic, she has been called on to comment about modern-day threats of bioterrorism and the efficacy and risks of smallpox vaccinations in interviews on CNN Live Today, C-SPAN, <em>Nightline</em>, and National Public Radio. She has also been cited or quoted in articles that have appeared in <em>The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report</em>, among others.</p><p>" There has been a kind of perverse serendipity to the success of this book," says Fenn, from her third-floor office in Carr Building on East Campus. "The news media has fueled this frenzy about the threat of smallpox, and I'm not sure the attention is warranted. I get calls from reporters asking about smallpox, and I say, 'Yes, it's a terrible disease,' and describe the symptoms and so forth. And that's what gets quoted--not my concurrent point, which is that I'm much more concerned about how we spend our public-health resources in this country than I am about an imminent outbreak of smallpox."</p><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_29.jpg" alt="" width="165" height="215" align="left" border="1" hspace="8" /><p><em>Pox Americana</em> was published while Fenn was teaching at George Washington University. At Duke she teaches an undergraduate course on the American Revolution, as well as an interdisciplinary examination of the history of disasters in North America, from the arrival of the Europeans to the collapse of the World Trade Center. In February, she was the inaugural speaker for a lecture series, "The Weight of War," co-sponsored by the history department and the Duke Alumni Association.</p><p>Even though<em> Pox Americana</em> has made its mark on the historical landscape, Fenn says she remains intrigued by all the unanswered questions and dead ends she encountered along the way. "The piece of information I most wanted to find was some hard evidence indicating that Comanches definitely carried smallpox to the Shoshones. And I would also love to know more about what was going on out in the Plains. The whole center part of the Plains remains a mystery to historians because there were no European eyewitnesses on the scene at the time--at least none who kept records and wrote about it."</p><p>" My hope remains that archaeologists can piece together what documents don't reveal," she says. "They can figure out when villages were abandoned and determine contractions of populations. There's really exciting work going on in archaeology right now, and historians are going to have to pay attention to it. It's going to be a different story."</p><p>It's a story she's eager to write.</p><p align="right"><em>Booher '82, A.M. '92, a former features editor of Duke Magazine, is assistant director of the Hart Leadership program at the Sanford Institute.</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/theory.png" width="620" height="265" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/bridget-booher" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bridget Booher</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502166 at https://alumni.duke.edu Oil Spill-After the Deluge https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/oil-spill-after-deluge <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><p class="articletitle"><em>During the last Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's troops released more than 400 million gallons of crude oil--forty times what was spilled by the Exxon Valdez--from Kuwaiti wells into the Arabian Gulf, coating the Saudi coast and creating the largest oil spill in history. Eleven years later, on the eve of another conflict with Iraq, a team of scientists from South Carolina conducted a massive ecological assessment as part of the international response to the Gulf War spill. From October 2002 to February 2003, I walked the oiled shores of Saudi Arabia as a field biologist on that assessment team.</em></p><p class="articletitle"><em><br /></em></p><p class="articletitle">Okay, Grandma, I will. I love you, too." I hang up the payphone in Terminal C of the Houston Airport and round the corner, looking up just in time to avoid a collision with a seven-foot-tall, bronze statue of the first President George Bush. The engraved message at his feet reads, "Winds of Change."</p><p>Thirty hours later, I am standing on a sunny street corner in Bahrain. My jet-lagged neurons cannot comprehend why my attire--cargo shorts and a collared shirt--has prevented me from entering the Saudi embassy. Elie reappears.</p><p>" Elie, I'm so sorry. I just...."</p><p>" Sign this." He hands me a Saudi work visa application. "And don't worry about it. How were you to know? Besides, the embassy changes its policies twice a week. Today they tell me that I must pay in Bahraini dinar instead of Saudi riyal. What kind of embassy does not take its own currency?" His Lebanese accent is strong, but his English is clear and perfect. Elie Malko is the liaison between my employer, Research Planning, Inc. (RPI), and its Saudi partner.</p><p>The King Fahad Causeway, which links several Bahraini islands to the Saudi mainland, reminds me of the low bridge that connects the islands of the Florida Keys. Twenty-five minutes into the drive, we come to a series of tollbooth-like checkpoints that mark the border between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We show our passports and collect customs forms. Below the usual questions about valuable goods is a "Religion" blank. I write "Christian," even though I'm not. After a cursory inspection of our vehicle, we are back on the highway and across the border.I meet Elie in the hotel lobby at three o'clock. He tells me that when he returned to the Saudi embassy to pick up the completed paperwork, it took the embassy officials an hour and a half to locate my passport. I definitely shouldn't have worn shorts. As I walk toward the car with my duffel over my shoulder, an atonal drone fills the street. It is the mid-afternoon call to prayer reaching me from a nearby mosque.</p><p>Through the Saudi province of Damam, dusty yellow school buses, construction equipment, and piles of metal parts litter the right side of the highway. I see a swastika and a few Arabic words scrawled in black spray paint on a cinderblock wall. A mile down the road from the scrap yard, perfectly conical sand dunes rise inside a double row of barbed wire fence. As we drive beyond them, I realize that they are airplane hangars, camouflaged to blend with the desert sand.</p><p>A Brady Bunch-style station wagon eases up alongside in the right lane. The driver stares. I stare back, a cultural faux pas akin to wearing shorts to a government office. The driver is wearing the traditional thobe, a long white shirt, but no <em>guthra</em>, the characteristic red-and-white checked head cover. An <em>egal</em>, the ring that holds the <em>guthra</em> in place, hangs from his rearview mirror. Expressionless, he speeds away.</p><p>Pipelines, covered in a thin layer of dirt, weave over the undeveloped stretches of landscape like gophers' burrows. The blue sky around me has a thick, gauzy quality, as if the desert dust is permanently unsettled. The edges of the sun are blurred even though there are no clouds. The increasing frequency of power-line clusters and monster metal towers, their transformer coils dangling like thickly muscled arms, hints of our approach to Al Jubail. This industrial city, located midway down the Gulf coast, is the base of RPI operations. We pull into town just before five o'clock. Two quick lefts bring us to the Gulf Mahmal compound.</p><p>The Gulf Mahmal is a three-story, rectangular, stucco structure with barred windows and a single, gated entrance. There is a room with no outer wall to the right of the gate in which a skinny, bearded man in Western clothes sits cross-legged on a woven rug. He is smoking a cigarette and acknowledges us only with his eyes; I will find this "guard" in the same position for the next two months.</p><p>A young Indian man is waiting for us in the parking area with the key to my room. Upstairs in Room 2309, I drop my duffel on the white tile floor. I kneel across the cartoon rabbit--a Bugs-Bunny knockoff--pictured on my bedspread to peer though the bars at the orange desert sprawl. The evening call to worship rises from an unseen loudspeaker on the street below. To my right, King Faisel Street is lined with restaurants, parked cars, and trash. To my left, the chalk road continues to an oil refinery that sits on the horizon, shrouded in a cloud of its own emissions. I can just make out an exhaust flame, mimicking the setting sun.</p><p>Because our shoreline survey focuses on the intertidal zone--the part of the shore that is exposed at low tide and inundated at high tide--our work schedule is dictated by the tidal cycle. I have arrived in Saudi Arabia during the part of the month when the high tide occurs at midday. Since the field teams are able to survey the coast only during low tide, midday high tides are days of rest, and my first day on the job is my first day off.</p><p class="articletitle">The twenty-something generation of Saudis loves country music. It's 5:42 a.m. on my second day in Saudi, and Saad Al Rasheed, the Saudi member of my four-man field team, is drumming the steering wheel in time to a Randy Travis song. Without warning, he swings our SUV to the right, fishtailing onto a dirt road and plastering me against the left side of the backseat. With four other four-wheel-drive vehicles in tow, we race across the <em>sabka</em> toward the morning sun. <em>Sabkas</em> are giant sand flats that stretch between the inland desert and the coastal zone. Walking on the crusty, uneven top layer of the sabka is like walking on stale sugar cookies.</p><p>The geologists, three of the four members of each field team, begin at a site by probing for signs of oil contamination farthest from the shore. They lay a transect line--in our case, a twenty-meter rope with knots every couple of meters--perpendicular to the shoreline. The team works seaward along the line, digging holes up to a meter deep at varying intervals. The oil geomorphologist, affectionately called the OG, characterizes the sediment layers in each hole and looks for oiled crab burrows and other hints of oil infiltration. The Global Positioning System technician (G-tech) pinpoints the exact location of the hole. He enters codes that describe what the OG finds in the hole--light, medium, or heavy oil residue and, sometimes, even pockets of liquid oil--into a handheld computer. The data from each hole sampled are automatically linked to a point on a digital map. All told, the teams will run transect lines every 250 meters along the entire gulf coast, a distance of about 800 kilometers.</p><p>The sediment technician, one of the geologists, usually a Saudi, collects sediment for chemical analysis. The 30,000-plus sediment samples collected during the project will be analyzed for concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons--the molecules that constitute oil. Because oils from different sources exhibit unique hydrocarbon "fingerprints," it is possible to identify the source of oil contamination. The results of this chemical analysis will be used as evidence in an international court.</p><p>After the Gulf War, the United Nations Security Council froze Saddam Hussein's international assets and used the money to create the United Nations Compensation Commission. The UNCC, charged with processing claims associated with Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, allocated a fraction of the seized funds to the Saudi government's environmental agency to pay for a survey of the oil-soaked Gulf coast. Saddam is fighting a legal battle to get his money back. The Saudi government, eager to collect damages, is racing to document just how much of its coast has been contaminated by the oil released from Kuwaiti wells.</p><p>The fourth member of each team is a biologist, like me. I zoom around the habitat between transect lines, doing a timed count of all species of flora and fauna and looking for evidence of oil damage. I am armed with a mini-shovel, walkie-talkie, binoculars, gloves, compass, pocket PC, sunscreen, plenty of food and water, and bags for holding samples of invertebrates. I carry a clipboard with data sheets and wear a digital camera on my belt like a holstered gun. I scrape algae, dig in the dirt, look under rocks, and chase crabs down their burrows. I identify plants and snails and worms. I am an ecological detective. I am a twelve-year-old at the beach.</p><p>I learn quickly that the life of a field biologist in a former war zone is not without its hazards. Chewing my peanut butter on pita, reflecting on my first five hours in the field, I notice a frosted piece of glass sticking out of the sand. I am about to dig it up when Scott Zengel, our head biologist, says, "You know, it's probably good policy not to mess with anything that you can't positively identify."</p><p>I raise an eyebrow.</p><p>" Yeah, there are rumors that the British land-mined certain parts of the coast when they thought the Iraqis were going to invade. Plus, you get ship mines and depth charges washing ashore. You know, that sort of thing."</p><p>Access to most of the Saudi coastline is through military or coast-guard installations. As in the U.S., these bases contain some of the wildest areas in the country. The expanses of land that buffer firing ranges and tactical training grounds become <em>de facto</em> ecological preserves. As our caravan speeds across the sabka one morning on the way to a field site, Norm Dodson, Team 3's G-tech, points out cement artillery platforms on the dune ridge ahead and the reinforced walls of the rifle range to our left. Norm is ex-Army Special Forces; a drive through a firing range with him is like a guided tour through a museum. While most of our survey team wears old running shoes or hiking boots into the field, Norm wears combat boots.</p><p>At 3:15 in the afternoon, a military jeep stops at our sampling station. Two haggard-looking men dressed in fatigues converse with our Saudi team member, Muhammad Nasser Al-Qhatani, and then drive away. "Time to go," he says. "Time for Navy shooting practice."</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: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_20.jpg" alt="Zengel and Fathi Al-Abazaid count inveterbrate species in tidal flat sample" width="325" height="218" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Water works: Zengel and Fathi Al-Abazaid, count inveterbrate species in tidal flat sample.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_21.jpg" alt="biologist Stowe Beam investigates salt-marsh plants" width="325" height="217" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Biologist Stowe Beam investigates salt-marsh plants.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_saltmarshalgalmat.jpg" alt="the folds of an algal mat from a dead salt marsh" width="325" height="244" /><p class="caption-text"><p>The folds of an algal mat, below, from a dead salt marsh.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I am stumped. I am standing in a field of mini-moguls, a sprawl of hummocks and rivulets that is the telltale sign of a Saudi salt marsh. In a healthy salt marsh, the earth around the halophytes (salt-loving plants) is riddled with <em>Nasima dotilliformis</em> burrows. When this species of crab burrows into the salt-marsh sediment, it creates a donut of dirt around the opening of its burrow; the compounded mud-moving effect of thousands of burrowing crabs shapes the salt marsh.</p><p>When the high tides carried oil into marshes like this one during the Gulf War spill, <em>Nasima</em> burrows served as chutes for the oil, allowing it to infiltrate to depths of sixty centimeters or more. Oil seeped into the sediment around the burrows, filling the space between grains of sand or mud and making the ground too toxic to support life.</p><p>Looking at the area around my feet, I expect to see oiled burrows and the remnants of oiled plant stems, but I see neither. A slick, grayish-green algal mat covers the mounded ground and stretches for hundreds of meters in all directions. Algal mats are common in the dead marsh areas along the Saudi coast, but this one is remarkable in its pervasiveness and impenetrability.</p><p>On a whim, I use my trowel to slice a two-meter by two-meter square in the algal mat. I peel it back to reveal the terrain beneath, and find <em>Nasima</em> burrows and oiled <em>halophyte</em> stems, frozen in time. Because little air or water has penetrated the dense algal mat, there has been very little weathering of the oil. I am essentially looking at a snapshot of what the marsh looked like just before the algae took over. Faisel Bukhari, the last biologist to join our ranks, arrives in late October. An ichthyologist from the Saudi Office of Fisheries, he is more familiar with the fish in the Arabian Gulf than the plants and invertebrates that inhabit its shores, so he is spending a few days with each of the other project biologists to get acclimated. I am his first host.</p><p>" This is <em>Nodilittorina arabica</em>," I say, bending down to pick up a fingernail-size snail. "It's usually a rocky-shore species, but we've been finding it like this, on hard algal mats with no rock in sight." I return the snails to the algal mat and we resume our walk.</p><p>" I wish that breeze would come back," I mumble, swatting a fly on the brim of my hat.</p><p>" Would you like some water? I brought two bottles." Faisel begins to unzip his pack. "I'm okay, thanks anyway."</p><p>" No, no, please. Water is life in the desert. It is a sacred gift and is to be shared."</p><p>Fathi Al-Abazaid is another of my Saudi team members. He is twenty-four. He sings while he works. He teaches me Arabic and I teach him English. <em>Samakha lawsia</em>. Sting ray. Every day, Fathi collects a bag of shells for his soon-to-be bride.</p><p>I feel a camaraderie with Fathi that I don't share with any of the other Saudis. One afternoon in the field, when Fathi is particularly rambunctious, he tells me that he and his fiancÈe are shopping for wedding rings during our upcoming, two-day break.</p><p>" No kidding! Is she going to pick you up at the compound tonight? Will I get to meet her?" I ask.</p><p>" You crazy man! You in Saudi now, women cannot drive!"</p><p class="articletitle">At 4:55, Muhammad picks up the CB radio and calls Saad, who is driving the truck behind us. Without using a turn signal, as is the Saudi way, Muhammad skips across the highway divider and into the parking lot of a truck stop, the only commercial structure within miles. This truck stop, like most Saudi filling stations, has a miniature mosque on the premises. A loudspeaker atop the minaret crackles to life with the evening prayer call as we glide into a parking space. The sound of chanted Arabic resonating off the eighteen-wheelers in the lot provides a surreal soundtrack for the fiery pink and orange sunset.</p><p>Because of our circumstances--more than an hour from home and our waiting dinner--our Saudi team members have decided to break their Ramadan fast on this, the second day of the month-long holiday, at this roadside establishment. The rest of us wait in the trucks as Muhammad, Saad, and Faisel melt into the crowd of white thobes that has formed in front of the restaurant counter.</p><p>Just as I am beginning to wonder how long the traditional break-fast lasts, our colleagues push out of the glass doors with bags of food in each hand. They summon us out of the trucks and unwrap packages of <em>sambusas</em> (pastry triangles filled with meat, vegetables, or cheese), plain yogurt, and dates. Fresh dates, <em>rutub</em>, are the traditional break-fast food. The seven of us huddle around a rusty oil drum, our makeshift table, and break the fast together as the last tinges of pink disappear on the horizon.</p><p class="articletitle">I am sitting at the only table in the only Baskin-Robbins in Jubail, finishing a double scoop in celebration of Patrick Hannah's birthday when two children, a boy and a girl, appear at our table, begging for money. With blank faces they ramble in Arabic, each thrusting a single finger toward the sky. All four of us at the table shake our heads and softly mumble "sorry," but the kids don't leave. The boy, maybe nine years old, keeps saying, "One, one. Okay, two, two." Now he is leaning on Patrick's chair. A few moments of awkward silence envelop the circular table as we search for unoccupied space with our eyes.</p><p>" No!" I say, when it is clear that the man behind the counter has no intention of intervening. The kids step toward the door. The boy pauses long enough to scream an English obscenity and grab his crotch before ducking out after his sister.</p><p>Two weeks later, I'm stopped at a red light on Jedda Street when a child appears next to my window. I recognize him as the same boy who begged in the Baskin-Robbins, only a few blocks away. I don't roll the window down, simply stare at his stone eyes as his fingers play across the glass. I watch as he uses one hand to simulate an object flying into his other hand, held vertically but toppling at the impact. In spinning disbelief I whisper to my companions, "Guys, guys! Watch!" They turn toward my window just in time to see another mimed recreation of the World Trade Center attack. The light turns. I pull away.</p><p>Three of the sheep's legs are bound together, but it does not struggle. It arches its neck so that its eyes are looking in my direction, but I just stare. We connect with a calm resignation, both of us aware that it is going to die. The sheep does not struggle when the two Bedouins pick it up by the legs and carry it to the slaughtering block, nor does it react when its throat is cut.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_jap15.jpg" alt="sharing a feast of roasted sheep and rice" width="325" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Saudi scenes: sharing a feast of roasted sheep and rice.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_22.jpg" alt="remains of a boat on the Jubail waterfront" width="325" height="217" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Remains of a boat on the Jubail waterfront.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_23.jpg" alt="an unusual sandstone outcropping discovered during a downtime day trip" width="325" height="218" /><p class="caption-text"><p>An unusual sandstone outcropping discovered during a downtime day trip</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>We sit on Persian rugs on the sand floor of the tent tea room, the Bedouin way. I watch as Fahlah Al-Hajri, our host, roasts green coffee beans over the wood fire in a small skillet. He grinds the beans with a mortar and pestle and then pours the grounds into an elaborate metal kettle, which he places on coals at the edge of the fire.</p><p>During the meal of sheep and rice, eaten with our fingers from communal trays, Fahlah's son points to my curls and laughs out a few Arabic words. When I ask Elie for a translation, he smiles and says, "Ibrahim says you have more hair than a camel. He thinks you have spaghetti on your head." I make an exaggerated face at the child, and he ducks from the tent, still laughing.</p><p class="articletitle">As I click the "Send" icon at the top of my inbox, I can hear my colleagues in the adjoining room making bets about when the first American bomb will fall in Iraq. It is the night before our move to a trailer park compound in Tanajib, a northern Saudi province. The new compound, run by the global petroleum powerhouse Saudi Aramco, will afford easy access to the coastline just below the Kuwaiti border. Communication is just one of several uncertainties associated with the new compound--we will be living within sight of the Aramco refinery, arguably the most obvious target in the country--and so I am getting one final e-mail message off to my family.</p><p>On our first morning in Tanajib, it takes twenty-five minutes for Muhammad and Jon Whitlock, an OG, to persuade the guards at the Aramco main gate to admit our two vehicles, and even then only under escort. As we pass through the gate, Jon nods to a huge wooden sign with the words "No Photos" in English and Arabic. "They made us promise to obey that sign," he says.</p><p>At the start of our final transect, I sneak a picture of the gi-gantic cylindrical containers and the tangle of metal pipes that are inside the barbed-wire fence. Seconds after I've returned the camera to the case on my belt, a security jeep drives over the dune and pulls up beside our truck. Jon frowns at me and walks over to talk to the guard. He returns to the transect line a few moments later.</p><p>" Jeff, seriously, <em>no pictures</em>!"</p><p>At the science meeting that evening, Muhammad asks to present our team's findings, even though it is Jon who is scheduled to report on the day's work. When his turn comes, Muhammad stands and says, "I am very happy this day because it is the first time that I have found a clean transect."</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: 112px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_dsc00066.jpg" alt="Jeffrey Pollack" width="112" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Jeffrey Pollack. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Stowe Beam.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Muhammad has been with the project since its inception in mid-September. This, his first entirely clean transect in four months of work, is located on the grounds of a massive oil refinery.</p><p>" Oh, yeah, one more thing," Miles Hayes, the project leader, says, wrapping up the meeting. "I need all of the Americans to stick around for a few minutes. Payroll issues. The rest of you can take off." Miles sits back down, closes his eyes, and rubs his temples with his thumbs. He looks tired, deflated by logistical battles and nagging financial worries. When the room has settled, he leans forward in his chair and addresses those of us remaining at the white Plexiglas table.</p><p>" This isn't about payroll. We got an e-mail from the American Consulate. They've issued a new travel warning for Saudi Arabia, advising all American citizens to rigorously evaluate the security of their situations. I leave the decision to you."</p><p>After a sleepless, emotional forty-eight hours, ten of us--more than half of the American staff--decide that it is time to leave Saudi Arabia, even though nothing around us seems to have changed.</p><p>Sitting on a plane fourteen hours later, I realize that Scott may have captured it best when he said that things felt fine, even at the end, and they probably would have continued to feel fine, right up until the second that something really wasn't fine.</p><p align="right"><em>Pollack M.E.M. '02, is a writer and a coastal ecologist for Research Planning, Inc., an environmental consulting company based in Columbia, South Carolina.</em></p><div><em><br /></em></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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_mara_19.jpg" width="620" height="331" alt="Clam digger: biologist Scott Zengel gathers possibly polluted samples for testing." /></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/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</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">Documenting Life in the Wake of Desert Storm</div></div></section> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502161 at https://alumni.duke.edu A Leader for Genomics https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/leader-genomics <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 width="631"><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><a href="http://www.duke.edu"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_35.jpg" alt="Willard: leading major team on genes" width="325" height="403" border="1" /></a><p>Willard: leading major team on genes. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Chris Hildreth.</span></p><p class="caption-text"><a href="http://www.duke.edu"></a><p>Willard: leading major team on genes. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Chris Hildreth.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Huntington Willard, a leader in emerging fields of genomics, has been named director of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP). The $200-million genomics institute, launched in 2000, represents Duke's comprehensive response to the broad challenges of the genomic revolution. Because advances in genome science and its applications raise a broad spectrum of ethical, legal, and policy issues, the IGSP comprises--in addition to scientists, engineers, and physicians--scholars in law, business, economics, public policy, ethics, religion, environmental studies, and other humanities and social sciences.</p><p>" Hunt Willard is a superb appointment to lead this unprecedented university-wide initiative," says Duke Provost Peter Lange. "What most pleases me, beyond his excellent record of accomplishments, is the speed with which he has grasped and embraced the unique interdisciplinary qualities of the IGSP. We have from the beginning recognized that the IGSP must engage the profound ethical, legal, and policy issues that are raised by the genomic revolution, even as the institute fosters Duke's research on fundamental questions of genomics and their transforming application to the clinical sciences."</p><p>Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy includes five research centers: the Center for Human Genetics, Center for Human Disease Models, Center for Genome Technology, Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy.</p><p>Researchers at the centers are carrying out studies on the genetic basis of diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to cancer, as well as developing new computational research techniques and organizing forums that explore the social impact of genomic advances.</p><p>Willard, who earned his bachelor's in biology at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at Yale University, has held research and academic posts at Stanford University and the University of Toronto. He joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University in 1992 as the Henry Wilson Payne Professor and chair of the department of genetics. In 1992, he also became director of the Center for Human Genetics at Case Western Reserve and University Hospitals of Cleveland.</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502155 at https://alumni.duke.edu Master of the Dance? Hardly https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/master-dance-hardly <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 width="49%"><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_aprilgargoyle.jpg" alt="Campus Gargoyle" width="153" height="175" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">I used to sit up nights wondering what it would be like to handpick the characteristics I could inherit from my parents. Why should I be content to accept the ones that had been dumped on me in some devious game of genetic Plinko? I wanted my father's sense of self, my mother's unfettered passion. For the most part, my Plinko balls have bounced favorably; however, one bad break has resulted in an irrevocable life sentence of humiliation at wedding receptions and trendy clubs.</p><p>As a kid, my mother was plucked from the performance halls of the San Fernando Valley to become the youngest-ever recipient of a coveted Ford Foundation Ballet Scholarship and shipped out to New York for the summer. Every day, she would head across town, dance bag in hand, to a studio underneath Lincoln Center to train and dance with greats like Edward Villela and George Ballanchine. Villela, who later became the first ballet dancer on the cover of Sports Illustrated, was so taken with my mom's skill that he specifically made her an example for the class to emulate.</p><p>Thirty-seven years later, and with the burden of inheritance weighing heavily, I walked intoWilson Recreational Center for my first "Social Dance" class. My girlfriend, Amanda, and I had decided to take the class together--it was a mutual decision, I swear--but I still was not completely keen on the idea. With windows on two sides and a full-length mirror on a third, the dance studio was an unforgiving chamber of intimidation. Passersby could stare in on their way to the parking lot or see me in all my graceless glory en route to their treadmills. My only previous public dancing had consisted of stumbling through the Electric Slide at my bar mitzvah.</p><p>" One, two, three. One, two, three. Break step," called out Liliya Shcherban, a recent Russian immigrant who was attempting to teach us the Shag. "One, two, three. One, two, three. Break step." The instructions seemed simple enough, and I grabbed Amanda authoritatively, hoping that a little swagger would compensate for any deficiency of talent. The swagger instantly dissipated, however, as my feet turned into non-compliant entities.</p><p>Liliya pulled me aside and took it upon herself to resolve the conflict between my head and my feet. Instead of coming to a reasonable compromise, my feet steamrolled the negotiations until, after five minutes of ineffectual instruction, Liliya exclaimed loudly in her broken English, "UGH! YOU NEED PRIVATE DANCING LESSONS!"</p><p>The entire class, working so diligently on their own Shags, halted in midstep as her words reverberated off the walls. With the stares of my classmates digging into me, I contemplated a number of reactions: anger at Liliya for embarrassing me; self-loathing for stumbling over the most elementary of steps. Instead, I felt a begrudging acceptance.</p><p>" You really are your father's son," my mother said when I called home looking for consolation. I knew what she meant. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, cocktail parties--he's a good sport, because he does dance. But he's just kind of uncoordinated. The man dances like, well, a construction attorney.</p><p>" Keep at it, though," my mother said before she hung up. "Maybe you've inherited some of my dancing genes."</p><p>If I did inherit any of her skill, it wasn't showing. But the end was in sight: After that disastrous first class, all I had left was twenty-five more--and the Fox Trot, Cha-cha, Tango, swing, waltz (Viennese and traditional), Rumba, and Polka--until I could receive my "Pass" and walk away. According to the class syllabus, I would one day grow to develop a "lifetime enjoyment of dance and physical movement." In the meantime, every Tuesday and Thursday at a little past noon, I would stroll, bad attitude in hand, to class and, seventy-five minutes later, I would leave, Amanda in hand, acid on my tongue.</p><p>It was the same routine every time, and I grew to dread it. Learn a step. Practice the step with multiple partners. Step on some poor girl's sprained left foot. Learn another step. I became famous. My fraternity brothers began making special trips to the gym just to watch me stumble over a cross triple-step or get caught in a reverse underarm turn.</p><p>Time dragged on. Class 9. Class 16. The fraternity brothers lost interest. There was no moment or class I could point to and say, "That was it!" But slowly--real slowly--I began to improve. First, I developed the ability to count time in my head. Then we moved on to more structured dances like the Fox Trot and Waltz, which, instead of requiring that I coordinate my whole body, allowed me to memorize basic foot movements. I could do that. About two months into the class, Liliya even went so far as to say that I had "nice posture."</p><p>Toward the end of the semester, pressure began to mount as our final--a two-minute, fully choreographed performance--loomed. At first Amanda and I were dumbfounded. Then, I realized another trait that I had inherited from my father: a loving acceptance of self-mockery. Liliya had taught us the Polka as a lark on the final day of class, and the dance's sheer ridiculousness drove nearly half the class off the dance floor. So, the choice for our final dance was easy. To save a little face, Amanda requested that we at least start with the Tango, and as long as I got to keep my Polka, I was in.</p><p>I arrived at the final in a sleek, black suit; she, in an elegant long dress. When our turn came, we earnestly and cleanly executed a fairly challenging Tango routine. Then the music switched from strings to tubas. She threw off her heels, and we polkaed ourselves silly. I even squatted down and did a series of mini-hops as Amanda pranced in a circle around me, patting my head. The crowd whistled and hollered in delight.</p><p>After catching our breaths, we were handed a sheet evaluating our performance: "Beautiful dress, Amanda. I never thought I'd see Greg move, much less like that."</p><p>Edward Villela might have scoffed, and I have yet to receive an invitation to perform at Lincoln Center, but Amanda gave me a kiss after our performance and told me how much she enjoyed taking the course. Maybe the Plinko ball bounced the right way, after all.</p><p class="articletitle"><em> Veis, a senior from Pacific Palisades, California, is editor of Recess, The Chronicle's weekly arts and entertainment supplement.</em></p><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td class="text" width="27%"> </td><td width="66%"> </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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/greg-veis" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Greg Veis</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502154 at https://alumni.duke.edu Pure Colors, in Abstract https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/pure-colors-abstract <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><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 284px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_8.jpg" alt="Times Light, 1983 Kenneth Noland" width="284" height="394" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">Times Light, 1983</span><br style="text-align: start;" /><span style="text-align: start;">Kenneth Noland</span><br style="text-align: start;" /><span style="text-align: start;">Acrylic on canvas</span><br style="text-align: start;" /><span style="text-align: start;">85 x 62 inches</span><br style="text-align: start;" /><span style="text-align: start;">Gift of Julie and Lawrence Salander</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Paintings by Kenneth Noland, who was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1924, belong to the movement in American art referred to as the second-generation or post-painterly abstractionists--the non-figurative painters who followed in the footsteps of the Abstract Expressionists of the Forties and Fifties, such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning.</p><p>The greatest influences for Noland, however, were the painters in this group who specialized in filling the canvas with pure color, denying any reference to the figure, removing the hand of the artist by minimizing the appearance of the brushstroke on the surface of the picture, and creating a spiritual effect, such as the color-field artists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.</p><p>Noland and his contemporaries, Morris Louis and Gene Davis--called the Washington Color Painters, because they lived and worked in Washington, D.C.--moved beyond color-field Abstract Expressionism. They eliminated emotional, spiritual, thematic, or subjective connotations of any kind. They were the first to assert the right to create a painting that is strictly nonrepresentational.</p><p>Times Light was given to the Duke University Museum of Art in 2002 by Julie and Lawrence Salander of the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York. It is a later development of Noland's famous "target" and "chevron" paintings of the early 1960s, which he created by applying thin bands of pure color onto unbleached raw canvases. Here he maintains the chevron composition, but uses an entirely new technique: the layering of very thick strokes of acrylic paint, expertly applied, layer upon layer, as if spreading thick frosting ona cake. The result is a bold display of painterly talent, with an unusual juxtaposition of hundreds of hues: pastel pinks, whites, and lavenders against the saturated yellows and reds.</p><p> </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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</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 DUMA</div></div></section> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502153 at https://alumni.duke.edu Forum: March-April 2003 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/forum-march-april-2003 <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>Uniform Perspectives</strong><p class="articletitle">Editors:<br /> The "young U.S. Army punks in uniform" ["<a href="../111202/afghan1.html"><strong>Letters from Afghanistan," November- December 2002</strong></a>] made it possible for our equally young [Barnaby] Hall to wander around Kabul taking pictures, without having to worry about getting his throat cut. His comments caused me to wonder if he was not the real punk.</p><p class="articletitle">Walter Boomer '60<br /> (via e-mail)</p><p class="articletitle"><em> The correspondent is the U.S. Marine Corps general, now retired, who commanded Marine forces during the first Gulf War. He is first chairman and CEO of Rogers Corporation.</em></p><p class="articletitle"><strong> Poor Portrayal</strong></p><p class="articletitle">Editors:<br /> As a woman engineering graduate student at Duke, I was made to feel unwelcome and unwanted by many male faculty and peers. One faculty member explicitly promulgated his belief that women did not belong in engineering at all; not one other faculty member publicly challenged him on this. One hopes that time brings enlightenment and changes in attitude.</p><p>Imagine my disappointment upon reading in the <strong><a href="../111202/depbks.html">November-December 2002 issue, in a review of Henry Petroski's latest book</a></strong>, that "Engineering is a discipline that separates the men from the boys.... The best engineers, be they male or female, are a lot like boys." In a misguided attempt at humor, the book reviewer does women and the profession of engineering in general a great disservice.</p><p>Obsessive inquisitiveness, love of trial and error, a knack for fiddling with gadgets, and appreciation of design and building as playtime are indeed characteristics of many good engineers. To define such traits as characteristic of boys, alone, is to imply that girls and women are somehow unnatural engineers.</p><p>Is Petroski's book truly a testament to the "indefatigable curiosity of boys," or is the book about Petroski's indefatigable curiosity? If the latter, why generalize to all boys (they don't all become engineers) and leave out girls (many of whom do)?</p><p>In To Engineer is Human, Petroski lays out a thesis that situates engineering as the most human of activities. Not the most boyish--the most human.</p><p>I don't think this is a minor issue. Consistent, persistent portrayals of engineers and engineering as the proper domain of boys and men contribute to the discouragement of many young women who could bring valuable contributions to the profession. Ask Dean Kristina Johnson if she thinks of herself as being a lot like a boy, or just a lot like a good engineer.</p><p class="articletitle">Suzanne Elizabeth Franks Ph.D. '91<br /> (via e-mail)</p><p class="articletitle"><em> The correspondent is director of the Women in Engineering and Science program at Kansas State University.</em></p><p> </p></td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><strong> Elmo's Ire</strong></p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">Editors:<br /> I just wanted to express my disappointment in your publishing the recent piece <a href="../111202/depgaz7.html"><strong>"Searching for the Soul of Elmo" ["Gazette," November-December 2002]</strong></a>. Actually, I'm disappointed in two things:</p><p>(1) Duke University allowing an "artist-in-residence" to waste Duke's resources (to which I am a donor) on such ridiculous pursuits; and</p><p>(2) our magazine for wasting time and energy humiliating alumni in noting that this artist is associated with a prestigious institution like Duke University.</p><p>If the president and board of Duke are proud of this individual and glad to have her showcased in our magazine, I'm appalled! Perhaps you would be brave enough to ask them to comment on how such decisions are made to allow Duke resources to be spent so frivolously.</p><p class="articletitle">J. Mark Hudson M.B.A. '99<br /> (via e-mail)</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">Editors:<br /> The article <a href="../111202/depgaz7.html"><strong>"Searching for the Soul of Elmo"</strong></a> made me cringe. If Ms. Heaton believed Elmo had a soul, she wouldn't be treating his body so cruelly. Fortunately, I believe that the soul of Elmo--and of teddy bears and of velveteen rabbits--are safely ensconced in the hearts of those who love them.</p><p>I sincerely hope that Ms. Heaton's search for "what constitutes a living being" will not prompt her to dissect humankind and hang our hides in an art gallery. Now that we're finally giving some credence to the mind-body-spirit connection, it would make sense to leave the three intact for purposes of research. Faith, Ms. Heaton, faith!</p><p class="articletitle">Sally F. Malkasian '50<br /> Longmeadow, Massachusetts</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><strong> Bad Chemistry</strong></p><p> </p><p class="articletitle">Editors:<br /> I had to wince when I read your article on Organic Chemistry in the <strong><a href="../010203/depsyl.html">January-February 2003 issue ["Syllabus, Chem 151L"]</a></strong>. Referring to organic chemistry as "dealing with substances found in living things" is a consequential by-product of pop culture in which the term "organic" is used to describe anything natural, pure, or "chemical-free" (an impossibility) and is often labeled as an antonym to "synthetic."</p><p>As every organic chemistry student knows (or should know, at least), the adjective "organic" refers to the chemistry of carbon-containing compounds. These include many synthetic substances and famous toxins such as mustard gas, dioxin, and DDT.</p><p>The second wince came later in the article when you mentioned "organic metals," for obvious reasons.</p><p class="articletitle">Steven R. Aubuchon Ph.D. '94<br /> (via e-mail)</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502152 at https://alumni.duke.edu Joanna Blumofe Meiseles '87 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/joanna-blumofe-meiseles-87 <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><table width="140" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="128"><img src="/issues/030403/images/meiseles.jpg" alt="Joanna Meiseles" width="126" height="155" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">She admits that the first time she took her son to get a haircut, she may have been a little too anxious. "I was nine months pregnant, looking nervous, and hoping to catch some of the falling hairs," says Joanna Meiseles, who also videotaped the event. "To lots of moms, it's more than just a haircut."</p><p>The experience ended disastrously, with all three participants--mother, child, and hairdresser--leaving unhappy. Soon after, Meiseles says, she began thinking about how barbershops could make getting a haircut easier for children (and their parents).</p><p>In 1993, the same year as her son's ill-fated haircut, she came up with the idea for a salon designed exclusively for kids. Two years later, her idea became a reality when she opened her first Snip-its in Framingham, Massachusetts. Now a thousand kids visit the original Snip-its each week, and Meiseles has opened four additional stores throughout the state.</p><table width="215" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_snip_its.jpg" alt="Snip-its interior." width="325" height="256" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Snip-its isn't just a salon, she says. Billed on its website as "the most amazing place for a kid to get a haircut," Snip-its provides children with a "haircut adventure." Each store is decorated with the "Snip-its cast of characters"--cartoon hairdressing implements "brought to life," much like the personified furniture pieces in Beauty and the Beast. Among these haircutting creatures are Flyer Joe Dryer, Maranga Mirror, and Jean Luc le Spritz, a "living" French mousse can.</p><p>Kids are included in the process at Snip-its, too. They get to choose the haircut they want from a large picture book, as well as how they want their hair to smell based on Snip-its' four shampoo "flavors"--banana, apple, grape, and strawberry. During the actual haircut, children play computer games featuring the cartoon characters.</p><p>Meiseles says her hair-cutters, who are all licensed cosmetologists, know how to cut kids' hair and how to make the experience fun--and fast. Before starting work, all of Meiseles' hairdressers are "Snipified": They undergo extensive training to make sure they're prepared to work with little kids.</p><p>Though Meiseles has always had a knack for business, her interests at Duke didn't necessarily line up with her talents as an entrepreneur. As an undergraduate, she majored in comparative area studies, with a focus on Africa, and worked at the Primate Center. She says she enjoyed watching basketball and hanging out with friends. She also met her future husband, Brad Meiseles '87.</p><p>Her first foray into business came right after graduating, when she opened Tesaro, a shoe store in Durham's Brightleaf Square. "It was based on the idea that, at the time, there weren't many upscale shoe stores in Durham," Meiseles says. Though Tesaro only stayed open a year, the store made money, and Meiseles says, "It was a great experience learning how to start, run, and close a store all in one year."</p><p>Meiseles then moved to Massachusetts with her husband and began a family. She admits that at first she was hesitant about starting Snip-its because of her lack of experience in the salon business. She credits her father, Robert Blumofe, a movie producer, for motivating her to follow her instincts.</p><p>" My father said, 'You don't need to be a hair expert to open the store. Produce the show, pull the people you need together, and make it happen.'"</p><p>Her "producing" efforts have paid off. Besides the five Snip-its locations in Massachusetts, which are all doing well, Meiseles says, starting in March, she will be able to begin selling Snip-its franchises. She soon hopes to open stores nationwide.</p><p>She had wanted her two oldest children, Ben and Brandon, now twelve and eleven years old, to be Snip-its' first and second customers. It would have been Brandon's first haircut, but the store opened too late. Brandon "had hair halfway down his back, and people started thinking he was a girl," she says.</p><p>Meiseles' youngest son, Justin, who is only three months old, will get his inaugural trim at Snip-its, she says, when he has enough hair to cut.</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="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</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/lucas-schaefer-04" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lucas Schaefer &#039;04</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</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 Cutting Edge for Kids</div></div></section> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502151 at https://alumni.duke.edu