Duke - Nov - Dec 2002 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002 en 2002 Distinguished Alumnus https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/2002-distinguished-alumnus <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:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="2"> <p>&nbsp;</p> <table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="6" style="width:22%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p>&nbsp;</p> <div class="caption caption-center"> <div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 320px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Benenson: trustee emeritus and founder of the Benenson Awards in the Arts at Duke" src="/issues/111202/images/depreg1.jpg" style="height:494px; width:320px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Benenson: trustee emeritus and founder of the Benenson Awards in the Arts at Duke.&nbsp;Les Todd.</p> </div> </div> </div> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>From nominations made by alumni, faculty, trustees, administrators, and students, the Duke Alumni Association has selected Edward Hartley Benenson '34 to receive the 2002 Distinguished Alumni Award. The highest honor presented to alumni, the award was established in 1983 by the Duke Alumni Association to recognize graduates who have made significant contributions in their own fields, in service to the university, or for the betterment of humanity. Distinguished Alumni Award winners are recognized each year at Founders' Day ceremonies in early October.</p> <p>Benenson, who graduated from Duke with a major in art history, is chair and owner of Benenson Funding Corporation, a real estate business. An Army veteran of World War II, he is a decorated officer of France's Ordre de Merite (Legion of Merit), and received the gold medal of Renaissance FranÁaise and the bronze medal of the City of Paris. He is also a Knight of the Order of St. John of Malta, a member of the board of overseers for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a trustee of Lebanon Hospital and the American Ballet Theater.</p> <p>Over the years, Benenson's service to Duke has ranged from the Marine Lab to the athletics program. Much of his attention has been directed to Duke Medical Center, where he chaired the board of visitors and played a major role in drafting the financial plan and securing funding for Duke Hospital North. He endowed a scholarship at the School of Medicine, has been a major sponsor of the medical center's annual Palm Beach Forum, has contributed generously to the Children's Health Center, and has been on the steering committee for the "Keeping the Promise of Medicine" campaign.</p> <p>A lifetime member and former chair of the Friends of the Duke University Museum of Art, Benenson has been an important advocate for the arts on campus. He established the Benenson Awards in the Arts at Duke's Institute of the Arts, along with the Benenson Lecture Series in the Arts. "At a time when there was very little financial support for artistic endeavors at Duke, the establishment of the annual Benenson Awards in the Arts met a great need for an underserved portion of the student population," says Kathy Silbiger, director of the Institute of the Arts. "That need continues, but the Benenson Awards have led the way and set the standard for how to encourage students to develop their talents to the fullest and to undertake socially meaningful projects."</p> <p>Since 1981, when the first Benenson Awards were given, more than 200 students have directly benefited from the program. Their endeavors have included art-historical research leading to publications; creative summer projects resulting in exhibitions, films, or musical compositions; and participation in summer educational institutions, such as the Aspen Music Festival and the British American Drama Academy.</p> <p>In 1979, Benenson was elected to Duke's board of trustees, where he served on its executive committee. He was named trustee emeritus in 1985. He and his wife, Gladys, live in New York City and Palm Beach and have four children, including Thomas Benenson '64; a granddaughter and a niece have Duke degrees, and a grandson is a Duke sophomore.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</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">Headed the Right Way</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501793 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/2002-distinguished-alumnus#comments The Dry Facts https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dry-facts <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: 353px;"> <div class="caption-inner"><img alt="Biologist Jackson: immersed in a delicate resource" src="/issues/111202/images/depqa.jpg" style="height:237px; width:353px" /> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Biologist Jackson: immersed in a delicate resource.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> </div> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><strong>One billion people are without access to safe drinking water. Five to ten million die from poor sanitation each year. Is the global situation improving or worsening?</strong></p> <p>It depends if you're a glass half-full or glass half-empty kind of person. In many ways it's improving. One billion is a very rough number, probably about the right size, but obviously an indefensible number. It's important to remember that there are 700 million fewer people without safe drinking water today than there were twenty years ago.</p> <p>A lot of work still needs to be done, but we are making progress. People realize that water is one environmental issue, if not the paramount one. The number of people is growing faster than the amount of water we have access to. So that means that on a per-capita basis, there will likely be less water, but that isn't to say necessarily that there isn't enough water in the world. It's partly an issue of distribution. In some respects it's similar to the food issue. There's enough food in the world to feed everyone, but we can't get it to people. That's also true of water, although shipping water is more difficult, because, of course, it's heavy and hard to move around.</p> <p><strong>Do you think it's a real possibility that nations might soon go to war over water, as they do today over oil?</strong></p> <p>I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibilities. We've come close in the past. I think it was in 1990: Turkey cut off the Euphrates River for a month upriver from Syria and Iraq. They were building a dam and filling it. The president of Turkey at the time threatened to curtail flow indefinitely unless Syria withdrew support for Kurdish rebels. It was a fascinating interaction. Here was this dam at the center, the ostensible reason that the water was being cut off, and yet in the background was this overtly political message, you know, "you're downstream from us, and we control the water source."</p> <p>Another famous example comes from Wesselton, South Africa, also in 1990, where the council cut off water to 50,000 people because they were protesting poor sanitation and living conditions. And then you have an example from the 1500s, another very fascinating one from Italy: Pisa and Florence were at war, and da Vinci and Machiavelli teamed up to divert the Arno River. They tried to deprive Pisa of water as an agent of war. They failed, but they tried.</p> <p><strong>What about conflicts within the United States? </strong></p> <p>Obviously there has been plenty of trouble with water in this country. Take the Colorado River and all the dams that have been built there. And, of course, the Rio Grande. Earlier this year, Texas and New Mexico farmers and ranchers wanted water that Mexico was supposed to deliver, but Mexico wasn't delivering it, so they blockaded the bridge.</p> <p>Another example I like: In the Thirties, California began building Parker Dam across the Colorado on the border with Arizona. It might be too melodramatic to say they were going to war over it, but the Arizona governor called out the National Guard and stationed them on the Arizona side of the river and said over his dead body were they going to build this dam. Of course, the dam was eventually built.</p> <p>I don't see states fighting one another physically over water. There are too many other alternatives. I don't think it is unreasonable, though, to think of water as a potential agent used in war for places like the Middle East.</p> <p><strong>Several new technologies have been proposed to help conserve water in agricultural use (which accounts for 70 percent of water use) including drip-irrigation and underground aquifer-storage systems. Are these proving useful? </strong></p> <p>They are effective in saving water. They're excellent tools. But they're only cost-effective if you have a valuable crop. If you're growing orange trees or strawberries, then they're definitely cost-effective. But we aren't going to grow wheat or corn--it's not something that's likely to go into broad application for row crops.</p> <p><strong>With oceans of water and easy access to them, why does desalinization account for so little (only .2 percent) of global water? </strong></p> <p>The problem with desalinization is that it requires a lot of energy. The countries that are doing it in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, are places where you have both water availability and energy availability. That's where it's cost-effective.</p> <p>I don't think it's unreasonable for cities like Los Angeles to talk more about desalinization. One kind of crazy scheme that's been proposed--crazy, I guess, depending on your perspective--is to couple nuclear power plants with desalinization. On the one hand, you think, gosh, that is an utterly crazy, ridiculous idea, but then you think, well, the alternative may be draining Mono Lake. And then the tradeoffs between the technology and water availability are not so clear anymore. We have this knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power, but all the things that we do have a cost and a benefit.</p> <p>And that's just one example of where we could go in cities, at least on the West Coast, where water is very scarce. I see this as possible, not very probable. But take California--40 million people. You pump 75 million people into California and it's not at all clear where water is going to come from to support those people.</p> <p><strong>Is the world's water problem a result of human pollution or of natural environmental processes at work?</strong></p> <p>I don't think it's either of those alone. You can argue that cleaning up fresh water in the U.S. and Europe has been a real success story of the last thirty years or so. For instance, the quality of water in the Great Lakes is much better now than when I was a boy. When I was a kid, we used to play on the shores of Lake Erie and there were dead fish everywhere. We'd have dead-fish fights. And it was because the water was in terrible shape.</p> <p>It's much better now. I don't think it's a pollution issue, certainly not in the United States, and it's not a climate-change issue. It is at the intersection between climate and people. The demographic trend in this country is for people to move south and west, and when they move, particularly west, they go from wetter to dryer. A lot of the areas that have had the highest growth, like Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles, are places where natural supplies of water are difficult to come by.</p> <p><strong>America is regarded as a gluttonous consumer of water. Has our overuse contributed to a global shortage?</strong></p> <p>There are issues where what we do has a tremendous influence globally, and one of those is greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change, where we have a quarter, approximately, of all fossil-fuel emissions in the world. I don't think the things that we as Americans do contribute, for the most part, to those one billion people not having enough water.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>How do you assess the work of the Army Corps of Engineers? </strong></p> <p>They have done their job well, at damming and channeling and reconstructing water flow across the country, and that has been a good thing in some ways and a negative thing in other ways. One of the greatest extinction events in this country has been along the Mobile River Basin, where dozens of species have gone extinct since we built a series of locks and dams along the waterway. Is that a bad thing? Yes, it is. But those Corps of Engineers activities also allow us to move boats and transport materials. It's a tradeoff.</p> <p><strong>Do you favor privatization of water in the United States?</strong></p> <p>I do think that's a growth business. There is an emotional aspect to water in this country. And it's why dams are very difficult to push through now, though that is also because the best dam sites are already gone. But people feel very strongly about water. There are those who argue that water is no different than oil or any other commodity: We should move it around, trade it. And then there are those who are vehemently opposed. For instance, Canada has loads of fresh water, but many people are against importing it.</p> <p>In some ways, yes, a private company can manage that sort of process more efficiently than most governments do. But you have to remember that a company's motivation is very different than a government's motivation, or should be. The question isn't just, "Will companies do it better?" but, "How will we reconcile the public good with private shareholders and financial constraints of companies?"</p> <p>If companies can get water to a billion people who don't have water, I'm all for it. But just because a company is good at selling water, I don't think that we should necessarily do it.</p> <p><strong>Can our government manage water efficiently--and are there problems with the way it is currently being managed? </strong></p> <p>What is really important is to acknowledge just how many groups within the government, both federal and state, are responsible for monitoring water quality and quantity across diverse agencies with very different agendas. It's an extremely difficult thing to coordinate.</p> <p>So, first you need to come up with a coherent plan for how we want to manage water in this country and think about it in ways more than just as a form of transportation and recreation. There's a new U.S. Global Change Water Plan that came out about a year ago, so it isn't as if nothing is happening on this front. But when you think about all of the different agencies--there's a Corps of Engineers, the EPA for water quality, the Transportation Board for ships, and on and on--it's sort of a quagmire.</p> <p><em>Jackson joined the Duke faculty in January 1999. He heads the Program in Ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and is director of the new Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. His new book, The Earth Remains Forever, was published this fall.</em></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Photo Credit:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/photographers/jon-gardiner-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jon Gardiner.</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 U.N. and World Bank have predicted that wars will be fought over water. Christine Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, calls water the biggest environmental crisis of the twenty-first century. Robert Jackson, associate professor of biology and director of the program in ecology, comments on the world&#039;s most precious resource--and where it went.</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501790 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dry-facts#comments Shoo-Bee Doo-Bee Duke https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/shoo-bee-doo-bee-duke <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">Listen to one of Duke's vocal groups, The Pitchforks, sing "Good Old A Cappella" on their 1998 CD Tastefully Done. Male harmony sings, "Shoo-bee-doo-wop, bop, bop... soul to soul, brother to brother, a cappella, well, it sounds good to me." You might think you're back in the Fifties, in the days of barbershop quartets, sweet Adelines, and "Down by the Old Mill Stream." But a quick glance at The Pitchforks' repertoire, which includes covers of songs by Toad the Wet Sprocket, Dire Straits, Lenny Kravitz, and Marc Cohn, provides clear evidence that this isn't your grandfather's a cappella.</p><p>A cappella--music made only with the voice--has experienced a boom in the last decade. According to the Contemporary A Cappella Society (CASA), there are now more than 500 collegiate groups. Deke Sharon, president of CASA and musical director for The House Jacks, a professional a cappella group, says, "A cappella music has been around longer than any other form and is a part of every culture and tradition around the globe. To the outside world, however, a cappella usually connotes barbershop, doo-wop, or choral music--none of which accurately represents many current groups."</p><p><br />Much of the growth in a cappella music has been fueled by college groups like those at Duke, including the oldest groups, the all-male Pitchforks (founded in 1979) and the all-female Out of the Blue (founded in 1980). Other campus groups are Lady Blue; Speak of the Devil; Something Borrowed, Something Blue; DÈj‡ Blue; and Rhythm and Blue.Performers and music executives trace the origins of this interest back to one man and one song--Bobby McFerrin and his 1988 chart-topper, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." McFerrin's ability to create a broad range of sounds without instruments in addition to singing lyrics opened many listeners' ears to the possibilities of the human voice. He pioneered what a cappella enthusiasts call "vocal percussion," the art of expressing rhythm with nothing but your lips, tongue, and voice. His playfulness appealed to young singers and, with the rise of rhythm-driven music like rap and hip-hop, college students found they could create innovative music, replicating and expanding on contemporary songs without instrumental accompaniment.</p><p>Why do students gravitate toward these groups? Former Pitchforks' member and business manager Bret Runestad '02 has one answer: getting to sing, but getting to sing with a certain style. "I did a lot of more formal singing in high school, both for my school choir and for a more exclusive, smaller madrigal ensemble," he says. "While I loved being a part of that, when I went home at night, the music I was listening to was a far cry from the classical and formal pieces I was singing. When I arrived at Duke, I retained a desire to sing, but I also had a real desire to loosen up and have more fun with it and sing more contemporary material. A cappella was the logical extension."</p><p>Dave Chong '03, of Something Borrowed, Something Blue, first felt the pull of a cappella during a visit to campus while a senior in high school. "My host was in Lady Blue, so I got to see them and The Pitchforks perform," he says. "This was a very cool way of musical expression. They all looked like they were having fun, enjoying singing and each other. Half of the appeal of a cappella is image. You can't help but think to yourself, 'Heck, if I could sing like that--and, more recently, dance like that--I'll look good and get women. I'll be cool.' As vulnerable, clean-slated freshmen, we all want to be liked, and there aren't many people who dislike a cappella here at Duke. It's a tradition."</p><p>Each of the groups has a distinct idea of who they are and what they sing, and the differences point to Runestad's idea of "loosening up." The Pitchforks, for example, "maintain two repertoires throughout the school year," he says, "a more modern one for campus and dorm shows, and a more traditional 'oldies but goodies' set for other occasions."</p><p>Out of the Blue was founded twelve years ago when four sophomores were lamenting the lack of a women's counterpart to The Pitchforks. According to the group's own history, Elisa Buono Glazer '83, Mary Pat Evans '83, Harriet Cann Connolly '83, and Loa Heymann '83 fell into a conversation about music, singing, and their love of a cappella, and talked themselves into a group. That group still "places emphasis on the musical aspect of a cappella," says Meg Watson '02, business manager for the group before graduating. "We have extremely difficult and layered arrangements, trying to stay as true to the original song as possible. It has been noted to us that this is the major point of separation between OOTB and other female groups on campus."</p><p>The intricacies of a cappella harmonies contribute not only to prominence but also to camaraderie, says Watson. "College a cappella allows members of the group to become very close on a musical and personal level. From practically the first day of fall semester, as a freshman, I had a group of older female friends to go to with questions," she says. "There's a reliance on other members of the group that exceeds that in a normal chorus, which--at least in Out of the Blue--has made us a close-knit group of girls."</p><p>Another tight-knit group of a cappella women, Lady Blue, has a website that describes them as "road-trip queens with hip wardrobes and a penchant for outlet malls, karate, silly string, dance parties (even without any great dance talent), and funky pants."</p><p>Many campuses also host a cappella groups who perform religious music, and Duke is no different. Something Borrowed, Something Blue began in 1969 as the Christian folk band Jesus Christ Power & Light Co. It's now affectionately nicknamed Borrowed and Blue, "a Christian co-ed a cappella group, all from different fellowships, guys and girls who love God and love to sing," according to its website. "We try to share the love of God and give testimony of what He's done in our lives through a cappella music, ranging from old school to new school, from contemporary Christian music to popular music to original arrangements--but basically music with a message of sorts, since we consider ourselves an a cappella ministry." Tim Chung '01, Borrowed and Blue's co-music director during his days with the group, says, "I like to think we sing with purpose. Being able to believe what I sing from the heart, expressing what is more important than all the silly little details I worry about in life."</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: 334px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/capella-a.jpg" alt="Perfect pitch: The Pitchforks sing the National Anthem in Wallace Wade Stadium" width="334" height="250" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">Perfect pitch: The Pitchforks sing the National Anthem in Wallace Wade Stadium.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Other groups sing from the heart in their own styles. DÈj‡ Blue, a women's group founded in 1999, performs a variety of female a cappella music, ranging in style and time period from Renaissance madrigals to Forties barbershop. Speak of the Devil sings old favorites and contemporary hits.</p><p>There are several campus a cappella events--some recurring, and some, like Lady Blue's Ten-Year Homecoming concert, a one-time occasion. The Pitchforks' Runestad says, "My favorite experience is our yearly Christmas concert in the Gothic Reading Room. Every year, we sing to a completely packed house, and it always starts off the Christmas season for me." Out of the Blue's Watson says, "I love performing for the freshman A Cappellooza concert in Page [Auditorium] every August. It is a great experience. A very, very close second, however, is our big spring concert, the weekend before spring break starts."</p><p>" For the listener," says Watson, "college a cappella offers a venue for people to go and hear popular music being performed. On Duke's campus, there are lots of opportunities to go to classical performances, but we rarely get nonclassical groups. That's where we come in. I think that many listeners are shocked when they first hear an a cappella group perform, because of the many layers of musicality that go into each song. I know a lot of people who sang in high school who are in awe of collegiate a cappella."</p><p>Using the music to share a message draws in other audiences as well. Chong says the expression of faith in the group's music is an integral part of their performance. "Obviously, we are set apart from some of the other groups because we are Christian; that's automatically a turn-off for some people, unfortunately," he says. "But Christianity dictates that our image with people is not important. It's not about what the world thinks. We're here to serve God, not man.</p><p>" So, in Borrowed and Blue, I sing for a few reasons. One is musical worship, just like you might find in a church. We actually believe what we sing, either encouraging people in faith or trying to convey a message or testimony of what and why we believe. For some listeners, it's really encouraging to hear some of what we sing about. And to those who don't share our faith, we want them to be able to enjoy our music. We strive for musical excellence. Those two standards will always be there."</p><p>While Chong says listener support for a cappella can ebb and flow a bit as students find other commitments or turn from one group to another, The Pitchforks' Runestad has organized the music's fan base into three groups. "Primarily, the people that are at the majority of our concerts are friends and acquaintances of group members who enjoy seeing people they know perform," he says. "There are also the more passive fans, who will go to a concert when it's at their dorm, or if friends of theirs are going, or if it's a big event like the huge orientation show or the Parents Weekend shows in which multiple groups are performing.</p><p>" Finally, there are some die-hard fans of the music we create and the performances we give. I don't know if it's the 'boy-band' phenomenon, but there are some people who really think we're the best show in town. And group members have been the subjects of crushes from people they don't even know. One of the Pitchforks had reconstructive surgery on his knee and, as he was recovering in his room, a girl he didn't know walked in, gave him a pie she had baked, said she was a huge Pitchforks fan, and wished him a speedy recovery."</p><p>The groups also perform off campus, with fellow Duke groups and some from other colleges, and on tour during fall and spring breaks. Out of the Blue's recent trips took in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Miami, while The Pitchforks have been to Florida, California, Hawaii, London, and Nassau. Rhythm and Blue has performed at Boston University, the University of Maryland, and the College of William and Mary, and have hosted the Princeton Nassoons, UNC's Tarheels With Voices, Tufts' Amalgamates, and others at various concerts. Lady Blue traveled to the Bahamas last spring, and Borrowed and Blue has sung throughout the Northeast and the South, as well as in Chicago and Hawaii.</p><p>For some students, most of the fun occurs on the road. Lillis Weeks '02, former general manager of Borrowed and Blue, says, the trip to Hawaii "was amazing on all levels--not just being on a beautiful island, but getting to hang with students from the University [of Hawaii] who were excited about us being there, doing some fun concerts, sharing stuff about God that excites me, being challenged in so many ways...just amazing."</p><p>Singing with other groups around the country has led to a national reputation for Duke's a cappella groups, one furthered by their inclusion in an album series called The Best of College A Cappella, or BOCA, produced by Varsity Vocals. "Being on BOCA is great," says The Pitchforks' Runestad, "simply because it places us among the best a cappella groups in the nation, and it helps distribute our music across the country."</p><p>Started in 1995, the BOCA series now totals nine, including a humor album, Wasting Our Parents' Money. Out of the Blue is one of the most-represented groups in the BOCA series. In 2002, their rendition of "Eve" landed on the disc. In past BOCA recordings, they or their Duke a cappella peers have covered The Dixie Chicks' "You Were Mine," Annie Lennox's "Train in Vain," Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street," Bonnie Raitt's "Nick of Time," and Toad the Wet Sprocket's "All I Want."</p><p>According to Thomas King, assistant editor and producer for the Southeast region for Varsity Vocals, "It is extremely difficult to get on the CDs. During any given year, as many as 150 recordings are being produced around the country by collegiate groups. Multiply that with, say, at least twelve tracks per recording, and you begin to see the odds that groups face in terms of getting on the CD."</p><p>Varsity Vocals also sponsors the Intercollegiate Championship of A Cappella (ICCA), held in locations around the country each year in the winter, culminating in a national competition in New York each April at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall. In 2001, 108 groups participated in twenty-five concerts in six regions. "On average, there are twenty-five to thirty groups for eighteen spots," says King. "Some groups are rejected during the audition process, since groups have to be as professional with the audition materials as they would be if they were performing for us onstage." Several Duke groups have competed in the past; in 2001, Rhythm and Blue's Erica Featherstone '03 won an arrangement award, while Jeremy Cromer '03 won a soloist award. Dave Widders '02 of Speak of the Devil was a runner-up for arrangement.</p><p>Duke's groups are held in high regard at Varsity Vocals. "Out of the Blue's talent and musicality have been of such high caliber consistently over the years that it's sometimes hard to remember that the roster of the group changes each year. You'd think those women had sung together for years," King says. "The Pitchforks are the gentlemen of a cappella. I love the music they do and the way they carry themselves in such a positive manner. Speak of the Devil's choreography is some of the best in men's a cappella. They have this great sex appeal, which drives audiences crazy. I'm partial to co-ed groups, though, so Rhythm and Blue and Borrowed and Blue hold special places in my heart."</p><p>Dave Chong looks at Duke's "loyal fans" and sees an embrace of the a cappella culture. "A cappella is fun," he says. "We express that in our songs and expressions--that we are having fun, that we're singing because we like to. Hopefully, we sound good to us and to the audience."</p><p>It's fun, and it's relatively simple to have that fun, as Runestad explains. "With ten of my good friends around, we can make something out of nothing. That's such a creatively satisfying experience."</p><p class="articletitle"><em>Plakcy is a Florida-based freelance writer.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/capella-b.jpg" width="620" height="437" alt="Singing out: Sonali Hippalgaonkar, left, rehearses with a cappella group Dèjà Blue. Jon Gardiner." /></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/neil-plakcy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Neil Plakcy</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</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 cappella groups on campus rely on no background music, no pyrotechnics--just the music of the sound of each other&#039;s voices.</div></div></section> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501827 at https://alumni.duke.edu Letters from Afghanistan https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/letters-afghanistan <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">Because I want to visit Afghanistan,I flippantly told history professor John Richards as he went around the class last spring asking why we were taking "Afghanistan: Warrior and Nation Building." Though this response was all I could think of at the time, it planted a seed in my head that I would toy with and eventually succumb to.</p><p>My parents had originally taken this as another fantastic whim of mine that would never materialize. As the pieces began falling into place, the battle lines were set. My parents, particularly my mother, were against my foray into Afghanistan. But when I steadfastly refused to change my opinion in the face of her arguments, it was decided that I would be allowed to go--under certain conditions, of course: I was to arrive by air from India, and I was to stay for just one week, and I was not to leave Kabul.</p><p>I arrived in India late on a Sunday night; it was hot, humid, and loud. The next morning, I awoke early and set off to the airport to meet the only ticket agent for Ariana Airlines, the Afghan national airline, in India. It took another full week for me to get my hands on a ticket to Kabul.</p><p>Finally on the Ariana flight to Kabul, I found myself closely inspecting my fellow passengers. I wondered what they were going to be doing in Afghanistan. Some joked and laughed; others, myself included, sat pensively.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong> July 15 </strong></p><p>Kabul's shabby, minimalist airport: Plane wrecks flank both sides of the runway, along with fortifications and a string of private jets for the different nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and aid organizations operating out of the city. Outside the airport, the tail of a Russian MiG was being repainted in the new Afghan colors.</p><p>Kabul defies expectations. For sure there are rusting tanks and vehicles and walls sprayed with the ubiquitous bullet holes. From the constant stream of media footage shown in the West, I was not surprised by the destruction. Parts of the city are totally destroyed from the civil war. And of course, there is a massive army presence. Yet in the central areas of Shari Naw and Akbar Xan Mena, there is no bomb damage, and the bazaars revealed an energy I had not anticipated.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-b.jpg" alt="John Spencer Bassett " width="250" height="373" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Wide, tree-lined avenues and bustling streets convey a sense of what Kabul must have been once--progressive, hip, a city on the move. I bought a guide to Afghanistan from the 1960s and one to Kabul written at roughly the same time; they describe a place "where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars filled with colourful, flowing turbans, gaily striped chapans, and a multitude of handsome faces." Each face I see has been etched by a conflict that has lasted nearly thirty years. And yet, in many ways, I am in awe of the recovery made in this relative peacetime.</p><p>I've managed to make my way to the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) building, where I met Peter Huff Rousselle, the chief of operations. He is very kind and offeres me a place to stay for the next few nights--five in total--on condition that I take photographs for the U.N. center. This will be good because he is getting me access to hospitals and women's education programs that I would not otherwise have.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong> July 17</strong></p><p>I have found the people here remarkably friendly and curious; I am often stopped in the street by an outstretched hand and fragments of English sentences. I have been followed and stared at, and have become accustomed to large groups of children following me around, demanding that their photographs be taken. Some come with serious questions, asking me my opinion of their future, what foreign troops want and expect in Afghanistan, and what I am doing. At the moment, I have no answers for them. I want to help in some way, but for now, I can only observe.</p><p>Yesterday I wandered by the music corps and was invited in for a recital. Though I had no idea what they were singing about, it was engaging and fun to be there. I have done a lot of walking around the city and am beginning to get my bearings here. The bazaars are full of colors and sounds, and full of life and energy. It is here that the city seems most alive and where people go about their daily business.</p><p>Women walk around, their burkhas billowing in the wind and dust. Sometimes they finger the blue fabric as they huddle over the cosmetic stalls. Far from discarding the burkha after Kabul was "liberated" from the Taliban, women have continued to wear them. Under the Taliban, females could not go out into the streets unless accompanied by a male member of the family. In practice, this is still often the case. The women who work for the UNFPA, including the cooks, are all picked up from their houses and dropped off after work.</p><p>The latest music from Pakistan and India blasts out from shops. Many of the food packages dropped from U.S. planes can be found for sale. The Afghans do not like them; they sell them in hopes that they might purchase more flavorful food. The shops are merely shipping containers; opened during the day and locked at night, they often double as homes. The banks of the river have been reclaimed by shopkeepers and made into a tented city, all constructed with canvas covers donated from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Passing through the market this morning, I saw a live pelican for sale. From what I understood, it is a useful source of oil.</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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-d.jpg" alt="Scenes from an Afghan journey:the rug market" width="300" height="202" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">Scenes from an Afghan journey:the rug market.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Alcohol is available on Chicken Street and Flower Street too, hidden in empty Pringles tubes and sold for $6 a can. Shopkeepers flock to the foreigner with carpets and hats and antiques.</p><p>I was surprised to bump into a London ambulance, zigzagging between cars, lights flashing and siren blowing. When I got close enough, I noticed that it was a donation from the London stock exchange, but before I could read the rest of the inscription, it found a gap and disappeared into the chaotic traffic.</p><p>This afternoon, I begin to take photographs for the U.N. Populations compound. This should provide an opportunity to see what all these organizations are doing here. There are certainly enough of them, in fact, so many that property values in Kabul have shot up, and arriving Afghans are finding housing expensive and hard to come by.</p><p>A third of the city is rubble, often referred to as simply the front-line district. Walking through it one can find spent ammunition and war debris. It is hard to describe such a place; the name Hiroshima could be aptly applied. Yet people are moving back into these areas, living in shipping containers. They somehow manage to make a living from the little that is around them.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong> July 18</strong></p><p>The people here have been remarkably friendly and I have already been invited to their homes, to concerts, and for tea. I changed some money, about fifty dollars, at the bazaar, and got a stack of "Afghanis" six inches high; their biggest banknote is 10,000 Afghanis and the exchange rate is 40,000 to the dollar, so you can imagine the raw mass one has to lug around! The exchange touts only accept the big bills if they are crisp (anything with a crease is passed around for a good look). The problem is, I can't hide them. When people ask for baksheesh, they point to my bulging pocket.</p><p>There is a big Kalashnikov-rifle culture in Afghanistan: Everyone has a gun or can get one. It scares me sometimes when a man waves his gun around, gesticulating and playing with it in a most unorthodox manner. I would not be surprised if one accidentally went off, and I continue to say to myself, "I hope the safety catch is on." I was somewhat bemused when I walked into a restaurant this afternoon to find Kalashnikovs hanging in the place of coats on the rack near the entrance, each one distinguished from the other by its owner's designs and motifs, usually Bollywood female stars, stuck to the handles.</p><p>It is funny to see these young U.S. Army punks in uniform driving around in their Hummers, with tattoos and crew cuts, and one man mounted on the gun. They cruise around here as if they own the place, and I guess they do. When they pass, they look at me and I look at them. The American embassy is a fortress, defined by a large perimeter wall, razor wire around the top, turrets with cameras, and youthful soldiers ducking under sandbags.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-c.jpg" alt="The old city: a street scene in Kabul's Shari Kuhna" width="580" height="388" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>The old city: a street scene in Kabul's Shari Kuhna.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 22</strong></p><p>I think I have found a guest house to stay in for the next week. It is in a safe location and is the cheapest that I have found.</p><p>I am still learning. To the shock of the guards at the U.N. compound, I went out for dinner one evening wearing shorts. I was not aware that this was a cultural faux pas, but luckily nothing happened. Afghans are likely to get irate over such cultural "mistakes." My two pairs of trousers will have to serve me well, and one pair is already filthy.</p><p>The other day, the United Nations Population Fund Association took me along to photograph their meeting with the minister for Women's Affairs. What I found interesting about my visit to the ministry was watching all of the women walk through the entrance and immediately remove their burkhas. Underneath, they wore makeup, nail polish, and smart clothes. I asked someone why Kabul's women still wore burkhas. His answer was that they still feel incredibly vulnerable and uncomfortable. There have been, and continue to be, acid attacks made against women who do not wear them. Many of the women I spoke to complained that the burkhas give them headaches. It's an impractical, uncomfortable garment, and dangerous to wear, they say, because they have no peripheral vision to help deal with Kabul's traffic. But, it is perhaps more dangerous not to wear one, so most do.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 22</strong></p><table width="266" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="252"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-e.jpg" alt="a Kabul baker wraps himself in cloth to withstand the heat from the oven" width="250" height="371" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="text-align: start;">A Kabul baker wraps himself in cloth to withstand the heat from the oven.</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I share the Haseeb guest house with two C.I.A. agents, two Korean photographers, and some U.N. employees, one a very kind doctor from the Sudan.</p><p>I had taken a roll of film of the marching band, and yesterday presented them with the pictures. I had stumbled into one of their practice sessions a week earlier and had since become close friends with Colonel Mohamad Alam Kohstany, commander of the Central Army band. They are delighted by their images on the prints, and have invited me to a party at their barracks. One would think this a safe proposition, but they have only one gun, which probably does not work.</p><p>I am visiting during the melon season, and have managed to stay away from some of the less-savory-looking platters. I bought a melon in the market and this has lasted me for the past couple of days--cheap and delicious. The food here is very greasy, though tolerable if one doesn't mind mutton. Meat, to the Afghan, is quite a luxury. Many families eat only vegetables.</p><p>I continue to be amazed by the hospitality of the people and a little fatigued by all of the children trying to get into a photograph. I am routinely followed by a whole bunch of them. Eventually, I give in and, as the camera is lifted, they assume their poses, very stiff and unsmiling, folding their arms and huddling close together.</p><p>I plan to stay in Kabul this week, making a couple of day excursions to the refugee camps and to the area north of Kabul, supposedly completely decimated during the civil war, and later up to the Panjshir Valley. Next week I will look into going to Masr-i-Sharif.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 30</strong></p><p>It was quite an incredible drive to Masr-i-Sharif, remarkable because of the number of destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles remaining by the road. The ground was littered with the carcasses of burnt-out vehicles, some having tumbled thirty feet down into a gorge, almost certain death for the Russian crew. The Russians responded to these attacks by destroying much, if not all, of the villages on either side of the road in an attempt to prevent the mujahadeen from blending back into them.</p><p>At some points along the road, there were mine-clearance personnel painstakingly clearing the ground inch by inch a foot or so off the road. I could clearly make out the tops of the land mines these men were working on. Our driver, seemingly oblivious to all of this, would casually swing off the road in order to pass the vehicle in front. My heart was often in my mouth. Just last week a bus was blown up.</p><p>One becomes very familiar with landmine markings: Red stones outline the mined areas and white stones designate the boundaries of a de-mined area. On street corners in Kabul, notices in both English and Dari warn that between twenty and twenty-five people are killed by landmines in Afghanistan each day.</p><p>The landscape itself was one of indescribable peace and beauty: lush valleys set against red hills, high snow-covered peaks, a spectacular limestone gorge near Kholm, and the flat high plain of the Uzbek border, where camels and sheep graze and the land disappears into a hazy line of horizon.</p><table width="266" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="252"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-f.jpg" alt="a Hazara refugee in Bamian Province" width="250" height="371" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">A Hazara refugee in Bamian Province.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Things did not go quite to plan. I was surprised to learn that my guide had never been to the North and, further, was a Pashtun in a city and province with heavy Uzbek and Tajik populations. The first day, I spotted some Uzbek women sitting in the shade of a tree. I sat next to them and, after a few minutes, began to take their photographs. A crowd grew around us. As I continued to photograph, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder; it was my guide pulling me away by my collar. From the start, he had been nervous, but as he watched me take the women's photographs in public, he had become increasingly agitated, worried that my actions might bring recriminations from the watching crowd of men. By the end of the trip, he preferred to stay in the hotel and let me explore the city on my own.</p><p>I took the opportunity to visit a hospital. Though I only gained permission for the men's quarters, it was a moving experience. Mahmod Akbar, a young doctor overwhelmed by the volume of cases, took me around. In one room in the mental ward, I encountered a man who was asleep, perhaps drugged, and chained to his bed. His contorted body struck me as rather harmless. As the doctors jockeyed to be photographed, I felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow.</p><p>Later that day while I was walking around the city, a vehicle driven by four U.S. Marines stopped me. They asked me my business in Afghanistan, then, quite unexpectedly, asked if I or someone I knew was writing a biography on John Walker Lindh. I replied that I was not, nor was I familiar with the author, and asked what they wanted: "No, no, we just want to find him for ourselves and ask him some questions."</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>July 31</strong></p><p>I managed to check my e-mail for the first time in a week. I laughed at the stories from my friends in the States, my brother's glum complaint at being "sent away" on holiday, and rather more worryingly, the frantic e-mail messages from my mother. She had decided enough was enough and that she wanted me out of Afghanistan. But it is easy to disobey one's parents a couple of thousand miles away, so I quickly concocted a tale and a reason to stay--that unfortunately, I could not change my air ticket.</p><p>The security position here is much safer than it's portrayed to be by the press. In fact, it is hard to imagine that just a few months ago these very skies were the backdrop of firefights between anti-aircraft guns and coalition jets. When the driver of the taxi points at a house and tells you that is where bin Laden lived or Al-Qaeda trained, it is hard to believe that these buildings were used for such sinister purposes. Already a tourist trade has begun selling access to the compounds.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>August 5</strong></p><table width="266" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="252"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-h.jpg" alt="a schoolgirl attends class in Bamian Province" width="300" height="200" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">A schoolgirl attends class in Bamian Province.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I am slightly fed up with kebabs and rice, which have formed my diet for the past straight three weeks.</p><p>Bamian, where mammoth statues of Buddha once stood, was a sight. The Taliban destroyed the statues, but there are tremendous ruins. It took nine hours to travel 150 kilometers, which should give an idea of the state of the roads and now my back. At one police checkpoint, our driver continued straight through, hoping to avoid giving anyone else a lift. We assumed that all was well until bullets ricocheted off the asphalt and all around us, even hitting our car. Obviously the policeman had woken from his nap and was rather angry. In any case, we did not stop.</p><p>The statues were erected under Kanishka the Great as part of a major commercial and religious center. At the same time, thousands of caves were dug out, sanctuaries exquisitely adorned with plaster friezes and colorful frescoes, and inhabited by Buddhist monks. The site drew pilgrims from all over to come and worship. Since those days, though, the caves have been robbed of their dÈcor. They have served as hideouts for mujahadeen fighters during the civil war and as lonely outposts for centuries. Now scores of refugees are making homes of them.</p><table width="266" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center" width="252"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-m.jpg" alt="a Kabul baker wraps himself in cloth to withstand the heat from the oven" width="300" height="443" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle"><strong>August 7</strong></p><p>This morning I obtained permission to visit a girls' school. Outside in the courtyard stood two large tents for classes of fifty students each. I found out only after my visit that the headmaster had feared if any of the girls mentioned to their parents that a Western man had taken their photograph, they would be pulled out of the school. I felt guilty when I heard this.</p><p>During the afternoon, I stumbled upon a U.S. special-services mission in the hills around Bamian. When they saw me carrying all my cameras and with my guide, they were not happy. There they were, with ridiculous amounts of guns and equipment, talking to the village elders of a remote refugee camp. When I asked about the soldiers' visit, I was told that the refugees were offered new homes and were asked for information about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>August 8</strong></p><p>Kabul's chief of police granted me a visit to the city's quite congested jail. Most prisoners were unchained, save for a few murderers, and their quarters were cramped. In one tiny room I spotted children, who looked to be the age of twelve, locked away.</p><p>Outside, women and children brought food and communicated through a grill in the fence with their relatives on the inside. They handed the meal through a hole in the door to the waiting guards, who picked at what they thought looked good before passing it on to the prisoner.</p><p>Later, I took a walk to an empty swimming pool at the top of a hill. It was quite surreal. Here, too, were the shrapnel marks and bullet holes that decorate nearly every building in Kabul. I started talking to the guard. He was eighteen, and had been a soldier for about a year. He gleefully recounted how, during the Northern Alliance offensive, he had killed thirteen Taliban soldiers. Here was a young man, who could have been enrolling this fall with the Class of 2006, relating unimaginable deeds. Perhaps the greatest tragedy for this country is its loss of innocence.</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>August 11</strong></p><table width="266" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"> </td></tr><tr><td align="center" width="252"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-i.jpg" alt="a Kabul woman's burkha billows in the wind" width="300" height="444" /><p class="caption-text"><p><img src="/issues/111202/images/letters-l.jpg" alt="a Kabul tea merchant oversees the arrival of tea into his warehouse" width="300" height="204" border="1" /></p><p><span style="text-align: start;">Cultural divides: a Kabul woman's burkha billows in the wind, top;a Kabul tea merchant oversees the arrival of tea into his warehouse, above.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I noticed a new set of traffic lights today in Kabul. No one was heeding them. I am not even sure if the Afghans knew what they were. They looked with wonder at the flashing colors and drove on.</p><p>At a kebab restaurant in the bazaar, a technician playing with a satellite dish made from tin drums managed to tune in to an Italian TV commercial featuring a bikini-clad female. The room went silent and everyone stopped eating, mesmerised by an advertisement for muscle toners. The audience was intrigued: "Do Western women wear these instead of covering up?"</p><p class="articletitle"><strong>August 12</strong></p><p>At the airport I ran into the journalist who had stayed at the guesthouse with me. He was writing a piece on two Afghan children who were flying on my flight to India for heart transplants. A very nice English girl of Afghan parentage, Seema Ghani, had arranged their transport, visas, and operations while working in Afghanistan.</p><p>The airport's X-ray machine and metal detector were broken. One guard glanced over my luggage and the other guard never bothered to look up. Waiting in the lounge, I was going over all the possibilities of what could happen, when suddenly I heard a large explosion and a plume of smoke rose high into the sky from somewhere between the runways. A surge of people, mostly foreigners, dashed to the window. The Afghans just continued with their conversations.</p><p>As we taxied to the runway, the plane's ceiling panel fell to the floor. That was the trip's last eventful moment. By the time I descended the stairs and put a foot down on Indira Ghandi International Airport in Delhi, I felt great relief to have this venture behind me.</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><em>--Hall is a senior history major from London.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/letters-a.jpg" width="620" height="418" 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/barnaby-hall" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Barnaby Hall</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Photo Credit:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/photographers/barnaby-hall" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Barnaby Hall</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501823 at https://alumni.duke.edu Nursing Heals Itself https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/nursing-heals-itself <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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/nursing-b.jpg" alt="some 1941 graduates" width="349" height="250" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: start;">Changing face of the profession: some 1941 graduates, above; a current class in the new Fast Track to Nursing program, below, directed by Michelle Renaud, center. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">photo below by Chris Hildreth.</span></p><p><img src="/issues/111202/images/nursin-c.jpg" alt="a current class in the new Fast Track to Nursing program, below, directed by Michelle Renaud, center" width="300" height="200" /></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">Gone are the days of Nurse Betty dressed in her starched white uniform, complete with crisp cap perched on top of her head, fluffing pillows and emptying bedpans and changing sheets in Duke Hospital. Not only are the uniforms passÈ ("White was just plain stupid, really," confides one veteran nurse. "People bleed on you, for heaven's sake!"), but nurses are more likely to be seen by a patient's bedside operating a bank of monitors worthy of NASA flight control, sharing expertise with the community in nursing homes or schools, or buried in a library.</p><p class="articletitle">"Fifty years ago, we had traditions. Now we have research," says Mary Champagne, dean of the School of Nursing. "Here at Duke we teach evidence-based practice--what has been proven in research to be effective for most patients. And we teach thinking skills, not just facts, because facts change. So it's important to have thinking nurses with excellent research skills. The old hierarchy simply doesn't hold anymore."<br /> This is not to say that past and present aren't connected. "Because nurses have made so many beds, they may be the ones doing the research now on the best beds, or the ones discovering ways for patients to tolerate their situation if they're bed-ridden," says Sue Schneider, director of the Graduate Oncology Nursing program. "Because we as nurses spend time with patients, we know what makes them comfortable. We deal in quality-of-life issues."</p><p class="articletitle">" While physicians are finding new chemotherapies, nurses are helping patients relax in the chaotic chemo environment," says Schneider, who is researching the use of technology as a useful distraction for cancer patients. She's working not only on stress reduction, but also toward better treatment outcomes. "Women with breast cancer increase their chances of survival if they receive all the prescribed chemotherapy treatment," she says. "Our goal is to break the cycle of anxiety with virtual-reality technology, hoping patients will be more likely to complete their treatments."</p><p class="articletitle">As Duke turns out advanced-degree nurses with research experience, the nation is struggling to fill basic nursing-care needs. Some126,000 nurses are needed to fill current vacancies at U.S. hospitals, according to the American Hospital Association's June 2001 TrendWatch. And fully 75 percent of all hospital personnel vacancies are for nurses. According to a study published in a summer 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the U.S. will experience a 20 percent shortage in the number of nurses needed in the health-care system by the year 2020. That translates into a shortage of more than 400,000 RNs nationwide.The chemotherapy room at Duke Medical Center is the last place people would want to find themselves, with chemo stations and dripping IVs closely lined up like soldiers in formation. But this relaxation research has helped. While donning a virtual headset provides privacy at a difficult time, it also offers patients the options of scuba diving in the deep blue sea or touring an art museum or solving a mystery aboard the Titanic. Patients report less nausea, stress, and fatigue. "It picks up my spirits," says one woman.<br /> Learning good research techniques is a core value of the nursing program. Deirdre Fleming, a graduate nursing student in the Family Nurse Practitioner program, says she was attracted to Duke because it encourages strong research skills. But even she was surprised at how much actual research experience a student can get. "I didn't think this level of research was even a possibility. But we learn techniques in a classroom and then we get associated with a project like the virtual-reality study," says Fleming, who is assisting Schneider in her research.<br /> The Nursing Research Center (NRC), established in 1993, is meant to foster the scholarly research efforts of nurses. The NRC is staffed with a full-time director, an administrative assistant, a full-time statistician, and data technicians who do everything, from helping to support researchers in processing research proposals and grant applications to assisting and consulting on scholarly preparation of manuscripts, oral presentations, and posters, as well as assisting with data entry and analysis and finding funding. <br /> Barbara Turner, director of the center, is also leading the efforts at the nursing school to improve the survival rates of premature infants. "A severely premature or high-risk infant may as well have been born on the surface of an alien and hostile planet," she says. "Their survival depends on the immediate intervention and care of trained professionals who know how to use the latest neonatal technology." Joining in the fight to increase the survival odds for preemies is Debra Brandon, neonatal clinical nurse specialist. She researches the neonatal intensive-care nursery environment to determine the factors that can promote health, and she is studying at what gestational age cycled light would be most beneficial for extremely low-birth-weight infants.<br /> While some faculty members and students are studying patients at the beginning of life, others are interested in issues found closer to the end of life. In 2000, 13 percent of the nation's population--some 35 million--was age sixty-five or older. These numbers are expected to double in the next thirty years. To meet the health-care needs of this aging population, the nursing school established the Trajectories of Aging and Care Center (TRAC). Faculty pool their expertise with that of colleagues at the nursing school and with partners from the divinity school's Institute for Care at the End of Life (the first of its kind in the nation), the medical school's geriatrics department, and the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at Duke. "More and more, we're bringing investigators from other disciplines into our research initiatives and leading the studies ourselves," says TRAC director Elizabeth Clipp.<br /> As Ruth Anderson, a colleague of Clipp, puts it, "Most people who observe nurses may not realize that what nurses do is based on science. Historically, nurses have based their practice largely on science from other disciplines such as medicine and psychology. Within the past twenty years, however, the nursing discipline has been actively developing its own scientists."</p><p>Ironically, nursing at Duke had a near-death experience two decades ago. In 1984, the traditional bachelor's degree in nursing, B.S.N., was ended, and the status of the graduate program was far from secure. Four years earlier, then-chancellor Kenneth Pye presented a document to the board of trustees called "Directions for Progress"--or, internally, the "Retrenchment Report." Pye notified the trustees that costs-per-student in the nursing school significantly exceeded all other baccalaureate programs, and that nine programs within the University of North Carolina system had been started that provided nursing education at significantly lower costs. Further, the 1970s was a period when more and more careers in science opened up to women, and nursing found itself with fewer applicants. The report concluded that Duke's overall interests would "best be served by terminating the present degree programs not later than 1983-84."</p><p>Upset alumni produced a flurry of impassioned letters to local newspapers and calls to the university, prompting a letter from then-president Terry Sanford to alumni attempting to explain the decision.</p><p>But now there's a dearth of nurses. Says Champagne, "The shortage has caused us to rethink. When we looked at the situation, we couldn't say, 'Everybody else must do something.' We know that the ratio of nurses to patients directly affects outcomes, so the stakes are high. Our medical center is splendid. You couldn't have a better facility for teaching. So we decided to do something."</p><p>That "something" is the Accelerated Bachelor of Science degree in nursing, more familiarly known as the "Fast Track to Nursing" program. A "second-degree bachelor's program" being offered to college graduates, the fast-track sixteen-month program "will blend the best of the old practices in nursing care with the best of the new evidence-based care," Champagne says.</p><p>" Burnout is a tremendous problem in nursing, so we will teach skills for prioritizing duties and maximizing energy. We will teach students how to manage aides and, most importantly, we will teach them how to think."</p><p>In keeping with its emphasis on research, the school has included an evaluation component that makes the fast-track program itself a research project. It will generate the strong data and program evaluation needed--but as yet unavailable--to assess what works in recruiting and retaining new nurses, to adapt nursing curricula to reflect the rapidly evolving demographics of society, and to incorporate recent technological and medical advances into nursing education.</p><p>Champagne is optimistic that the program will work. "We hope that through its implementation at Duke, and its dissemination as a model to other schools of nursing, the Fast Track to Nursing program will exert a strong counter-force in the struggle to overcome our country's critical shortage of nurses," she says.</p><p>The Helene Fuld Health Trust has pledged $6 million to make the new program possible. The trust is the nation's largest private foundation devoted exclusively to nursing education, and its gift to Duke is the largest in the nursing school's history.</p><p>The program crossed its last hurdle last May, when the North Carolina Board of Nursing gave its unanimous approval. The school had more than ninety applicants for the program's forty slots. Two applicants already had Ph.D.s, several had master's degrees, and the mean G.P.A. was 3.4. Applicants hailed from many different backgrounds, including biology, poultry science, English, women's studies, medicine, psychology, education, marketing, and nutrition. Twelve percent of the applicants were men, and 18 percent were from an ethnic minority.</p><p>Fast Track director Michelle Renaud says, "The number of clinical hours we require is head and shoulders above other programs. Also, we offer students the opportunity to take fifteen graduate hours, which gives them a step up in becoming a master's prepared nurse, opening up more career opportunities."</p><p>Responding to career opportunities, the School of Nursing has tried to cultivate an entrepreneurial culture. When several school graduates requested a program to train them as site investigators for clinical trials, school leaders did some investigating. They realized that nurses with specific training for pharmaceutical trials would help speed the approval of new medical products, and that nurse practitioners with such training would also be able to qualify as site investigators. Site investigators implement and execute large multi-center clinical trials. They also have access to emerging drugs and therapies for their patients.</p><p>So, last fall, the nursing school became the first in the nation to offer nurses the opportunity to fill a new role by offering master's-degree-level training in clinical-research management. "During a clinical trial, a delay of just one day can cost the pharmaceutical sponsor more than a million dollars, as well as postpone the arrival of a life-saving drug on the market," says Anthony Dren, consulting professor in the creation of the program. The delay "could be caused by a simple thing such as not filing the right federal regulatory form by the right date, or something complex, such as an error in medical protocol. In view of the high stakes involved here, a workforce educated in clinical-research management is absolutely imperative."</p><p>" In developing this curriculum, we had access to experts in many fields at Duke," says George H. Turner III, assistant clinical professor and co-creator of the program. In addition to colleagues in the medical school, the Duke Health System, and the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the school drew on expertise from Duke's Fuqua School of Business and the departments of economics and biometry. Students can complete the program either on campus or online from anywhere in the country.</p><p>And the online theme continues: Students enrolled in the Partnerships for Training program pursue their master's education through flexible distance education. Nurses in rural North Carolina with a bachelor's degree in nursing, for example, can earn a nurse practitioner degree, giving them a broader scope of services they can provide, such as diagnosing and treatment. (Nurse practitioners in North Carolina can do 80 percent of what doctors do.)</p><p>Duke's experience in offering distance-based nursing programs began in 1997. Besides its Partnerships program, it includes a post-master's certificate program in Nursing Informatics that has trained nurses in fifteen states (including Alaska) and Canada.</p><p>Taking a distant look back, the then-chancellor of the medical center, William Anlyan, says he understood the rationale for discontinuing the undergraduate program, but also understood the critical need to continue to train nurses at Duke. The master's program in nursing at that time had a separate faculty and, as Anlyan describes it, "students who hardly knew where the front door to the hospital was."</p><p>" That program was more about the sociology of nursing," he says, "and I saw a chance to build a real bona-fide clinical nursing program, with nurses who knew how to deal with patients. So I used all my powers of persuasion and any brownie points I could find to advocate for a new program." The idea wouldn't succeed without the right administrators, he says. "I knew we needed to get a dean who could build a new faculty, and it had to be a faculty who knew where the front door was."</p><p>Enter Mary Champagne. "Dean Champagne came to a school back in 1991 that didn't have much of a vision of the future," says Tony Adinolfi M.S.N. '93, assistant clinical professor and a nurse practitioner. "Within a couple of years, she took us forward with a vision that could only make us better and better. She nurtured the existing staff and faculty and brought in exciting new faculty."</p><p>For her part, Champagne says the "corporate culture" now stresses innovation in delivering health care. "Because we keep that at the forefront, we can do all kinds of things."</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><em>--Sauls is a regular contributor to the magazine.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/nursing-d.jpg" width="620" height="859" alt="&quot;It&#039;s important to have thinking nurses with excellent research skills. The old hierarchy simply doesn&#039;t hold anymore.&quot; Mary Champagne Dean, School of Nursing. Chris Hildreth." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/miriam-sauls" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Miriam Sauls</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</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">Stereotypes of nurses have been exploded in an era of increased nursing responsibilities, graduate-level research, interdisciplinary initiatives, and new technologies--all to be provided by a new, accelerated nursing program.</div></div></section> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501822 at https://alumni.duke.edu From the Brink https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/brink <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">At 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Owen May was sitting in his car, its turn signal blinking, first in line to turn left into a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Gil Scharf had just finished a business lunch in London. Karen Preziosi was on a city bus headed downtown on the Avenue of the Americas. Then the minute hand moved forward, and life changed.</p><p>" The morning of the eleventh, I had the alarm clock set early," says May M.B.A. '83, whose investment firm, May Davis Group, had on September 10 put to rest a lengthy and difficult battle with a much larger financial company. The protracted struggle had nearly cost the firm everything, May says, and the settlement had come just in time to keep the doors open and allow the small company to begin to recoup.</p><p>" On Monday, everybody was high-fiving in the office," he says. "We could move on. As I was leaving, I said, 'Listen, I'll be here first thing in the morning, and we'll do what we need to do to get back in the game.' I was really happy. When the alarm clock went off Tuesday at six-something, my daughter was lying in the bed with me, kicking all over the bed, and I said, I'm going to hang out for just a little longer. And now I get up at 7:15 or so, really behind, and I rush and get into the car and start my work from the car."</p><p>Preziosi B.S.E. '84 had also planned an early arrival at her office. Vice president of information technology financial and business software at Euro Brokers Inc., she was responsible for software issues, and Tuesday morning, new software was being launched. A co-worker had offered to be the one to come in at seven that morning to deal with it, but Preziosi felt she should be there. It didn't happen.</p><p><br />May, meanwhile, was driving in from New Jersey, making calls and assigning tasks. "I probably called the office fifteen times between my house and there," he says. "Everyone's saying, 'Owen, where are you?' I get down to just about West Street, I say, 'Listen, I'm a couple of minutes away, I'll be upstairs in a second.' 'Okay, Owen, we'll see you in a couple of minutes. Bye.' I get right in front of the Trade Center, and there's a red light where I turn in and park my car inside the garage every day, and I hear an explosion."" Monday night the Giants were playing, and I watched the game to the end, a little after one o'clock," she says. "And when the alarm went off the next morning for me to go in early, I couldn't get up." Knowing her co-worker would be there, she left at her regular time, catching a bus in Sea Bright, New Jersey, sitting down by the driver and settling in for a ride that would have gotten her to the office around nine.</p><p>Construction noise is just part of the New York soundscape, and May says a large project had been going on nearby. "I'm thinking they're dynamiting. It was a little louder than expected, but, hey, there's a whole lot of rock. I see a woman looking up, and the blood had drained from her face and she was pale white. And I try to look up--I was too close to the building, and I had to look underneath my rear-view mirror. I see flames coming out, I see little papers coming out, just now sprinkling down, and I'm the first car in line there, and I call upstairs."</p><p>The offices at May Davis were in 1 World Trade Center, on the eigthty-seventh floor, a suite chosen by May in the mid-1990s when tenants had left after the 1993 bombing and rents were low. He built up the firm from the thirty-five employees who moved in to a high of eighty, then restructured in 2000 and settled at sixty. Fourteen of those employees were already at work that morning, and one of them answered May's 8:46 call.</p><p>" She's saying, 'What do I do?' and I'm counting windows. I look up at Windows on the World and I'm counting down," May says. "I don't want to tell everybody to run out the door knowing they're going to run into the fire, so I said, 'I don't know.' "</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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/brink-c.jpg" alt="Tragic vista: Altman's view from his parents' 19th-floor apartment" width="300" height="451" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Tragic vista: Altman's view from his parents' 19th-floor apartment. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Greg Altman '95.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>On the bus, Preziosi was chatting with the driver. "All of a sudden, somebody says on the [dispatch] radio, 'Don't bring the buses toward Wall Street. There's smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center.' I got up to get a better look out the window, because we're still driving down towards Canal Street at this point, and I said, 'Oh my God, there is smoke.' So I get on my cell phone."</p><p>Preziosi reached a co-worker, who told her things were "okay; it's a small plane." "I'm like, 'It is not small. I'm telling you that I'm looking at at least a five-story hole in First Tower, you've got to get out of there!' And the bus stopped, right near Canal Street."</p><p>" I was sitting at one of our trading desks," says Gil Scharf '70, chairman of Euro Brokers Inc., a financial services firm with offices in New York City and in London. He was in the London office that week and, after lunching with a client, had taken a moment to check television news headlines. "All of a sudden, a flash comes across that a plane has hit the World Trade Center."</p><p>The London and New York offices have transatlantic telephone connections between the trading desks. "We heard that the plane hit Tower One, the north tower, and we were in Tower Two, the south tower," Scharf says. "I have guys on the link lines telling people to get out. Then the Port Authority came on the loudspeaker system and made an announcement that Building Two is secure, go back to your offices. We had people going down, and they heard that announcement, and some of them went back up."</p><p>In Tower One, the May Davis employees had begun to evacuate. On the street, May began to try to figure out how to get his car out of the way, and then he began to try to figure out how to get into the building to help his employees. As he stood below the towers, he recalls, "I'm watching this next plane from the Statue of Liberty. The day was so clear, it was so calm--it was a beautiful day--and I'm saying, why is this plane coming into the area? Don't they know there's a problem?"</p><p>In his eigthy-seventh floor office, May says, he had gotten used to the patterns of the air traffic that swirled around the southern tip of Manhattan. This plane didn't fit. Thinking logically, he decided it must be trying to dump water on the blazing tower. "Then I'm saying, this guy isn't dropping water. This guy's close! Maybe he's lost. Maybe he just doesn't know what he's doing. And as he's getting closer, I'm hearing him rev his engine up, and I'm watching him, and I'm standing there saying, push over, push over, because he's going toward the east side of the building, but he's tipping his wings so it looks like maybe he's trying to get out of the way, and now I see, this thing is going to hit. I'm standing there, I'm realizing that as he hits, I am right here" on the opposite side of the tower. "This plane is going to go through the building and it's going to come out the other side and it's going to kill me."</p><p>It was 9:02. In Tower One, May's employees were on their way down eighty-seven flights of stairs. In Tower Two, many Euro Brokers employees were evacuating, but some had remained--most at the trading desks on the eighty-fourth floor. Scharf was watching CNN in London. Preziosi--cell- phone service down--was waiting for a pay phone, hoping to reach her co-workers. May was standing below the south tower, "and I watched him hit the building."</p><p>" First, you're in shock," May remembers. "You have no clue. Then something real kicks in and says, 'Owen, you'd better run.' And I run real quick and huddle in a corner, just a little concrete corner, with a couple of women." Their lives were saved when the fireball shattered out sideways over the plaza instead of directly through the building as the first had done.</p><p>" You're just standing there," says Scharf of his reaction to seeing the explosion happen in front of him on television, but 3,500 miles away. "You can't say anything. And looking at the pictures, seeing the plane hit, you know the fireball probably went right through the trading floor."</p><p>" Out of the thousands of people leaving the area," May recalls, he was spotted by friend Derek Penn '79 M.B.A. '84. Penn talked May out of returning into the burning tower to try to find his employees. "It was fate that brought Derek to me. He was the voice of reason to get me out of there--no question I would have died had he left me."</p><p>Within ninety minutes, both towers had crumbled. Karen Preziosi was caught up in the tsunami of dust and debris, but survived by helping and being helped by strangers. Penn took May to his home, where he began making phone calls, trying to account for people. All but one of his co-workers survived. In the impact, explosion, and aftermath, Scharf lost sixty-one employees, including Peter Ortale '87.</p><p>Almost a year later, two weeks before the anniversary, Scharf, May, and Preziosi tell their stories separately, each focusing on something different about their survival and the rebuilding of their lives and livelihoods. Their reactions in the intervening months have run the gamut from determination to depression, from struggle to resolve.</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: 275px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/brink-b.jpg" alt="Crazy quilt: a sample of memorial art Altman observed on anniversary walkabout" width="275" height="207" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Crazy quilt: a sample of memorial art Altman observed on anniversary walkabout. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Greg Altman '95.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The offices of Euro Brokers are now on the sixteenth floor of One New York Plaza, a relatively small skyscraper just at the southern tip of the island, next to the ferry docks on the East River. Computers crowd desks that crowd aisles that are filled with traders, sitting and standing, on the phones, on the computers, making trades and transactions. The atmosphere is noisy and energetic, the large rooms filled with light. One would never suspect what has brought the firm to this point.</p><p>Scharf sits in his office, door open to the trading floor, windows behind him overlooking the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. He is quiet as he tells the story, pausing at times to collect his thoughts or emotions, acknowledging his own "saving grace" of being in London while honoring the memories of the dead and the difficulties of the survivors.</p><p>Being in London, he says, "gave us a base of operations that we wouldn't have had immediately in New York. We had a firm meeting, and then, that night, we started making calls." The London offices had copies of employee lists, and Scharf and his team were able to make a start at finding out who had survived and who had not. "We tried to patch things together. After the first twenty-four hours, we thought we had lost eighty people." As more people were able to communicate, that number decreased, and by the time Scharf was able to return to New York on Friday, the firm knew it had lost sixty-one.</p><p>This was the biggest loss, the most irreplaceable, and next to it, Scharf doesn't dwell on the loss of infrastructure and records. Instead, he speaks of making decisions that would keep his company together. Even while in London, for instance, he had a business acquaintance call him to offer office space--this space in which the offices are housed. A skyscraper. In the city. Downtown.</p><p>" You had all sorts of reactions, obviously," Scharf says. "Some people didn't want to come to New York City. Some people certainly didn't want to be downtown. Other people didn't want to be above the second story. All understandable." But it was the only offer Scharf had that didn't split up his employees among several different sites.</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: 333px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/brink-e.jpg" alt="Creation from destruction: a tile project in a Manhattan neighborhood" width="333" height="250" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Creation from destruction: a tile project in a Manhattan neighborhood. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Greg Altman '95.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>"This company is very family-oriented," he says. "We're pretty close. And I felt very strongly that we really needed to be together as a firm in one location. If we were to splinter, we'd never recover." So he held a managers' meeting, there at One New York Plaza, giving his team an opportunity to reconnect with one another, to walk around the space and get a feel for it, to hear him make the case for keeping the company intact. It was September 16.</p><p>" We had to act. If you didn't act, the fragility of people on their own would have worsened." He acknowledges that One New York Plaza "wasn't a perfect solution," but it was the solution that would bring people back together, helping both the employees and the firm get back on their feet. At a firm-wide meeting the next day at a midtown hotel, he gave people the opportunity to spend time together, to "mingle and hug and cry," and after he presented the office- space plan, gave them time to react.</p><p>Euro Brokers would continue to give its employees time. Scharf recalls some of what he said at that meeting. "'Beginning tomorrow,' I said, 'I'm going to be there. If you can't make it tomorrow, that's fine. If you can't make it next week, that's fine, too. If it takes you a month, it doesn't matter. But I'm going to be down there, and we're going to be setting up, and we're going to be open tomorrow.' And we came in here the next day, and we were all out on the floor, and we probably had 60 percent attendance."</p><p>Preziosi had actually returned to work on Friday the fourteenth, at a small Euro Brokers office in Parsippany, New Jersey. "I was never there before," she says. "Once we got to the office, I had to hug everyone there." A co-worker told her that the body of a friend had been found, news that "just made it all too real" and made work difficult that day.</p><p>When the offices at One New York Plaza opened, Preziosi changed her commute from the bus--which couldn't get through the roadblocks that had shut down lower Manhattan--to the ferry. "I cried as we stood on line on the dock, looking at the New York skyline," she says. "The towers were gone, smoke still coming up where they once stood, and I wanted so to go back to my old office." Having inhaled a large amount of dust on the eleventh, she wore a respirator as she walked through the downtown streets.</p><p>Getting back to work, she says, kept her mind busy. "The disaster recovery process started at the software and hardware levels, which included my staff and the hardware and networking staff and the communications people. We worked long extra hours getting the systems back together and running for the brokers to be able to return to work."</p><p>By the end of that week, Scharf says, more than 90 percent of his employees were coming in. The next hurdle, which Preziosi and her co-workers were overcoming, was infrastructure. "We had forty dial-up lines," Scharf says, comparing that to the 2,000 direct lines that the firm had had at the Trade Center. "We didn't have any direct lines, we were getting our infrastructure back, our software back--but we started doing business." He gives the credit to his employees, the managers and traders who "stepped up." "Everyone was very determined and committed. We were committed to rebuilding--we had responsibilities to the survivors, we had responsibilities to the families, we had responsibilities to the company as a whole, and there was no way we were just going to fold our tent."</p><p>" We did this to feel useful--like this would not defeat us," Preziosi says. "This is what our lost friends would want us to do. It was also helpful to be with people who went through it, because if you did not live it, you really have no idea what it means to run for your life."</p><p>Owen May's employees were going through similar stresses. He, too, had a friend who called in the days immediately following the attacks to offer workspace. It was also downtown, at 120 Broadway, a difficult location behind the barricades and near enough to the World Trade Center site that it is visible from the building, "right there in the thick of things." He says the firm was trying to come to terms with the trauma and the loss of head trader Harry Ramos, and trying to get back to work.</p><p>" For certain people, it was hard, emotionally, to get back into the game," he says. "Some people couldn't leave their house. Some people were suffering traumatic stress already. And I didn't want to disrupt anybody's grief, make it harder on them."</p><p>Added to the emotional toll was the loss of every record the company had. Housed in Tower One, the May Davis Group archived its back-up records in Tower Two, off-site but near at hand. The offices of the firm's attorneys were in the towers. Even the records from the firm's Baltimore office were in New York that day, on-site in preparation for an audit. With only the personal records of a few employees available to them, May Davis was starting from scratch.</p><p>" People would come up to me and say, 'Owen, you have the most difficult task in the world.' But I built the company with a business plan, and if I didn't learn anything the first time around?" He shakes his head and laughs once, letting that rhetorical question trail off before returning to the "how" of rebuilding at 120 Broadway.</p><p>" We've got one phone line," he says. "Chase Plaza was right there, and I spotted an outlet, and they had chairs, and I would sit out there with all my paperwork and plug in my cell phone and set up my laptop, and I'd have an office. Those were the kinds of things that we had to do."</p><p>While some employees were dealing with severe emotional trauma, he says, those who were able to return to work did so with the attitude that the firm wouldn't be defeated. "We fought so hard until September 10 to keep it alive," he says, recalling the company's earlier struggle. "Everybody started to chip in and do what they needed to do, in one effort. 'I'll take care of this.' 'Okay, I'll take care of that.' 'I'm going to call these people.' And I had all my friends, all my friends called me up. My friends from Duke would take time off from work to help us put things together."</p><p>In April, representatives from the recovery crews at the World Trade Center site arrived at the office. May was in London that day, and so he missed the delivery of the plaque that had graced the company's front door on the eighty-seventh floor. "It was emotional for everybody," he says. "They said, this is one of the few things that survived out of any firm. They found it at the bottom of the rubble."</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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/brink-d.jpg" alt="Owen May, Chairman, May Davis Group" width="300" height="370" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>"First, you're in shock. You have no clue. Then something real kicks in and says, 'Owen, you'd better run.'"<br /><span class="pulloutcredit">Owen May<br />Chairman, May Davis Group. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Chris Hildreth.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>With months of effort, that rubble was cleared away. But it's harder for survivors to cope with the emotional debris. Both Euro Brokers and May Davis employees had counselors available, but even so, you can hear the tension in some workers' voices when they speak of how their lives have changed.</p><p>" The hardest thing has been dealing with the depression," says May. "It didn't come to me until six or seven months later because I was so busy dealing with everyone else. And when it does hit, it's just crazy--you don't even know what it is at first, because you never went through it before." He says he tries to set an example for his co-workers by having a counselor come to the office. "I don't try to hide it. I figure I should do it openly."</p><p>Preziosi says while she insisted her staff members participate in counseling, it has been less helpful for her. "Survivor guilt has plagued me. I wonder why I was spared and not some or all of the others. For a while, I did very little--just got through the days going to work, working long hours, on the weekend just going in and out of bed crying and remembering what life was like and what it was supposed to be."</p><p>The anniversary presented its own difficulties. Separately, two weeks before, Scharf, Preziosi, and May each expressed a need for September 12 to arrive. "It's going to be very hard. People are tense--it's going to be very emotional," Scharf says. "I'll be glad when it's over--I will be glad when it's over."</p><p>" Over the last couple of weeks I've been very stressed, very depressed," May says. He's given dozens of interviews, but at the same time, telling the story has been "like rehashing it and rehashing it and rehashing it."</p><p>" Some days it feels like it all happened years and years ago," Preziosi says. "On other days, it feels like it just happened yesterday. How life can change so drastically, in a split second, is still unbelievable to me."</p><p>On September 11, 2002, as bells tolled throughout the city and each victim's name was read, May was with his family in Mexico. Preziosi and Scharf were with other Euro Brokers employees at the firm's memorial service at the site of their soon-to-be new offices, at the Seaport.</p><p>" That day, it felt like I had fallen down eight rungs of the healing ladder," says Preziosi. "I had spent the past year struggling so hard to climb ten steps up. Prior to the anniversary, I kept thinking I couldn't wait for September 12 to come because it would give me a new lease on life and a new beginning--but this didn't actually happen. Every day is a struggle. Some days are better than others, but it is getting better now that the anniversary has passed."</p><p>Recovery means different things to different people, and may be difficult for some to ever achieve. As a company, Euro Brokers has clearly rebounded and is now in a position described by its chairman as one of "growth." "Prior to 9/11," says Scharf, "our company was really on a roll. There was a great positive attitude, we were gaining market share in virtually every business we were in, we were adding new businesses. We were in the process of negotiating with some other groups to come and join us, and they were going to provide a higher-margin business than we were used to.</p><p>" We had to put all that on hold--we had to focus on survival, not building. But it's interesting that since we had to end those discussions, and after we finally got things to a state where our business was back, we started renegotiating with some of those groups. Two of those businesses are here with us now. We've started some other businesses within our Euro Brokers subsidiary that we didn't have before, and we've gained market share in every business that we're in."</p><p>There has been some rebounding on the personal level, too. Euro Brokers kept grief counselors on site through the end of 2001. Scharf points to the Euro Brokers Relief Fund, set up for the families of the company's lost employees. Money was provided by the firm, by employees, by competitors and customers, and by the revenues generated on a "charity day," March 11, the six-month anniversary. There are people available to help families work through the maze of bureaucracy surrounding relief funds. And Karen Preziosi started a memorial website, first as a small personal project, which then received management approval as a firm project and grew into the publication of a memorial book.</p><p>A co-worker called the website "the most depressing project I've ever worked on." As she spoke with family members, gathered photographs, and put the site together, Preziosi also had some of those moments. "It can help you heal to honor someone, but there were times when I found myself withdrawn and upset over it," she says. "Yet I kept working on it. Some days it was literally therapeutic for me to work on it."</p><p>The website went public in February--after permission and support were given from upper management, the book was developed this summer and distributed at the firm's one-year anniversary tribute. Preziosi treasures the notes and e-mail messages from family members thanking her and her colleagues at Euro Brokers for doing it. In a letter to co-workers about the website, she wrote, "I am hopeful that this website will assist everyone in some way in the healing process and help us all to remember fondly the ones we loved and lost and keep them close in our thoughts." "If I achieved this for at least one person," she says, "it was worth the emotional pain and difficulty it took to create."</p><p>At May Davis, healing and survival have been hard-won. The markets have been dismal. An article in The Baltimore Sun reports that the firm now has twenty-three employees, with some lost to other firms, some to stress and trauma. But the same article also reports new market opportunities for the company, and a new business plan.</p><p>A year before, just before the terrorist attacks, The Sun had written a different article on May Davis and the business battle it had fought that summer. "The headline of the article was 'Failure is Not an Option,'" May says. "For me, it was never an option. It's going to take more than the Taliban."</p><p>" I'm going to kick and fight all the way down," he adds. "Anybody who knows me knows I don't lie down easily--we're still around, after all we've been through."</p><p>The proof, if needed, waits in his office--the old plaque, battered, shining brass no longer, but mostly intact, and still proclaiming the firm.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/brink-a.jpg" width="620" height="761" alt="&quot;Beginning tomorrow, I&#039;m going to be there,&quot; Gil Scharf told his employees at Euro Brokers Inc. on September 17, 2001. &quot;If you can&#039;t make it tomorrow, that&#039;s fine. If you can&#039;t make it next week, that&#039;s fine too. If it takes you a month, it doesn&#039;t matter.&quot; Chris Hildreth." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/kim-koster" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kim Koster</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</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">When tragedy strikes, no one is prepared for the grief and anger that follow. In the aftermath of September 11, multiply that grief exponentially. It&#039;s a Herculean task for the survivors: trying to find a way to cope with the loss of livelihoods and loved ones while also dealing with a larger collective context.</div></div></section> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501820 at https://alumni.duke.edu Information Lockdown https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/information-lockdown <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"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">In October of 2001, Ann Miller, public documents librarian in Duke's Perkins Library, received a document that she hadn't exactly anticipated for her collection. It was a memo to depository librarians from the U.S. superintendent of documents. The memo referred to a CD-ROM that had been singled out by the U.S. Geological Survey's associate director for water; the CD-ROM carried the dry title "Source-Area Characteristics of Large Public Surface-Water Supplies in the Conterminous United States: An Information Resource for Source-Water Assessment." From there, the language was succinct: "Please withdraw this material immediately and destroy it by any means to prevent disclosure of its contents."</p><p>The directive apparently grew from a concern that terrorists might tap into the water system. Duke is an official government depository site; its holdings of official documents essentially belong to the government. So this was a recall notice that had to be honored.</p><p>" The CD-ROM had been in the collection for several years," says Miller. "It concerned national water supplies, but we weren't asked to withdraw the CD-ROM on state water supplies, which we also have. And this notice only applied to depository libraries. What if one of our geologists or geographers had purchased a copy? They didn't have to return it. So it was a little odd."</p><p>Perhaps it seemed a little odd, but this seek-and-destroy mission points to a new stress on security that may be intruding on the free flow of information. Miller's memo file includes a message to executive departments and agencies from Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff. Last spring, Card asked Justice Department officials to safeguard "government information in your department or agency regarding weapons of mass destruction, as well as other information that could be misused to harm the security of our nation and the safety of our people."</p><p><br />One thing government did, right around the time that Miller found herself hunting down the offending CD-ROM, was to pass the USA Patriot Act. (Its formal and imaginatively cumbersome title is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.) In amending more than fifteen federal statutes, the Patriot Act expanded the authority of law enforcement.Those are awfully broad guidelines, Miller observes. And they're being applied across the range of information media--potentially by low-level bureaucrats. Federal Computer Week, a government watchdog group, reported this fall that "tens of thousands of documents" have vanished from government websites. One month after last year's terrorist attacks, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blocked access to website information on hydropower plants, gas pipelines, electricity transmission lines, and other components of the energy infrastructure. "I'm worried that we won't be able to look back on this time period and get any sense of our history, of who we were and where we've been and how we got to where we are now," Miller says. "That's what government publications do."</p><p>The American Library Association points out that under the act, the FBI can acquire library circulation records, which are now treated as business records. While University Librarian David Ferriero says he finds that provision disturbing, the practical effect is hard to gauge. "In our online system, we don't keep histories. When a transaction is completed, when you return your book, that link is broken and there's no trail. So no one could go into our system under your name and pull up everything that you've ever borrowed. The only thing they could determine is what you currently have out."</p><p>Of course, he adds, "A faculty member here at Duke has year-long borrowing privileges, which are renewable, so they could have quite a collection of material out. In fact, until we have more space, I encourage the faculty not to return their books."</p><p>What the Patriot Act encourages is new cooperation by libraries. With a court order, libraries now have to help monitor a user's electronic communications sent through the library's computers. In seeking records, agents are not required to demonstrate "probable cause" of a crime; they need only claim that those records are linked to a terrorism investigation. Unless agents were physically monitoring a public-access computer, Ferriero says, it's hard to see how they could peg an individual user to a particular website. Still, he says, "since so much of what we're doing involves Internet access, and since we have so many opportunities within the physical space for people to do that, librarians have a genuine concern" about that aspect of the Patriot Act.</p><p>The Patriot Act is also bringing a new meaning to library silence. Librarians served with a search warrant issued under the new rules may not disclose the existence of the warrant. They can't discuss the fact that records were produced as a result of the warrant. And they have to resist telling a library patron that his records were given to the FBI or that she is the subject of an FBI investigation.</p><p>Access to information is now an issue that transcends libraries. A National Academy of Sciences report on science, technology, and terrorism points out that debates on the free exchange of ideas always arise during wartime. Duke doesn't allow classified research on campus. Judith Dillon, director of the Office of Research Support, says classified research "is contrary to our mission. The mission of a university is to disseminate information, not keep it secret."</p><p>More than philosophical stances come into play. A university's status in the eyes of the IRS hinges on that traditional mission, she says, and a shift in policy (even, ironically, in service of government imperatives) could endanger its tax-exempt status. For graduate students, involvement with classified research could be career-deadening. As she puts it, "What do you do with a dissertation that's based on classified research? You can't defend it. You can't put it in the library. In essence, you don't have a dissertation."</p><p>Dillon says the university will permit prior review of publications--which is different from the right to refuse publishing research findings. "The issue of whether we will accept a restriction on publication is one that comes up frequently. We always fight it." Prior review focuses narrowly on two areas. "First, they can ask to see if you've revealed their confidential information--that is, information that you may have been given. In that case, you'll be asked to remove it or to disguise it. Second, they can ask you to delay publication so that patent applications can be made. That's it. In either case, they can't stop publication. They can only ask you to make some changes."</p><p>In the last year, Duke turned down a Department of Defense grant that involved an engineering faculty member. Duke would have been a subcontractor with a principal investigator at Mississippi State University. DOD wouldn't agree to unfettered publication. "We could not get around the restrictions on publication," says Dillon. "It was absolutely impossible. We tried all kinds of different wording of the publication clause, and they would not change it." She learned that at one point "everything in the lab where the project was going on was boxed up and carted off--dissertations, everything," she says. "Now it's all back out of the boxes. But this does happen. It is a real consequence and it is a real fear with classified research."</p><p>Increasingly, government contracts are carrying clauses that would require the university to obtain an export license before technical data reach another country. That might cover giving a presentation in a foreign country, or involving a foreign student or visiting professor in the research team in this country. So the Department of State or the Department of Commerce would have the right to approve or disapprove the "export." But Dillon sees this as an example of bureaucratic inconsistency: If in fact they're doing fundamental research, research institutions by law are not subject to export regulations.</p><p>Some clauses are overtly targeting foreign nationals, with language specifying that all foreign nationals working on a project must have the approval of the contracting officer. "We fight very hard to remove those clauses. It isn't up to them to say who and who may not be the people we designate to have on a project," Dillon says.</p><p>Dillon worries about a newly emerging middle ground between fundamental research and classified work, one that takes the form of "sensitive information." "How do you define sensitive information?" she wonders. "These clauses have absolutely no criteria in them whatsoever. But they allow a contracting officer to sort of sit there and look at a publication and say, well, this might be sensitive--no explanation necessary."</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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/information-d.jpg" alt="WILLIAM VAN ALSTYNE, Professor of law" width="300" height="203" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>"Even the AAUP concedes that we do have the rights of citizens, but we should remind ourselves that institutions will often be judged by our known associations."<br /><span class="pulloutcredit">WILLIAM VAN ALSTYNE<br />Professor of law. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Les Todd.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Such creeping ambiguity is a departure from a longstanding executive-branch policy. A Reagan administration national-security directive stated that "No restrictions may be placed upon the conduct or reporting of federally funded research that has not received national-security classification." That policy was reaffirmed just a year ago by Condoleeza Rice, the current national security adviser. But government agencies are becoming more insistent about reviewing findings--even from unclassified research--for sensitive information.</p><p>In the competition for research contracts, universities, too, are reckoning anew with the definition of prudent--or appropriate--policies. James Siedow, vice provost for research, says there's pressure to rethink the classified-research prohibition at Duke. A research policy committee he chairs will be scrutinizing the ban.</p><p>" In the post-September 11 world, there's clearly going to be a lot of federal funding that may come with strings attached. There are components of the university, particularly engineering, which may be locked out of large pools of federal monies if we're caught in this dilemma," he says. But it's more than a money matter. "We have an engineering school with lofty ambitions. And being an engineering school, they're going to see those more practical things as being very much part of what they do. At the moment, they can't do that. So we just have to recognize that if we're going to play in the big leagues, we need basically to give the school the wherewithal to compete without having one hand tied behind its back."</p><p>There's plenty of precedent for hand-holding between the university sector and the federal government. After all, as MIT's Technology Review magazine puts it, the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development generated civilian research "from fighting malaria to radar to the atomic bomb." And MIT presents an interesting model on matters of science and secrecy: MIT bans classified research on campus but allows it at secure, off-campus facilities, notably its Lincoln Laboratory.</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: 296px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/information-c.jpg" alt="JUDITH DILLON, Director, Office of Research Support" width="296" height="196" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>"The issue of whether we will accept a restriction on publication is one that comes up frequently. We always fight it."<br /><span class="pulloutcredit">JUDITH DILLON<br />Director, Office of Research Support. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Les Todd.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Historically, though, government's embrace of the academy hasn't been a stranglehold. In their survey The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger note that academic freedom is a modern term for an ancient idea. It probably dates at least as far back as Socrates' defense against the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens. But the university itself--including disputation as an academic form--has medieval roots. "In internal matters the universities had the prerogative of self-government," according to Hofstadter and Metzger. "They were autonomous corporations, conceived in the spirit of the gilds; their members elected their own officials and set the rules for the teaching craft."</p><p>At various times and in various ways, the concept of academic freedom has been articulated by the American Association of University Professors and allied groups. In a 1915 statement, the AAUP supported "freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utterance and action." An updated 1940 AAUP statement said "the teacher is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his subject, but he should be careful not to introduce into his teaching controversial matter which has no relation to his subject." When a faculty member speaks or writes as a citizen, according to the statement, "he should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but his special position in the community imposes special obligations."</p><p>Academic-freedom purity hasn't always been the position of the courts. Duke law professor William Van Alstyne, a noted First Amendment scholar, says academic freedom can be seen as extending either to the institution or to the individual faculty member or student--a triad that can sometimes be in conflict within itself. It was only after World War II, he says, that the Supreme Court adopted a strong First Amendment stance and elaborated on academic freedom within the special protection of the First Amendment. "Roughly from 1965 on, the First Amendment has grown more and more robust and, correspondingly, academic-freedom claims based on the First Amendment have tended increasingly to win. It was not always so."</p><p>In the past few decades, the Supreme Court and lower courts have acknowledged universities' freedom to maneuver, whether to set a standard curriculum, emphasize certain schools of thought in their programs, or, as in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, establish affirmative-action guidelines as an educational imperative. (In the latter case, decided in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell wrote an opinion that granted the medical school at Cal-Davis an exception to what the Equal Protection Clause would otherwise demand, namely, strict color-blindness in admissions.)</p><p>Most of the academic-freedom cases, though, have focused on the professional prerogatives of the scholar against the restrictions of the state or the institution. Loyalty oaths in the academy were largely upheld in the Fifties. But in Baggett v. Bullitt, decided in 1964, the Supreme Court turned aside the requirement of professors (and others) at the University of Washington that they swear not to have "subversive" intentions. There, the Court hinged its ruling on student academic freedom--that is, the view that learning requires a faculty whose critical skills aren't arbitrarily reined in. Three years later, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Court struck down a similar New York loyalty oath, with a strong nod to the First Amendment. As Justice William Brennan saw it, "[A]cademic freedom...is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."</p><p>It's a special concern to the academy when the First Amendment Center, a think tank on free-expression issues, reports--as it did this summer--that "for the first time in the annual State of the First Amendment survey, almost half of those surveyed said the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees." The survey saw a jump by ten percentage points from 2001. More than four in ten said they would limit the academic freedom of professors and bar criticism of government military policy. For many Americans, academic freedom and other fundamental freedoms are "possible obstacles in the war on terrorism," center officials said in a statement.</p><p>Academic-freedom controversies loomed large over the summer for Duke's neighbor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The furor came from a reading assignment for freshmen, Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, by Michael A. Sells. The book is a translation of thirty-five early suras, or chapters, of the Koran, accompanied by commentary and a glossary of Islamic terms.</p><p>A conservative Christian group charged that the assignment represented "forced Islamic indoctrination," and took the university to court. At the same time, the North Carolina House passed a bill that would deny funding to Carolina's summer reading program if it did not give equal time in the classroom to "all known religions." The university's board of governors, whose thirty-two voting members oversee the flagship Chapel Hill campus along with the system's other components, was a slow-to-arrive ally of the school. It failed to produce the needed two-thirds majority vote for a resolution proclaiming the importance of academic freedom. Some objected on procedural grounds; others, reportedly, were reluctant to offend members of the legislature.</p><p>But UNC President Molly Broad asked the governing board to reconsider its vote. She voiced concerns about accreditation problems that could arise from a perceived lack of support for academic freedom, and raised the possibility of a reprimand from the American Association of University Professors. Eventually, the board bought into academic freedom. That action followed on the heels of Carolina's own Faculty Council executive committee, which had voted unanimously to uphold "academic freedom and the fair exchange of ideas," as well as a commitment to "understanding cultures and conflicting values of all lands."</p><p>In the midst of the controversy, Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane sent a strongly supportive letter to the chairwoman of the Faculty Council at UNC-Chapel Hill. Keohane noted, "At a time when our nation is focused on challenges that directly threaten the freedoms that make our country a model for the world, it is useful to remember that those who have attacked us would move quickly to prohibit free discussion. It is all the more important, therefore, that we stand firm, as you and your colleagues have done, in defending core values which throughout history have characterized the very best institutions of higher education."</p><p>Challenges to academic freedom are hardly new. In his 1989 book Stalking the Academic Communist, David R. Holmes documents some of the effects of McCarthyism. "Because so many of the firings were done quietly (especially the nonrenewal of contracts for untenured faculty), done ostensibly for other reasons, or were not reported to the AAUP," he writes, "we may never know the actual numbers of faculty dismissed during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is probable, however, that the total number of faculty dismissed for political reasons during the McCarthy era surpassed one hundred. This estimate does not include the many faculty who, under threat, resigned or chose to take early retirement."</p><p>Higher-education institutions were all too ready to join the campaign to root out Communists. In a 1953 statement, the Association of American Universities, which represented the administrations of the nation's leading research universities, declared: "Above all, a scholar must have integrity and independence. This renders impossible adherence to such a regime as that of Russia and its satellites. No person who accepts or advocates such principles and methods has any place in a university."</p><p>As a historian of America, Duke's William Chafe, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences, looks back on that era and sees some unpleasant echoes in our own time. "There were some serious breaches, even at those schools we would identify as part of the fortress of academic freedom. It's scary, the number of people who were willing to compromise the intellectual freedom of some of their faculty colleagues and to be complicit in the hurting of their careers." Today, he says, campuses are "more institutionally conscious of the need to preserve their independence than was true in the 1950s or even the teens, when faculty were fired for being opposed to World War I."</p><p>In their book, Hofstadter and Metzger refer to the nationwide "cult of loyalty" in World War I. At the University of Virginia, the head of the journalism school was charged with disloyalty--and eventually dismissed--for a speech in which he declared that "we can win the war only by freeing the spirit of democracy in the Germans by goodwill," that "war does not remove the menace of autocracy [or] make the world safe for democracy," and that Russia would be the spiritual leader of the next generation. Columbia's president formally withdrew the privilege of academic freedom for the duration of the war. "What had been tolerated before becomes intolerable now," he said. "What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason."</p><p>Chafe says today, he worries about "a willingness to make judgments about people who criticize the government or who raise questions about our policy on terrorism. They are being subjected to highly generalized denunciations, not from within the university but from outside the university."</p><p>Some of the strongest denunciations have targeted Sami Al-Arian, a tenured computer science professor at the University of South Florida. In August, the university accused Al-Arian of links to terrorism. It then asked a Florida court to rule on whether firing him would violate his constitutional rights. As The Chronicle of Higher Education noted, "The idea that a professor who had not yet been fired would have to defend himself in court frightened some faculty members at South Florida and elsewhere."</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: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111202/images/information-b.jpg" alt="ANN MILLER, Public documents librarian, Perkins Library" width="300" height="447" border="1" /><p class="caption-text">"I'm worried that we won't be able to look back on this time period and get any sense of our history, of who we were and where we've been and how we got to where we are now."<br /><span class="pulloutcredit">ANN MILLER <br />Public documents librarian, Perkins Library. </span><span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Les Todd.</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In the mid-1990s, a federal grand jury spent more than two years looking into Al-Arian's ties to two organizations. No charges were ever filed. But just after last September's terrorist attacks, he appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, a television talk show on Fox News Channel, and listened to host Bill O'Reilly accuse him of associating with terrorists. O'Reilly quoted a speech Al-Arian had given in Arabic more than ten years ago in which he had called for "Death to Israel." According to The Chronicle's reporting, Al-Arian has since said that he meant death to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and that he would never support terrorist acts.</p><p>Duke Law's Van Alstyne was chair of the American Association of University Professors Committee that investigated the case. (Van Alstyne has been national president of the AAUP and AAUP general counsel, and chaired the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Association of American Law Schools.) In an interim report, the committee concluded that Al-Arian's statements "fell well within the ambit of academic freedom," and that other charges pending against him were "too insubstantial to warrant serious consideration as adequate cause for dismissal."</p><p>In Van Alstyne's view, the South Florida action departs from academic due process; there was no effort at mediation, no peer-group judgment by other faculty members. But even deeper issues arise with the university's legal course. "This offends the First Amendment and not simply standing AAUP statements on academic freedom," Van Alstyne says, "with the university saying, we're not merely going to give you notice of dismissal, we're going to sue you. So you hire an attorney and defend against our claim that when we fire you, we will not be violating any legal rights."</p><p>South Florida is making claims about Al-Arian's terrorist connections, Van Alstyne stresses, that haven't been validated by grand juries. "It is a puzzle why the university feels it is incumbent to make its independent charges when the federal government has made none." If Al-Arian were indicted and put on trial, he adds, the university could justifiably take a different stance. In that event, "it might very well be that his sheer inability to meet his responsibilities would require at least if not outright sacking, then termination with a certain severance pay. And surely if he were convicted, his inability to perform the terms of his agreement with them--to render the service for which he receives a stipend and fringe benefit--would give them full cause to terminate."</p><p>" For the most part, the AAUP's position is that in order to cut the tie, the institution must be able to show the manner in which the faculty member has abused his position as an academic," Van Alstyne says. "That would be falsifying data. That would be also abusing your post to advance a private agenda unrelated to your work." South Florida has claimed that when Al-Arian was heading up a nonprofit foundation, he was using his professorial status to gain credibility in fund raising. But there's no support for that claim, Van Alstyne says. And there's no accusation that, on campus, Al-Arian might have been, for example, misusing his access to computers.</p><p>And what if a professor were seen as merely spouting a pro-terrorism line? Even granting his First Amendment rights, would such professing make him right for the classroom? Van Alstyne says that could be a less clear-cut scenario. "The peculiarity, as it were, if not criminality of one's behavior other than in a professional role could certainly raise a fair question about your professional capacity." He can imagine situations--not precisely Al-Arian's--where professors' public involvements "will necessarily produce a difficulty in their teaching, because of the alienation of those whom they're expected to teach and maybe of their colleagues as well. Then it becomes difficult for the university. Even the AAUP concedes that we do have the rights of citizens, but we should remind ourselves that institutions will often be judged by our known associations."</p><p>Such strains in the classroom should not be a rationale for dismissal, Van Alstyne adds, any more than Al-Arian's dismissal might be justified by concerns about the feelings of influential constituencies. That would lead to "the heckler's veto," he says, "so that if alumni of the University of South Florida don't like Mr. Al-Arian's politics, then by canceling their contributions, they provide the university an excuse" to dismiss him.</p><p>" And you might say, won't that make it hard on the university? Yes, it certainly does. In theory, a university could be destroyed because of the disaffection of those upon whose financial goodwill the institution depends. But what, then, is the alternative? The sharp alternative is that whenever an institution's ability to deliver academic services is threatened by the loss of funds, then it must track down the source of the threat--not the donor, but whoever provoked the donor. That becomes the reason to sack them. And that's the end of academic freedom."</p><p>The heckler, if not the heckler's veto, emerged as an academic-freedom issue this fall with the convergence of international events: the deepening conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the growing threat of war with Iraq. The Middle East Forum, a pro-Israel research and policy group, started a website that included "dossiers" on scholars it deemed intellectually suspect. It also invited "reports on Middle East-related scholarship, lectures, classes, demonstrations, and other activities." After some negative press, the organization eliminated the dossiers but persisted with its "Survey of Institutions." Some of the faculty members singled out--and sympathizers who asked to be added to the list as a gesture of protest--saw the whole effort as pernicious. The New York Times quoted one professor as saying, "It's not so intimidating for people like me, with tenure, but it makes graduate students and untenured professors very nervous, and makes it even harder to talk about Israel."</p><p>The use of websites "makes techniques of potential intimidation more cheaply and readily available to larger numbers of persons and groups," Van Alstyne says. "A lot of critical political speech is meant to be intimidating. But the order of magnitude is certainly enhanced enormously through the capacity of the Internet, just as the gift of useful free speech is enormously enhanced."</p><p>Web-spread criticism may challenge the academic freedom of the opinionated professor. But for academics engaged in the public arena, Van Alstyne suggests, that comes with the territory. Just this fall, Harvard president Lawrence Summers called demands that colleges divest their stock in Israeli companies "anti-Semitic in effect if not intent." Some academics celebrated that characterization for its honesty. Others faulted it for potentially stifling campus debate.</p><p>Says Van Alstyne, "It's standard First Amendment law that the more one becomes enmeshed in public issues, the more one submits oneself to First Amendment-protected abuse. The more you exercise a robust freedom of speech on political issues, the more you become a vulnerable target of other people's animus toward you."</p><p>And the more the campus enshrines academic freedom, he suggests, the greater the contribution to the public good. He compares a university to the office of devil's advocate within a church: While faithful, it aims "not to confer sainthood unrigorously."</p><p>Faculty members, then, are "licensed truth-hunters" whose work is defined by free debate and who serve to keep free institutions in check. "An academic institution does not sack its faculty because outsiders or others do not like their work or think their work is insidious. The very function of an academic institution is to nourish critical thought, to re- examine the ideological status quo. The whole idea of research, literally, is to search again, think about it again, look at it again."</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/information-a.jpg" width="620" height="776" alt="Chris Hildreth." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</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">With terrorism threats and rumblings of war, we find ourselves living in a security-conscious society. But when documents begin to disappear from library shelves and professors are censured for their words, has national security put academic inquiry at risk?</div></div></section> Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501818 at https://alumni.duke.edu In Brief: November-December 2002 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/brief-november-december-2002 <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"><p>- Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, edited by professors William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, and the staff of the Behind the Veil project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, received a 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award. Presented annually by the Southern Regional Council, the awards recognize authors whose fiction and nonfiction writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator, and social critic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. The awards are the South's oldest literary honor. Remembering Jim Crow was also awarded the 2002 Carey McWilliams Award, presented annually by the MultiCultural Review to an outstanding scholarly or literary work related to the U.S. experience of cultural diversity.</p><p>- Edward Hull, former director of residence life and student housing at Southern Methodist University, was appointed to the newly created position of director of residence life and housing services. With oversight of an annual budget in excess of $25 million, he is responsible for the management of programs that support undergraduates and graduate students living in university residence halls and apartments.</p><p>- Reynolds Price, novelist, poet, dramatist, and essayist, was awarded the 2002 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council. The Caldwell Award recognizes those who strengthen the educational, cultural, and civic life of North Carolina through the humanities. Price '55, James B. Duke Professor of English, was cited for his work as a "writer, devoted scholar and educator, and mentor to aspiring writers."</p><p>- R. Sanders Williams M.D. '84, dean of Duke's medical school, and Debra A. Schwinn, professor of anesthesiology at Duke, have been appointed to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, one of three institutes within the NAS. Medical professionals consider it a high honor to be included in the group, which consists of national scholars and leaders in health and medicine, behavioral and social sciences, administration, law, the physical sciences, and engineering. Williams, a physician-scientist, has made major contributions to the understanding of the basic mechanisms of cardiovascular disease. He was appointed dean of medicine and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke Medical Center in April 2001. Schwinn joined the Duke faculty in 1989; she is also professor of pharmacology/cancer biology and surgery, vice chair for research in anesthesiology, and director of the Molecular Pharmacology Laboratories and Perioperative Genomics, and she chairs the third-year medical student (research year) curriculum. Her research focuses on better understanding how stress and genetic differences between people relate to disease outcomes.</p><p>- James A. Nunley, an orthopedic surgeon on the faculty at Duke Medical Center, was named chief of the division of orthopedic surgery. He succeeds James Urbaniak, Virginia Flowers Baker Professor of orthopedic surgery, who stepped down after seventeen years as division chief but who will continue in his role as vice chair of surgery. Nunley specializes in surgery of the hand and foot, as well as total joint replacements and the use of microsurgical techniques. He joined the faculty in 1980.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501814 at https://alumni.duke.edu Greed Is Not Enough https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/greed-not-enough <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/111202/images/depgar.jpg" alt="Campus Gargoyle" width="142" height="152" border="1" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">I must speak to you about something that I can only formulate as the soul of the university. I begin, moreover, with a litany that may not seem entirely appropriate to this edifying setting: Enron. Arthur Andersen. Dynegy. Qwest. Tyco. Adelphia. ImClone. WorldCom. RiteAid. Xerox.</p><p>What went wrong? Those ten names, and the frauds associated with them, account for a loss of a half-trillion dollars in investment value, more than the gross national product of all but a dozen countries on our planet. That's not the whole story. In 1981, three U.S. companies found it necessary to restate their earnings; between 1997 and 2000, 700 companies had to. And clearly a lot more are doing so this year.</p><p>The problem goes far beyond fraud in a few highly visible companies, or the criminal behavior of "a few bad apples," or the half-truth that perverse incentives have led some CEOs to greedy behavior.</p><p>Look at another well-known corporation, GE, or specifically the perks a compliant board of directors lavished on the most admired CEO in America. Now, I believe Jack Welch when he says that he could have negotiated cash payments that would have cost more than all the wine and flowers and groceries and sports tickets and free newspapers he got from GE. Was he greedy? Sure, but why? The problem goes beyond greed: Jack Welch didn't see that he was disgracing his name and that of GE by seeking these trivial status markers.</p><p>We have become a culture not of greed, but of excess; that is, a society in which status is conferred by lavish consumption and display. In such a culture, greed is not enough; it's just a way of getting status. But status comes at a price: alienation from friends, neighbors, communities, and nature.</p><p>None of this would surprise the early Greek writers, who were convinced that there was a sequence in human affairs, expressed through three personifications. Koros, "satiety," really means having a full belly. Hybris, "overweening pride," is the feeling that you can do what you want and get away with it, even if it's arrogant or violent. And Ate-- blindness about who you are and where you are--will lead you to ruin.</p><p>Silly Greeks, to think such personifications represent a universal process. Silly, but I fear we may soon see that they were right. In a time of bloat, we think we can get away with things, and sooner or later we get blindsided. That applies to each of us as individuals, and, I fear, to our nation.</p><p>This situation would not seem surprising to these Greeks, nor to William Wordsworth, who, almost 200 years ago, saw what we are talking about quite clearly--affluence, alienation from nature, the inability of traditional cultural norms to inspire restraint, and, not least, blindness to what is around us and what could sustain us. It's all in his sonnet: "The world is too much with us, late and soon,/Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"</p><p>When you set foot on a college campus, do you ever feel that you are stepping onto sacred ground, into a place that has been set aside for something beyond getting and spending? Sometimes I even think that I am back in classical Athens: glorious buildings are rising up (perhaps not the Parthenon, but a much-needed parking deck), leadership is at a pinnacle with Pericles in command, intellectuals from all around the world are giving lectures, the fundamental nature of matter is being explored as atomic theory is formulated, everything is there--except one funny-looking old guy: Socrates.</p><p>Where is he in today's university, on this campus? Is he out there, buttonholing young people, challenging them to think through their assumptions, cross-examining them about the values that will shape their lives, teaching them the vocabulary and the techniques they need to be effective moral agents, and convincing them of that one ineluctable Socratic truth--that the unexamined life is not worth living?</p><p>Where is he? Is he locked out, sneered at as "irrelevant," or "impractical," ostracized into some remote curricular corner, asphyxiated with pedantries, forced to drink hemlock lest he corrupt the minds of the young with his incessant questioning and challenging of society's unexamined values? Or does his insistence on the examined life live on, not in a few courses, but in the heart and soul of the place, as the spirit that infuses greatness into a university?</p><p>Where is he in this university, and this country of ours, endangered as it is by the drive for status, greed, and bloat, and in danger of being blindsided? Where is he if our graduates, affluent, influential, well-intended, on some September morning look up, see those planes, watch those buildings crumble, breathe that smoke, and realize then that they need to rebuild their lives and have neither the words nor the tools to do the job?</p><p>Walking one afternoon, Socrates converses with his young friend Phaedrus about the things that really matter--inspiration, knowledge, madness, and, above all, love. But then, Socrates turns the talk to wealth, in a self-mocking, tongue-in cheek prayer:</p><p>Pan, my friend, and all the other gods who dwell here, make me beautiful--inside. And as for the externals, let them be compatible with what I have within.</p><p>Help me to remember that it's the wise person, and only the wise one, who is really rich.</p><p>May I have a pile of gold, but no more than a sensible man would try to carry around.</p><p>He turns to his young friend and says, "Is there anything else we should ask, Phaedrus?" Phaedrus says, "Just include me in your prayers, for friends have everything in common."</p><p>Socrates must have smiled. Phaedrus got it. He saw that he was not an isolated individual who looked after only his own wealth, status, or self. He was a friend, part of that wider community to which he was returning--just as we here today are friends, bound together by our devotion to an institution that has a special place in our hearts, a special heritage from its founders, and a special duty to perform. That's why we are here. Once we understand that, we can move forward.</p><p>And Socrates turns to Phaedrus and says, "Let's go."</p><p> </p><p class="articletitle"><em>-Connor is director of the National Humanities Center. These remarks are excerpted from his Founders' Day address.</em></p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</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/w-robert-connor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">W. Robert Connor</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501813 at https://alumni.duke.edu Forum: November-December 2002 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/forum-november-december-2002 <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>On Situs</strong><br /><br /> Editors:<br /><p>I applaud Julia Connors for her heartfelt writings of the Situ family [<strong><a href="../050602/depgar.html">"Under the Gargoyle," May-June 2002</a></strong>]. I have also been blessed by having the Situs pass through my life, and Julia caught the essence of Kevin and Helen.</p><p>Through all the pain that family endured, they remained full of love. The article brought tears of both sadness and joy to my eyes. Kevin was a miraculous child who blessed everyone he met.</p><p class="articletitle">Sue Swarter (via e-mail)</p><strong>Reading the Record</strong><br /><br /> Editors:<br /><p>In the <strong><a href="../070802/index.html">July-August issue</a></strong>, you say that last summer's reading assignment for the incoming freshmen was "for the first time ever." Not true.</p><p>I know from personal experience that the Class of '68 had summer reading--and it was more substantial than the short story, "The Palace Thief," that my freshman son was asked to read. For the summer of 1964, we were assigned the novel All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, plus The Public Philosophy by Walter Lippmann.<br /> Just wanted to set the record straight.</p><p class="articletitle">Richard S. Miller '68<br /> The correspondent is the parent of students in the Class of '01 and '06.</p><p> </p></td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"><strong>Remembering Parker</strong><br /><br /> Editors:<br /><p>The most persistent memory of my Duke experience, now thirty years on, is of the quality of professors I had the good fortune to meet. All practiced their calling with craft, and most were talented artisans. Many taught with verve, but a few were truly sorcerers. Harold Parker had magic.</p><p>His magic of teaching was quiet and understated, especially when compared to the art as wielded by his contemporary, Wallace Fowlie of the Romance languages department. Ranging from the commedia dell'arte to Dante, from Voltaire to Valery, Fowlie would take ordinary objects, spin them, invert them, and expose them as masks hiding beauty, wonderment, and the abyss, so that visions of a sewing machine mated to an operating table or of Duke's leading basketball guard walking a lobster on a pink ribbon through the dining halls were hardly cause for comment or surprise.</p><p>Professor Parker was different. You heard about his "European Intellectual History" courses as a freshman; and you spent the next three years plotting to be accepted. On the first day, everyone was seated well before the hour; and the atmosphere was hushed, almost reverent. He appeared, smiled, and then lectured brilliantly and without notes, while expecting us to make nearly verbatim transcripts.</p><p>As a parting written assignment that first day, we were expected by the next class to analyze the writings of Dilthey, who was described as the "father of modern history." The pattern of lectures and written assignments persisted throughout the semester. That we could interrupt, question, and dispute was a realization that came slowly over some of us. The majority of the papers submitted on Dilthey varied from ten to fifteen pages, and one student's effort, typed single-spaced and bound, was fifty-plus pages. In returning them graded by the next class, Professor Parker mentioned that he had given a few A-/B+'s, a bell curve of B's and C's, and one A+. Parker read the A+ essay; it was no more than five to six sentences. Dismissing the class, he added, "Dilthey was just so much soufflÈ." A number of us were equally deflated.</p><p>We realized that the icons of European intellectual history were his props, and the classroom was his theater. In his lectures and digressions, he would hint, wink, and nudge you to the realization that there was a string lying there that would unravel the convoluted writings of one author or a card, if pulled, that would bring tumbling down the philosophical edifice of another. He also showed that if you would judiciously remove the warped lumber and mismatched bricks housing other works, the thoughts, concepts, and reasonings inside were pure diamonds.</p><p>I literally hauled my stack of legal notepads and typed assignments around with me for the following decade as baggage in my moves from one country to another. They were finally lost when my apartment in Beirut was broken into during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. I found out later that they were used to good effect as kindling during the power outages and fuel shortages that winter.</p><p>Parker's comment on that would have been: "Fitting."</p><p>And death is but a parenthesis....</p><p class="articletitle">Robert G. Atcheson '72<br />Cairo, Egypt</p><strong>Wrongful Assessments</strong><br /><br /> Editors:<br /><p><strong><a href="../070802/convictions.html">"Overturning Wrongful Convictions"</a></strong> [July-August 2002] by Georgann Eubanks is a typical, left-wing, one-sided attack on the death penalty in the United States. Eubanks tells us that Henry Baker is innocent because he says he is, that the death penalty is flawed because a group of New York City Marxist law professors says so, and that the phony moratoriums placed on the death penalty by two corr</p><p>The fact is that in 1998 there were 15,000 murders in the U.S., and only ninety-eight murderers put to death. The death penalty is fair, effective, and final. It should be used more, not less. We know who speaks for the criminals, but there was not one mention of a single victim in her entire article. This is the outrage that should be addressed.</p><p class="articletitle">Ray Gordon<br /> The correspondent is the parent of a Duke senior.</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="2002-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Saturday, November 30, 2002</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2002" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2002</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Sat, 30 Nov 2002 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501811 at https://alumni.duke.edu