Duke - May - Jun 2001 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001 en Getting the Picture https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/getting-picture <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><span class="text">In 1968, as a gift for his eleventh birthday, Tom Rankin received a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was a miniature version of the old-fashioned machine his paternal grandfather used for listening to classical music on the family farm near Louisville, Kentucky. That Christmas, with some encouragement from his elders, Rankin concealed the recorder’s microphone in a poinsettia plant on the living-room coffee table. When his voluble Auntie Ann arrived and positioned herself on the couch, Rankin prompted her to launch into the most vivid Kentucky folk tale in her famous repertoire. </span></p><p><span class="text">The story, Rankin explains, was along the lines of a traditional “Jack tale”—that family of Appalachian stories that have ancient Celtic roots, brought to the United States by Scots-Irish immigrants and passed along through generations by oral tradition. In these stories, Jack is the common hero who meets danger and difficulty at every turn, but always prevails by some combination of native wit and luck.</span></p><p><span class="text">“Of course I violated the first rule of documentary work by not letting the subject know she was being recorded,” says Rankin, now director of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke. As it turned out, his aunt soon died after that clandestine recording session, and Rankin put the tape away. He didn’t listen to it again until he was sixteen; by then he knew he wanted to memorize the spooky tale himself so that he could tell it to friends at late-night sleepovers and camping trips. <br /> In the story, an idle country boy is swinging on a fence when he is approached by two old women dressed in silk petticoats and long green veils. At their request, the boy first fetches water for them and then, with his mother’s permission, leads them toward the crossroads they are seeking. On the journey, the old women grow weary and are soon walking on their hands and knees. All at once they are transformed into vicious panthers and chase the boy up a tree. When the panthers’ tails turn into axes and begin to chop down the tree where the boy has sought refuge, his mother, back home, intuits her son’s danger and releases the family dogs. They race to the boy’s aid and chew the panthers to death, sparing the boy and, implicitly, the entire community from the wicked women.<br /> In his first undergraduate course in folklore at Tufts University with ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon, Rankin wrote a paper about the story. By this time, he fully appreciated the treasure he had captured and made copies of the original tape for various members of his family. Today, his sons Julian, fourteen, and Alexander, ten, can recite the tale word for word in the energetic style of the great-aunt they never met. <br /></span></p><table width="150" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td height="156"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic2.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="153" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Aristeo Orta works with Proyecto Azteca, an organization that develops homes constructed mostly by and for Mexican-American farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valle.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">That first coffee-table oral history project was predictive of Rankin’s career. He has co-produced two documentary record albums —one featuring fiddle-music traditions from Mississippi and another presenting a sound portrait of a rural African-American community in Tennessee. Three documentary films —in which Rankin has served by turns as cameraman, director, and co-producer—have all focused on the expression of the cultural traditions of common people. Rankin’s still photographs of folk and blues musicians, farmers, fishermen, hunters, and writers have been widely published and exhibited in venues across the South. And in his most recent role, co-director of a $4.2-million project funded by the Pew Memorial Trust, Rankin has helped bring to light the stories of common people performing heroic acts on the local level. Indivisible: Stories of American Community is a nationwide, multi-media project designed to encourage similar documentary efforts in local communities across the county. </span></p><p><span class="text">To begin the project, Rankin and co-director Trudy Wilner Stack of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona selected teams of distinguished photographers and interviewers to spend a month in a dozen communities across the country where citizen-driven projects have brought about profound improvements. The fieldworkers were given the freedom to pursue their own cultural and artistic interests within the set goal of Indivisible—namely, to document the people and initiatives that have made such an impact. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Reducing crime in Delray Beach, Florida; revitalizing small towns in western North Carolina; improving the status of youth in Chicago and San Francisco; humanizing the practice of obstetrics in Stony Brook, New York; and restoring marine habitat in Sitka, Alaska, are among the grassroots efforts now presented in a large format, coffee-table book and an accompanying compact disc, Local Heroes Changing America, published by CDS in cooperation with W.W. Norton. Alongside intimate portraits of the people and the landscapes where they live and work, citizens explain in their own words how organizing direct action to solve a local problem has empowered individuals and transformed communities. Local Heroes is less interpretive than it is the beginning of what Rankin hopes will become an ongoing, nationwide conversation about citizen activism on the local level.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">As he writes in the book’s introduction, “Hero is used here not to put certain folks on a pedestal above others or to shine some kind of divine recognition down on particular individuals. Rather, I have in mind the countless parables in almost all cultures of the lone, ordinary soul, whose modest act reverberates throughout a group as heroic, as an act that brings about a positive change.” </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Arguably, these stories are contemporary Jack tales, though neither fable nor sensational. The idea, Rankin says, is to offer a hopeful vision of contemporary democracy at work. Or, as public broadcaster and author Ray Suarez writes in his foreword to the book: “There is a common thread running like a vein of ore through these stories. It’s the surge of confidence, in themselves and in their neighbors, that comes to people when they take those first, tentative steps toward acting instead of being acted upon.”</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Indivisible staff has also created a traveling museum exhibit, an extensive website (www.indivisible.org), a collection of free postcards available in kiosks placed in a number of public spaces around the country, and a K-12 teachers’ guide offered through the website and the museum venues. Archived collections of the photos, interview tapes, and other project materials will ultimately be housed at both Duke and the University of Arizona, and each of the twelve communities that participated in the project will receive a set of photos and tapes from its portion of the project. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">One additional resource that’s been created as a part of Indivisible perhaps best represents the particular vision Tom Rankin brought to Duke when he assumed his post nearly three years ago. “We have a mission,” he says, “ to share these tools of documentary work and then turn them loose.” To this end, the project staff has also created a workbook called “Putting Documentary Work to Work.” Offered in both Spanish and English on the Indivisible website, the handbook is targeted to community groups interested in conducting their own documentary projects about civic life and community participation. As the handbook states, “Out of shared telling and remembering grow identity, connection, and pride, binding people to a place and to one another. These ties form the basis of community life.”</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This take on documentary work as a grassroots practice for community building is a relatively new notion. In 1936, when novelist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans received an assignment from Fortune magazine to collaborate on a series of articles on daily life among Alabama tenant farmers, documentary work was understood to be a form of ethnographic study or investigative journalism performed solely by outsiders, mostly academics. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the classic work that came out of their assignment, Agee first expressed his concerns about the ethics of such a practice—the voyeuristic dilemma of well-meaning interlopers who seek to document the lives of the less fortunate for academic analysis and/or popular consumption: </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">…these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these that are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into still by others, who have picked up their living just as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Unwittingly, Agee, with his lyrical language, and Evans, with his stark and startling photographs of Depression-era farm families, gave notoriety to a discipline that has, by turns, been criticized ever since as everything from an awkward marriage of literature and photojournalism to fine-art-as-social-work. The problem, says Rankin, is that “it has been the paradigm of documentary studies up until very recently that the privileged are the documentors and that those in need are documented.” </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">“In the 1960s, some came to believe that if you go and make pictures of people who are impoverished and sick, you are ‘doing good’ by drawing attention to their plight,” he says. “However, in that paradigm, documentary studies looks only toward problems, what is missing in a community, rather than toward what might also be that community’s gifts and assets. I think we need to do both.”</span></p><span class="text"><span class="text"> <br /></span></span><table style="width: 1150px;" width="170" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 170px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic6.jpg" alt="" width="170" height="175" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Working in a Texas cabbage field</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">This criticism has likewise been leveled at DoubleTake magazine, formerly published in association with the CDS at Duke, and now produced in Boston by the DoubleTake Community Service Corporation. The award-winning magazine that made a big splash with its founding in 1995 regularly showcases the work of top-flight photographers, poets, and other documentarians who have focused on subjects ranging from African refugees to barrio workers in Chicago, from the homeless to women and children living with AIDS.</span></p><p><span class="text">When the publication’s substantial production budget exceeded its apparent fund-raising capacity, creating a potential liability for the long-term sustainability of the CDS itself, the board of directors of CDS decided it was time to rethink the long-term goals and mission of the center. Their first step was to hire Rankin as the new director. They then embarked on a year-long process that culminated in the magazine’s separation from the center and DoubleTake’s move to Boston. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Here he was associate professor of art and Southern studies, Rankin had already helped establish the Center for the Study of Southern Culture on the Oxford campus—a high-profile project that had been the brainchild of folklorist William Ferris, now chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. As director of documentary projects and the Southern Media Archive at Ole Miss, Rankin had a strong track record of creating well-attended public exhibits and conferences on Southern culture and history that were explicitly designed to speak to a non-academic audience. Bringing the nascent Indivisible project with him, Rankin signaled a sea change in the focus of CDS. </span></p><p><span class="text">“Tom Rankin is a folklorist who understands his job as more than to document and interpret,” says his earliest mentor, Jeff Todd Titon, now professor of music and director of the Ph.D. program in music at Brown University. “Beyond those tasks, the folklorist’s job is to collaborate with the people you are visiting, to learn what they are hoping for, what they might want from you, how they might be able to use your expertise, or your credentials, to further an end of their own that’s consonant with your purpose in documenting.” </span></p><p><span class="text">As an example of this philosophy at work, Titon cites the 1995 book Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life, published by the University Press of Mississippi and edited by Rankin. “Giving the camera over to the subjects themselves, and letting them say what they see, allows communities and individuals to present their own agenda, not the agenda of an outsider,” he says. <br /></span></p><table style="width: 1150px;" width="114" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 114px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic7.jpg" alt="" width="114" height="175" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">a Haitian church outing on Delray Beach.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">In the early 1980s, after finishing his graduate coursework in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rankin discovered the work of fellow Kentuckian Maggie Lee Sayre, a woman born deaf in 1920 and who had first used the box camera her sister received as a gift from the Kodak company in 1930. Sayre has spent more than fifty years living on a river houseboat making photographs of her family and friends as they earned a livelihood fishing. With Rankin’s assistance, Sayre not only got a book contract but has exhibited her photographs at the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife, the Olympic Games in Atlanta, and a number of other sites. </span></p><p><span class="text">When Rankin set out for his graduate thesis to document the life of Andrew Jones, a Tennessee blues musician, he asked Jones if he could record him. “You can tape me talking and playing,” Jones said, “but I’ve already done it all myself. I ain’t braggin’ on myself, but I really got some dandy tapes they already made.” Jones took Rankin to his room and opened a drawer that contained more than fifty audiocassettes. The musician had actually created an ongoing faux radio show in which he cast himself as host, musical guest, and preacher, retelling the story of his decline as a gambler and blues singer and his eventual spiritual conversion to gospel preacher.<br />“He had interviewed himself,” Rankin explains. “The tapes were like a diary or a family photo album, and they changed forever the way I see the documentary process. The impulse is not academic. It is natural to all of us to want to tell our stories.”</span></p><p><span class="text">And that, says Titon, is the distinctive vision Rankin brings to the classroom and to his ongoing research and photography in the Mississippi Delta. “It’s not about going out into the field to gather data and bring it back into the academy for examination, or about going out and gathering images to make an artistic statement for art’s sake, only to be wracked by the kind of guilt James Agee had,” Titon says. “It’s about the preservation of cultures and recognizing what we as documentarians can do locally by offering our services to the communities we enter.” <br /></span></p><table style="width: 1150px;" width="285" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="left"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 275px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic9.jpg" alt="" width="275" height="180" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">a daughter of one of the dancers rehearsing for the Haitian Flag Day ceremonies at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Delray Beach.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">As evidence of this perspective, CDS, under Rankin’s leadership, has launched a noncredit certificate program in Documentary Studies for local citizens in conjunction with Duke’s Office of Continuing Education. The certificate courses, conducted in the evening and on weekends to accommodate working adults, cover documentary traditions, techniques, fieldwork theory, and ethics. To earn the certificate, participants must complete six sixteen-hour courses, including a final project that records some aspect of their own family history or local community life. To date, some 225 people have enrolled in the courses offered.</span></p><p><span class="text">Rankin has also been team-teaching an undergraduate course with the center’s director of curriculum and education, Charlie Thompson, on the culture of tobacco farming in North Carolina—an enterprise on the cusp of dramatic change. Rankin, Thompson, and their students are exploring the contradictions inherent in those fiercely religious North Carolina communities—communities where smoking has been understood as a sin, and yet where the livelihood of the people is built around this single crop that requires so much tedious handwork and cooperation. It’s a topic that Rankin understands first-hand. His grandfather and great uncle worked in tobacco, and his father bought and sold tobacco leaf. </span></p><p><span class="text">“We’re interested in finding out from the growers what it means to have all that come crashing down,” says Rankin. “And there is a certain irony, of course, that of all places for us to be doing this, we are at Duke. But the center would be remiss if we didn’t complicate the debate about tobacco by listening to the voices of those with the most at stake.”<br /></span></p><table style="width: 1150px;" width="170" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 173px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic10.jpg" alt="" width="173" height="175" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Davitus Gosnell, a ninety-year-old tobacco farmer from Marshall, North Carolina.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><span class="text"><span class="text"><span class="text">Rankin represents the generation that found its calling in the social activism of the late Sixties and Seventies, having been forever affected by the images of civil-rights protests, the films of villages under siege in Vietnam, and the photos that documented Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the black and white of those times has given way to multiple shades of gray. At the heart of Rankin’s convictions is the belief in bringing the voices of the marginalized and the mainstream together at the table in order to enrich, and often complicate, our contemporary questions about social policy and economic justice. He notes that in the post-Cold War era, we have seen more barriers drop than just the Berlin Wall. Radical demographic shifts in communities such as Durham, and a gradual breakdown of racial and social barriers in schools and neighborhoods, have helped to open profound new avenues for community-based conversations. <br /><img src="/issues/050601/images/pic4.jpg" alt="" width="125" height="119" align="left" border="1" hspace="4" vspace="4" /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">“Things change so fast in this country today,” says Rankin. “The only way to understand or make sense of our collective history is to have the benefit of multiple voices. Our challenge at the center is to communicate with and engage viewers and participants in our exhibits, books, and classes—to get more people in the conversation.”</span>Though never explicitly stated, the Indivisible project suggests by its title the words in the Pledge of Allegiance that immediately follow. Liberty and justice for all is a lofty goal. But for Tom Rankin, that goal is approachable through the telling of our many tales. <br /></span><span class="text"><br /></span></span></span><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><span class="text"><span class="text"><em>Eubanks ’76 recently completed work on a documentary video, Something in Common, about diversity in North Carolina public schools for the state’s public television network.</em></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</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/pic1.jpg" width="620" height="499" alt="Rankin: “We have a mission, to share these tools of documentary work and then turn them loose.&quot;" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</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 his latest project, Indivisible: Stories of American Community, the director of the Center for Documentary Studies is helping to bring to light the stories of common people performing heroic acts on the local level.</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502034 at https://alumni.duke.edu Duke Magazine-May/June 2001-Conservation Versus Culture https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/duke-magazine-mayjune-2001-conservation-versus-culture <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" height="205" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"><tr><td height="71"> <table width="99%" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="47%"><span class="text"><img src="/issues/050601/images/head/head3.gif" width="279" height="36" border="0" alt="Duke Magazine-The Culture of the Gun" /></span></td> <td width="20%"> </td> <td width="33%"> </td> </tr></table></td> </tr><tr><td> <span class="text"><i><a href="conserve.html">• continued from page one</a></i><br /><br /></span> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="4" width="170" align="left"><tr><td height="151" width="320"><img src="/issues/050601/images/main3.jpg" width="190" height="150" border="1" /></td> </tr><tr><td class="pulloutcredit" width="320" align="center">The battle in Baja: some members of the local fishing community, who once harpooned turtles for food, now work with Nichols.</td> </tr></table><span class="text">  The Mexican government, though, insisted that there was no longer any problem with local consumption and, therefore, no need to focus money and effort on conservation work. Nichols criss-crossed the peninsula, talking to fishermen and to members of local communities. He counted thousands of carapaces in backyards and dumps, proving that consumption remains a serious and persistent problem. This is where he realized his resource-management training at Duke would be the most beneficial. <br />   “Scientific research wasn’t enough,” Nichols says. “Now what we’re doing is a lot of social sorts of things, understanding the economics and policy issues as well as marine science. Marine conservation is also really about people and fishermen and impacts to the marine environment. So it ended up being an extremely useful degree to have.”<br /> The meeting with local fishermen in Banderitas Estuary is part of his latest conservation strategy. His research there supports his belief that Banderitas is the perfect site for the first official sea-turtle reserve in Baja California, an idea he’s recently been advocating. It’s a calm, quiet arm of the bay that’s easily protected. Turtles that feed there seem to stay in the area, and it’s easily accessible to tourists. With their recently received fishing rights, the cooperative of fishermen has an incentive to begin long-term management of the region.<br />   </span> <table width="206" border="0" align="right" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2"><tr><td> <hr width="350" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr><tr><td align="center" class="text"><span class="brwntextpullout">“I realized that this connection to the animal is one of the reasons why it’s endangered, but it’s also a tool and the reason why they will be protected, and why people will be enthusiastic about working for their recovery.”</span><br /><br /><span class="pulloutcredit">—Wallace J. Nichols</span></td> </tr><tr><td> <hr width="350" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr></table><span class="text">Nichols admits that the idea of a turtle sanctuary in an area already protected by law might sound unusual to the rest of the world. In theory, all the waters off the coast of Mexico are turtle sanctuaries. The local law isn’t working, however, since there is little enforcement and follow-up. Without the communities on board, the ones that are the source of both the problem and the solution, nothing will change.<br />   Leaning forward toward the fishermen in the boat, hands clasped, Nichols outlines his idea to make Banderitas Estuary a turtle reserve, an area the fishermen will still be able to use but one completely safe for turtles. The thirty-four-year-old scientist has an easy smile and a slow pull to his words, but his honest enthusiasm and passion are infectious. The men are drawn in as he explains that the reserve will be the first in all of Baja California, and thus could attract international attention. He tells them that tourists who flock to the area in the later winter and spring to see gray whales and their calves might stay an extra day and go snorkeling to see turtles in an area they know is protected. These men, who know the turtles’ habits, would be the guides. He also tells them that their fish and oysters could command a higher price if they come with some sort of certification that they are grown in an ecologically sensitive manner that helps protect endangered sea turtles.<br /> The men are interested. “I’d like to protect turtles,” says Arturo Gonzales Dominguez. “Both for my own benefit, and for the future. If we don’t protect them now, my children when they are grown won’t be able to see turtles as I have.”<br />   Nichols doesn’t stop at the discussion of Banderitas. He relaxes back in his chair and continues on to another aspect of his latest conservation strategy. “Did you know that sea turtles are the most important animals in Baja?” The men pause and consider his words. He tells them that there is absolutely no other animal as tied in to the life, food, culture, and ecology in the region. “Can you think of one?” he asks. They can’t. He knows he has them hooked.<br />   This simple statement is a carefully thought-out tactic. He says he believes if he says it enough times to enough people—“Turtles are the most important animals in the entire peninsula”—they will start repeating it. And if enough people repeat it to others, then idea will take hold.<br />   </span> <table width="206" border="0" align="left" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2"><tr><td> <hr width="200" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr><tr><td align="center" class="text"><span class="brwntextpullout">All species of sea turtles in the world are endangered, faced with threats from fishing nets, pollution, and hunters who prize them for their shells, meat, and eggs.</span></td> </tr><tr><td> <hr width="200" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr></table><span class="text">After years of conducting research in Baja, and befriending fishermen and community members, Nichols has seen that is how things work. Decisions are not made in the air-conditioned offices in Mexico City, and turtles aren’t protected by the government officials who pull into town in clearly marked vehicles. Meetings take place on the side of the road, around pick-up trucks, sitting around a cooler on a boat in the estuary, and turtles either will or won’t be protected by the people who work near them every day.<br />   His theories on information flow in Baja are supported later that evening, when he stops by a local taco stand to pick up dinner. “Did you hear?” one man says to him. “They’re thinking of starting a turtle sanctuary in Banderitas Estuary.” Nichols simply nods and looks interested.<br />   It’s taken years to get people in communities around Baja to trust and accept him. When he first pulled into Puerto San Carlos four years ago, armed with a pitted pick-up truck, a research permit, and fluent Spanish, locals saw him as an odd gringo with a passion for turtles. They tolerated his questions. Nichols says it wasn’t difficult to figure out who the poachers were, that “if they know about exactly where turtles feed and what they eat and where to find them—well, these are things you know only if you spend a lot of time thinking about turtles.”<br />   And the locals, even the poachers, are exactly the ones he approached to learn more about Baja’s turtles. Since they’re the ones who know the most about the animals living there, Nichols saw every conversation as an opportunity to share some information about turtle biology and why the animals might disappear forever. It’s the people’s passion for sea turtles that may help the turtles survive. “Sometimes I’d look at these people and think, ‘you’re made of turtle, eating so many turtles over the years, drinking the blood, part of you is turtle protein,’ ” he says. “Instead of reacting to that in a disgusted way, I just listened. I realized that this connection to the animal is one of the reasons why it’s endangered, but it’s also a tool and the reason why they will be protected, and why people will be enthusiastic about working for their recovery.”<br />   Nichols says that about 25 percent of the animals he’s tagged are killed. That estimate is supported by two fishermen who started their own basic tagging system, tying fishing wire onto the shell of turtles caught accidentally before throwing them back in the water. Of the four turtles they tagged their first few weeks, one turned up eaten.<br /></span> <table border="0" cellpadding="8" width="200" cellspacing="4" align="left"><tr><td height="89" class="text" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"><b><img src="../../images/spacer.gif" width="300" height="5" /><br /> TURTLE TASKS AT THE MARINE LAB</b><br /><br />   Larry Crowder, the Stephen Toth Professor of marine biology at the Marine Laboratory in coastal Beaufort, North Carolina—a branch of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences—has been studying and teaching about sea turtles since the early 1980s. A University of Wisconsin doctoral student working with Crowder was trying to make sense of all the loggerhead sea-turtle population information she had collected. She turned to him because of his expertise in the field of mathematical modeling. Their collaboration, plus follow-up work by others, showed ties between loggerheads who turned up dead along South Carolina beaches and shrimp trawling. That research, in turn, led to regulations to equip trawl nets with turtle-excluder devices to prevent the animals from being inadvertently caught and drowned during shrimping activities.<br />   “I thought I would be in and out of sea turtles,” Crowder says. “But I haven’t been able to extract myself since.” Applying his analysis and modeling talents, he continues to co-author turtle studies. One predicted that small declines in survival rates of loggerhead adult and sub-adult females in Australia could be enough to lead to their vulnerable colony’s extinction. The study also found that programs to protect newly hatched loggerheads from early deaths should have comparatively little impact, because “survival in the first year of life is relatively less important in these long-lived and slow-maturing animals.”<br />   In 1999, Crowder—also a field biologist who studies estuarine-dependent fish—began co-teaching a course, “The Biology and Conservation of Sea Turtles,” during the marine lab’s summer term. The most common sea-turtle species in the waters around Beaufort are loggerheads, followed by Kemp’s ridleys. There are also Atlantic leatherbacks, “mostly offshore,” Crowder says, and green seat turtles and hawksbills that “wander around here occasionally.” <br />   Loggerheads are officially listed as threatened, and the rest are all considered endangered for familiar reasons: Sea-turtle eggs have been collected as a delicacy; adult sea turtles, as well as the diamondback terrapins that live in coastal marshes and lagoons, have long been trapped for cuisine such as turtle soup; and when baby turtles hatch, hungry animal predators—birds, mammals, and other marine life—are waiting to eat them at their most vulnerable stage. <br />   Green sea turtles may not begin reproducing until they are thirty-five or forty. Even Kemp’s ridleys, probably the shortest-lived of sea turtles, first reproduce only at age ten or twelve. That’s a lot of time to “live in a dangerous world,” says Crowder. Last August, more than 200 dead sea turtles, mostly loggerheads, washed ashore on the Outer Banks, some with netting on them.</td> </tr></table><span class="text">  Today, Nichols splits his time between working in Baja and in northern California, where he writes papers and grant proposals and works for Wildcoast, the nonprofit he helped form that focuses on conservation in Baja (www.wildcoast.net). Widely recognized as the leading expert on Baja’s turtles, he frequently presents papers about his research at scientific meetings. He’s careful to thank all the fishermen, his assistants, and the people who made his work possible, which does not always sit well with some of his fellow scientists. One once congratulated him on a successful research presentation but told him he had spent too much time on the “little people.”<br />   These “little people” are the very people Nichols considers his colleagues. He says the best way to learn from them, and to teach them, is to do things a little bit differently from the norm. He doesn’t slide into town with shiny new equipment, drop anchor, work for a couple of weeks, and leave. Even if he had more money for research, he says, he’d rather employ more locals to conduct research and use local equipment than buy some fancy new boat.<br />   “These are the real heroes of sea-turtle conservation,” says Nichols. “They’re making decisions that are not popular, that are ridiculed by their families, and are really sincerely working to protect an endangered species that is food for most people. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in a community where I grew up and go against something that’s such a deep tradition.”<br />   That tradition appears to be slowly changing. Only two weeks after the first meeting on the pontoon, the hundred men of the fishing cooperative called a town meeting and announced that Banderitas Estuary will be the first turtle sanctuary in all of Baja California. They even went one step further, announcing their intention to go house to house, notifying poachers—who might be friends and relatives—that poaching will no longer be tolerated in their area. Government officials and the local branch of the navy were at the meeting to back them up.<br />   Farther up the coast, the fishing community of Punta Abreojos is virtually a reserve, says Nichols, because they so carefully manage their fishery and have recently begun to enforce the Mexican turtle ban. Two areas on the gulf side are also being considered for future turtle sanctuaries. Nichols hopes these will be the beginning of a string of protected areas around the coast.<br />   But these are only four communities out of hundreds around the coast. Even if the turtles do survive, they have to swim thousands of miles back to their nesting beaches, encountering nets, fishing lines, pollution, and hunters along the way. In the face of such challenges, Nichols has one vision that keeps him going. “Sometimes I imagine being an old man and sitting around with some of these fishermen that are my age with our grandkids, and seeing some turtles swim by in a place that’s beautiful,” Nichols says. “And I think, God, that’s going to be great.” . </span> <span class="text"><br /></span> <span class="text"> <br /></span> <hr width="80%" noshade="noshade" size="1" /><i><span class="text">Graber is a freelance writer and a reporter with the National Public Radio program Living on Earth. An audio report on Nichols and his research aired on the show in March. <br /> Jeffrey Brown, a 1997 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is a freelance photographer. For more information, e-mail <a href="mailto:jbrown@jeffreybrown.com">jbrown@jeffreybrown.com</a>. </span></i></td> </tr></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502033 at https://alumni.duke.edu The Fire Down Below https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/fire-down-below <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><span class="text"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A hot stone embedded in the middle of my belly. That’s what the nagging ache felt like when it asserted itself abruptly one evening—a distinctive new addition to the repertoire of usual gastric phenomena I’d experienced over decades of stomach ownership. Like anyone else’s,</span> at one time or another the old tummy has felt queasy, nauseated, acidic, cramped, gassy, growlingly empty, pleasantly full, and Thanksgivingly overstuffed. But not until that particular evening had it felt hot-stone-achy. This worrisome ache—along with volcanic belching—waxed and waned over a few weeks.</span></p><p><span class="text">When it finally became too intense, I visited my primary-care physician. He put me on a blessedly effective acid reducer that seemed to give relief, and he referred me to a Duke gastroenterologist. A subsequent test showing a faint sign of blood in a stool sample prompted her to order the Full Monty of tests on my middle-aged, and therefore suspect, gastrointestinal system. The resulting medical odyssey led me through three of Duke’s GI diagnostic labs, where, fortunately, the kind ministrations of some very sympathetic professionals made the experience about as pleasant as such procedures can probably be.</span></p><p><span class="text">In the upper GI lab, I gulped chalky liquid to make my stomach opaque to X-rays and swallowed fizzy crystals to inflate it. Barely holding back the mother of all belches, I watched with utter fascination the sloshings of my honest-to-God actual stomach on the video screen—for the first time really witnessing that heretofore invisible, and sometimes rebellious, pouch. The jovial technician and I also discussed my intestines. She volunteered that she’d seen lots of intestines in her time, and not one set looked like the neat assemblage portrayed in textbooks. She’d seen intestinal kinks, loops, knots, and all manner of other unruly arrangements.<br /> A visit to the ultrasound lab brought me to another nice technician, who showed me the shadowy outlines of my gallbladder and pancreas. We were both gratified to find them in their place—although I recall with some chagrin that my liver was pronounced slightly fatty.</span></p><p><span class="text">A week or so later came the piéce de résistance—the colonoscopy. The day before, I had undergone the rigors of overnight fasting, of drinking only clear liquids, and of ingesting a thoroughly pipe-clearing physic. That morning found me lying woozily on a table in the colonoscopy lab watching on a video monitor a Fantastic Voyage through my glistening, beige nether passage.<br /> As I waited for the final report on the various explorations of my internal labyrinth, I launched an exploration of my own into the impressive array of other diagnostic and treatment techniques that Duke gastroenterologists employ to understand and cure GI disorders. Such a broad capability is one reason the gastroenterology division has been ranked among the best in the country.<br /></span></p><table width="116" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="left"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 116px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/fir1.jpg" alt="" width="116" height="175" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p> </p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">McGrath and endoscope: examining via EUS (endoscopic ultrasound)</span></p></p></div></div></div><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">Gastroenterologists can diagnose and treat the rising tide of GI disorders using ever more effective and benign tools, including ultrasound endoscopes that can explore the GI tract from the inside, “photodynamic therapy” techniques that use laser light to activate chemicals that selectively destroy dysplastic cells in the esophagus, and computer-generated X-ray images, called “virtual colonoscopies,” of the intestine.<br /> Of these, perhaps the most revolutionary-sounding is the virtual colonoscopy, which theoretically enables radiologists to explore a colon for cancers, polyps, and other pathologies without using an invasive probe. The technique involves performing an X-ray CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis and using a computer to analyze the X-ray data to reconstruct the interior topography of the colon. A new technology is not necessarily a better technology. So, associate professor Don Rockey and his colleagues are leading a $7-million study to compare the accuracy of virtual colonoscopy with the venerable barium enema X-ray and the colonoscopy.<br /> “We’re comparing the three techniques to find which one reveals such abnormalities as cancers, polyps, colitis, and inflammation,” says Rockey, who heads the gastroenterology division’s Liver Center. “And, we’re also asking patients for their opinions on comfort, pain, and the likelihood that they would be willing to repeat the procedure.” After all, adds Rockey, even the most effective diagnostic technique is useless unless patients are willing to undergo it. </span></p><p><span class="text">As a radiologist, associate professor Erik Paulson M.D. ’85, who is also participating in the trial, agrees with the need for patient cooperation. He and his fellow radiologists are only too aware of the problems of persuading patients to undergo the colonoscopy screening that could save their lives. Says Paulson, “We know that if we can catch colon polyps early and remove them, we can greatly reduce or eliminate colon cancer. But despite the fact that screening works, lots of patients don’t get screened. Either their family doctor or internist doesn’t recommend it, or they don’t want to because of the discomfort.” Thus, says Paulson, virtual colonoscopy—more correctly called “CT colonography”—seems to offer a way to screen patients that is not, literally, a pain in the butt.</span></p><p><span class="text">Despite the technique’s patient-friendliness, CT colonography might not become widespread because of its complexity, says Paulson. “While there are many well-trained gastroenterologists and radiologists, we need to make sure that they can routinely interpret the results from CT colonography accurately. There may not be that many medical centers like Duke, in which gastroenterologists and radiologists work together so effectively.”<br /></span></p><table width="185" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 185px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/fir2.jpg" alt="" width="185" height="275" /><p class="caption-text"><p> </p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Baillie uses ECRP optics for noninvasive surgery on bile ducts.</span></p></p></div></div></div><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">While the clinical trial—funded by the National Cancer Institute through the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center—is only in the first of its four years, Rockey suspects that the results will not be a slam-dunk for any of the techniques. “Colonoscopy is probably the most accurate test compared to the X-ray methods, but the question is whether the X-ray tests are still accurate enough to make them useful. The fact is that there are simply not enough people to perform colonoscopies on patients with colon abnormalities,” he says. “Also, colonoscopies are very expensive, especially compared with barium enema X-rays, and there is a small but significant risk of complications such as perforation of the intestine. So, I suspect that the three will be complementary in many respects, and I would be very surprised if any of them becomes the exclusive method of choice.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Another exotic-sounding visualization technique being advanced by the Duke gastroenterologists is “endoscopic ultrasound” (EUS). Most ultrasound examinations, such as the one that revealed my gallbladder in all its glory, are conducted from the outside, with the same type of ultrasound probe used to see a future-junior in a pregnant mom’s belly. However, EUS sees from the inside. Basically, the technique involves threading an endoscope, whose tip holds an ultrasound transducer, either through the throat or rectum. Physicians can, thus, obtain an up-close sonar image of the GI tract that provides far better resolution. Says assistant professor Kevin McGrath, who participates in the division’s EUS research and applications, “We use EUS mainly for determining the stage of cancers, including esophageal, gastric, pancreatic, and rectal.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Determining a cancer’s stage of progression is a key to guiding treatment. In particular, the fact that ultrasound penetrates tissue means that physicians can also use it to evaluate abnormalities immediately adjacent to the GI tract. The EUS system allows physicians to do more than see a cancer, says McGrath; a needle aspirator allows the scientists to use real-time ultrasound guidance to biopsy abnormal lymph nodes around the stomach or pancreas or to sample any tissue that looks abnormal on a previous endoscopy or CT scan. The system even has a “Doppler” capability that allows physicians to detect flowing blood, allowing them to avoid blood vessels and minimize the possibility of bleeding from the biopsy. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">According to associate professor Paul Jowell, who directs the division’s EUS effort, “EUS has probably become the most accurate technique for staging of tumors within the wall of the GI tract.” However, he cautions, the new technique has brought with it a demand for new skills and training. “It’s a challenge to position the probe adequately, but even once you do that there are pitfalls to interpreting the images accurately. So, there is a significant learning curve to both the technique and the interpretation.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Jowell is leading a clinical trial in which the researchers are comparing EUS and CT scans with subsequent needle biopsies for diagnosing pancreatic cancers. “One problem with CT scans is that they require a reasonably sized mass before you can see it and biopsy it,” he says. “EUS seems to be able to detect smaller tumors. Also, with CT, there is often first a diagnostic study and then <br /> a second study for the biopsy. With EUS, <br /> we normally do both at the same time.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Technological advances will continue to improve EUS as a diagnostic tool, says Jowell. These improvements include smaller, more maneuverable endoscopes and a new instrument with forward-viewing optics, as opposed to current instruments that allow visualization only at an angle. He predicts that future EUS instruments will not only visualize tumors, but also be used as a method for injecting chemotherapeutic drugs or vaccines.<br /> Gastroenterologists are already routinely using one endoscopic treatment called “photodynamic therapy” (PDT) for abnormal GI tissues and cancers. In PDT, a light-sensitive chemical is first injected into the bloodstream. For a reason physicians still do not completely understand, cancerous or dysplastic tissues tend to accumulate more of the chemical than do normal tissues. The gastroenterologists next insinuate a fiber-optic-equipped endoscope into the GI tract near a tumor or such dysplastic tissue as found in Barrett’s esophagus. Flashing a low-power laser through the optical fiber, they expose the chemical to light, activating it to generate a highly reactive form of oxygen, which triggers a toxic chain reaction in the tissue, killing the tumor or dysplastic cells.</span></p><p><span class="text">Such therapy has proven especially useful in treating Barrett’s esophagus with high-grade dysplasia, says McGrath, and that’s important to preventing cancer. “Barrett’s esophagus is a known risk factor for esophageal cancer, which is probably increasing faster than any other type of cancer,” he says. Particularly worrisome, says associate professor Scott Brazer ’77, M.H.S. ’90, director of Duke’s PDT treatment and research program, is that many people with Barrett’s don’t know it. “Many who have heartburn symptoms alleviated with antacids may have Barrett’s. And about a third of patients with the disorder have no symptoms, perhaps because their esophageal tissues have become resistant to the acid. So, there are a frightening number of patients out there at risk for adenocarcinoma that don’t have any idea that they have it.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Brazer and McGrath are testing a new PDT technique for more effectively treating advanced cases of near-cancerous dysplasia. The method involves inflating a clear plastic balloon in the esophagus to flatten out the hills and valleys in the overgrown tissue, allowing a more uniform exposure to the laser light. The physicians have already completed the treatment phase of the clinical trial and are observing the patients to determine whether the “centering balloon”—invented by endoscopic PDT pioneer Gene Overholt at the University of Tennessee—will prove more effective at removing, or ablating, dysplastic tissue. </span></p><p><span class="text">Such advances are making PDT an even better choice over surgery, says McGrath. “Until now, treatment for high-grade dysplasia was often surgical removal of the entire esophagus, which is a major surgical procedure for patients. And because many of the patients were elderly, there was a significant risk of complications and even death. I think this trial will show that PDT is an effective treatment and will save patients with high-grade dysplasia from esophagectomy. However, we need to learn more about safety and other issues before we can say whether it will be useful in patients with lower-grade Barrett’s.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Among the most demanding of the gastroenterologists’ endoscopic techniques is the one with the mouthfilling title “endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography” (ERCP) —a division service directed by professor John Baillie and associate director Malcolm Branch, who is an associate professor. This technique with the huge title employs one of the tiniest endoscopic devices. ERCP involves threading an endoscope down the throat, through the stomach, and into the duodenum. Unlike other forward-looking endoscopes, the ERCP optics aim sideways, and the physicians use the imaging to seek out the “ampulla,” a tiny opening where the pancreatic and bile ducts exit into the intestine. Once they find the ampulla, the gastroenterologists thread a tiny catheter through it to inject X-ray dye, or to use small baskets to snag bile duct stones, electrocautery to open the duct, or cylindrical stents to prop the duct open.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">“For such procedures as retrieving bile duct stones and relieving certain types of malignant obstructive jaundice, ERCP is superior to surgery in its reduced complications and length of hospital stay,” says Jowell, who participates in ERCP procedures. “In general, it’s a one-day outpatient procedure.” He emphasizes that considerable skill is needed to master the art of threading the catheter into the ampulla in the confusing, turbulent depths of the intestine. “It sounds so straightforward because there’s this opening and you think you can just slide the catheter in. But the ampulla is surrounded by a muscle that often makes it difficult to thread the catheter into the duct. Once past that, there are curves in the duct and the pancreatic duct is often no larger than a pencil lead.” </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In fact, a study of fellows in training at Duke by Baillie, Jowell, and their colleagues revealed that ERCP training elsewhere is often inadequate. “The study showed that, to gain minimum competence in ERCP, a physician must do from a 180 to 200 procedures. But the average training number we found in most fellowships was twenty-five to fifty. We came in for a lot of heat about the study, but our data were indisputable,” says Baillie, who was awarded the 2001 “Master Endoscopist Award” by the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Many surgeons were initially resistant to ERCP, but most medical centers have now developed the same kind of productive partnership between gastroenterologists and surgeons that Duke enjoys. Baillie says, “There are surgeons depending on me and my team for what we do, and vice versa. Most diseases involving the liver, bile ducts, and pancreas need a multidisciplinary approach. For example, we’ll have patients come in with terrible pancreatitis and cholangitis—infection of the bile from a stone in the common bile duct. If such a patient were operated on during the illness, they would run a high risk of death. So, we’ll use ERCP to remove the stone and let the pancreatitis settle down; and later the surgeons can operate to remove the diseased gallbladder and the stones it contains, to prevent a recurrence of the problem.”</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">What’s more, Baillie says, ERCP will become even more important as researchers learn to better detect early malignancies of the bile duct and pancreas—an especially virulent cancer—by testing the cells that can be retrieved with the technique. “There are promising techniques that will allow us to progress from what used to be 25 percent sensitivity for picking up cancer, to 70 to 80 percent. Ultimately, if we can identify people at high risk really early, we may be able to change the natural history of the disease, by diagnosing the precursor lesion and finding a way to reverse it.”</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">While the endoscopic techniques used by the gastroenterologists are perhaps the most visible of their efforts, the division’s faculty are also conducting pioneering basic research to understand GI disorders including pancreatitis, hepatitis C, cancer, and Crohn’s disease. And they are operating specialized services such as the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinic not only to treat patients’ medical disorders, but also to counsel them on how to cope with their disease.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">So with all this expertise available, what of the “hot rock” lodged in my belly? The colonoscopy report pronounced my colon an “excellent preparation,” which made me rather proud. Annoyingly, however, the report’s characterization of my dynamic self as a “fifty-four-year-old man with dyspepsia” did make me sound like a cranky old goat, which I did not particularly appreciate. But gradually, as I took my gastroenterologist’s advice to lay off caffeine and aspirin, that hot rock shrank away to almost nothing. And, when I quit taking a joint-fortifying glucosamine supplement, the rock disappeared altogether.</span></p><span class="text"><span class="text"> <br /></span></span><table style="width: 1150px;" width="220" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 224px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/fir3.jpg" alt="" width="224" height="125" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Virtual colonoscopy: doctors Rockey, left, and Paulson are conducting trials on a new probe-free technique for screening cancer.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">According to associate professor Paul Jowell, who directs the division’s EUS effort, “EUS has probably become the most accurate technique for staging of tumors within the wall of the GI tract.” However, he cautions, the new technique has brought with it a demand for new skills and training. “It’s a challenge to position the probe adequately, but even once you do that there are pitfalls to interpreting the images accurately. So, there is a significant learning curve to both the technique and the interpretation.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Jowell is leading a clinical trial in which the researchers are comparing EUS and CT scans with subsequent needle biopsies for diagnosing pancreatic cancers. “One problem with CT scans is that they require a reasonably sized mass before you can see it and biopsy it,” he says. “EUS seems to be able to detect smaller tumors. Also, with CT, there is often first a diagnostic study and then a second study for the biopsy. With EUS, we normally do both at the same time.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Technological advances will continue to improve EUS as a diagnostic tool, says Jowell. These improvements include smaller, more maneuverable endoscopes and a new instrument with forward-viewing optics, as opposed to current instruments that allow visualization only at an angle. He predicts that future EUS instruments will not only visualize tumors, but also be used as a method for injecting chemotherapeutic drugs or vaccines.</span></p><p><span class="text">Gastroenterologists are already routinely using one endoscopic treatment called “photodynamic therapy” (PDT) for abnormal GI tissues and cancers. In PDT, a light-sensitive chemical is first injected into the bloodstream. For a reason physicians still do not completely understand, cancerous or dysplastic tissues tend to accumulate more of the chemical than do normal tissues. The gastroenterologists next insinuate a fiber-optic-equipped endoscope into the GI tract near a tumor or such dysplastic tissue as found in Barrett’s esophagus. Flashing a low-power laser through the optical fiber, they expose the chemical to light, activating it to generate a highly reactive form of oxygen, which triggers a toxic chain reaction in the tissue, killing the tumor or dysplastic cells.</span></p><p><span class="text">Such therapy has proven especially useful in treating Barrett’s esophagus with high-grade dysplasia, says McGrath, and that’s important to preventing cancer. “Barrett’s esophagus is a known risk factor for esophageal cancer, which is probably increasing faster than any other type of cancer,” he says. Particularly worrisome, says associate professor Scott Brazer ’77, M.H.S. ’90, director of Duke’s PDT treatment and research program, is that many people with Barrett’s don’t know it. “Many who have heartburn symptoms alleviated with antacids may have Barrett’s. And about a third of patients with the disorder have no symptoms, perhaps because their esophageal tissues have become resistant to the acid. So, there are a frightening number of patients out there at risk for adenocarcinoma that don’t have any idea that they have it.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Brazer and McGrath are testing a new PDT technique for more effectively treating advanced cases of near-cancerous dysplasia. The method involves inflating a clear plastic balloon in the esophagus to flatten out the hills and valleys in the overgrown tissue, allowing a more uniform exposure to the laser light. The physicians have already completed the treatment phase of the clinical trial and are observing the patients to determine whether the “centering balloon”—invented by endoscopic PDT pioneer Gene Overholt at the University of Tennessee—will prove more effective at removing, or ablating, dysplastic tissue. </span></p><p><span class="text">Such advances are making PDT an even better choice over surgery, says McGrath. “Until now, treatment for high-grade dysplasia was often surgical removal of the entire esophagus, which is a major surgical procedure for patients. And because many of the patients were elderly, there was a significant risk of complications and even death. I think this trial will show that PDT is an effective treatment and will save patients with high-grade dysplasia from esophagectomy. However, we need to learn more about safety and other issues before we can say whether it will be useful in patients with lower-grade Barrett’s.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Among the most demanding of the gastroenterologists’ endoscopic techniques is the one with the mouthfilling title “endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography” (ERCP)<br />—a division service directed by professor John Baillie and associate director Malcolm Branch, who is an associate professor. This technique with the huge title employs one of the tiniest endoscopic devices. ERCP involves threading an endoscope down the throat, through the stomach, and into the duodenum. Unlike other forward-looking endoscopes, the ERCP optics aim sideways, and the physicians use the imaging to seek out the “ampulla,” a tiny opening where the pancreatic and bile ducts exit into the intestine. Once they find the ampulla, the gastroenterologists thread a tiny catheter through it to inject X-ray dye, or to use small baskets to snag bile duct stones, electrocautery to open the duct, or cylindrical stents to prop the duct open. </span></p><p><span class="text">“For such procedures as retrieving bile duct stones and relieving certain types of malignant obstructive jaundice, ERCP is superior to surgery in its reduced complications and length of hospital stay,” says Jowell, who participates in ERCP procedures. “In general, it’s a one-day outpatient procedure.” He emphasizes that considerable skill is needed to master the art of threading the catheter into the ampulla in the confusing, turbulent depths of the intestine. “It sounds so straightforward because there’s this opening and you think you can just slide the catheter in. But the ampulla is surrounded by a muscle that often makes it difficult to thread the catheter into the duct.</span></p><p><span class="text">Once past that, there are curves in the duct and the pancreatic duct is often no larger than a pencil lead.” In fact, a study of fellows in training at Duke by Baillie, Jowell, and their colleagues revealed that ERCP training elsewhere is often inadequate. “The study showed that, to gain minimum competence in ERCP, a physician must do from a 180 to 200 procedures. But the average training number we found in most fellowships was twenty-five to fifty. We came in for a lot of heat about the study, but our data were indisputable,” says Baillie, who was awarded the 2001 “Master Endoscopist Award” by the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. </span></p><p><span class="text">Many surgeons were initially resistant to ERCP, but most medical centers have now developed the same kind of productive partnership between gastroenterologists and surgeons that Duke enjoys. Baillie says, “There are surgeons depending on me and my team for what we do, and vice versa. Most diseases involving the liver, bile ducts, and pancreas need a multidisciplinary approach. For example, we’ll have patients come in with terrible pancreatitis and cholangitis—infection of the bile from a stone in the common bile duct. If such a patient were operated on during the illness, they would run a high risk of death. So, we’ll use ERCP to remove the stone and let the pancreatitis settle down; and later the surgeons can operate to remove the diseased gallbladder and the stones it contains, to prevent a recurrence of the problem.”</span></p><p><span class="text">What’s more, Baillie says, ERCP will become even more important as researchers learn to better detect early malignancies of the bile duct and pancreas—an especially virulent cancer—by testing the cells that can be retrieved with the technique. “There are promising techniques that will allow us to progress from what used to be 25 percent sensitivity for picking up cancer, to 70 to 80 percent. Ultimately, if we can identify people at high risk really early, we may be able to change the natural history of the disease, by diagnosing the precursor lesion and finding a way to reverse it.”</span></p><p><span class="text">While the endoscopic techniques used by the gastroenterologists are perhaps the most visible of their efforts, the division’s faculty are also conducting pioneering basic research to understand GI disorders including pancreatitis, hepatitis C, cancer, and Crohn’s disease. And they are operating specialized services such as the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinic not only to treat patients’ medical disorders, but also to counsel them on how to cope with their disease.</span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">So with all this expertise available, what of the “hot rock” lodged in my belly? The colonoscopy report pronounced my colon an “excellent preparation,” which made me rather proud. Annoyingly, however, the report’s characterization of my dynamic self as a “fifty-four-year-old man with dyspepsia” did make me sound like a cranky old goat, which I did not particularly appreciate. But gradually, as I took my gastroenterologist’s advice to lay off caffeine and aspirin, that hot rock shrank away to almost nothing. And, when I quit taking a joint-fortifying glucosamine supplement, the rock disappeared altogether.</span></span></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="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</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/fir4.jpg" width="620" height="534" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/dennis-meredith" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dennis Meredith</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</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">It took considerable intestinal fortitude for our science writer to investigate, personally and passively, the latest ways in which gastroenterologists are plumbing our plumbing.</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502032 at https://alumni.duke.edu Duke Alumni Magazine https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/duke-alumni-magazine-2 <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" height="205" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"><tr><td height="71"> <table width="99%" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="47%"><span class="text"><img src="/issues/050601/images/head/head3.gif" width="279" height="36" border="0" alt="Duke Magazine-The Culture of the Gun" /></span></td> <td width="20%"> </td> <td width="33%"> </td> </tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" align="right" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0"><tr><td height="13" width="104"> <hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" size="1" /></td> </tr><tr><td width="100%" class="brwntextheader">Sea-turtle populations in Mexico’s Baja California are declining, despite a ban on fishing. Meanwhile, a researcher is working to protect this endangered species, whose consumption is rooted in custom.</td> </tr><tr><td width="104"> <hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" size="1" /></td> </tr></table></td> </tr><tr><td> <span class="text"><img src="../../images/dropcap/e.gif" width="25" height="27" align="left" />arly morning: A light breeze barely ruffles the waters in Banderitas Estuary. Flashes of silver dart underneath the turquoise motorboat. Along the shore, bright green mangroves dip their gnarled, entwined limbs into and out of the water. <br /></span> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="4" width="250" align="right"><tr><td height="151" width="320"><img src="/issues/050601/images/cons1.jpg" width="250" height="169" border="1" /></td> </tr><tr><td class="pulloutcredit" width="320" align="center"><b>Photograph by Jeffrey L. Brown</b>.</td> </tr></table><span class="text">   If someone knew where to look, it would be relatively easy to spot sea turtles swimming and eating in this calm arm of Magdalena Bay. On the Pacific side of Mexico’s Baja California, it’s the perfect spot for a meeting on sea-turtle research and conservation. Two Mexican fishermen point out where they’ve recently seen turtles to Wallace J. Nichols M.E.M.’92, known to everyone simply as “J.” Then they climb over the side of their fishing boat onto Nichols’ newest research pontoon. <br />   The vessel is a piecemeal affair. Nichols and some friends fashioned it from an old boat that had been used in the winter and spring to bring tourists out to see whales calving in the bay. He noticed it lying dormant in a vacant lot and negotiated a good deal with the owner. Atop the flat wooden boat, there’s a small stove, coolers of food, a table with a radio, a cot, and boxes to store personal belongings. Nichols, his Mexican assistant Adan Hernandez, and the two fishermen pull up plastic chairs around an Igloo cooler, top it with </span> <span class="text">Nichols’ hard plastic equipment case, and pull out a map of the region. <br />   </span> <table width="173" border="0" align="left" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="6"><tr><td align="center"> <hr size="1" width="165" noshade="noshade" /><table width="150" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0"><tr><td align="center" bgcolor="#999999" class="furtherhead">More Information</td> </tr><tr><td bgcolor="#CCCCCC"><a href="http://www.wildcoast.net" class="elevpxtextblk">Conservation Versus Culture Wildcoast <br /> (the conservation organization of which Wallace J. Nichols is the director)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.seachallengers.com/index.cfm?catID=8&itemID=54" class="elevpxtextblk">Chelonia: Return of the Sea Turtle <br /> (a children's book co-authored by Nichols)<br /></a><br /><a href="http://www.turtles.org" class="elevpxtextblk">Turtle Trax <br /> (a sea turtle tracking website)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.cccturtle.org" class="elevpxtextblk">Caribbean Conservation Corporation</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.bajalife.com/ecowatch/seaturtles.html" class="elevpxtextblk">Baja Life Online's Eco Watch <br /> (provides reporting on the Baja project and the participation of the local fishermen)</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.env.duke.edu" class="elevpxtextblk">Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.env.duke.edu/dukenvironment" class="elevpxtextblk">Dukenvironment magazine</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.seashepherd.org" class="elevpxtextblk">Sea Shepherd Conservation Society <br /> (protecting marine mammals)</a><br /><br /></td> </tr></table><hr size="1" width="100%" noshade="noshade" /></td> </tr><tr><td align="center"><img src="/issues/050601/images/cons4.jpg" width="171" height="275" border="1" /></td> </tr><tr><td align="center" class="pulloutcredit">Nichols tags them for migration and population research.</td> </tr></table><span class="text">In its own way, this is an official meeting, or at least an introductory one. The fishermen head the cooperative that recently received the rights from the government to control fishing in part of the estuary. They had noticed Nichols’ research pontoon floating in their area, and his work, while not threatening, excited more than mild curiosity. The evening before, they stopped by the American field school Nichols uses as his base in Puerto San Carlos. Nichols told them about his most recent research project and its goals and invited them to join him on the water this morning. They agreed. He hopes to persuade them that Banderitas Estuary is the ideal site for Baja’s first sea-turtle sanctuary.<br /></span> <span class="text">  Sea turtles are a crucial part of food and culture in Baja California, despite Mexico’s ban on killing and consuming the animals. Baja California is also one of the most important Pacific feeding grounds for four species of endangered sea turtles. These two facts are why Nichols has dedicated his life to researching and protecting turtles in the area.<br /></span> <span class="text">  He started working with sea turtles in 1992, but his fascination with turtles began back when he was a child. “I always loved dinosaurs,” he says, “and turtles are like living dinosaurs.” Sea turtles, in fact, appeared on the planet about 150 million years ago, while dinosaurs roamed the Earth. They survived to see humans invade their waters. But whether they’ll continue to survive is the current urgent question: All species of sea turtles in the world are endangered, faced with threats from fishing nets, pollution, and hunters who prize them for their shells, meat, and eggs.<br /></span> <span class="text">  This fascination with turtles grew after Nichols completed his first graduate degree in natural-resource economics at what is now Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. In 1992, he worked with the Caribbean Conservation Corporation in Costa Rica on a nesting beach—walking the shoreline, counting turtle eggs, and tagging turtles, and connecting with the local community in developing a protection strategy. <br /></span> <span class="text">  With friend and colleague Jeff Seminoff, Nichols wanted to continue working with these captivating endangered creatures, so the two hatched a plan to visit all the turtle-nesting beaches in Mexico. The next year, after beginning their Ph.D. work at the University of Arizona, the pair packed up a truck and drove for four months, visiting fifty-two research and conservation sites, from Texas to Belize, from Guatemala to California. They met researchers and concerned citizens and made contacts that would last into their careers as turtle researchers.<br /></span> <table border="0" cellpadding="6" width="200" cellspacing="8" align="right"><tr><td height="89" class="text" bgcolor="#CCCCCC"><b><img src="../../images/spacer.gif" width="250" height="5" /><br /> TURTLES OF BAJA</b><br /><br /><img src="/issues/050601/images/cons3.jpg" width="118" height="76" border="1" align="left" /> The rich coastal waters off Baja California provide food for four species of endangered sea turtles: black turtles, also known as East Pacific green turtles; loggerhead turtles; olive ridleys; and hawksbills. Leatherback turtles have one nesting site near the southern tip of the peninsula.<br /> Black turtles, which feed in bays and estuaries around the peninsula, are one of the main species on which Nichols’ research focuses. They nest in southern Mexico, in the state of Michoacan, and swim more than a thousand miles to feed on algae, sea grass, and occasionally invertebrates such as crabs. Most of the turtles caught in Magdalena Bay are black turtles.<br /> Out in the Pacific, loggerhead turtles migrate all the way from Japan to feed on pelagic red crabs in the deep ocean waters near Baja’s shores before returning to their natal beaches to nest. Catching these turtles to study them is more difficult than throwing out a net and waiting, as Nichols does to catch black turtles in the bay. Instead, he travels miles out in the Pacific on a small motorboat and searches for a small white bird that rests on the backs of basking turtles. When he and his assistants find one, they dive into the water and wrestle the turtle over to the boat.<br /> Of the two other species that feed near Baja, olive ridleys are plentiful enough that Nichols says the need to study them is not as urgent. But the numbers of hawksbills have dwindled so significantly that scientific research is extremely difficult. <br /> Olive ridleys, with their mottled green-gray carapaces, or shells, have been recovering in Mexico due to beach protection and the dynamics of their nesting sites and migration patterns. Like the loggerheads, they spend time offshore in the deeper waters of the Pacific. <br /> Hawksbills live around the Pacific, but the ones that feed in Baja come from nesting sites in Mexico. Populations of these animals have been decimated because of their beautiful shells, so finding one swimming in Baja’s waters today is extremely rare.</td> </tr></table><span class="text">  “It was kind of a reconnaissance effort,” says Nichols. “It seemed like a setback in terms of time, but invaluable in terms of education and contacts and friendships. Looking back, it was a genius move—but at the time it just seemed like a lot of fun.”<br /></span> <span class="text">  What he learned during these travels was that Mexican biologists and researchers were doing a remarkable job protecting turtles on their nesting beaches. The populations, though, continued to decline, and Nichols saw that little research effort was focused on the animals’ time in the water, where they spend 99 percent of their lives. He decided this would be his focus, and that he would concentrate on Baja California. “There were some references to the area in earlier literature,” he says, referring to a scientific paper written on Baja’s turtles and the fishery in the 1970s. “There was some documentation on the legal fishery. It was clearly an important feeding ground. But there was not much contemporary research on the animals there. There was clearly a big gap in both protection and knowledge of the animals.”<br /></span> <span class="text">  He went back to his Ph.D. committee with a proposal to study Baja’s sea turtles. The committee, though, was skeptical. They said the region had basically been fished out back when there was a legal turtle fishery in the area, and that there wouldn’t be enouanimals to conduct scientific research.<br />   Nichols asked for a year in which to prove that a scientific study was feasible. He went out in the Gulf of California with fisherman Juan de la Cruz, who claims to have caught more than 3,000 turtles with his harpoon. Together, as dawn broke, they caught a big black turtle. “This convinced us that we could do it,” says Nichols. “We could go out on the water and catch turtles. It wasn’t a lot, sure, but it was one—I definitely felt like it was the beginning of something.” He also worked with Antonio and Bety Resendiz, at the time the only Mexican sea-turtle researchers in the area, who had little funding or support from the Mexican government.<br />   Nichols proved that there were enough turtles around to conduct a scientific study. Since then, he has gone even further, proving that Baja remains a vital feeding ground for four species of endangered sea turtles and that, in fact, tens of thousands of turtles still live in the region.<br />   In the past, turtles swimming in the rich waters off Baja’s coast numbered not just in the thousands, but probably in the millions. The turtle fishing industry, once simply a part of life, became a huge commercial export business in the Fifties and Sixties, but it soon crashed. In the 1980s, the government tried to manage the turtle fishery and limit the catch, but it was already too late. The number of turtles continued to drop rapidly. In 1990, the Mexican government banned the killing and eating of sea turtles altogether, even those caught as by-catch or washed up dead on shore.<br />   </span> <span class="text">Despite the ban, communities all over Baja continue to prize turtles as a delicacy. The region today is likened to the American Wild West—and is just as difficult to govern. Small fishing communities and slightly larger towns and cities are separated by sometimes hundreds of miles of dry, dusty roads. More than 2,000 miles of coastline wind in and out of inlets around the peninsula. Only five government officials are responsible for all resource-management enforcement in the southern half of Baja—everything from poaching to forest management to protecting endangered species.<br />   </span> <table width="206" border="0" align="left" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2"><tr><td> <hr width="325" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr><tr><td align="center" class="text"><span class="brwntextpullout">“Scientific research wasn’t enough. Now what we’re doing is a lot of social sorts of things, understanding the economics and policy issues as well as marine science.”</span><br /><br /><span class="pulloutcredit">—Wallace J. Nichols</span></td> </tr><tr><td> <hr width="325" noshade="noshade" class="tanline" /></td> </tr></table><span class="text">Nichols began his work by measuring, weighing, and tagging all turtles he caught to study populations—figuring out how big the turtles living there were, at what ages they arrived, and how long they stayed in the region. He did DNA studies to provide clues linking Baja’s turtles with specific nesting beaches. He wanted to know exactly where the turtles were coming from and where they were going, so in 1997 he and the Resendizes put a satellite tag on a loggerhead turtle that a local named “Adelita.” They tracked Adelita as she made her way all the way across the Pacific to Japan. Nichols was so excited about what he saw that he had a friend set up a <a href="http://www.cccturtle.org">turtle-tracking website</a> so that people around the world could watch Adelita’s journey (<a href="http://www.cccturtle.org">www.cccturtle.org</a>).<br />   Scientists had long suspected that turtles born in Japan make their way to Baja to feed, but his study was the first to prove conclusively the Japan-Baja connection in detail. He also showed that these turtles, upon reaching reproductive age, take months to swim thousands of danger-fraught miles to their natal beaches.<br />   As he continued his research, Nichols discovered something else: Conservation on nesting beaches was working. More turtles were able to safely lay eggs, and more of those eggs hatched, with more hatchlings reaching the water. But if those turtles made it to Baja, many of them never made it out again. “It’s kind of like blocking off the kitchen door,” he says. “They come here to feed, then they’re killed as they’re eating. They never leave the kitchen.”<br /></span> <span class="text"> <br /><a href="conserve2.html"><i>• continues on page two</i></a></span> </td> </tr></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502031 at https://alumni.duke.edu Ministry of Ethics https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/ministry-ethics <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><p><span class="text">James Joseph has a word to describe those who take their concerns about private morality and wield them like a weapon against individuals.</span><span class="text"> He calls them “virtuecrats.” And while the former U.S. ambassador to South Africa is as concerned as anyone about ethics and morality—more concerned than most, actually—he is just as concerned that the focus on private virtues be matched by an equal emphasis on public values.<br /></span> <span class="text">“In this society, we are beginning to see that people who have been demanding that their leaders act morally as individuals are now beginning to demand that their institutions act ethically,” Joseph says. “We have an opportunity now to enlarge that conversation —to talk about ethics and government, ethics and business, ethics and social change, ethics and protest. The moment is basically right.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Joseph has experience in knowing when the moment is right. His office at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy provides just the latest in a long line of opportunities for him to expound and act upon his long-held ideas of an ethical society, from his days as a civil-rights organizer in Alabama in the early 1960s to his appointment by President Clinton as ambassador to the post-apartheid South Africa of Nelson Mandela. He has spent the past year as professor of the practice of public policy studies at the Sanford Institute and as leader-in-residence at its Hart Leadership Program. In February, he traveled halfway around the world for four months in South Africa, a schedule necessitated by his alternating semesters at Duke and at the University of Cape Town, and by the project for which one could say he has been preparing since his boyhood: the Center for Leadership and Public Values, based in Chapel Hill and Cape Town.</span></p><p><span class="text">“I think I have a point of view and a perspective that ought to be part of the national conversation,” he says, “and so I will want to find some time to begin to translate these ideas into the sort of workable concepts that the public can identify with.” That translation has taken the form of his “Leadership and Public Values” class, a book on ethics and public life, and the nascent Center for Leadership and Public Values, which will be an independent center affiliated with Duke and the University of Cape Town. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">It is no accident that leadership is the common denominator. Joseph has been learning and teaching about the subject for decades, in arenas far removed from the classroom. “I have decided to focus on leadership because of my experience in all three sectors of society: business, government, and civil society,” he says. “I know a lot of people whose experiences could be beneficial to emerging leaders. One of the best things I could do is bring those people together, emerging leaders with experienced leaders, so leaders could learn from leaders. I’m not developing leaders—I’m identifying leaders who are emerging and who have the potential to provide leadership in a much larger way. And I’m identifying experienced leaders who are models of public accountability and efficiency, who can be not only models but mentors for emerging leaders.</span></p><p><span class="text">“That’s why I’m establishing the center. The focus is not on what can the university teach these leaders. It’s what these young leaders can learn from experienced leaders. Best practices: What did you consider when you were mayor to be best practices in terms of the way you operated as a mayor, and the way in which you responded to your constituents as mayor? Even more important, how do you avoid burnout? What do you do for spiritual and intellectual renewal?”</span></p><p><span class="text">While he doesn’t hold himself up as the model of leadership, pointing instead to other leaders, from Nelson Mandela to philanthropist-industrialist J. Irwin Miller, Ambassador Joseph is one of those who has been through it, and whose going through it holds the lessons emerging leaders can follow. He has come a long way from the Jim Crow South of his youth, when the rules of segregation were clear and brutal—separate and unequal facilities for education, transportation, and recreation. Whites only. No Colored allowed. </span></p><p><span class="text">In his hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana, where he grew up in the late 1930s and through the 1940s, this was a way of life. It was still a way of life when he was a student at Yale Divinity School, where, upon earning an internship to spend a year in a college chaplaincy, he had to request an assignment to an integrated school. And to his dismay, it was still a way of life when he got his first job after seminary—a teaching post at historically black Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.</span></p><p><span class="text">Alabama had been feeling the pressures of change for nearly a decade when Joseph arrived there with his wife and month-old son in 1963. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1954-55 had shown the success of non-violent social protest and catapulted a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight. Freedom Riders had taken Greyhound buses into the heart of Dixie’s segregated travel laws, facing a bus bombing in Anniston, Alabama, and beatings in Montgomery. The Birmingham movement had survived the dogs and fire hoses of Sheriff Bull Connor and a bombing directed at King and his lieutenant, Fred Shuttlesworth. Even in Tuscaloosa, the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood had prompted bantamweight governor George Wallace to stand in the door of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to fulfill his pledge, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”</span></p><p><span class="text">But there was no real movement in Tuscaloosa. Despite the currents of social change swirling around the South, it was clear that the city remained a stagnant pool of racism. For downtown, where blacks worked and shopped, a new courthouse was being built—with one particular design feature that was, for this young professor, the last straw.<br /></span><span class="text"> <br /><span class="text">“They were starting to put up the Colored and White signs,” Joseph says. He and three other local ministers wrote a letter to the editor in protest and—not knowing quite how else to sign it—called themselves the Tuscaloosa Citizens Action Committee. Once the letter was published, no one knew who the group was. “We decided, well, we ought to do something. One thing led to another, we had a big mass meeting, and we organized a real movement and demonstrations and successfully desegregated a lot of things.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">He recalls the Tuscaloosa Citizens Action Committee’s first boycott as a lesson in ethics. Tuscaloosa’s white downtown merchants were feeling an economic pinch, but this was in part because a group of young blacks were “policing the boycott by tearing up any bags of anything they saw blacks buying. It was clear that we were so successful because there were enforcers to make sure that people didn’t buy, and the ethical question was, what is the primary good here? The success of our movement, so we can get jobs for people? Or is the process of nonviolence so important a statement that we cannot allow the use of violence, even against property, to enforce nonviolence?</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“Even then, my concern with ethics was not just a concern with social justice, but it was also with the ethics of protest. What standards ought to apply to trying to deal with change in the community?”<br />It’s a concern whose roots reach as far back as the Star Light Baptist Church in Opelousas where his father was the minister. “His approach to ethics was inspirational ethics, but rule-oriented ethics—very strict, what you should not do,” he says. “I began to feel early on that there had to be more to ethics than just what I could not do. I began to get concerned that when people talked about ethics—not only my father and his church, but in the white churches and everywhere else—they really were talking about dancing, and going to the movies on Sunday, and playing cards. They were not talking about the injustices that really characterized the predicament of the black community. So from a very early age, I began to make a distinction between personal ethics and social ethics.” </span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">After graduating from Southern University, Joseph decided to go to divinity school “to develop a more sophisticated capacity for moral reasoning, so I could probe and pursue those questions that I had been asking ever since I was a kid.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">He has asked those questions over and over again throughout his career, whether teaching and organizing in Tuscaloosa, serving as a college chaplain at the Claremont Colleges in California while also protesting the Vietnam War, or working in the corporate world as a business executive and philanthropic leader. “My feeling is that wherever you are professionally, if you bring with you certain commitments and certain values, you can find the space to act on them, whether you are in a traditional orthodox institution or fully engaged in a social-change institution,” he says. “So I never was just the organizer of the local civil-rights movement. It is something I did while I was teaching at Stillman. I never was just the Vietnam War protestor, I was chaplain of the Claremont Colleges and it is where the moral obligations of my faith took me. And then I left Claremont and I went into business, and it was for a corporation that allowed me to raise the ethical questions both within the corporation, in terms of what it means to be responsible as a business, and on the outside, in terms of what it means to be responsible to the communities and the society in which you do business.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">One important component of Joseph’s plans for the Center for Leadership and Public Values is the opportunity for experienced leaders to mentor emerging leaders. Indeed, the center will be focused on helping to develop those relationships. Joseph says he benefited from such a relationship when he was hired to help organize the family and corporate philanthropy of the Cummins Engine Company, which “was at that time the most socially responsible corporation in the United States.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“The opportunity to work for J. Irwin Miller really set my career on the path that has led to the many things I have done since,” he says. “If I became diplomatic, then it’s because of the influence of Irwin Miller—I was much more confrontational before. Once I went to Cummins, J. Irwin Miller used to talk to me about really getting to the levers of change, the boardrooms, and one had to be willing to be diplomatic in order to do that. I began to see the way he exerted influence; he had been an adviser on civil rights to Kennedy and Johnson, and he was chairman of the National Council of Churches at the time of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Here was this businessman, this successful, highly admired businessman who produced a quality product and made a profit, but who was very influential as a humanitarian as well. </span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“So I began to think differently about how you leverage power and influence change. It took me in another direction. I had been on the outside trying to influence change, and once I got the opportunity to be on the inside, I didn’t change my values because I was in business; I just took those same values with me and used a different vehicle to try to achieve the same purpose. Running through everything I have done is this commitment to the well-being of people and improving the quality of life for people, so whether it was business or it was government, nothing changed about me. I just changed the vehicle through which I worked.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">In 1973, just ten years after Tuscaloosa, Cummins Engine Company gave Joseph the opportunity to go to South Africa. The company had been invited to open a diesel-engine plant there, and Joseph had already helped found the anti-apartheid organization TransAfrica. “We were debating whether or not Cummins should indeed take advantage of that opportunity,” he says. “The divestment discussion was taking place, so we needed to take a careful look. I wanted to go anyway, to take a look around and gather ammunition for the war we were waging against apartheid.” He went and stayed three weeks. </span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">While he was there, he landed on the front pages of South African newspapers for a speech condemning apartheid, with his photograph—a successful black American businessman standing on a South African beach posted with signs reading “Whites Only. No Dogs Allowed.” He had to leave immediately because of numerous death threats received after the article’s appearance. Cummins did not build the engine plant, and Joseph did not return for seventeen years.</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">With each new career opportunity, Joseph’s message about ethics could reach a wider audience and effect greater change. He took a job as Undersecretary of the Interior in Jimmy Carter’s administration, the first of four presidents he would serve. When his term was over, he was invited to apply for a position at the Council on Foundations. Again, his mentor, J. Irwin Miller, made a difference in his direction, referring to the opportunity to work with the philanthropic organization as a “ministry.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“He’s the one who really put into words what I had been feeling,” Joseph says. “He said, ‘The ministry to the wealthy and powerful is much more difficult than anything you’ve done, but I think it’s what you’ve been preparing for, and you ought to seriously consider whether you should do it.’ ” </span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“Everything I’ve ever done has been a form of ministry,” says Joseph, explaining why Miller’s words had stayed with him. “I never served a regular parish, but I’ve always retained my ordained standing in the church, and I saw what I was doing as my sense of ministry. Whether I was at Cummins Engine Company, the Department of the Interior, or wherever.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">He became president of the Council on Foundations, a job he describes as “a spokesperson for benevolent wealth. But not just a spokesperson for—a spokesperson to. I brought to the Council on Foundations and to the field of organized philanthropy the consideration of values, raising questions about the fundamental purpose of what they do, and how they do it, and the relationship between means and ends.”<br />The point, he says, was to make a distinction between philanthropy and charity. “Charity is aimed at ameliorating the consequences of something, and philanthropy has an opportunity to get at the causes. I began to try to get people to look beyond the fact that people have needs, and to say, why do they have these needs?”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">In his Hart Leadership Program Distinguished Speakers Series lecture last fall, he used a familiar parable to illustrate the point. “The most often repeated example of compassion is the story of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. A traveler comes upon a man, who had been badly beaten, on the side of the road. He stops and provides aid and comfort. But suppose this same man traveled the same road for a week and each day he discovered in the same spot someone badly beaten. Wouldn’t he be compelled to ask who has responsibility for policing the road? His initial act of compassion must inevitably lead to public policy. It is this progression from private compassion to public action that is often missing in our discussion of private virtue. Genuine compassion requires that we not only ameliorate consequences, but that we also seek to eliminate causes.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Nowhere does Joseph see this being as essential as in the area of race relations in the United States today. Speaking before the campus controversy over an advertisment in The Chronicle, he said, “I use the word ‘reparation,’ which is emotional and sensitive to some people, but I’ve made it clear that I am not necessarily talking about just some form of cash payment. Reparation is an attempt to redress the problems of the past in some significant way. I’d settle for putting an educational floor under everybody, so everybody has a chance to compete. That, for me, is reparation. </span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“When I use the word ‘reparation,’ I don’t mean to give every African American $20,000, like we did the Japanese [survivors and descendants of World War II internment camps]. But I certainly consider affirmative action a form of reparation, and affirmative action as it was originally intended, not as it is now stereotyped. That is a recognition, as I said in the [Martin Luther King Jr. service] sermon, that if you break a person’s leg and you put them on the starting line of a hundred-yard dash and say, you have an equal opportunity, it’s a joke. But, if you help to mend that individual’s leg that you’ve broken and then you say, you now have equal opportunity, that’s the kind of reparation I’m talking about.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Joseph doesn’t actually bristle when he is asked whether pervasive racism and a clear political divide in the United States would be ameliorated by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission akin to that put in place in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. But he is clear about the inadequacies of such a solution for this country’s problems. “The truth that the South Africans wanted to deal with was the truth about the past. What we need to deal with is the truth about the present,” he says. “If we’re going to talk about truth and justice and reconciliation, rather than just truth and reconciliation or rather than just justice and reconciliation, we have to make sure that Americans understand that race still matters. Most Americans now are saying, because they know at least one black American who is doing well, that race no longer matters.</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“I think the word ‘reconciliation’ sounds too much like the human-relations committees that were established in the late Fifties and early Sixties. There was one in Tuscaloosa when I went there, and I went to one of their meetings, where people sat around and talked and they considered that ‘reconciliation.’ And in the meantime, folks were still prohibited from eating at restaurants or getting a drink of water at a clean water fountain or getting an education. They were sitting around talking about improving human relations when what black people really wanted was access to jobs and opportunities.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Talking didn’t work then, and Joseph says it isn’t what’s needed now. “People want to sit around again and have reconciliation groups and let people tell their stories. There may be a few individuals who are willing to do that, and it may be helpful for some who have already been successful. They can talk about, ‘when I tried to join a private golf club, I ran into discrimination.’ But they’ve already made it. They’ve got the money to join that golf club. What we really need to talk about is the majority of the black community, and how you benefit the majority. How to reconcile them with the rest of society is by equipping them with skills and making sure they have an opportunity to compete. It’s not a conversation. It’s action.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Action is what Joseph wants to continue to facilitate through his work on leadership and ethics. He returns to the idea that public values—what he calls “macroethics”—are increasingly becoming a part of the larger dialogue. “I argue in my ‘Changing Role of Ethics’ lecture that, increasingly, ethics is power. Business corporations are beginning to see that being ethical is good business,” he says. “Whether they see it from the language of self-interest or they are driven by something transcendent doesn’t really matter. What I am interested in is their acting ethically. Once you engage them from the language of self-interest, you may be able to take them to a much nobler and higher level. In the process, some of those companies begin to look at the larger need of the community, and they begin to realize that the success of the corporation may be dependent upon the quality of life for the communities in which they operate.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Even as Joseph stresses the need for “public values appropriate for an interdependent world that is integrating and fragmenting at the same time,” as he put it in his Hart lecture, he does come full circle to the responsibility of and the necessity for the ethical individual to act. “In the midst of all the reasons for pessimism,” he said in that speech, “I think I hear what Albert Camus described as the flutter of wings. I think I see what Robert Kennedy called a million points of daring.”</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">Back in his office, as he points out a picture on the wall of him and his second wife, Mary Braxton Joseph, with President Mandela, and a notepad filled with reminders of things to do when he arrives in South Africa the next week, the ambassador reflects on the private virtues that can lead to these public values.</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text">“The individual’s responsibility is to remain committed to a core set of values, wherever you are, and to act on those wherever you are, rather than simply to say, I’m in business now and so, while I have these individual concerns, my job now is as a business executive,” he says. “Well, you need to focus on where you are. You begin where you are. You try to find some space where you are to change where you are, and that is the responsibility of the individual. There’s the opportunity always to work outside, too, to find some time to volunteer, to work with some sort of change organization. You find yourself doing both, if you remain committed to your values.”<br />That commitment is clearly not impossible. Joseph’s own career is the proof. And the philosophy that he began to develop in that Opelousas church, the pursuit of which took him to divinity school, has given him a pulpit where he can lead by example, where every speech and every action can be seen as a sermon on ethics, and the congregation grows larger than he might ever have thought it would.</span></span></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="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</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/min1.jpg" width="620" height="943" 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/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/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</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">From business to government to private life, Ambassador James Joseph has been striving to act ethically and develop new models of leadership.</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502030 at https://alumni.duke.edu A Matter of Honor https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/matter-honor <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><span class="text">Last semester, a longtime Duke professor had an academically unsettling experience. For a freshman seminar, he had assigned a paper on the writings of Louis Armstrong. One of the fifteen papers that came back to him didn’t seem quite right. It was “beautifully written,” he recalls. But it dwelled on the generic topic of jazz and American culture. And it came from a student who hadn’t exactly performed with distinction in class.</span></p><p><span class="text">Suspicious of the paper’s origins, the professor brought it to the university’s associate dean for judicial affairs, Kacie Wallace ’89. Through a keyword search, it took Wallace less than five minutes to find the paper on an Internet term-paper site. The student had even kept the original title. It’s not tough to find Internet assistance in those moments of academic crisis: One site offers “more than 25,000 topics to choose from”—in the category of post-Civil War U.S. history alone, those topics range from “President McKinley and Expansionism” to “Mexican-American Soldiers in World War II”—along with “custom writing services.”</span></p><p><span class="text">The head of the faculty’s Academic Council, Peter Burian, observes that cheating has been a pedagogic problem at least since students assembled in Plato’s academy. And ancient authors traded charges of plagiarism. (Burian is a classical studies professor.) But there seems to be a fresh focus on the problem. In the 1960s, one in four surveyed students admitted to cheating once or more on a test in the previous year. By 1993, that figure had doubled. And given the Internet addiction of today’s students, there’s concern about whether the ease of electronic cutting and pasting will aggravate the problem.</span></p><p><span class="text">That concern was given new weight this spring, when some 122 University of Virginia students were accused of copying from one another’s term papers in an introductory physics course. As many as half of them are expected to face the only penalty available for cheating: “permanent dismissal from the university,” or loss of degrees awarded in earlier years, as the so-called “single sanction” rule demands. In force for almost 160 years, Virginia’s honor system “directly expresses the principle of student self-governance,” according to a statement from the Honor Committee. </span></p><p><span class="text">“‘Honor’ at the university is far more than a word or a student organization. The Honor System provides students with tangible benefits enjoyed every day. You may write checks with local merchants simply by showing your student I.D., and you may take unproctored exams in the comfort of your room or in a pavilion garden. Students at the university live in at atmosphere unfettered by distrust and temptation.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Technology, though, can heighten temptation. And the irony in this episode is apparent: The same technology that fostered plagiarism allowed its detection. A computer program devised by the physics professor—a program that detects similar word patterns in term papers—uncovered the copying. As a New York Times article reported, “In an era when people swap music over the Internet, forward e-mail messages, and send texts to each other with a single keystroke, the lines between collaboration and theft have blurred.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Penny Rue ’75, dean of students at the University of Virginia, says student habits with the Internet have “made it more difficult for faculty to educate students about what constitutes proper research techniques, how to cite different kinds of work appropriately, how to give suitable attribution for ideas. This is a serious challenge to all universities in the information age.” But even given the fracas over physics, she doesn’t see a serious challenge to the venerable honor system. “I believe this episode has affirmed the honor code and its importance to the university,” she says, adding that Virginia’s alumni “consistently cite the honor system as one of the most important features” of their campus experience. </span></p><p><span class="text">“The level of conversation about this incident at virtually any university gathering shows the seriousness with which the community views the honor system. There is disagreement about the single sanction, but that is natural, and shows that students still care very much about the system and want to make it their own.”</span></p><p><span class="text">In the 1999-2000 academic year, Duke took part in a multi-institutional survey project meant to show whether, in fact, students cared very much about academic integrity. With support from the John Templeton Foundation, the project was led by the Center for Academic Integrity, a national consortium of 200 colleges and universities that is based at Duke and is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Four hundred Duke students were invited to participate in the survey; 242 replied. Faculty members were also surveyed.</span></p><p><span class="text">The Duke survey showed a fairly small number of transgressions in several areas—plagiarizing a paper; turning in a paper based on information obtained from a term-paper “mill” or website; copying from other students with or without their knowledge; cheating on a test or helping someone else cheat on a test. But it did point to a range of other problem behaviors. Forty-five percent of the responding students reported that they had engaged in unauthorized collaboration; 38.5 percent in copying a few sentences without footnoting them in a paper; 37 percent in falsifying lab or research data; 24 percent in getting questions or answers from someone who had already taken a test; 21 percent in receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment; 19 percent in fabricating or falsifying a bibliography. </span></p><p><span class="text">Probably the biggest survey surprise came in attitudes toward cheating. Most students frowned on copying from others with or without their knowledge, or writing a paper for another student, or plagiarizing in any fashion. But only 24 percent gauged unauthorized collaboration as a serious form of cheating. Receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment and falsifying lab or research data received around the same ranking. Just 40 percent viewed copying another student’s computer program as serious; the figure for the more general category of turning in work done by someone else was a less-than-reassuring 44 percent. While most students aren’t rampantly cheating, a lot of them have a remarkably casual attitude toward cheating.</span></p><p><span class="text">Part of that attitude may reflect what Missy Walker ’03 refers to as “ambiguity in faculty expectations.” Walker, chair of the student-run Honor Council, says that in math and engineering classes in particular, problem sets completed as homework are a substantial part of a student’s grade. In the absence of explicit faculty guidance, students will be quick to realize the advantages of working in tandem. She notes that students charged with plagiarism routinely say they didn’t know the conventions of citation. </span></p><p><span class="text">Cheating arises not just in an atmosphere of ambiguity, but in a culture committed to getting ahead. In a survey by Who’s Who Among High School Students, 80 percent of high-achieving high school students admitted to having cheated—a figure suggesting that it’s not just the struggling student who’s the problem student. Eighty-three percent said cheating was common at their school; 53 percent did not believe that cheating was a serious ethical violation. Some anecdotal indications point to the same problem. Students at a Chicago high school, including some of the top scholars in the school and the student-body president, were found to have cheated in an academic decathlon in 1995. They had used a pilfered test to memorize the answers. (Newspaper accounts also noted that in the same year, the president of the school board was jailed for income-tax evasion.)</span></p><p><span class="text">Such reported behavior is consistent with findings from the work of Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a professor of organization management at Rutgers University. McCabe has conducted surveys with tens of thousands of students over the past decade. He was the principal investigator for the most recent study; he also ran two previous surveys at Duke in 1990 and 1995. </span></p><p><span class="text">“I believe there’s less cheating at the more selective, more competitive schools,” he says, “though there is more cheating among the more competitive students. Most people feel that where there’s a high grade point average, there’s a lower amount of cheating, that it’s an inverse relationship. Actually, it’s more complicated than that. Some students at the bottom are cheating out of necessity to keep parents off their backs, to keep up their grades in order to stay eligible for scholarships. And some students at the top are cheating owing to the intensity of the competition. They want to go to the top professional schools, and a hundredth of a point on their GPA, as they see it, might make the critical difference. They’re just driven.”Duke students were driven—though hardly with great interest or energy—to install the current honor code in the spring of 1993. Just 2,600 undergraduates voted in the campus election, and just 52 percent supported the honor code. Characterizing the code as “modest in its expectations,” President Nannerl O. Keohane says it “has yet really to take root on campus.” She adds, “It is true that all students sign it, it is routinely posted and printed, and it does bind students to demonstrate integrity in the pursuit of their intellectual endeavors and to encourage their peers to do the same. However, for many students and faculty members, the honor code is peripheral, elective, and unclear.”</span></p><p><span class="text">The recent survey backs up those assessments: Sixty-two percent of the student respondents rated “the average student’s understanding of Duke’s policies concerning student cheating” low or very low. Even higher percentages of faculty rated the faculty’s understanding of those policies low or very low.</span></p><p><span class="text">If the honor code is peripheral, part of the reason may be that it speaks to an age of chivalry and elitism—to values that have fallen out of the favor in broad sectors of the academy. Elizabeth Kiss, director of the Kenan Institute, acknowledges that the traditional honor-code schools are often rooted in “notions of gentlemanly honor.” As she sees it, though, “You could make a very strong case for an honor code from a diverse, democratic vision of an academic community. </span></p><p><span class="text">“One of the things that’s really powerful about an honor code is that the students develop the rules and help to adjudicate them. Even if you look at schools that haven’t moved to a full-blown honor code, one of the things they feel very strongly about is student involvement in the process. Students are living under the rules that they themselves helped to frame and are responsible for upholding. I think that’s a very powerful expression of the democratic ideal. There are some schools—and I think this would be an interesting model for Duke to consider—where students every year have to reformulate the honor code, so that the process is always fluid and students are always a part of it.” </span></p><p><span class="text">A “cheating culture,” Kiss says, is defined by an us-versus-them attitude, where it’s either students against other students or, more typically, students against the faculty. “What you find in very well-functioning honor-code communities is a sense that students feel they have a stake in the system. They feel this is their code.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Kiss says immersion in a strong honor-code environment can change individual student behavior, and can in fact be life-changing. And McCabe’s research seems to confirm that: For the student who cheated in high school and goes on to an honor-code university, “there’s a high probability that he’ll be extremely reluctant to cheat, or at worst will engage in nickel-and-dime cheating, not serious cheating.” McCabe says that peer influence exerts a stronger influence than an individual sense of honor. “At campuses with strong honor codes, particularly those that are smaller in size and where it’s hard to remain anonymous, the reason you don’t cheat is that it’s socially unacceptable. Other students will know who the cheaters are, and they will look down on you. They’ve been given a tremendous amount of freedom in this environment, non-proctored exams and so on. They’re primarily responsible for maintaining that environment, and they are responding to the high level of trust that exists.”</span></p><p><span class="text">It’s a good thing if students are sufficiently malleable to develop new habits: McCabe has found that cheating in high schools is quickly migrating to the Internet. “And while Internet cheating is not yet endemic in college, watch out,” says The Philadelphia Inquirer in reporting on the latest McCabe findings. “Today’s high-school students surely will bring it with their backpacks.”</span></p><p><span class="text">As Kiss puts it, “There is strong evidence that the so-called invisible curriculum is especially important for students—what the peer culture is like, what messages they’re getting from their peers. And if you ask students who graduate from honor-code schools what was most important about their college experience, the honor code is one of the first things they cite. People talk about it as a touchstone of their professional lives; this is something they will keep thinking about.” The college years, then, can be key years of moral development.</span></p><p><span class="text">Exactly, says divinity school professor Stanley Hauerwas. An academic community should be less concerned with teaching values—which he says can be reduced to arguing over the attributes of cherry ice cream as against chocolate ice cream—than about teaching virtues. Classroom objectivity is pure cowardice, he says. “I think the modern university that says we want to train students to make up their own minds is simply self-deceptive. No teacher teaches to have students make up their own minds. I tell my students that they don’t have minds worth making up until I’ve trained them.”</span></p><p><span class="text">The faculty, in his view, have let go of important notions of authority in favor of a reliance on expertise—“a peculiar modern invention,” as he calls it, that substitutes command of information for wisdom. For his part, Hauerwas is drawn to the master-apprentice relationship historically associated with the craft trades, where “the truth and truthfulness become absolutely essential for carrying on,” he says. “Moral life is about the formation of virtuous people by tradition-formed communities.</span></p><p><span class="text">“People always ask me, Where are these institutions that still produce people of virtue? And I always say, [the Marine training camp at] Parris Island and medical schools. Medical schools are still quite extraordinary in the kind of moral training they provide. For example, one of the fundamental commitments of medicine is that you are to care for a patient in a way that transcends all other considerations. So this could be a vile child molester, and yet you as the physician have to take care of their bad gall bladder. Now that’s really extraordinary moral training. You must do this to be honored, to be a member of the medical world. I think the Marines are really very good at it too. I’m a pacifist, but as a person committed to non-violence, I think we have to be at least as intentional in our training of people as the Marines are.”</span></p><p><span class="text">In a Duke talk he gave a year ago, Hauerwas said that cheating is “a more serious crime than murder for those engaged in the activities of learning and teaching.” He went on to argue that “Because judgments must be learned through apprenticeship to master, some dead, some living, we cannot and do not use others’ work without due acknowledgment, because that would betray our activity.” Due acknowledgment of someone else’s work, then, “is a way of indicating who are the necessary members of the conversation I am participating in to acquire the same kinds of nuanced judgments that I find exhibited in their lives.” </span></p><p><span class="text">Hauerwas defends honor codes as necessary because “we need one another to be good, and that is what we gesture to one another through an honor code.” Good communities and good institutions “need to find ways to remind themselves of what they are about as well as to give initiates a sense of those forms of life that make the community what it is.” <br /></span></p><p><span class="text">Doesn’t it demand a huge cultural shift to demand that students turn in other students who violate a code of conduct? In the Duke survey, just 18 percent of the responding students said they would report a cheating incident to an appropriate authority. “Of course, it’s a big thing to ask,” says Hauerwas. “But I can’t imagine life going on in the university without that requirement. Our work would be impossible if we didn’t believe in it.”<br /> One often-cited example of a community that gives frequent expression to honor is Davidson College, whose president is Bobby Vagt M.Div. ’73. Vagt says the practice of honor was first codified at Davidson back in the mid-1800s; the focus was on preventing lying, cheating, and stealing. Over time, the responsibility has shifted in the direction of students, and honor has come to be understood “more in terms of positives than negatives.” </span></p><p><span class="text">The Davidson honor code encompasses the social and academic spheres alike. “Life is of a single piece. We see the transition from the classroom to the dorm room as seamless in terms of personal comportment,” Vagt says. He says the code is “embedded” in the community, and that it’s one of the top reasons students cite for attending Davidson. There are deliberate conversations about honor, discussions organized by the student Honor Council, and public signing ceremonies. “Rather than having a set of rules of what we can’t do, we really define what our expectations are for each other. It goes beyond self-scheduled exams; it’s why people leave book bags hanging around unattended, why doors are left unlocked.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Davidson’s code requires student to refrain from cheating, including plagiarism. It also specifies that “every student shall be honor-bound to report immediately all violations of the honor code which come under his or her observation; failure to do so shall be a violation of the honor code.” Vagt calls the reporting requirement “the hardest piece of the honor code,” but he says it works: The college had four honor-code cases in the fall semester, and in two of the cases students turned in other students.</span></p><p><span class="text">But according to Rutgers researcher McCabe, “turning in other students doesn’t happen often,” even at schools with strong honor codes. “The ‘rat clause,’ as students lovingly refer to it, varies from the requirement that students should confront another student or report the transgression, to a recommendation to report, to a requirement to report but with no penalty for failing to report.” The national trend, he says, is for colleges and universities to reduce the reporting pressure placed on students. And where student reporting does go on, it’s typically because someone was affected directly by another’s cheating—perhaps because a grading curve was thrown off, or the student’s own test answers were being copied.</span></p><p><span class="text">Even The New York Times Magazine’s “Ethicist” columnist, Randy Cohn, isn’t big on student reporting requirements. In a late-April column, he wrote: “While it is reasonable to ask students to regulate their own behavior, little good will come of compelling them to police the behavior of their schoolmates. For one thing, few will do so. Our society has real ambivalence about informing. To punish only the occasional kid for failing to inform is arbitrary and capricious, and it undermines the sense of the school as a just community.”</span></p><p><span class="text">“Some people would say that because it’s so hard for students to report, we should drop reporting requirements from honor codes,” says the Kenan Ethics Institute’s Kiss. “There are others who would say—and I’m inclined to be in this group—that it’s really important to have that requirement there. The service academies have started to distinguish rather sharply between breaking the code by not reporting someone and breaking the code by cheating. If used to be that if somehow they found out that you knew somebody had cheated, you could be expelled. They’re starting to recognize that this is an incredibly hard moral dilemma for a young person. But at the same time, having that obligation in the code may be a very important way of at least getting a student to confront someone—not necessarily to turn them in, but to confront them and say, you’ve put me in a horrible position because I’m obligated to report you and yet I feel like I can’t report you out of a sense of friendship or loyalty.” </span></p><p><span class="text">An obligation to report carries a strong deterrence value against cheating, Kiss says. “Not only are students afraid that somebody will rat on them, but, on a more noble level, they’re thinking that they don’t want to put their fellow students in this really horrible situation. So you’re creating a kind of community ethos.”</span></p><p><span class="text">There may be gentler paths toward a community ethos. The University of Maryland at College Park has a code that does not include provisions for non-proctored exams or obligate students to report any cheating they might observe. But it does provide for significant student involvement in the resolution of alleged cases of academic misconduct among students. And it encourages student involvement in promoting academic integrity. Gary Pavela, Maryland’s director of judicial programs and student ethical development, says student members of the Honor Committee lobbied the academic deans to make academic integrity a prime topic in classes. A decade ago, Maryland had no honor code.</span></p><p><span class="text">Pavela characterizes the atmosphere then as “a little like the Cold War, where the faculty were designing ways to prevent academic cheating and the students treated beating the system as a game. Honor codes and honor councils can challenge the attitude that’s fairly common in high schools and some colleges that academic integrity is sort of us versus them, faculty versus students.” The code was finally put in place at the suggestion of students serving on the institution’s governing board.</span></p><p><span class="text">As he ponders an emerging interest in academic integrity, Pavela speaks in Hauerwas-like language, emphasizing the campus as a place of enlightenment. He sees that interest, in part, as a reaction to the view that “particularly at large institutions, faculty members have vacated the fields of ethics and character development, that they feel very uncomfortable talking about those things in their discipline.” Students, then, have the sense “that they’re missing something, that this isn’t a trade school, and they are interested in hearing out faculty on broader and deeper issues. There’s almost a spiritual interest in finding meaning.”</span></p><p><span class="text">“The implementation of an honor code is incremental,” Pavela says. “We may evolve into the full traditional model here. Maybe the next step is non-proctored exams; we’re expressly heading in that direction. But it won’t work to simply say, tomorrow we’re having non-proctored exams. It’s not a matter of an edict. It’s a matter of creating a culture. The more students hear the faculty and their own peers talking about wanting to be at a place where honor is valued, the less academic dishonesty there will be.”</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Part of creating such a culture is being clear about expectations. In his introductory “Electric Circuits” course, Gary Ybarra, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering, gives his students a written statement about honor. The statement spells out examples of academically dishonest behavior that he’s encountered—submitting another student’s work, submitting a lab report for which the lab exercise was never performed, accessing another student’s computer files and transferring data.</span></p><p><span class="text">Ybarra, who sits on the Undergraduate Judicial Board, makes it clear in the statement that he feels an obligation “to confront those individuals whose work is questionable.” He notes that “the very nature of engineering is collaborative,” and that “creativity is often generated from sharing ideas and discussing methods of attacking problems.” But he offers a specific warning against “showing to others any written solution to a problem that is to be turned in for a grade.” (In his research, Rutgers’ McCabe has noted a dramatic increase in student collaboration on assignments where the professor had explicitly asked for individual work. “While some professors strongly encourage such work, others forbid it, and some fail to delineate their expectations,” he and a co-author write in Change magazine. “In the face of such confusion, many students choose the path of least resistance and elect to work together.”)</span></p><p><span class="text">Ybarra says that when he began teaching at Duke in 1983, he didn’t make it a habit to stress academic-integrity issues. After taking several cases to the judicial board, he decided to outline his expectations in writing. He also says he takes practical steps to combat “wandering eyes,” such as giving different versions of the test in a test sitting. </span></p><p><span class="text">Because of careless work habits and time-management issues, even good students can succumb to the cheating temptation, Ybarra says. “The engineering curriculum in particular is very demanding. Some students who haven’t planned very carefully how to manage their time can experience panic as the due date for an assignment nears. And their judgment can change. That can happen to anyone, from the academically challenged to the academically gifted.” </span></p><p><span class="text">But a lot of professors are reluctant to take cheating incidents to the judicial board, he says, preferring instead to deal with those incidents “in-house”—perhaps by failing the student in the assignment. They may feel that judicial-board procedures are too cumbersome and time-consuming. “It’s a hassle not only in terms of time and energy, but the very purpose of it is sickening,” Ybarra says. “It’s unpleasant for everyone involved; it’s unpleasant for the student, it’s unpleasant for the professor.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Professors also may think that the likely punishment won’t fit the offense. The “precedented sanction,” in his phrase, is a two-semester suspension from the university. He offers the examples of a student who is a chronic copier of others’ work, and another student who, before turning in homework, talks through a single problem with his classmates. Those are very different infractions, but they may not be treated differently, he says. “I’ve seen a student who copied lab reports all semester and got a two-semester suspension. I’ve had a student who turned in ten lines of computer code identical to another person; working out those ten lines of code might have taken an hour or less. And they got the same sanction. That’s a problem.”</span></p><p><span class="text">The judicial board adjudicated eighteen academic-dishonesty cases in the fall semester. (A hearing panel consists of three students, one academic dean, and one faculty member or a student-affairs administrator from a pool of Undergraduate Judicial Board members.) Kacie Wallace, the chief judicial-affairs officer, says, “I know we can’t have absolute consensus on what the sanctions should be. But I do think we should probably be doing more to talk with faculty about what the sanctions are. And if there’s not agreement, then let’s change them. We’re not wedded to particular sanctions; it’s just sort of what has evolved over the years.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Wallace also sees the system in more flexible terms than Ybarra. If there is a finding of academic dishonesty, whether it’s plagiarism or cheating, “the discussion will start at a two-semester suspension,” she says. “They will look at the nature of the violation. Is it egregious, or is it less of an infraction? Is it just a quick lapse in judgment, or did the student really take some time to prepare for this infraction? They’ll also look at what was going on with the student at the time of the violation. If there are lots of personal issues—family issues, illness—then the board may take that into consideration. Very few cases will result in what we call a suspended suspension, which means there’s no actual time away from school. Maybe 30 to 40 percent of the cases will result in a one-semester suspension. The majority probably result in a two-semester suspension. But we’ve also had two expulsions this year, permanent expulsions for academic dishonesty, in very egregious cases.”</span></p><p><span class="text">In both of the recent expulsion cases, the students “were doing very well in school,” Wallace says. “There’s the assumption that plagiarism and cheating are often done by the students who are really struggling to make it at Duke. But I think in a significant number of these cases, it’s the more driven, the more competitive students who are trying to get the edge. There’s a lot of parental pressure to make all A’s. There’s a lot of peer pressure to succeed. There’s a lot of pressure to get into a particular law school or medical school.” And that felt pressure can make the judicial hearings all the more wrenching, she says. “Students and their families are very outcome-driven. And sometimes it feels like the education itself is less important than what the final transcript shows, what the GPA shows, what the résumé shows. Rather than seeing it as an educational intervention, which is how we would like to see the process, they see it as affecting where the student goes next. We’re looking for an educational opportunity and they’re looking for an outcome.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Cheating infractions range from bringing in notes to a test to stealing a test to changing answers and then submitting the test for re-grading. While plagiarism cases have been on the rise, instructors are more effective in combating it. Duke decided against deploying a university-wide service, available commercially, that automatically compares submitted papers to every document available on the Internet. Still, says Wallace, some academic departments have been identifying plagiarism-combating search engines—like Turnitin.com, which advertises an online service that makes “determining the originality of any paper a breeze.” </span></p><p><span class="text">She says, “In the Eighties, when I was in school, you had to do more work to cheat. You had to steal tests, you had to collaborate with somebody, you had to look on someone else’s paper. Now, it’s easier to do it in the confines of your own room.” Cheating and plagiarism have become more an act of intellectual gamesmanship than an exercise in physical labor, she says. Academic dishonesty may not be more rampant or more egregious than in the past, but it’s stealthier. She mentions a couple of cases where students interested in previewing tests have tried to break into a faculty member’s computer account. </span></p><p><span class="text">Wallace acknowledges faculty concerns about the time investment involved in investigating academic-integrity cases. Some faculty members will simply hand her a paper, tell her it doesn’t resemble the student’s work, and ask her to investigate it. Others will spend hours in Internet searches. “None of us likes to take the time” to probe for dishonesty and to show up for a hearing, she says, “but it’s an important thing” for an academic community. And she says she wishes there were broader understanding that presumably punitive sanctions are intended also to be educational. “If you hear what goes on in those board hearings, if you hear the struggles these students are having, a lot of times what they need is a break from school, a break to sort of re-prioritize, to figure out what’s going on before they come back and refocus. We’ve done a lot of psychological counseling, academic-skills counseling, reflection papers.”</span></p><p><span class="text">There’s been a lot of reflecting on the part of the faculty. That’s been satisfying to Missy Walker ’03, chair of the Honor Council, who, in an open letter to the faculty, said they served—consciously or not—as role models for students. “Between August and May, we are…literally and figuratively taking notes.” In all four of her fall-semester courses, she says, instructors discussed the honor code in class and placed it on their syllabi. And at the initiative of the student Honor Council, freshman orientation last fall included, for the first time, an honor-code “signing ceremony.” Walker says she and other members of the Honor Council have overheard fellow students talking about the honor code; one student, she says, challenged another’s casual stance toward cheating by reminding him that he had “signed that thing saying you wouldn’t cheat.”</span></p><p><span class="text">In April, the executive committee of the Arts and Sciences Council and the Engineering Faculty Council endorsed a several-part resolution on academic integrity. The joint resolution calls for the creation of an Academic Integrity Council, which would develop outreach programs, look for other ways to promote integrity, and monitor the impact of technology on academic dishonesty. The resolution encourages faculty to clearly communicate a concern for honesty to their students, and to educate their students about the nature of misconduct in their discipline. Educational approaches might include printing a statement about the honor code on course syllabi, asking students to write out and sign an honor pledge on assignments, serving as a role model by citing sources in lectures, or providing clear guidelines regarding collaboration. </span></p><p><span class="text">There are also suggested prevention measures: assigning narrow and specific research topics and collecting drafts; changing exams and problem sets annually; and reducing the temptation to cheat by having students sit at a distance from each other or producing alternate versions of an exam. </span></p><p><span class="text">One goal targeted by the resolution is clarifying academic-integrity policies. In the ambiguous language of the current faculty handbook, instructors are either “expected” or “required” to report academic-integrity violations to the judicial board. And—though it may be seen as inconsistent with having an honor code—they are required to proctor exams. The resolution supports a first-time publication embracing all aspects of academic integrity.</span></p><p><span class="text">According to Walker, “Obviously, there is a point in every Duke student’s life where he or she will no longer be taking exams, a point where the primary focus of his or her life will no longer be in writing papers for introductory classes. It is at that point where the most vital ethical decisions will be made: What does a signature mean? What is a verbal statement or a promise? What should I do? These and others are the questions we will face—as researchers, politicians, journalists, or stay-at-home parents.”</span></p><p><span class="text">Maybe an honor code can be considered a “utopian” idea, Walker says. Or maybe “a game.” She says she prefers to think of it as practice for a thoughtful life. <br /></span> <span class="text"> <br /></span></p><table style="width: 1150px;" width="150" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 150px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/honor2.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="147" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Illustration by Walter Stanford.</p></div></div></div></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span class="text">The Duke survey showed a fairly small number of transgressions in several areas—plagiarizing a paper; turning in a paper based on information obtained from a term-paper “mill” or website; copying from other students with or without their knowledge; cheating on a test or helping someone else cheat on a test. But it did point to a range of other problem behaviors. Forty-five percent of the responding students reported that they had engaged in unauthorized collaboration; 38.5 percent in copying a few sentences without footnoting them in a paper; 37 percent in falsifying lab or research data; 24 percent in getting questions or answers from someone who had already taken a test; 21 percent in receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment; 19 percent in fabricating or falsifying a bibliography. </span></p><p><span class="text">Probably the biggest survey surprise came in attitudes toward cheating. Most students frowned on copying from others with or without their knowledge, or writing a paper for another student, or plagiarizing in any fashion. But only 24 percent gauged unauthorized collaboration as a serious form of cheating. Receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment and falsifying lab or research data received around the same ranking. Just 40 percent viewed copying another student’s computer program as serious; the figure for the more general category of turning in work done by someone else was a less-than-reassuring 44 percent. While most students aren’t rampantly cheating, a lot of them have a remarkably casual attitude toward cheating.</span></p><p><span class="text">Part of that attitude may reflect what Missy Walker ’03 refers to as “ambiguity in faculty expectations.” Walker, chair of the student-run Honor Council, says that in math and engineering classes in particular, problem sets completed as homework are a substantial part of a student’s grade. In the absence of explicit faculty guidance, students will be quick to realize the advantages of working in tandem. She notes that students charged with plagiarism routinely say they didn’t know the conventions of citation. <br /></span></p><table style="width: 1150px;" width="200" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="0" align="left"><tbody><tr><td><table style="width: 1128px;" width="200" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" align="left"><tbody><tr><td class="text" colspan="2" bgcolor="#CC99CC"><strong><img src="../../images/spacer.gif" alt="" width="250" height="5" /><br />ACTIONS AND ATTITUDES</strong><br /><br />   <strong>These are some of the results from an Academic Integrity Survey at Duke released in the spring of 2000. Four hundred students were surveyed, and 242 responded for a response rate of 61 percent. Roughly equal numbers of the respondents were sophomores, juniors, and seniors.<br />Percentage of respondents who have engaged in the following actions once or more than once since coming to Duke:</strong></td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Unauthorized collaboration</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">45%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying a few sentences without footnoting them in a paper</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">38.5%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Falsifying lab or research data</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">37%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Getting questions or answers from someone who has already taken test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">24%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">21%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Fabricating or falsifying a bibliography</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">19%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying material, almost word for word, from any source and turning it in as your own work</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">11% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying from another student during a test/exam without their knowledge 11%</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54"> </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying another student’s computer program</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">9% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Helping someone else cheat on a test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">8% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Plagiarizing a paper in any way using the Internet as a source</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">6% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Cheating on a test in any other way</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">6% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Turning in work done by someone else</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">5% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Using non-permitted crib notes (or cheat sheet) during a test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">4% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying from another student during a test/exam with their knowledge</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">4% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Writing or providing a paper for another student</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">2% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Turning in a paper based on information obtained from a term-paper “mill” or website</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">2% </td></tr><tr align="center"><td class="text" colspan="2" bgcolor="#CC99CC"><em><strong>Percentage of respondents who consider the following forms of cheating serious:</strong></em></td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying from another student during a test/exam with their knowledge</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">85% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying from another student during a test/exam without their knowledge</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">83% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Writing or providing a paper for another student</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">79% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying a few sentences without footnoting them in a paper</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">77% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Cheating on a test in any other way</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">75% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying material, almost word for word, from any source and turning it in as your own work</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">74% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Plagiarizing a paper in any way using the Internet as a source</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">70% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Turning in a paper based on information obtained from a term- paper “mill” or website</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">69% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Getting questions or answers from someone who has already taken test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">67% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Helping someone else cheat on a test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">66% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Using non-permitted crib notes (or cheat sheet) during a test</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">51% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Turning in work done by someone else</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">44% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Copying another student’s computer program</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">40% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Fabricating or falsifying a bibliography</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">38% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Falsifying lab or research data</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">28% </td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Receiving substantial, non-permitted help on an assignment</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">27%</td></tr><tr><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="221">Unauthorized collaboration</td><td class="text" bgcolor="#CC99CC" width="54">24%</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p></td></tr></tbody></table><p> </p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</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/honor1.jpg" width="620" height="867" alt="Illustration by Walter Stanford" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/robert-j-bliwise" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert J. Bliwise</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</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">“There’s the assumption that plagiarism and cheating are often done by the students who are really struggling to make it at Duke. But I think in a significant number of these cases, it’s the more driven, the more competitive students who are trying to get the edge.”</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502029 at https://alumni.duke.edu A Dean for Medicine https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dean-medicine <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" width="631"><br /><br /><br /><table width="110" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="2" align="right"><tbody><tr><td width="320" height="151"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 112px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050601/images/dean.jpg" alt="" width="112" height="250" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p><span style="text-align: -webkit-center;">Coming home: cardiologist Williams back to lead the medical school.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Sanders “Sandy” Williams M.D. ’74 has been named dean of Duke’s School of Medicine and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke Medical Center, effective July 1. Currently, Williams is chief of the division of cardiology and director of the Rayburn Center for Molecular Cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.<br /> “I am delighted to have Dr. Williams return to Duke to assume this critical leadership position. He is one of the rare outstanding ‘triple threats’ in academic medicine. Sandy is an internationally recognized research cardiologist, a highly regarded clinician, and an excellent teacher,” says Ralph Snyderman, chancellor for health affairs.</p><p>The selection of Williams comes after a national search, following the departure of Dean Edward Holmes last September. Holmes is now vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the medical school at the University of California, San Diego.<br /> Williams earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1970. After receiving his medical degree from Duke, he completed a residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and then a cardiology research fellowship at Duke. He joined Duke’s faculty in 1980 as an assistant professor of medicine, physiology, and cell biology. After a 1984-1985 stint as visiting professor in the biochemistry department at Oxford University, he returned to Duke and in 1986 became an associate professor of medicine and microbiology. <br /> In 1990, Williams left for a position as professor of internal medicine, biochemistry, and molecular biology, and chief of cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 1995 and 1996, he was a visiting scientist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Last year, he helped develop the Center for Biomedical Invention (CBI), which develops new devices, drugs, and procedures to improve prevention or therapy for heart disease and can be transferred to pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies for further development and application. He also led the Dallas Heart Disease Prevention Project, an innovative program of research in the genetic epidemiology of cardiovascular disease.<br /> Williams has won numerous awards for his research and teaching in cardiovascular disease. In 2000, Duke’s School of Medicine presented him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award. He has more than 150 medical and scientific publications and holds five patents for his work.</p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502028 at https://alumni.duke.edu Under the Gargoyle: May-June 2001 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/under-gargoyle-may-june-2001 <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"><span class="text"><br /><br /><img src="/issues/050601/images/gar.gif" alt="" width="108" height="160" align="left" border="1" />How ought people come to terms with difficult, traumatic, even horrifying, histories? The issues are as pressing as they are vexing. Can individuals find a way to atone for the past? What role does repentance play? Can collective groups, such as nations, repent, atone, or forgive? What would such repentance and forgiveness look like? Is it possible to heal memories, or are they bound to be the fertile sources for mobilizing vengeance in the future?<br /> Such issues haunt the moral, political, and religious landscapes of some of the most complicated sites of contemporary life, including the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, South Africa. Yet they also continue to haunt us in the United States of America. The United States has not yet come to terms with the difficult, traumatic, and horrifying aspects of its histories—especially in relation to slavery and racism.<br /> Americans are haunted by this issue in diverse ways, yet it often remains as toxic waste lurking under the surface of other discussions. Rarely is the issue brought to explicit focus for discussion and debate—and, perhaps most importantly, constructive action in the future.<br /> Duke’s campus has spent the latter half of the second semester explicitly trying to grapple with the question, thanks to the inadvertent prompting of The Chronicle’s decision to publish, without editorial comment, David Horowitz’s advertisement opposing reparations to African Americans for slavery. Horowitz had intentionally set a Catch-22 for the more than fifty universities where he tried to place the ad: If they rejected the ad, it was confirmation that “political correctness” reigns; if they accepted the ad, then his views were aired without needing to pass the normal process of evaluating an op-ed’s quality.<br /> Many members of the Duke community were justifiably outraged by both the content of the ad and The Chronicle’s actions in publishing it without any comment. Some of the debate has focused on journalistic ethics, issues of free speech, and the criteria that should or should not be used in accepting advertisements. Many have also questioned whether The Chronicle adequately seeks to represent all of the Duke community in its work.<br /> But the debate has turned more determinatively to the content of Horowitz’s ad, and the issue for which “reparations” has become the shorthand: Has the United States come to terms with the effects of slavery and racism on us all? This way of phrasing the question already puts me at odds with Horowitz, for I assume that the issue is not about what “we” (i.e., white Americans) owe to “them” (i.e., black Americans). It also puts me at odds with extremists on the other side, who perpetuate a “we-they” dichotomy through a superficial demonizing of “white” America. Rather, I am convinced that the crucial issue is how all of us who live in the United States should come to terms with the legacies of slavery and continuing racism.<br /> This is the crucial issue because it has been so persistently evaded by the dominant strands of American culture, a culture that systematically enslaved persons for three centuries and then followed that with state-enforced discrimination and oppression for yet another century. Americans have not yet grappled with the consequences of such state-sponsored oppression, not only on the direct black victims and their descendants, but on the broader moral, political, economic, and religious landscape. When a colleague from South Africa is asked to contrast race relations in South Africa and the United States, he says simply, “In South Africa, we have them. In the United States, you don’t. In South Africa, race relations are complicated, difficult, and involve struggle. But at least we recognize what needs to be dealt with.”<br /> In the United States, proposals for reparations, and those that oppose them, often turn to financial considerations and their feasibility—including who should get what from whom. Those are important issues, but they too quickly restrict the scope of analysis. I suggest that, drawing on the wisdom that can be found by including a theological analysis, we broaden the framework by initially changing the word from reparations to repentance. Both words focus on how to repair the damage, the brokenness, that has occurred in the past. How might people who have directly or indirectly benefited from slavery, and who continue to depend on the effects of racism, express repentance for the horrors of the past as well as the present?<br /> After all, both Jewish and Christian traditions have long emphasized that any apology or regret over wrongdoing in the past—what those traditions call sin—must be accompanied by concrete deeds of repentance. These deeds are not a prerequisite to forgiveness, but they are requisite to showing that one understands the implications of forgiveness for the future. Any attempt to offer an apology and receive forgiveness that does not take into account the necessity of repentance is cheap and offensive. Repentance is crucial for discovering costly forgiveness that makes remembrance a moral virtue rather than a source for vengeance.<br /> Of course, it is crucial that the repentance not be predicated on a presumption of infinite guilt. Too often people are made to feel as if no repentance will be enough, that forgiveness will be deferred indefinitely. Even with this risk, however, we need to put at the center of our discussions how repentance might be expressed for a system of slavery that oppressed millions and that continues to find personal and institutional embodiments of racism.<br /> How might repentance be expressed? How might reparations be conceived to begin to heal the wounds of the past? I suggest four layers of perspective that might indicate that repentance and reparations are a serious issue for all of us in America. <br /> First, there needs to be a serious and truthful accounting for the past and the realities of the present. One of the most offensive features of Horowitz’s advertisement is its use of half-truths, distortions, and deceptions designed to advance a pernicious ideological agenda. I do not presume that such a “truthful accounting” will be easy, or that there will ever be an agreed narrative of what happened to whom and when. But a willingness to search for the truthfulness of the past is critical to a more hopeful and just future.<br /> Second, and closely related, there needs to be publicly articulated means of remembering truthfully in hope. Why, for example, are there so many memorials throughout the United States remembering the sacrifices made in wars, the traumas of the Holocaust, but very few that bear witness to the horrors of slavery? What might a memorial in Washington, D.C., look like that remembered the past of slavery and the realities of racism—not as a source for mobilizing vengeance, but as a way to offer hope for the future?<br /> Third, we need a renewed commitment to eradicating racism in both its personal and institutional forms. Jewish and Christian traditions have long recognized that sin cannot be unlearned overnight, that repentance is a gift given by God to cultivate holiness over time. So there need to be concrete actions that seek to make “race relations” in the United States a reality rather than that lurking toxic waste below the surface.<br /> Fourth, some form of financial compensation needs to be addressed as one means to show concrete repentance. Might such a clear, official statement by the United States government offer a clear recognition of the unique burdens of slavery and racism, and a way to move forward?<br /> Each of these layers of perspective has been part of the work of South Africa’s efforts to come to terms with its past, especially through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. South Africa’s efforts have not been perfect by any means, but in their explicit willingness to engage moral and religious dimensions in their public debates, they offer a sign of hope—and a word of judgment on this country, which has done so much less in a century and a half than South Africa has in less than a decade.<br /> During the spring semester, Duke’s observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday focused on a semester-long examination of “remembrance, reconciliation, and restitution” in South Africa in order to try to shed light on issues of race in the United States. I hope that the debates and protests prompted by The Chronicle’s publication of the Horowitz ad will heighten the enthusiasm for our examination of the South African experiment to begin more faithfully and truthfully to come to terms with the difficult and traumatic, even horrifying, histories of slavery and racism in the United States. Perhaps they will help us take specific steps toward a more faithful, truthful, and life-giving future.<br /></span><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr><tr><td class="text" width="27%"> </td><td width="66%"> </td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</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/gregory-jones" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gregory Jones</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</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">Reparations, or Repentance?</div></div></section> Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502027 at https://alumni.duke.edu Duke's Signature in American Higher Education https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/dukes-signature-american-higher-education <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"><p><span class="text">Over the past two years, Duke has undertaken a comprehensive academic planning process, both within each of the schools and Trinity College, and across the university, with a goal to position the university to become as good as any private university in the nation. The planning process, which was led by the university’s senior academic officer, Provost Peter Lange, concluded in February with the board of trustees’ unanimous authorization to invest some $727.1 million over the next five years to strengthen Duke’s academic programs and its students. </span></p><p><span class="text">In the following pages, Duke Magazine reports the introductory section of the plan, which outlines the context for higher education’s current and future challenges and describes the unique leadership role that Duke plays and projects to play in the future. This preface was principally drafted by Provost Lange and by Vice Provost for Finance and Administration James Roberts.<br /><br /> The purpose of this introductory essay is to provide a broad context for considering the carefully crafted and intellectually exciting initiatives outlined in the academic plan described in the following pages. Before we turn to these specific initiatives, it is useful to situate our high ambitions and bold goals in the context of American higher education and the particular traditions of Duke University. Above all, this introduction is intended to remind us of the ultimate ends and values that motivate our collective efforts and that must ultimately provide the touchstone for measuring our success. Duke has been blessed in the past by far-sighted, effective leaders attuned to these values; such outstanding leadership will be equally important in achieving the goals of this plan.</span><br /><br /><span class="brwntextpullout">Private Research Universities in American Higher Education</span><br /><br /><span class="text">American higher education is widely admired throughout the world. Although the United States has no national university system, we have achieved a breadth of access to higher education for our citizens that is unequalled and a depth of accomplishment in advanced training and scholarship that is unrivalled. The balance of trade in intellectual capital and in providing intellectual services is decidedly in our favor. Our strength results from the tremendous diversity of our educational “system” (which is of course no system at all, but rather an educational ecosystem of over 3,000 separate institutions, some public and some private, some large and some small, some focused exclusively on undergraduate education and some with broader aims in teaching and research).<br /><br /> While institutions of many types and levels can be effective in meeting their missions and serving their particular constituencies, only a small number of the more than 3,000 institutions of higher education are nationally and internationally pre-eminent by virtue of the breadth and depth of their capacities and the contributions to education and learning that result. There are institutions of this caliber among the great state universities, and some of our liberal arts colleges are truly distinguished. Among the great research universities, a very high proportion are private. Many of these same institutions are leaders in graduate and professional education, research, and health care. <br /><br /> Private research universities occupy a special place in the diverse world of American higher education because of their distinctive missions, organization, governance, and funding. They are deliberately intermediate in scope and scale between the small private colleges and the large public universities. As a group, they attract a disproportionate number of the best faculty, are highly selective in their admissions policies, create a residential educational experience that promotes interaction with the faculty and student learning outside the classroom, and provide much of the nation’s leadership in research and scholarship. They are resource-intensive places, typically combining large endowments, strong philanthropic support, and external research funding with high tuition. These resources are powerfully additive in supporting the teaching and research missions of these institutions and their commitment to national and international leadership.<br /><br /> Like the best small colleges, the premier private research universities provide low student:faculty ratios, small classes, and extensive residential programs with attractive social and cultural amenities. At the same time, they support their research missions through competitively paid, research-oriented faculty and the library, technology, and facilities infrastructure necessary for them to succeed. Professional schools in areas like business, law, and medicine add further to the range of opportunities these institutions provide. Out of this combination comes an education of extraordinary breadth and depth, as students learn from faculty members who themselves are actively engaged in creating new knowledge and solving real-world problems.</span><br /><br /><span class="brwntextpullout">Duke’s Mission, Ambition, and Responsibility</span><br /><br /><span class="text">Duke University is among these top-echelon private research universities. We have substantially realized James B. Duke’s remarkable vision of transforming a progressive regional liberal arts college into a national and international university. Thanks to the vision and patient labor of generations of trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, students, and alumni, Duke has claimed “a place of real leadership in the educational world,” as he envisioned. Our trajectory has been remarkable, and our momentum is strong. But our work is never done. Honest self-examination and understanding of the competitive advantages enjoyed by even more successful institutions show us the way. Moreover, like other successful private universities, Duke must continually adapt its priorities and commitments in the face of new environmental opportunities and challenges and the changing internal dynamics of the educational ecosystem. <br /><br />This is not a matter necessarily of catching some institutions or surpassing others. We do not know with certainty which institutions will be “the best” 20 or 30 years from now, or how the best will even be defined. Our overriding goal therefore is to be among the small number of institutions that define what is the best in American higher education. Certainly Duke can learn from other institutions, but we must also set our own sights and help set the standards for others. This is what leadership means.<br /><br />What are the practical implications of this overarching ambition? It means first of all focusing on fundamental purposes and then setting our own standards. We are the stewards of a sacred trust rooted in our strong historic ties to the Methodist church, recognized civilly in our tax-exempt status, and reinforced by the benefactions of generations of donors who have reposed confidence in us to exercise wise stewardship over the resources they have entrusted to the university. This sacred trust and attendant resources have but one inter-related, common purpose: to foster the intellectual and ethical development of individuals and to promote the good of society. We pursue the good, as the Indenture and our mission direct, through teaching, patient care, the preservation and discovery of knowledge, and other forms of service to our community.<br /><br />Being a leader in these pursuits requires an unstinting devotion to excellence. The notion of excellence and its pursuit has become something of a cliché in recent years so it is worth pausing to consider what we mean by it. Like other fundamental values, excellence eludes simple definition; nonetheless, some effort at clarification is worthwhile. Excellence is first of all a quality of what we aim to create. To paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, excellence is the quality that distinguishes the imaginary state of perfection from the mediocrity we too often see around us. Although we can’t always define or measure it precisely, thoughtful people recognize excellence in the various walks of human life, and that subjective recognition (justly deserved fame) is intrinsic to its elusive quality. Indeed, the most common way to recognize excellence is through peer review processes (juried competitions and selection committees for prestigious awards, for example). From another perspective, excellence is not a “thing” or an end-point but rather, as Aristotle was probably the first to say in his discussions of ethics, a habit (or discipline) of constantly pursuing the best. The pursuit of excellence is not a destination but the disciplined commitment to excel (to rise above others, to be eminent). <br /><br />Duke’s ambition must be to excel in its chosen endeavors, to pursue the elusive goal of perfection through constant improvements, to surpass others and gain distinction. This is our responsibility if Duke is to claim and sustain a “place of real leadership” in the educational world and to serve society as James B. Duke envisioned. This striving to be the best is what gives us the prospect of being among the best.<br /><br />How do we know if we are hitting the mark in doing good and pursuing excellence? We need both internal standards and external feedback. While a substantial section of the strategic plan is devoted to assessment, it is worthwhile to reflect here on the fundamentals with regard to teaching and research. Consistent with our mission, we want to have a demonstrable impact on the good of society through our teaching, research, and direct service to the community. Our social impact in teaching is greatest if Duke educates leaders, men and women who will not only succeed professionally but who will be role models in their personal conduct, their civic contributions, and their commitment to lifelong learning. It follows that we want those whom we teach to leave Duke better equipped not only with specific knowledge and skills but also with a truer ethical compass, a deeper sense of social responsibility, and a more passionate engagement in the multifaceted world around them. This is especially true of our responsibilities to (and expectations of) undergraduates, who spend four especially formative years among us, shaping their characters as well as their minds. As Duke graduates, all our students must share that sense of stewardship of our sacred trust that properly motivates trustees, administrators, and faculty. <br /><br />We can only imperfectly measure our success in educating in this expansive way, but what we want to gauge is the long-term satisfaction of our alumni, both with their Duke education and with the lives they lead, and the contributions they make in their professional endeavors and the communities in which they live. Shorter term, we can (and do) learn from our currently enrolled students about their Duke experiences, what is working well and what needs improvement. While we can gauge success anecdotally, and measure it periodically through survey research, there is also an important market test, and that is the demand for our programs expressed in our applicant pool and matriculation rates. The expected value of a Duke education is embodied in the choices of the thousands of students who apply for places in our programs each year. Indeed, this is one of most critical forms of external feedback we receive.<br /><br />When it comes to research and scholarship, Duke serves society by preserving and extending the body of human knowledge, enriching the diverse perspectives that can be brought to bear on the fundamental character and practical problems of human life and society, and contributing to the stock of useful products and services available to society. How do we know if Duke is succeeding in this part of our mission? Again, there are no definitive, easy measures. Just as the individual impact of a Duke education is played out over decades, the work of research and scholarship is long-term and cumulative. Some impacts are immediately evident, but the lasting impact of ideas and discoveries is something only time can tell. But we know Duke is succeeding when the work of our faculty is published in prominent places, discussed in the national media, cited in the works of other scholars, taught in their courses, and honored by professional organizations and national awards. In professional fields, we want to inform the practice of doctors, lawyers, preachers, engineers, business people, and public policy makers well beyond the ranks of our own students. In the sciences and engineering, we want to earn the support of private foundations and government agencies, produce important discoveries and translate them into successful products and processes. Though harder to quantify than student demand, these are all real market indicators of our effectiveness. <br /><br />But we can also look closer to home. The most immediate impact of our scholars and researchers is on their faculty colleagues and their students. Interesting faculty attract interesting faculty, and we can size up the vitality of our faculty individually and collectively by the degree to which they serve as magnets by virtue of their ability to stimulate the creativity and contributions of others. It is not just the quality of our faculty that matters but the quality of their interactions with each other and with their students. <br /><br />This latter point provides an important reminder of the centrality of community in higher education. Our job as leaders is to create the conditions that allow teaching, learning, scholarship, and research to flourish. While each of those activities can take place under a wide range of circumstances, there is no question that they flourish most effectively in a community that shares a common purpose and values, a community that fosters creativity, intellectual risk taking, spirited debate, and social engagement. Essential to achieving those common purposes is a value system that respects and takes full advantage of the intellectual and cultural diversity of our community and that accords dignity and respect to all of the varied people and roles essential to the mission of Duke. Like excellence, community is an elusive ideal. It is both a goal and a discipline, and we must keep it constantly in view.</span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="brwntextpullout">Competition and Differentiation: Duke’s Distinctive Signature</span><br /><br /><span class="text">In our consideration of the broader context in which Duke functions, it is important to discuss the dynamics of our market within American higher education. The leading private research universities have much in common, offering similar degree programs and pursing similar lines of research, yet the rivalry among them is often intense. Each institution is pursuing excellence (and the public recognition that comes with it) on it own terms, seeking to create the deepest, richest, and most diverse environment possible for teaching, learning, and research and for the preparation of new leaders for our society. The leading universities compete with each other for the human and financial capital they need to excel in their broadly overlapping missions. <br /><br />Although this competition can be costly and sometimes takes on the character of an arms race, the independent pursuit of excellence by individual institutions is an important source of innovation. Because there are few if any trade secrets in higher education and many channels of information sharing, successful innovations are widely publicized and then diffused. This free flow of information and innovation is undoubtedly one of the great strengths of the American system of higher education, contributing to its ability over the last century and more to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by changing environmental circumstances and new public demands. It also helps to explain the broad similarity of the leading institutions as well as relative stability of the prestige hierarchy in American higher education. If Duke develops an innovative, effective program of teaching or research, other institutions with adequate resources can seek to imitate our success. Similarly, we are always on the lookout for what is working elsewhere. <br /><br />Nevertheless, because no institution has the resources to escape defining choices, and each institution evolves independently, every private research university has its own distinctive signature reflecting its unique history, specific programmatic balances, and relationship to place and space. We need to understand <br />what is truly distinctive about Duke’s signature and what elements of that distinctiveness we want to <br />preserve or sharpen over time. Having this or that program is not alone the answer because programs <br />can be replicated and their leadership attracted away. Our signature is determined far more by distinctive programmatic balances, relationships, and values. James Engell, professor of English and comparative <br />literature at Harvard University, has expressed this idea most eloquently in a discussion of the entelechy (en-TEL-echy) of higher education:<br /><br />Entelechy means the striving for perfection in a series of goals taken together as a whole. The word comes from Greek enteles, or complete or full, which in turn derives from telos, or goal. An entelechy demands we envision how to fulfill the potential of the whole by coordinating and giving proper relative weight to a set of varied goals and the goods they seek to achieve. For each institution, this entails a particular inflection or emphasis.1<br /><br />How do we describe the balances and inflections that form the signature of Duke? Several interrelated factors create this signature:<br /><br />• We have an exceptionally strong tradition of academic freedom dating back to Trinity College; we recognize that this tradition of unfettered inquiry, free expression, and spirited debate is essential to the critical examination of the human condition and the discovery of new knowledge. Like other forms of freedom, its productive exercise requires mature judgment and respect for the rights of others.<br /><br />• The distinctive combination of schools that constitute Duke and the relationships among them are unique. Each of our schools has substantial interactions with virtually all the others, and our faculty members have close colleagues and collaborators not only in their own disciplines but in many others as well. This is less true of our students but ought to be more so; the intergenerational University Scholars Program is a start.<br /><br />• This sense of complementing and a habit of cooperation extends beyond our own campus to formal and informal partnerships with other universities and organizations in the Research Triangle, across the country and, increasingly, throughout the world. Duke has been and will continue to be a leader in collaboration.<br /><br />• Our signature reflects a combination of place and scale and a relationship between campus and surrounding towns that is especially conducive to community. It is easier at Duke than at most other major private research universities to establish multifaceted relationships that span professional interests, family friendships, religious devotion, and recreational pursuits. In addition, we have abundant opportunities, individually and collectively, to help meet the many needs of the Durham community and to see our efforts make a tangible difference. We need to sustain and expand this sense of belonging to a community, and make it more intergenerational and inclusive; it is one of our defining assets. <br /><br />• Duke is a community of deep engagement for students outside the classroom, in community service, the arts, political organizations, academic competitions, and athletics. Duke’s men’s and women’s sports attract the interest and loyalty of people in all walks of university life, and in the wider community as well. Participation in high-level athletics competition while engaging in a challenging course of study is a defining characteristic of Duke for many students; and many more of us take pride in their efforts and accomplishments and share their triumphs and disappointments. Our widely shared interest in athletics is an important source of community; the academic and athletic performance of our student athletes and their personal conduct reflects our commitment to excellence, personal growth, and high standards for all our students.</span><br /><br /><span class="text">• Duke has a culture of innovation and collaboration rooted in its long tradition of academic freedom and the ease of interaction in an academic community situated in a small-town environment. Duke is especially open to innovation and supportive of entrepreneurial initiatives undertaken by our schools and members of our faculty, staff, and student body. We need to make this sense of shared ownership and empowerment even more pervasive.<br /><br />• We have a tradition that fosters moral and ethical reflection, responsible leadership, and spirited debate. This tradition permeates Duke in many ways: through the central presence of the Duke Chapel, the broad influence of the Divinity School, and the fresh energy of the Freeman Center. Our innovative Institute for the Care at the End of Life spans schools, disciplines, and faiths in addressing some of the most personal human needs and profound mysteries. The innovative work of the B.N. Duke, Hart Leadership, and Kenan Ethics programs touches many members of our community. Our robust faculty governance system and the active roles played by students, through DSG and GPSC and many other avenues, provide abundant opportunities for leadership, linking faculty and students with each other, campus administrators, and trustees. <br /></span><br /><span class="text">• Duke is committed to the value of diversity in all its forms as part of the celebration of human life and a fundamental foundation for effective teaching, learning, and inquiry. Though this commitment has never been perfectly realized, it has deep roots and requires constant nurturing. An especially important part of this commitment is our strong support for effective financial aid programs in each of our schools; these programs help ensure that our programs are accessible to talented students from many diverse backgrounds and that all our students benefit from participation in a diverse academic community. <br /><br />Our quest for academic excellence is inextricably bound up with these signature qualities. Like any other great university, Duke depends on attracting outstanding faculty, students, and administrative <br />leaders. But it is how their talents and energies work together that matters, and Duke is a particularly <br />conducive place for working together, for interdisciplinary collaboration, for the transmission of values and experience through participation in an intergenerational community in which we learn from each other (and challenge each other to excel). </span><br /><br /><span class="text">These relatively intangible qualities require careful cultivation, and that work goes on as a function of leadership at many levels, an essential backdrop to the development and execution of our academic plans. We recognize, of course, that none of these signature characteristics is fully formed or free of tensions and contradictions. Raising them to consciousness helps us understand these tensions, and the work that remains to be done to build a distinctive, inclusive community devoted to academic excellence, not for its own sake, but as part of a fabric of stewardship, citizenship, and reverence for the gifts that have been assembled here. This is the entelechy that makes Duke a special place—a place like no other—to teach, learn, discover, create, and offer care.</span></span></p><p><span class="text"><span class="text"><span class="brwntextpullout">Fundamental Threats to the Pre-eminence of Private Research Universities</span><br /><br /><span class="text">This mission-driven, values-driven view of our defining characteristics comes under periodic pressure, and the pressure is intense today. Over decades and centuries, however, universities have shown a remarkable capacity to adapt and change; they may change slowly, after many committee meetings, but they do change. “New inventions, fresh discoveries, alterations in the markets of the world throw accustomed methods and the men who are accustomed to them out of date and use without pause or pity,” wrote Woodrow Wilson, then Princeton’s president, in 1909.2 But the institutions about which he worried are still with us, recognizable though also clearly different. Indeed this combination of change and constancy, innovation and consolidation, is what makes it possible to think of universities as institutions and not just organizations or enterprises. Private universities like Duke are here for the long run and must chart their courses accordingly. <br /><br />Yet this is a moment of paradox. On the one hand, the demand for high-quality higher education is at an all time high and support for our research mission is equally robust. Despite the substantial costs, would-be students are lined up by the thousands to attend the leading institutions, and most are turned away. The returns to a college degree are also at an all time high; the knowledge economy is for real, and solid college preparation and advanced degrees are rightly seen as essential to success. Moreover, it is widely recognized that the breadth of education acquired through a liberal arts education, with its emphasis on lifetime learning and life skills, is the best preparation for a complex, rapidly changing, interdependent world. Yet this is also a moment of great anxiety for higher education. We have weathered a decade of criticism about rising costs and “political correctness” that has not wholly subsided, and there are now new threats on the horizon.<br /><br />The threat most often cited today is digital technology and, more particularly, the emergence of vigorous, entrepreneurial for-profit education providers. A 1999 study by Merrill Lynch & Co. outlined the opportunities for private investment in for-profit higher education,3 and the sums invested are rapidly increasing. The question is not whether for-profit distance education will become a factor but at what rate and with what implications for the leading private research universities. The issue for Duke and similar institutions is whether for-profit on-line education will unleash new forms <br />of competition that will erode our core markets and thus force a fundamental restructuring of the kind <br />of education that has been the hallmark of private research universities. <br /><br />On-line education by for-profit providers could fundamentally change the dynamics of competition and educational delivery. In the “old economy,” the leading institutions competed for the best students and the best faculty, but they did not compete for market share. (No one wanted substantially more students, who would overwhelm finite campus resources and dilute student quality.) But in the model of the “new economy,” education is infinitely scalable, and the new for-profits will want market share above all. This makes all the difference. Standardized curricula consisting of “plug and play” modules prepared by the leading content authorities and supported by wizards of the new on-line, multi-media technologies and cognitive learning specialists will obviate the need to prepare local lectures on American politics or English literature or organic chemistry. At the same time, the cost per unit of instruction delivered can be driven dramatically downward as economies of scale are realized, potentially extending the reach of high-quality education but threatening the purchase of old-fashioned, labor intensive, high-cost providers. Students will not only benefit from lower costs and the wider availability of “name brand” education, they will be free to choose the time and place of study to suit their own convenience. Students will have “live” interactions with their professors or instructional guides through two-way video or at their convenience through electronic mail and course web postings. On-line libraries from around the world will be at their fingertips. Students will meet and greet each other digitally, discussing course content, collaborating on projects, sharing cultural and political interests, developing friendships and romances, and perhaps even competing in their favorite “dream team” on-line sports. The beautiful grounds and expensive bricks and mortar foundations of today’s leading institutions may become a liability rather than an asset.<br /><br />This stylized vision of market forces and new technology is powerfully exhilarating to some, deeply troubling to others. What does it mean for Duke and other distinguished private research universities? We are, after all, the “old-fashioned, labor-intensive, high-cost providers” in the paragraph above. In one very important sense, the scenario outlined above is not really new. Private research universities have always faced competition from lower cost institutions. We have deliberately chosen a small market niche, providing high cost/high value education to a small number of the best-qualified students, all of whom would have had a wide array of less costly alternatives open to them. So competition itself is not new. Demand for selective private higher education under these circumstances has always exceeded supply, despite significant cost differences. Our market power can only be explained on the assumption that students and parents are finding an experience of great value in the education we offer.<br /><br />Notwithstanding bursts of public concern and criticism about the quality of the education Duke and similar institutions offer, we have stood up to this fundamental market test very well.<br /><br />The real question for the future is whether the structure of demand is likely to change. Will the students and parents who currently choose institutions like Duke prefer a digital university without walls in the future? This alternative will be cheaper (as are other current alternatives), but will it also be more appealing, or at least sufficiently appealing to change current preferences? These are not questions that we can answer with certainty. But to face them squarely, we need a clear-eyed understanding of our “customers’” needs and expectations and a commitment to meeting them through the “value proposition” we offer them.<br /><br />Survey research suggests two things: Students are seeking academic quality and a sense of community that will reach beyond the years of study on campus. Clearly, there is a mix of practical and idealistic motives in seeking these characteristics, but many students are finding them in private research universities. We have been meeting their needs—never perfectly, but in many substantial ways. The “value proposition” of the private research university has rested on three fundamental principles: the complementary relationship of teaching and research scholarship in producing a distinctive form of education that at its best involves students directly in the creation of new knowledge; the value of personalized education that is as much about leadership and character formation as it is about skills and knowledge transfer; and the overarching importance of participating in a learning community, with a wide range of intergenerational interactions and opportunities for leadership and participation in athletics, cultural events, and social service. <br /><br />Our conviction is that the best way to succeed under changing market conditions will be to intensify these distinctive characteristics of private research universities, and Duke’s signature among them. At the same time, we must be fully accountable to our many constituencies in demonstrating as effectively as possible that the education and community we sustain creates superior value, widely accessible, for the students who experience it directly and for the larger society. This vision of conserving a legacy rooted in deeply held values and intensifying our signature is fully compatible with, but must constantly shape, our commitment to innovative leadership through bold initiatives in teaching and research. These initiatives will not only deepen our commitment to traditional modes of inquiry and discussion, they will also harness new technologies to our carefully defined purposes and allow us to reach new markets of students, particularly in our professional school programs, beyond our traditional reach.<br /><br />The academic plan gives bold expression to our <br />commitment to stewardship, leadership, excellence, community, and values-to our distinctive entelechy. Duke University, like the other great private research universities, was created and has been sustained by men and women for whom these simple virtues have real meaning. If we cannot sustain these virtues, we are unworthy of our legacy and deserve to be judged by ordinary, commercial, and utilitarian logic. Cyber-U will not be far behind. <br /><br /></span><span class="tenpxtext">1. James, Engell, “The Idea of Organic Growth in Higher Education,” paper presented to the Forum on the Future of Higher Education, The Aspen Institute, 1999, p. 1.<br />2. Quoted in Engell, p. 1.<br />3. M. Moe, K. Bailey and R. Lau, “The Book of Knowledge,” Merrill Lynch & Co., 1999. </span></span></span></p></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502026 at https://alumni.duke.edu Bigger, Better Bookshelves https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/bigger-better-bookshelves <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" width="631"><br /><br /> A state-of-the-art, off-campus book repository opened in April, enabling the university to accommodate an additional three million volumes and better preserve its books and other holdings. The $7-million building, the newest addition to Duke Libraries, is the first phase in the William R. Perkins Library renovation, a series of improvements expected to be among the most significant in the library’s history, according to University Librarian David Ferriero.<br />“This is a milestone,” Ferriero says of the new facility, named the Library Service Center. “It will ease the shelving problems we’ve faced in recent years. What’s more, it puts us in position to begin the Perkins improvements.”<br /> The stacks at Perkins and other libraries on campus are overflowing, a situation Ferriero described as detrimental to the books and other collections materials, as well as to their use. In the open-stack campus libraries, it is hard to keep temperature and humidity at levels that help preserve books and manuscripts. The Library Service Center (LSC) has been designed to maintain optimal levels and give materials longer lives.<br /> Located at 5 Anson Street, near Durham Technical Community College, the LSC is roughly 23,000 square feet and consists primarily of shelving units. But it also includes a reading room, where materials can be used on-site; a staging area; a processing room; a garage and utility room; and other space for storage and preservation.<br /> One of the LSC’s more innovative features is a bar-code system that will significantly reduce what is known as “shelf failure,” books shelved in the wrong places. Library administrators say the new system could improve accessibility to materials even though the facility is located off campus. A courier service will regularly deliver books to campus libraries. Less frequently used materials from libraries throughout the university will be shelved at the LSC, freeing up space in the campus libraries for new acquisitions.<br /> The facility will be able to hold three million volumes at first, with the capacity to add additional shelving modules, raising the maximum capacity to fifteen million volumes. Administrators have spoken with colleagues at other Triangle universities about shared shelving. Duke is a member of the Triangle Research Libraries Network, which also includes North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.<br /> The Library Service Center has been funded by the university with the support of a grant from The Duke Endowment.<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /></td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Friday, June 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 01 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502025 at https://alumni.duke.edu