Duke - Special 2019 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/issues/special-2019 future Future Special  en Q's & A's With Forward-Thinking Folks https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/qs-forward-thinking-folks <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><strong>Robert J. Lefkowitz, James B. Duke Professor of medicine and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>That I became a scientist.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Get as rounded an education as possible. And make sure you are well-versed in computer science, whatever [your] major.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the biosciences? <em>A continuation of the trend of more and more interdisciplinary collaboration.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the biosciences? <em>A reduction in the increasingly onerous number of regulations around virtually every aspect of the research process by government agencies, institutions, and journals.</em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>Adolph Hitler. The human talent and potential future talent that he exterminated is, to me, inconceivable. We will never know what these millions of individuals might have accomplished.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>Global warming and nuclear annihilation.</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>I’m pessimistic about both possibilities; there’s a lack of strong, visionary leadership to confront them.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>The unredacted Mueller Report, a current medical textbook, and a laptop computer.</em></p> <p><strong>Missy Cummings, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>That I am a professor; as an undergraduate, I swore that I would never go to graduate school.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Take the path that is the hardest; by going down paths less trodden and pushing yourself to step outside your comfort zone, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the interaction of humans and computers? <em>Exoskeleton research will bring the most amazing changes—certainly for people with disabilities but also for those looking to enhance their job performance.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the interaction of humans and computers? I<em> would very much like to see computer science and engineering departments take the field of research in human-machine interaction more seriously; the current issues surrounding Tesla, Boeing, and surgical robot accidents highlight the importance of understanding human-in-the-loop issues.</em></p> <p>What global figure, in your lifetime, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>Tim Berners-Lee. He was a colleague of mine at MIT who invented the World Wide Web, and is currently a big voice in net neutrality, digital privacy, and open access to the Web.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>Lack of principled and evidence-based thinking.</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>Pessimistic, because people increasingly want information and answers on demand and seem less willing to do a deep dive. Machine learning is incredibly popular with students, but few want to understand the underlying concepts; they’re interested in real-world application, even if that is not a good idea.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>A Tesla and a DJI drone. People will laugh at how primitive we were.</em></p> <p><strong>David Rubenstein ’70, philanthropist and cofounder of the Carlyle Group </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>That anyone at Duke would still be interested in my views on any matter.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Learn how to read books regularly; learn how to write clearly and persuasively; learn how to speak effectively; learn how to take the initiative but to share the credit—these skills will always be in demand.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see around philanthropy in America? <em>Philanthropy will be seen as a moral imperative for all individuals at all levels of society.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see around philanthropy in America? <em>Philanthropy to be seen as the ancient Greeks originally saw it—as a way to show a love of humanity. This can be done as much with your energy, time, and ideas as with your checkbook.</em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>Martin Luther King Jr.—his leadership of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement ultimately led the way for people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, capabilities, and sexual preferences around the world to pursue equal rights and opportunities, and to bring life to the once-revolutionary idea that all people are equal.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>The failure to recognize that the planet is evolving because of climate change (whatever the cause), and the consequential failure to make the requisite adjustments in our lives to ensure Homo sapiens can survive for at least a few more millennium.</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>Optimistic that the problem has been recognized, but pessimistic that enough will be done in the near term to avert bigger problems in the lifetimes of those currently alive.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>Pictures of Coach K and his five men’s basketball championship banners and teams, and Coach Brooks and his seven women’s golf championship banners and teams—all to show the personification of leadership, excellence, and teamwork.&nbsp;</em></p> <p><strong>Adam Silver ’84, commissioner of the National Basketball Association </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>The amount of traveling I do around the world. (And the fact that I’m friends with Coach K!)</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Take courses in many different fields, stay up-to-date on current events, and pay attention.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see around professional sports? <em>Changes to the way live games are experienced, presented, and distributed.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see around professional sports? <em>More media and corporations embracing women’s professional sports.</em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>President Barack Obama, for embracing globalism.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? T<em>echnology designed to connect people that instead fosters isolation and mental-health issues, along with the inability to distinguish fact from fiction—all of that in a world where content, including video, can easily be altered and manipulated.</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>Optimistic, because of institutions like Duke that teach young people how to solve problems.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>A basketball.</em></p> <p><strong>Dean Smith, who began this summer as director of Duke University Press </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>Advising and sometimes publishing my mentors while working in a place where my name causes a visceral reaction in both directions.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Develop portable assets (written and oral communication skills, presentations skills, project management), and endlessly cultivate your mind and an ironic sense of self.</em></p> <p>What is the most dramatic change you expect to see in the publishing industry? <em>The emergence of an “agile” or “smart” publishing firm that will utilize “just-in-time” machine-driven technologies to spontaneously create and deliver knowledge in multiple formats based on reader preferences</em>.</p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the publishing industry? <em>A sustainable model for opening high-quality, peer-reviewed knowledge to the world.</em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>J.K. Rowling fostered a new generation of readers and writers in the digital age around the world and reinvented the YA publishing genre for future generations.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>A global lack of empathy—for the concerns of others and the social issues affecting us (e.g., climate change).</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>I’m a publisher who tilts at windmills at one of the world’s leading institutions—I’m definitely an optimist.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>A Blackwing #1 Palomino pencil.</em></p> <p><strong>Mary Pat McMahon, who began this summer as vice president/vice provost for campus life</strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>That I’d spend over a decade on the coast of Maine or be setting up a life here in Durham; I thought I was headed for a big city like New York, Beijing, or London. Their scale, community, and engagement give smaller cities and towns a distinct appeal I didn’t fully see back then.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Follow your passion and collaborate toward a shared goal on athletic teams, in the arts, or through student organizations or community service. </em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the area of student life? <em>Access to and use of student space is a hot topic, and it will ultimately shift campus planning and design. ​Who sets the agenda for social events and programs? Are the events inclusive and reflective of the whole student body? How are spaces organized and designed to reflect the shared values of a campus community?</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the area of student life? <em>I hope leaders in higher education look at the ways we define “success” before, during, and after the undergraduate experience. Our system of incentives and rewards can be unhealthy and shallow. How do we support students who want to take intellectual and personal risks? </em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan. Her personal heroism and her advocacy for access to education for young girls around the world will influence a generation of young people. </em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>The decline of civic and community participation, and related ways that social media—particularly without a healthy balance of face-to-face authentic engagement with other people—can lead to greater isolation and intolerance. In some ways, this current generation of students has a better understanding of the problem than the rest of us. </em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>Optimistic. If we can equip our students to make the most of their college experience, they will be prepared to go into their field of study, the workplace, and civic life with the skills to improve humanity. </em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>A baseball signed by Mookie Betts, a fidget spinner, the original cast recording of Hamilton, a recipe for homemade glitter slime. Can you tell my kids are in elementary school?</em></p> <p><strong>Marco Werman ’83, host of the Public Radio International show The World </strong></p> <p>What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? <em>That I’d still be consuming marijuana, and that it would be endorsed for medical reasons by the state of Massachusetts.</em></p> <p>What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? <em>Follow your curiosity and fuse that with work that leaves the planet a better place than how you entered it.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you expect to see in the field of journalism? <em>The age of the Deep Fake, video and audio that can be manipulated to imitate the voice of whomever the creator chooses.</em></p> <p>What’s the most dramatic change you’d like to see in the field of journalism? <em>Exchanging social media for the morning and evening newspaper.</em></p> <p>What global figure in your lifetime, in your view, had the greatest influence on the future, and why? <em>Donald Trump. He didn’t happen overnight. He just spotlighted the ills that have been there all along—racial tension, economic injustice, questionable global alliances—and now there’s really no excuse for ignoring them.</em></p> <p>What do you see as the greatest threat to the future of humanity? <em>Climate change and the inability to swim.</em></p> <p>In light of that threat, are you optimistic or pessimistic, and why? <em>I’ll be an optimist until I’m dead. Thailand, I hear, is instituting swimming lessons as part of its national school curriculum, so they get it.</em></p> <p>What would you put into a time capsule for the people of 2219? <em>A teaspoon. Think about it.&nbsp;</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T10:30:45-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_18.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/civic-engagement" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Civic Engagement</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/forever-learning" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Forever Learning</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/opinion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Opinion</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/pop-culture" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pop Culture</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Staff</a></li></ul></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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Missy Cummings, Robert J. Lefkowitz, Mary Pat McMahon, David M. Rubenstein, Adam Silver, Marco Werman, and Dean Smith</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 14:38:36 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506219 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/qs-forward-thinking-folks#comments To Create Something Better https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/create-something-better <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>I recently attended a panel discussion with three scholars debating life in the “Anthropocene era,” the idea that humans are now the dominant force in shaping the ecological and even geological fate of our planet. With talk about the destructive consequences of our carbon emissions, the devastation of industrial food systems, and the depletion of our natural resources, the discussion was pretty bleak.</p> <p>Afterward, I joined the panelists for dinner at a local Italian restaurant. As I began to describe my work with companies on climate change and ocean sustainability, the mood at the table grew even darker. One of the scholars put down his fork and scolded me: “Why bother? We have missed the window of opportunity to solve these problems. You need to wake up to the crisis we are in and face that we can’t do anything about it.”</p> <p>I understood what he meant. We have a future problem. As we create more powerful methods of predicting the future, we seem to be losing the ability to choose the futures we want. It’s not hard to find reasons for pessimism. A tide of recent reports by international agencies warns of inevitable climate change and mounting species extinctions. But rather than sparking action, this flood of dire predictions threatens to depress citizens so much that they give up on finding solutions and simply brace themselves for disaster.</p> <p>Yet I can’t sit in that helplessness. I am&nbsp;committed to fight for the future we desire, and the way out is to begin asking different questions: How might we create more space for agency and positive change in our thinking about the future? How do we make the future work for us, not against us?</p> <p>First, I think we must recognize the future in the present. The science-fiction writer William Gibson once noted that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” While we can’t know for certain how the future will unfold, we can become more skilled at recognizing possible futures by tracking the early signals and creative experiments happening in our current environment. Gibson encourages us to pay more attention to positive developments, people, and movements that are emerging, and assess how they might be scaled and accelerated.</p> <p>Young leaders like Greta Thunberg from Sweden are challenging politicians to take urgent action on climate change. Her bold speeches at the UN and other venues have been a catalyst for a worldwide wave of climate protests in recent months, with tens of thousands of students participating in school strikes. An energized global youth climate movement is demanding very different cultural priorities and new kinds of politics.</p> <p>Second, let’s reframe our priorities. It’s likely that the future will be less comfortable and more chaotic than the world we’re used to. I mourn the coral reefs our kids may not see, the increasingly fierce storms that threaten our homes and communities, the growing instability of our food systems. These threats are even more unsettling because we have placed comfort and stability above almost every other cultural value. But a chaotic future need not threaten our ability to have a meaningful life. In fact, the world will need compassionate, creative, and resilient people more than ever. We can’t promise our kids stability, but we can prepare them to care for the planet and their communities, and to be everyday heroes in addressing the needs of a turbulent world. To do this work, we can’t waste time and energy on despair.</p> <p>Finally, we can work to design a better world. Real change starts with the recognition that we don’t live in an ideal world now—far from it. While many people experience a higher quality of life than previous generations, we have achieved these gains at great social and environmental cost and have failed to distribute these benefits equitably. We need to challenge ourselves to let go of our current reality in order to create something better.</p> <p>Is it possible that we could create a less consumptive, more equitable society? Could the inevitable changes driven by climate change help create space for a healthier and more resilient society? How might we approach the future as a design problem rather than a final verdict? One example is the Transition Movement, which helps communities learn to grow their own food, build more resilient homes and neighborhoods, and prepare for the predicted shocks of climate change. Transition Towns are proactively developing the resources and institutions we will need to flourish in a climate-changed world.</p> <p>At our dinner table recently, my normally upbeat fifteen-year-old daughter was unusually quiet. After some prodding, she shared that she and her friends had been discussing climate change, and had concluded that they probably wouldn’t have children—and may not live longer than four more decades because the world would be too broken to support them.</p> <p>My heart crumbled, knowing that she had now experienced the anguish of our ecological crisis, not only intellectually but also viscerally. I don’t have any easy answers to assure her, but I am more committed than ever to claiming our agency and actively building a world where our children can thrive.</p> <p><em>Vermeer is executive director of EDGE (the Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment) and associate professor of the practice at the Fuqua School of Business.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T09:30:15-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_17.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/business" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Business</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/energy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Energy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/environment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environment</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/environmental-research" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environmental Research</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/global" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Global</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/sustainability" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sustainability</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/dan-vermeer" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dan Vermeer</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Building a world where our children can thrive</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:38:59 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506217 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/create-something-better#comments A New Kind of College Experience https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/new-kind-college-experience <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>When I walk across Duke’s majestic campus, I’m sometimes lulled into thinking campus-based universities, beloved for centuries, might continue forever. Duke’s beauty and dynamism make it hard to imagine that the campus model of higher education is heading into long-term decline, to the point where a generation from now it will be the exception, not the rule.</p> <p>Of course, it’s often difficult to recognize the end of an era when you’re in the midst of it. We understand Duke basketball is approaching the last few years of the Coach K era, but we don’t know whether the program can sustain his excellence after he leaves. When I worked for <em>The Washington Post </em>years ago, it didn’t occur to me that the Internet and mobile technology would soon fundamentally disrupt the newspaper industry.</p> <p>So too it may be for America’s universities, the best of which today are so sought after that wealthy parents are willing to pay millions to slip their kids in the “side door.” Yet cracks in the system’s foundation have been appearing for decades. Prices have skyrocketed: From my time at Duke to my daughter’s, the cost of attendance increased by <em>four times </em>the rate of inflation. Schools further down the food chain than Duke will struggle to sustain their high prices—especially given evidence that nationwide college learning outcomes haven’t improved. Just 11 percent of business leaders think recent college grads are ready for work.&nbsp;</p> <p>And the system is tilted sharply in favor of the wealthy. A number of well-known colleges have more students from the top one percent than from the entire bottom 50 percent. Students of modest means get relegated to schools with fewer resources and lower prestige, making it harder to climb the ladder.&nbsp;</p> <p>In most markets, if providers raise prices, exclude customers, and stall on quality, competitors enter. Over the years that’s been slower to happen in higher education, where a web of tradition, reputation, regulation, funding, and accreditation protects incumbents. But that’s shifting. In the 1990s, I helped start Concord Law School, the first online law school, and then Kaplan University, one of the first online universities. We aimed to take what’s best about the existing system and tailor it to working adults, stripping out extras they don’t care about (like fancy dorms). We applied emerging innovation and technology to increase quality, flexibility and outcomes each year while <em>reducing </em>costs.&nbsp;</p> <p>Back then, many were confused or horrified at the thought of an online university. An early <em>Wall Street Journal</em> article attempted to describe Concord Law School in the painstaking way you might explain the Super Bowl to a North Korean visitor who had never seen a television set, much less a football game or the Anheuser Busch Clydesdales. One quote dismissed online education as “an April Fool’s joke.” Others were harsher: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg gave a speech pronouncing herself “deeply troubled by ventures like Concord,” where, she said, “students learn in isolation.”</p> <p>But students weren’t learning in isolation. As young people today would easily understand, they were forming different types of meaningful communities online, enabling new friendships, study groups, and faculty relationships. And both students and faculty loved it. Within a decade, Kaplan University grew into the top 10 percent of all universities nationally by enrollment. Students excelled, outperforming comparable students at traditional colleges nationally on key measures like learning outcomes, student satisfaction, graduation rates, and graduate income improvement. Employers started welcoming online grads.&nbsp;</p> <p>Even so, most of traditional higher education only tentatively embraced online, at least until some highly publicized courses at Stanford legitimized the market in 2011. Today, most universities offer at least some online programming. Competition accelerated last year when we sold Kaplan University to Purdue to create Purdue University Global, which instantly became one of the world’s largest public online universities. (Kaplan continues to provide non-academic support, but Purdue University governs the institution.)</p> <p>While overall U.S. post-secondary enrollment is in an eight-year decline, online degree enrollments continue to grow. Already enough students are pursuing alternatives that some smaller colleges are missing enrollment targets. Some are even having to close. That trickle may become a flood in the coming years, with experts predicting as many of half of today’s 4,000 U.S. colleges might be forced to shutter in the next twenty-five years.</p> <p>Why? Because even those who wouldn’t consider an online education for their kids (or themselves) today will find it difficult to resist in a decade or two. By then alternatives with comparable faculty, learning outcomes, and employment prospects will be available for less than a tenth the price of a campus education—including from highly regarded institutions like Arizona State and Purdue. That will be hard for families (and legislatures that fund public higher education) to overlook.&nbsp;</p> <p>This shift will be painfully transformational for many institutions, to be sure. But it will be transformational for individuals and the economy as well, in a very good way. Far more students than today will gain access to an affordable, quality higher education, leveling the economic playing field.</p> <p>And what of the things we remember most about our own college experiences—the intense late-night conversations, deep friendships, and first loves? Rest easy: Future nineteen-year-olds won’t be staying home on Saturday night any more than we did. New social structures will evolve for those who don’t go to an on-campus university. The things we all recall most fondly about our college experiences will still exist, just in a different environment.&nbsp;</p> <p>The exact parameters will evolve over time. But it seems likely that for many, the traditional campus experience will be remembered as a quaint relic, like the morning newspaper that used to appear on our doorstep.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>&nbsp;Rosen ’82 is CEO of Kaplan and author of </em>Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy.&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T09:30:15-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_16.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/628512" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Education and Classroom Learning</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/online" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Online</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/opinion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Opinion</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/students-and-campus-life" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Students and Campus life</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/andrew-rosen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew Rosen</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The traditional campus may become a memory</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:32:31 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506216 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/new-kind-college-experience#comments Seeing Beyond The Now https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/seeing-beyond-now <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>In 2016, my freshman year at Duke, I was one of nine undergraduate students who occupied the Allen Building demanding, among other things, higher wages and improved workplace conditions for Duke employees, and because of an incident with an employee, the termination of Executive Vice President Tallman Trask III. While the whirlwind sequence of events that comprised the week we spent entrenched in the administrative floor can sometimes bleed together in my head, I remember with sharp clarity the moments the Reverend William Barber M.Div. ’89 spent bellowing into our twerpy second-hand amp and mic setup just outside the parameters of Abele-Ville.</p> <p>Specifically, I remember him calling the building takeover an “act of faith,” and I’ve thought about that quite a lot since. At the time, it felt like such a weighty, abstract burden to place on such young shoulders: that of having <em>faith</em>.</p> <p>I’ve been working with SEIU, UFCW, AFSCME Local 77, and a number of other economic-justice-focused organizations for the past four years in North Carolina. Most of the time, it hasn’t felt like an act of faith. It’s felt like white-knuckle anger and residual generational fear—cellular lineages of hard labor and deaths of orchestrated, artificial scarcity you could trace in my telomeres. It felt like an obligation of survival, not a pious burden handed to me by God. My dedication to it infrequently felt like faith in anything, but rather often a sense that it was either this or a passive death in a future uncertain.</p> <p>I’ve come to find that to be concerned with labor and economic justice at all is to be concerned with future-building and futurity—seeing the future as unprecedented and therefore full of potential for being free of our current conditions, not simply better off within them. While there isn’t space in this essay for recitations of Fanon, Marcuse, or Derrida, Mark Fisher does serve as an accessible entry point for thinking about this more.</p> <p>Fisher developed the concept of Capitalist Realism as a definitional culmination of the ways in which capitalism obscures alternative futures. In <em>Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?</em> he refers to the well-worn adage—attributed to both Slavoj Žižek and Duke’s own Fredric Jameson—that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” noting that it reflects the precise phenomenon he’s attempting to understand.</p> <p>Broadly, it’s the inescapable sense that only capitalism can support life and that there exists no other worlds outside of it—that we’d sooner be able to comprehend and accept a barren Earth purged of all life than one free of imperialism and the internal contradictions inherent to capital accumulation, regardless of how catastrophic. This crushing debt, piling medical bills, precarious living arrangement, perma-wars, imperialist military occupations, and endless hours spent working a job that you will never be able to retire from: all of it appears as a permanent sentence. What this leaves us with is a constrained, stunted sense of temporality—a warped life where the future is either too painful to endure or frighteningly opaque.</p> <p>Now, looking back, Barber’s comment makes more sense. In the face of a shamelessly gerrymandered state with misleadingly named “Right to Work” laws, where the current minimum wage can’t cover cost of rent anywhere in the United States, the belief in the&nbsp;collective power of workers to change their seemingly immutable conditions can often look like a faith in an impossible, unimaginable future. When we are mired by the inability to imagine a life worth living beyond our wage labor constraints, organizing for a better world must appear to be only the work of the devout called upon by something higher.</p> <p>How else could one face the crushing reality of real hourly wage growth stagnation—despite productivity increases—since the 1970s, privatization of services essential to life, the breakdown of Fordist social relations with the coinciding birth of neoliberal social modes that increasingly situate capital at the center of our relationships to one another, and the largely unencumbered development of the debt economy, without something as unshakable as faith in a future most of us can’t even begin to envision?</p> <p>So, perhaps futurity <em>is</em> reliant on some form of faith:&nbsp;an unwavering conviction that despite all the evidence presented to us to the contrary, the struggle for an anti- racist coalition of workers building collective power is a just one and that a different life can come to fruition. That faith is more than the will to just survive, to make it to the next day or paycheck. It’s an ability to conceive of something entirely new: an ability to not just rage against the now, but the capacity to dream of a tomorrow worth greeting. Maybe it’s a radical form of love. Maybe it’s Gramsci’s optimism of the will. Regardless, in my experience, no place in the United States strengthens that faith more than the South.</p> <p>In North Carolina alone, just the past few years have been transformational in the resurgence in organized labor and working-class demonstrations. Whether it be&nbsp;thousands of public educators flooding the state capital, the formation of the Duke Faculty Union and Graduate Student Union, state-wide mobilization against HB2 (which prohibited transgender people from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity and limited local minimum-wage increases), or McDonald’s employees walking out on strike over sexual harassment, we’ve witnessed tremendous feats of worker power here. Of people daring to see beyond the often crushing misery of the now and daring to begin the work of envisioning something different—a faith in some new potential future even if we’ve never before seen it and may never witness it ourselves.</p> <p>Socialism makes me believe in the future. Worker liberation challenging the interconnected sites of capital and white supremacy make me believe in the future. Watching laborers demanding a life worth living makes me believe in the future. Seeing a revitalization of organized labor crop up across universities, public schools, large fast-food chains, and grocery stores; watching increasing numbers of calls for anti-war solidarity and fights against settler colonialism from within the belly of Empire; and the roar of demands for the right to health care feel like a potential livable world slowly coming into focus. After all, we still have a world to win.</p> <p><em>Roberts ’19 majored in global cultural studies with a Marxism and Society certificate, was the chair of </em>The Chronicle’s <em>editorial board, and was a Point Foundation Scholar. She works in union organizing in Washington, D.C.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T09:15:45-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_15.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/sydney-roberts" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sydney Roberts</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Envisioning an impossible, unimaginable future</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:23:07 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506215 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/seeing-beyond-now#comments A Toast At The Frontline https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/toast-frontline <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>I stand on a small tributary of the Irrawaddy River. Across it is Myanmar—formerly Burma: I’m about as far west in the Chinese province of Yunnan as I can be. Borders between countries fascinate, for they illuminate different experiments in how we manage our natural world. Across the river, the land is going up in smoke. There’s a dense blue haze. At night, I see dozens of small fires, while overhead a satellite maps them from their thermal infrared radiation.</p> <p>On returning to Duke, I look at what those maps show. China’s border is obvious. For a thousand miles along its southern and southwestern frontier, it has very few fires, while thousands carpet the land of its immediate neighbors.</p> <p>Across the river unfolds a human tragedy, repeated across the developing world. Poor farmers burn the land each year to clear forests and brush and to enrich the poor soils with the nutrients the burning releases. On steep slopes, the inevitable heavy rains will wash away those nutrients, the soils, and often people’s homes too. The land’s fertility degrades each burning season.</p> <p>Globally, burning tropical forests adds 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year, almost as much as all the emissions in the U.S. and more than those from the European Union.</p> <p>On the China side, there are no fires. There are fields, already planted with corn and other crops. Between them are lots of forests that are just leafing out; they cover the mountains with a soft green on this lovely spring morning. An odd analogy strikes me: They are like a school class, all the same size and age, all dressed in their identical, green uniforms, their shining faces full of hope. The trees’ age is not an accident, and the trees are full of promise.</p> <p>In the early 1960s, China learned the hard way that when we harm Mother Nature, she bites back. Massive, country-wide deforestation cleared forests off steep slopes leading to massive erosion and catastrophic flooding. Those young trees are the result of recent country-wide policies to restore the land.</p> <p>Why am I here in a remote part of China?</p> <p>My fieldwork involves watching wildlife, usually endangered species, and often birds and mammals. The mountains that stretch from western Yunnan across northern Myanmar to India, just 200 miles away, and then to Bhutan, are one of the most biologically diverse parts of the planet. This is a frontline for saving biodiversity. It’s not just the number of species. Many of the species of animals here—and plants, too—live only in these mountains. That restriction means the species are especially vulnerable to the loss of their forest habitats. This area has unusually many species at risk of extinction.</p> <p>I love the peace of fieldwork. Alas, no chance of a good night’s sleep, for while I am here, the United Nations released an international assessment of the status of the world’s biodiversity. Reporters’ deadlines were in the very early hours of my morning. “Yes, the world is losing species a thousand times faster than it should,” I tell them. “And, yes, biodiversity matters to all of us, as the report makes clear.” (I would tell them this; after all, the report was quoting my research.)</p> <p>That’s not lost on the local communities here in Yingjiang. Within a few years, they have built hotels and thriving businesses of showing mostly Chinese wildlife photographers the area’s exceptional species. Far better than eking out a desperate living growing subsistence crops on land where that cannot be sustained. Signs near our hotel proclaim President Xi’s vision of “ecological civilization” and that “green is the new gold.”</p> <p>Governments can set the tone of a nation’s environmental choices. Just how much is nature&nbsp;worth? The Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway get 30 million visits a year, the Cape Hatteras National Seashore adds another 2.5 million and North Carolina state parks another 20 million. Is trashing national monuments and parks in the U.S. really our nation’s best strategy economically, given the hundreds of billions of dollars visitors spend?</p> <p>Protecting biodiversity must benefit the people who live next to it. Outside the U.S., that’s not always easy. We rich visitors to Africa’s national&nbsp;parks must heed the needs of the poor outside the expensive lodges where we sip our gin and tonics. That park may have lions that can eat your wealth in cattle in a night. I’m not always in a lodge. Sleeping in a small tent with lions sniffing around just outside always takes practice—the first time I lay awake terrified. For villagers nearby, the threat is always there.</p> <p>Here, at Yingjiang, there are no lions—or the tigers that were once here—but the question remains of what use is biodiversity? How to convert that green to gold? Local resourcefulness and vision, plus national government policies, admit a more promising future than on the opposing&nbsp;banks of the Irrawaddy.</p> <p>The wildlife blinds in which the wildlife photographers and I sit testify to local initiative. The blinds are simple cloth structures with crudely crafted log benches. Village women ensure that an irresistible drip, drip, drip of water through a bamboo pipe attracts thirsty laughing thrushes, quail, and sunbirds. That evening, the photographers show me what they captured with delight, and we toast each other with beer.</p> <p><em>Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of conservation ecology in the Nicholas School and an expert on biodiversity and species loss, received this year’s International Cosmos Prize for contributions to his field.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T09:00:15-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_14.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/environment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environment</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/environmental-research" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environmental Research</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/faculty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Faculty</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/global" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Global</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/natural-sciences" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Natural Sciences</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/stuart-pimm" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Stuart Pimm</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Of what use is biodiversity?</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:14:17 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506214 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/toast-frontline#comments As Another Storm Approaches https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/another-storm-approaches <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>It has been a great spring and summer in beautiful and historic Beaufort, North Carolina, my hometown. Hundreds of visitors daily have come to explore the glorious coastal ecosystem, just as they have every summer. Yet the normality is just surface. Beaufort is still recovering from Hurricane Florence, which struck the area just under a year ago.&nbsp;</p> <p>It seemed we were on a clear path to recovery. I was proud to see citizens offer selfless support to neighbors in need. Supplies and assistance were deployed from across the country. FEMA, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and many other organizations were on the scene in short order to support storm response and start recovery efforts.&nbsp;</p> <p>But then, after a few weeks, the effects of water damage (e.g., mold and mildew) started to appear. Many residents were compelled or encouraged to leave their houses or apartments. Some chose to stay at home despite the health risks. When an apartment complex in Beaufort with 109 families had to be evacuated, there were limited options. Extensive damage across eastern North Carolina means there are few vacancies for those displaced.&nbsp;</p> <p>So, instead, it’s been a painful, delayed recovery. Many citizens and businesses in eastern North Carolina are still struggling. As mayor, what keeps me awake at night is that I still do not even know how many citizens remain displaced in tents, in cars, or worse.&nbsp;</p> <p>What I do know now is that these problems have to be solved at the local level. The political dysfunction we’ve seen at the national level has permeated our states. National elected officials have no vision for the future; the U.S. agenda is clearly driven by special interests over citizen needs. Yet, at all levels we face complex, overlapping challenges, like an expanding socioeconomic divide, climate change, degrading water quality, failing infrastructure, and drug addiction.&nbsp;</p> <p>Consider just the expanding socioeconomic divide. Hurricane Florence exposed this growing inequality, especially in the more rural parts of eastern North Carolina. Those with means are recovering much faster than those without economic resources. We have not yet talked much about this divide because it is complex, has been slow in evolving, demands sustained and discomforting critical thinking, and will require a broad menu of interconnected solutions. Yet our schools skillfully manage these concerns every day. Sixty to seventy percent of students in our schools are eligible for free or reduced-rate lunches, and the impacts of poverty go much deeper than food. If we hope to address these problems, we need to examine the work of the schools. How do students without Internet compete? How do students focus on school work when there are challenges at home with food, shelter, transportation, and mounting bills? How are student performance indicators, discipline problems, and drop-out rates tied to these economic challenges? Does a sense of hopelessness lead to a continuing cycle of poverty and drug addiction? In my town, churches are providing food and resources; the Boys and Girls Clubs are providing food and a safe environment for education and leadership skills; and since North Carolina has not expanded Medicaid, the Broad Street Clinic is providing health care for more than 900 county residents otherwise unable to pay. If local groups with minuscule resources can face these problems, how is it possible that the elected leaders of the world’s most powerful nation, blessed with enormous resources and wealth, are unwilling to meet these basic needs of its citizens?&nbsp;</p> <p>Our community, facing real crisis, is finding ways to speak together, to work together, to come together. The Carteret Long Term Recovery Alliance (CLTRA), a group of selfless organizations and volunteers, formed to help those who continue to struggle from Hurricane Florence and to prepare for future storms. But there is still an urgency to address the deeper problems that require national leadership. These problems do not merely remain. They multiply.&nbsp;</p> <p>And another hurricane season approaches.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Newton is a doctoral student at the Duke Marine Lab of the Nicholas School of the Environment and the mayor of Beaufort. He is a retired colonel in the Air Force, where he was a fighter pilot, engineer, and foreign area officer.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T09:00:45-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_13.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/civic-engagement" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Civic Engagement</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/environment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environment</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/environmental-research" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Environmental Research</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/graduate" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Graduate</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/618266" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Law and Government</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/leadership-conference" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Leadership Conference</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/opinion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Opinion</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/public-policy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Public Policy</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/everette-newt-newton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Everette &quot;Newt&quot; Newton</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A delayed recovery reveals better ways to respond</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 13:05:05 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506213 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/another-storm-approaches#comments Prediction Takes Analysis And Faith https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/prediction-takes-analysis-and-faith <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>You might think that someone who spent twenty-one years conducting and overseeing FBI investigations would be inclined to look at the world retrospectively. A lifetime of trying to figure out what happened, after it happened, might have you constantly looking backward. An organized-crime figure is discovered dead—who did it, and why? Somebody set off explosives at the Boston Marathon—how did they do it, and where did they go?</p> <p>But I know the past is only part of the story.</p> <p>It is crucial that we solve these mysteries not only to bring justice to victims and consequences to perpetrators, but also because the answers help us make the country safer in the future. In the days after the attacks on 9/11, President George W. Bush asked FBI Director Robert Mueller pointedly, “What are you doing to stop the next attack before it happens?” With that question came a new mission, and the necessity to transform the FBI into an organization focused on mitigating threats rather than simply working cases. We needed to learn how to predict the criminal activity, terrorist attacks and foreign spying that might take place in the future.</p> <p>Reading the future is not a small or simple task. It requires an established process. You start with what you know. The FBI relies on analysts to know everything about our past work. They combine data from recent cases with reporting from informants, witness accounts, surveillance collection, intelligence from other agencies, and many other sources of information. Analysts digest that information with one eye on our reason for being: our mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.</p> <p>Next they consider recent trends like changes in terrorist tactics, newly developing criminal schemes, advances in technology, and demographic shifts. From this mix, they divine possible outcomes. For example, if our cases in the previous year saw an increasing number of Americans travelling to Syria, and we know how this experience might radicalize people, we can predict with fair confidence that the next year will see an increasing number of battle-trained, hardened extremists returning to live in the U.S.</p> <p>Finally, we rank these emerging threats in order of probability and impact. This process, completed in a consistent, disciplined way, gives us a rich picture of the challenges we will likely face in the years to come. With that picture of terrorist, criminal, and foreign-intelligence threats, we allocate investigative resources strategically, by moving agents and analysts among programs and field offices.</p> <p>These days, as a concerned citizen, I try to apply that same process to understand the threats our country will face in the future. I don’t have access&nbsp;to the same information I reviewed as a leader of the FBI, but there are still abundant sources to work with. I begin the process by trying to know as much as I can about our past—understanding the history and challenges that have shaped the pluralist democracy we enjoy today. I apply that to the core assumptions I believe all Americans share: that we are still “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”</p> <p>The next step in the analysis calls for looking at current trends and recent developments. And that’s when things begin to look much darker. I see the malign actions of our foreign adversaries becoming fodder for political debate, rather than a rallying cry to protect our democracy. I consider how the bellicose positions we now take are straining relationships across the globe with our strategic partners. I see national leaders assailing the institutions that execute the rule of law with false stories about plotting coups and maneuvering against the president. I cringe when I hear those same politicians attack the men and women who protect us and demand their imprisonment to the gleeful cheers of onlooking supporters.</p> <p>And I see people’s reflexive inclination to dismiss any inconvenient truth as fiction or fake news rather than engaging in dialogue. This analysis paints a dark picture of our future, one in which division and politics tear the country into warring tribes, unable to unite around issues necessary to protect our nation and advance the lives of all Americans.</p> <p>And that is where the analytical process fails me. Or, rather, I fail it by abandoning it for faith. Despite the indicators, I still believe that most people, regardless of political affiliation, want to live in a country that is free and fair and just. For everybody. I still believe that most people think the laws our elected representatives create should be applied equally and consistently to every citizen. I still believe that there are more things that bind us as Americans than divide us into political camps.</p> <p>My former colleagues might be disappointed with my forsaking the discipline of analysis for optimism and faith in the American spirit. But if I were sitting at the conference table with them again, debating the pros and cons, I would argue that my faith and their analytic rigor both stand on the foundation of our past while looking into our future. I would point out that we have been through tougher challenges and darker times before, from which we emerged as a stronger, smarter nation, better equipped to embrace our destiny. I have no doubt we will again.</p> <p><em>McCabe ’90, former deputy director of the FBI, is the author of </em>The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-12T08:45:00-04:00">Monday, August 12, 2019</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/future_12.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/618266" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Law and Government</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/618273" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Politics and Public Policy</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/andrew-mccabe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Andrew McCabe</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Reading the future isn&#039;t a simple task</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 12:53:33 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506212 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/prediction-takes-analysis-and-faith#comments For A Sustainable Media https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/sustainable-media <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>A couple of weeks after I graduated, my editor at the independent blog company I had interned for over my junior-year summer called to offer me a full-time gig. This was about a month after a has-been professional wrestler nearly sued the entire company out of existence.</p> <p>Taking a risk, I dumped the summer internship I had secured and took the job. That fall, the company got bought by a massive media conglomerate; the independence vanished overnight. Where once the fate of our media company and our financial futures rested solely in the hands of our owner, Nick Denton, that power now belonged to a faceless group of overpaid midlevel executives who would pop in every few months for increasingly disastrous all-hands meetings.</p> <p>Fast forward to the spring of 2018. Saddled with debt by the privateequity firms that they had stupidly sold pieces of themselves to for years, the conglomerate, or rather its debtors, decided costs needed to be trimmed. For us, that could have meant dropping 30 percent of our staff, as the conglomerate initially (reportedly) hoped. Instead, because of our union, the result was eighteen weeks of severance for the forty-four staffers who took the deal. A major loss, but also a mitigated one.</p> <p>Now jump to this spring. In March, a day after I joined a dozen fellow employees in informing the lawyers for the faceless conglomerate that we would strike if they did not offer us a fair contract, the conglomerate conceded to our heroic bargaining team and offered us a fair contract. A month later, our (highly successful!) blogs were sold as part of a preplanned dump-off to a(nother) private-equity—sorry, “growth” equity—firm, which immediately replaced our bosses with two nondescript mid-sixties white guys to run a company whose cornerstones include Jezebel and The Root (which focus on women’s and African- American issues, respectively). Oh, and the big conglomerate that used to own us gave us about a two-week notice that our company’s more than 200 employees had to move out of our office. The economic issues that have befallen the digital news industry in the past five years, and America in the last forty, have also befallen print media: Outlets are increasingly coming under the control of a select few major investors and newspaper groups, whose executives feel far more beholden to their stockholders than to the communities their outlets serve, let alone the reporters serving them. And at a certain point, a union, as they are currently constituted, is limited when these people decide the axe must fall.</p> <p>The summer following my sophomore year, I interned for <em>The News &amp; Observer </em>in Raleigh, on the sports desk. Thanks to industrywide consolidation and some terrible investments made by some C-level suits, mass layoffs had ravaged the newsroom. As a result, the three-story office was a ghost town. The interns, along with the remaining staff, sat through meetings where the higher-ups explained how the paper was actually still profitable, but because it was not independent from the dozens of other properties this corporation controlled, its profits did not mean more jobs or higher salaries, but that the money simply vanished, <em>poof </em>, off to settle the company’s aforementioned debts. A couple of years later, they swapped their office for a smaller one, selling the storied building to a company that invests in “securities, real estate, and oil and gas.”</p> <p>In the same way that our union could not stop Gawker Media from being sold, a union would not have saved <em>The N&amp;O</em> from its post-Recession contraction. It almost certainly would have secured workers better health care and salaries and, eventually, buyouts, but a union in the form that presently pervades the print and digital sectors would not have withstood the inherent idiocy of late-stage capitalism.</p> <p>The idea of always-elusive high profit margins and quick cash-ins has spelled doom for workers at every outlet from <em>Vox</em> to <em>The Denver Post</em>, because at the end of the day, newsrooms that do not control their own financial fate, or have a sole owner that is concerned with more than their ROI, are asking their owners to minimize their own outsized slice of the pie chart in favor of providing a crucial and quickly fading community service. What we have seen on the owners’ part, repeatedly, is the opposite. They instead point to us, the reporters and editors, and say we must do more with less. Then, after normalizing the new work practices, they will ask the same of us again. And then again. And then again, until there is left but one person clacking away in a hollow bullpen, assigning, filing, editing, and publishing all the day’s news.</p> <p>For the current and future employees in the news media to create a sustainable model that fosters lifelong careers and moves away from the benefits-absent freelance model, unions are necessary. But they must grow and evolve with the goal of inserting a group of representatives in the boardroom to force executives to hear the voice of all those who contribute to the production of the outlet, so that when it comes time to make a risky investment or cutbacks due to macroeconomic reasons, the workers at the bottom are not the only ones getting screwed. Since 2015, more than 2,000 digital media workers have unionized their newsrooms. It is time for these workers, and for their colleagues in the print industry, to declare the era of single-handed domination by venture capitalists and conglomerates at an end.</p> <p>I’m not old or grizzled or wise. But I’m already tired of praying for a benevolent billionaire, and other journalists should be, too.</p> <p><em>Martin ’16 is a staff writer at </em>Splinter, <em>where he covers Indian Country and Southern politics. He is also a citizen of the Sappony Tribe and a proud member of the Writers Guild of America-East.</em> <style type="text/css">p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 9.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 10.0px Times; color: #211d1e} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 12.1px; font: 10.0px Times; color: #211d1e} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 10.4px; font: 10.0px Times; color: #211d1e} span.s1 {font: 8.0px Times} </style> </p> <p class="p1">&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-08T17:00:00-04:00">Thursday, August 8, 2019</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/future_11.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/business" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Business</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/career" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Career</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/mass-media" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mass Media</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/opinion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Opinion</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/nick-martin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nick Martin</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The way forward for the press</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 08 Aug 2019 21:09:50 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506206 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/sustainable-media#comments If Sex Matters Less https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/if-sex-matters-less <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>For as long as I can remember, I have existed within and been marked by sex classifications. By this I mean that I have been sorted into and out of categories, spaces, and opportunities on the basis of sex, including formally by governments and institutions, informally by people in my life and on the street, and naturally by the facts of my body and my own related choices. These classifications are sometimes a net good, sometimes a net harm, and often simply value-neutral.</p> <p>I tick the box for “Female” on the myriad forms that request this information. I walk through the door marked “Women” to use the toilet, the locker room, or the changing room. For many years, first as an amateur and then as a professional, I competed in “girls’” and “women’s” events in the sport of track and field. I’ve experienced my share of #MeToo moments: as a child on a playground, even though I undoubtedly presented as a tomboy; as a teenager on a babysitting job; and as an adult in the street, on running trails, and at the office. (By the time I was grown, it had become clear that it doesn’t matter how we present: our sex and its associated vulnerability shines through for those who would abuse their relative physical advantage.) And, I’ve had the inevitably sexed experiences that are gestation, childbirth, and nursing; pregnancy and a D&amp;C; menstruation and amenorrhea; and birth-control pills for birth control, but also to regulate my menstrual cycle for athletics and to minimize the incidence of period-related migraines.&nbsp;</p> <p>To the extent that I identify as “female” or as a “woman” it is because of these physical experiences and their associated psychological effects, not because of any inherent sense that I am or my brain is female or feminine. The fact is, I tick the box “Female” pretty much automatically, but when I think about it, I accept that it’s often a rational (albeit imperfect) identifier for administrators, just as it is for all of us as we continually situate ourselves in relation to others. I go into doors marked “Women” for reasons that are almost as automatic: because it’s the custom and because I care about my bodily privacy and safety in relation to men. Safety in relation to men is also why I no longer run at night or on trails and back roads, even though these are the best runs. And because I was an athlete, for many years my body was my business, from its parts and processes to the complete package and how fast it could go. The nature of that “business” changed when it was about mothering instead, but throughout it remained a specifically female-bodied experience.</p> <p>That women continue to be treated differently in school and the workplace partly because others see in our female phenotypes a signal that we have certain capacities, aptitudes, and commitments, makes clear that our female bodies remain deeply salient in the extent to which they affect our experiences and opportunities. As with physical assaults, these incidents of female sex exist however we present, whether we adhere to or defy feminine stereotypes. And they surely contribute to the fact that fifty years from the start of RBG’s revolution, still only 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 20 percent of equity partners in major law firms are women.</p> <p>Because of all of this, but also because federal constitutional law clearly allows policymakers to recognize the “inherent differences” between the sexes when this is necessary to ensure equality for females—see Title IX, for example—I was surprised and disappointed when the Obama administration announced that it would interpret the word “sex” in “sex discrimination” law to mean “gender identity,” which it defined as “an individual’s internal sense of [themselves] which can be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.” Of course, this move was designed primarily to secure much-needed protections for people who are transgender. But it also signaled the administration’s view of the relative insignificance of biological sex as a legal category, as well as its alliance with that strand of the identity movement that holds that erasure of the sexed body from law and policy is necessary to ensure equality for the LGBTQIA community.</p> <p>Unsurprisingly, this move at the federal level didn’t survive the earliest days of the Trump administration or the scrutiny of many across the political spectrum, including within the LGBTQIA community itself. But it was effective in the interim, and it’s had quite a long tail. Fearing the withdrawal of federal funds, or because they agreed with the Obama administration’s position, many states adopted similar policies. And this past spring, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which does a version of the same, defining “sex” to include “gender identity” and disallowing any distinctions on the basis of sex. Its effect would be to elide the differences between women who are female and women who are transgender.</p> <p>In related testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, I encouraged legislators to enact protections for the LGBTQIA community that remain considered about the circumstances in which biological sex still matters, including in sport. Because females are physically disadvantaged in relation to males, Title IX and the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act require schools and national governing bodies to provide separate but equal opportunities for females. This requirement continues to be enormously empowering in ways that transcend sport and that are not only good for female athletes but also for girls and women and their societies more generally. If you had any doubt about this before, I trust that this summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup resolved them. In contrast, approaches to addressing inequality that elide relevant differences tend not only to be ineffective; they can actually serve as cover for ongoing discrimination.</p> <p>In the future, when the dust has settled on this turbulent moment, my broader hope is that we will have managed to secure equal protection for people who are transgender without having to adopt the legal fiction that sex and gender identity are interchangeable. We’re all entitled to equality on the terms that matter. For women and girls, whether we like it or not, sex remains one of the terms that matters most.</p> <p><em>Coleman is a professor of law at Duke School of Law.&nbsp;</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-08T16:30:15-04:00">Thursday, August 8, 2019</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/future_10.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/618266" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Law and Government</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/opinion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Opinion</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/public-policy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Public Policy</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/staff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Staff</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/doriane-lambelet-coleman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Doriane Lambelet Coleman</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">Why the future should be female and protection should be for all</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 08 Aug 2019 20:54:48 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506205 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/if-sex-matters-less#comments An Imagination Of Language https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/imagination-language <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><em>Watashi wa watashi-tachi mo mata kõei aru Nihonjin de-aru koto wo akumade shinjite-iru mono de-arimasu.</em></p> <p>“I am, and all of us are, glorious Japanese, and I will believe that until the end.”</p> <p>These words come from the police chief in Nakajima Atsushi’s 1929 short story “A Policeman’s Landscape,” one of the stories I translated in my master’s thesis this past year. At this point in the story, officers had gathered to elect new members for their prefectural council in Japaneseoccupied Korea. Of the many candidates, only one is Korean, and during his speech, an officer throws a slur at him. The hall erupts into discord, and the police chief shouts out that statement to put a lid on things. The racist remark is bad for the chief’s brand, but his way of downplaying it erases the Korean officer’s ethnic and cultural identity and coincides with Japan’s goal of assimilating Korea into its fold.</p> <p>The police chief ’s problematic belief that all of the men in the room are “glorious Japanese” is expressed with the phrase <em>shinjite-iru</em>, a stative construction similar to “–ing” in English. I translate the verb with the future tense (“I will believe that until the end”), since its assertions reach forward without an end date. But this “future” projected by the police chief officially ended in 1945 with Japan’s defeat and the loss of its sprawling colonial possessions. With the ensuing American occupation, Japan immediately set out on a new course, its former trajectory diverted toward democratic practices, demilitarization, and increased civil liberties.</p> <p>When I was a freshman at Duke learning Japanese for the first time, I was surprised to learn that the language doesn’t have a formal future tense: There’s simply a past form and a non-past form, which can be interpreted as present or future depending on the context. For example, <em>tabemasu</em> could mean “I eat” or “I will eat.” Instead of tense, which categorizes verbal action as falling on a linear timeline, Japanese relies on aspect, which tells whether an action is completed or not. Rather than conveying temporal information, the conjugated verb tabemasu encodes that the action has not yet been completed (corresponding to future tense) or will never truly be completed because it is a stative or habitual action (present tense).</p> <p>Does this lack of future tense mean, as some linguistic determinists might insinuate, that the Japanese don’t conceptualize the future in the same way as speakers of other languages? As researchers have confirmed over the past decades, all languages can express the same concepts, but one might go about it in a different way than another. Further, this question is rooted in a false assumption. English, for its part, does not codify future tense into its verbs, but instead uses the addition of auxiliaries like “will” and “would” to make the timeframe understood. Japanese uses similar non-tense factors to get the point across.</p> <p>Recently, Japan enthroned a new emperor. For the three decades of the Heisei era, Akihito was Japan’s national symbol. Then, on May 1, 2019, tracks shifted, and suddenly Japan had a new figurehead. On April 30, an article in the literary magazine <em>Bunshun</em> asked in its headline: <em>Reiwa-jidai no kōshitsu wa Heisei kara dō kawaru?</em> The verb “change” (kawaru) being unmarked for tense but implied as future, I translate the headline as: “How will the imperial family of the Reiwa era change from the Heisei?” Although the emperor has no formal political power, for most within Japan and without, there is hope for peace and prosperity. But for those affected by Japan’s role in World War II and their descendants, a simple date on the calendar does not erase generations of trauma and exploitation.</p> <p>With every passing moment, people and nature interact in ways such that the future is always changing. In and of itself, the future is an imagination of language: a laying-out of one possibility for one particular world. Translating historical texts allows me to celebrate and protest various futures that have populated the literary imagination in the past. But futures continue to shift every day. Writers and executives and activists and scientists continue to put forth hypotheses that we <em>will</em> have a better world one day. No matter how our languages grapple with time, we can all construct better futures—and pursue them until they become history.</p> <p><em>Korschun ’16 graduated with a major in linguistics and Asian and Middle Eastern studies and this past spring received his M.A. in Japanese literature from the University of Colorado-Boulder. A Fulbright U.S. Student Award grantee, he is teaching English at Law Enforcement University in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for the upcoming academic year.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2019-08-08T15:45:30-04:00">Thursday, August 8, 2019</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/future_9.jpg" width="800" height="600" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-topics field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/alumni" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alumni</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/asian-and-middle-eastern-studies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Asian and Middle Eastern Studies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/drew-korschun" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Drew Korschun</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/issues/special-2019" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Special 2019</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">What the future tense can tell us</div></div></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Thu, 08 Aug 2019 20:27:15 +0000 Adrienne Martin 18506204 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/imagination-language#comments