Fall 2017 Issue v. 3

MAGAZINE

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

DUKE MAGAZINE • FALL 2017

DUKE

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M AG A Z I N E

FALL 2017 SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

We just love it there!

Epworth Forever

Why it’s Duke’s most beloved dorm

Jared Lazarus

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Opportunities of a lifetime

Driven. Curious. Outrageously smart. At Duke, we recruit students based on their character and talent, not their ability to pay. By supporting financial aid, you ensure the best and brightest always have a spot at Duke.

Made possible by you.

April 13-15, 2018 Celebrate. Reminisce. Reconnect.

Come back to Duke Reunions and remember what it means to be Forever Duke.

CELEBRATING THE CLASSES OF: 1958, 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993,

Class of 2017 students scale the top of Duke Chapel during the annual climb hosted by Duke Annual Fund Seniors for Duke.

1998, 2003, 2008, 2013 and the Half Century Club

Learn more about the weekend, see who's coming, and add your name to the list:

www.DukeReunions.com Whether you leave a legacy with a planned gift or make an immediate impact with an Annual Fund donation, every dollar makes a difference. Together, we are generating the means for the next generation of Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. Learn how: giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

Duke Alumni Association Reunions Office • Box 90572 • Durham, NC 27708-0572

INSIDE Fall 2017 | Vol. 103 | No. 4

FEATURES:

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4 FORUM

There’s no place like Epworth

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by Scott Huler

THE QUAD

Installing a new president, calculating by hand, making science elementary

Reagan Lunn

Duke University Archives

A lint czar, a Purple Parlor, and roach infestations. Just some of the reasons Duke’s oldest building might be its most lovable.

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SPORTS

An NCAA rule has led Erik Hanson and other graduate studentathletes to join the Blue Devils.

Dr. Feelgood

by Danny Hooley Using sartorial style and a patientcentric approach, Richard Bedlack offers optimism in his quest to cure and treat those with ALS.

42 FOREVER DUKE

Meet the 2017 DAA Award winners, then meet Michael Sorrell A.M. ’90, J.D. ’94.

Alex Boerner

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DEVILIST

We asked for signs that fall has arrived at Duke. You answered.

COVER: Photographs by Jared Lazarus and Duke University Archives

To the tenure track…and beyond

Alex Boerner

by Lucas Hubbard As Ph.D. candidates deal with a shortage of professorships, they’re being challenged to discover different ways to use their skills and new definitions of success.

FULLFRAME STOMPING THE YARD: Brothers of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity add some height to their step show during the Multicultural Greek Council/National Pan-Hellenic Council carnival on the Bryan Center Plaza.

Photo by Megan Mendenhall

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

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n what the academy sometimes labels “the real world,” it’s been quite a calamitous season. Hurricanes. Shootings. Fires. As it happens, some Duke alumni have played key roles in covering and contextualizing the whole range of seemingly apocalyptic events.

“Covering a disaster where you live means watching your friends and neighbors suffer,” says Andrew Kragie ’15, who reported on Hurricane Harvey for The Houston Chronicle.

“It means wondering who is affected, who is okay, who needs help. It makes it less voyeuristic, less impersonal, harder to forget and move on to the next assignment.”

With the arrival of Harvey, the roads around Kragie’s apartment had three to five feet of water. His editor dispatched him to a local medical complex, which ranks as the world’s largest. “I rode my bike through the streets—like pedaling a slightly-better-than-stationary bike in a swimming pool, but with all sorts of contaminants you’d like to ignore.”

Along the way, Kragie ran into a

“The residents had only minutes to collect whatever they could and flee.”

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

homeless man. “He was out of food and water, so I gave him my granola bars and split my water. He didn’t have a cell phone to call for help if the waters kept rising. I imagine he was fine and was able to leave the next day. But I have no idea.”

Kragie returned to the field to write about what flooded homeowners saved or salvaged from the water. “Family photos mean a lot to people, especially the old ones we never think about digitizing until it’s too late. Pets, of course.

One woman’s many handmade quilts. A woman’s Christmas ornaments, made for her children by her mother.”

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Seeking out such personal details behind extraordinary events is also the work of Elizabeth Van Brocklin ’11, a former Felker Fellow for Duke Magazine. She’s now a reporter for The Trace, a website that covers gun violence and gun issues.

“The week of the Las Vegas shooting was busy and upsetting for the reasons one might expect,” says Van Brocklin.

“Horrendous as they are, high-profile mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of people are shot every year in America, many of them in urban neighborhoods where resources are already thin.”

Roughly ninety people die from firearms injuries each day. More than double that number are shot and survive their injuries. “Some of them leave the hospital only to face physical disability, a shattered psyche, and huge medical bills—and there’s no coordinated system of support to help them through.” One fellow reporter described this daily violence to Van Brocklin as “a mass shooting in slow motion.”

The massive wild fires were in familiar territory for San Francisco-based New York Times photographer Jim Wilson ’74. On the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Oakland Hills fire, which destroyed nearly 3,000 structures and took twenty-five lives, Wilson observes, “Sadly, I’ve been down this road previously.” That was his first wild fire as a photographer. “It touched me personally. The home I’d just bought was in an area that was on standby to evacuate; a very fortunate change in the wind direction meant that my neighborhood was spared.”

On this assignment, Wilson headed to the wine country village of Glen Ellen, where a mental- health-care facility was endangered. He documented several crews as they fought fires on “fully engaged homes” and ended up in Santa Rosa, where the destruction stretched to a mobile-home park, apartment complexes, and a couple of hotels.

“The full impact of the fire didn’t actually hit me until I drove a few miles west into the Coffey Park neighborhood, where there was nothing left, just piles of smoking ashes where homes had once stood,” he recalls. On many lots, the only thing that was recognizable was the shell of a washer or a dryer or an occasional vehicle parked in a driveway—though often the vehicle was just a pile of molten metal and glass.

“What struck me most was that these neighborhoods were in the heart of Santa Rosa, a vibrant city of tidy subdivisions,” Wilson says. “There were areas where no one would have ever imagined that a wild fire could burn through as this one had. The residents had only minutes to collect whatever they could and flee. Now, they are returning, trying to figure out how they will start over.”

—Robert J. Bliwise, editor

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MAGAZINE

DUKE UNIVERSITY, BOX 90572 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 27708-0572

LETTERS & COMMENTS Like music to her eyes The “Secrets” issue was Duke Magazine at its best. The issue was well sequenced (like a great album of music) and the pieces excellently edited. The photography for each piece augmented the text so well.

I can’t remember reading a magazine word for word, cover to cover in a long time.

Pamela George Adjunct professor, Nicholas School of the Environment A door to more readers This was a most unique style among the many university publications I have read over many years. All too often there is a “sameness” in these magazines—a narrowness that is sometimes overlooked by the writers and staff. Of course, I am sure that the writers will vigorously defend their work in terms of the “whats and whys” that flowed from their pens. And what, therefore, might I ask of the contributors, are the visions and goals of the publications?

Answer: to reach as many readers as possible.

With this novel issue, to me, you have opened the door to do that very thing of extending (slightly outside of the usual norm) and achieving a bit more influence over and enjoyment for many of those who may be “cover gazers and page flippers.” Congratulations on this publication!

James Macomson, D.D.S. Gastonia, North Carolina Vandalism shouldn’t triumph How ironic that the Robert E. Lee statue was removed from Duke Chapel shortly after being “outed” in the

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

DUKE

M AG A Z I N E

SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

“Secrets” issue. I would like to think it will be returned after repairs, but I imagine that is wishful thinking. home is this?

MyWhose grandfather, J. Deryl Hart, helped shepherd Duke through some very difficult times, as his presidency (1960-63) coincided with part of the civil rights movement. Among other things, he was instrumental in formulating the committee that made the decision to admit qualified blacks to Duke. I am quite sure, however, that he would never have seen fit to alter Duke Chapel by removing the likeness of a great man—not to mention a great educator—due to a senseless act of vandalism.

For the Duke graduate who lived here, it was a place where all that was collected served as inspiration and homage, and perhaps for visitors, as revelation.

Learn the answer and see more, beginning on page 38.

Photos by Alex Harris

ber one in his class at West Point, never receiving a demerit. He served these United States for thirty-two years, fighting in the Mexican War with bravery and distinction—a war Congressman Lincoln opposed and avoided. He was offered the command of the Union Army and in a fierce internal struggle chose his state over these United States.

If this school had a shred of honor, which is hard to believe after its participation in the lacrosse scandal, it would remove Duke’s monument on East Campus and rename itself Trinity College.

TH ES EC

RE TS ISS

UE

John Maclean ’77 Savannah, Georgia

Charles H. Warner M.D. ’85 Roanoke, Virginia

Put this in your pipe and smoke it What about Washington Duke?

I have two concerns about your “Secrets” Is there no contradiction between Duke issue cover picturing the James B. Duke forming a committee to sanitize its statue. statuary and yet prominently displaying 1. Covering his cigar is inaccurate. It a monument to the world’s greatest drug is no “secret” that Duke was founded dealer, Washington Duke? Duke owned on money earned from tobacco sales and, one slave that we know of, fought in the through The Duke Endowment, continConfederate Army, and then afterward ues to receive significant funding from created the world’s largest cigarette company. He peddled a drug that has killed money earned from tobacco sales. more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao 2. Given Duke’s pervasive climate of combined. political correctness, it would not surprise Yet, we condemn Robert E. Lee. me to hear someone or some group of Here was a man who graduated num“protestors” have decided “something must CORRECTIONS: In

the Summer Issue 2017, the Pageturners section had an incorrect class year for author Daniel Riley ’08, whose debut novel Fly Me was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s best summer books of 2017.

In the Special Issue 2017, a caption accompanying the essay “Code-making and code-breaking” misidentified the nationality of famed codebreaker Alan Turing.

Turing was an Englishman.

DUKE MAGAZINE Fall 2017 | Vol. 103 | No. 4 | www.DUKEMAGAZINE.duke.edu EDITOR: Robert J. Bliwise A.M. ’88 MANAGING EDITOR: Adrienne Johnson Martin SENIOR WRITER: Scott Huler CLAY FELKER STAFF WRITER: Lucas Hubbard ’14 CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Penn and Christina Holder M.Div. ’13 STAFF ASSISTANT: Delecia Hatcher PUBLISHER: Sterly L. Wilder ’83, associate vice president, Alumni Affairs SPECIAL SECTIONS EDITOR: Bridgette Lacy ART DIRECTOR: Lacey Chylack, phase5creative, inc. PRINTER: Progress Printing OFFICERS, DUKE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION: Jack Boyd ’85, president, Sterly L. Wilder ’83, secretary-treasurer DUKE MAGAZINE Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 PHONE: (919) 684-5114 FAX: (919) 681-1659 E-MAIL: dukemag@duke.edu ADDRESS CHANGES: Alumni Records, Box 90581, Durham, N.C. 27708 or bluedevil@duke.edu • © 2017 Duke University, Published five times a year by the Duke Alumni Association.

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be done” about the cigar on the statue.

Were that to occur, I suggest it would be hypocritical for any alumnus, student, or professor who feels that way, but who has benefited from being part of Duke, were they not to give back all of the salaries, scholarship money, and any other benefits they have received.

Harry Nolan ’64 Atlanta It’s not all about the surprise Your antidote to the fear of spoilers is an effective one, I think (“Unspoiled Territory”). Excellent storytelling is not always about the surprise shock. If it were all about the surprise shock, then we would not revisit the stories that we love. And there would be no new Star Wars fans. There would be no Shake-

speare revivals or festivals. There would be no classics.

Keith Underwood ’83 Lewes, Delaware A geographical error I was perusing the “Secrets” issue and something jumped out at me. “Walden Pond in Kunshan” by Patrick Thomas Morgan was an interesting read, but the thing that jumped out was the background graphics depicting a silhouette of China. It included Taiwan, insinuating that Taiwan is part of China, which is both erroneous and offensive.

As a proud Taiwanese American who grew up in the deep South, I’ve come across my fair share of people who may not be able to pick out Taiwan on the map or [who] confuse it with Thailand. I

UPDATE Special Issue

In the , in the “Tour of Secrets” pullout, we mentioned that among the statues at the portal to the chapel stood one, surprisingly, of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Since then, that statue has had rather an adventurous time of it. The Duke community awoke on August 17 to find that the statue had been defaced—almost literally. Someone attacked the statue’s face with a blunt instrument. Within hours President Vincent E. Price had issued a statement: “Each of us deserves a voice in determining how to address the questions raised by the statues of Robert E. Lee and others, and confront the darker moments in our nation’s history,” Price said. “For an individual or group of individuals to take matters into their own hands and vandalize a house of worship undermines the right, protected in our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion, of every Duke student and employee to participate fully Duke Photography in university life.”

Two days later the statue was removed. “The removal also presents an opportunity for us to learn and heal,” said Price. “The statue will be preserved so that students can study Duke’s complex past and take part in a more inclusive future.” That study began with the new Commission on Memory and History, comprising faculty, students, staff, alumni, trustees, and members of the Durham community. The commission is charged with “developing principles to apply when issues arise related to the names of university facilities and monuments on campus, recommending next steps for the entrance of Duke Chapel, and providing guidance…as we engage in a broader campus conversation about history and inclusion.”

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understand that most of the time, it’s an honest mistake born out of ignorance or lack of correct information. However, there are instances where the inclusion of Taiwan as part of China is being done with malice, intending to provoke, demean, and oppress Taiwan and its people.

I hope this was just an honest mistake.

Eric Lai ’05 Chapel Hill Another part of the story My father, David L. Swain ’48, M.Div. ’51, is the one Johanna McCloy referred to as the “missionary” in her story [“Before/After”], and the setting was our family cabin in the mountains of Japan.

My mother confirms that, yes, both she and my father knew Johanna’s dad was a “spy.” And yes, my dad was incensed with the idea that his own U.S. tax dollars were paying for CIA agents, like Johanna’s dad, to spy on American nationals, like himself.

There is a chance my father did garner some attention: As a United Methodist missionary, David Swain worked on peace and justice issues in Japan, helping students grow in their faith, assisting persecuted Christians in South Korea, and ultimately winning awards for his co-translation of “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bomb,” the first comprehensive study of the events and results of the 1945 nuclear bombing of Japan.

My father passed away two years ago in his hometown of Asheville. I’m immensely proud of my dad, for what he did and produced for the world—and my dad was so proud of being a Dukie, as am I. Dinah Swain ’86 Minneapolis SEND LETTERS TO: Box 90572, Durham, N.C. 27708 or e-mail dukemag@duke.edu.

Please limit letters to 300 words and include your full name, address, and class year or Duke affiliation. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity. Owing to space constraints, we are unable to print all letters received. Published letters represent the range of responses received. For additional letters: www.dukemagazine. duke.edu.

Brain PowerBrewing over Baldwin

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LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

2021Move-in

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Jared Lazarus

BehindTheScenes: MBasketballPoster

WSoftball: Season One Groundbreaking

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How do Duke Gardens grow?

After a decade of improvements, dreams of an entryway with a sense of moment

D

uke Gardens executive director Bill LeFevre seems at home in a golf cart.

He zips along the gardens’ crushed gravel pathways, up and down hills, through gates and over bridges, many of which were built during his tenure.

Horticulturists, curators, and volunteers seem to have an ear for the cart’s humming and step aside, smiling as LeFevre rolls by.

He coasts to a stop at the Frances P. Rollins Overlook, a stone-paved plaza bounded by a low wall with a view of the gardens’ iconic eight-level terrace. The perfect spot for gazing, the overlook opened only in 2012. Before that people had no place to rest, though they had always stopped to look. “The original entrance” to the gardens, LeFevre explains, pointing up the path, “was the little stone gate behind the Allen Building.” Now the main entrance is across the gardens, off Anderson Street, designed in 1959 for its stunning view of the chapel down the Main Entry Allée. But even the Doris Duke Center there, added in 2001, rarely welcomes visitors. “They park, and they go off in different directions,” LeFevre says. “And we do not interact with them.

“We are the number-one tourist attraction in Durham, North Carolina, and we don’t have a front door.”

The gardens staff hopes, in several years, to resolve that with the Garden Gateway Project, a $30 million renovation of the Doris Duke Center and its surroundings that will provide an entrance with a sense of moment, featuring a striking shed roof straddling a new entry plaza.

The expanded center will offer food service, restrooms, and even a rooftop terrace to enjoy that chapel view. Above all, the gardens will have their front door.

The gateway will tie the gardens together in a way their unusual history has not before encouraged. “This garden was not designed, per se,” LeFevre says. “It’s grown organically for eighty years,” though perhaps never so rapidly as during LeFevre’s tenure. Originally planned as a lake but sidetracked by the Depression, the gardens developed because in 1930 Duke neurologist Frederic Hanes disliked his daily walk to work through the debrisfilled lakebed. He proposed an iris garden and convinced Sarah P. Duke to donate funds. The resulting terraces were

“We are the number-one tourist attraction in Durham, North Carolina, and we don’t have a front door.”

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COME ON IN: An architectural rendering shows the gardens with a proper front door.

joined by the H.L. Blomquist Garden of Native Plants in 1968, the W.L. Culberson Asiatic Arboretum in 1984, and the Doris Duke Center in 2001. LeFevre arrived in 2007 as the gardens’ first full-time director (all previous directors had been Duke botanists, with more on their mind than the gardens). He says even then he saw the need to better join what sometimes felt like four separate gardens. Yet he wished to do so without upsetting the rhythms of an enormously successful and beloved place.

“The goal when my time here comes to its end is that these gardens do not feel any different,” he says, “but they work a lot better for the visitor.” And in ten years LeFevre has overseen a parade of improvements. Though some of

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Courtesy Duke Gardens

them, like Wi-Fi and improved grading on paths, certainly make the gardens work a lot better, many do make visitors feel different.

During his term the gardens have added features like the Pine Clouds Mountain Stream Japanese garden and the Welch Woodland Garden Overlook, both of which include recirculating streams, and have redesigned the rose garden, installing the Roney Fountain (an idea hatched after LeFevre’s dog led him to the remains, on East Campus, of the original). On his watch, the gardens have improved sustainability by making the koi pond entirely recirculating rather than dependent on municipal water; and entirely new facilities have been added, like the Charlotte Brody

Discovery Garden, which teaches vegetable farming, and the brand new Piedmont Prairie, giving space to the native plants and bugs that would have populated an open space long before there was a Duke. Garden staff have doubled, and funding has improved, and LeFevre’s colleagues have noticed—the gardens won the 2013 Horticulture magazine Award for Garden Excellence. LeFevre currently serves as president of the board of the American Public Gardens Association.

LeFevre is proud of the gardens’ growth in the last decade, but he takes little credit. “It was always beautiful.

It just needed a little more,” he says. “We’re just polishing the gem.”— Scott Huler

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Photos courtesy Duke University Chemistry Department 10

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So let it be written

P

A physics fellow explains why, sometimes, using pen and paper is the right calculation. ostdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has helped solve a mystery about the physical nature of glass. But as interesting as the breakthrough is, perhaps equally interesting is Yaida’s choice of tools—the same ones used by Newton and Darwin. For research recently published in Physical Review Letters, Yaida spent a month at his desk calculating, using nothing more technological than printer paper and free pens from the supply cabinet.

Yaida studies physics in the chemistry lab of Patrick Charbonneau, where among the things they analyze is what physicists and chemists call “the glass problem”: how glass works. “Surprisingly, even though we know how to make them,” says Yaida, “we really don’t understand the physics of glasses.” Unlike crystals, whose ordered molecular structure makes them easy to understand, molecules in glasses (ordinary windows and tumblers and stuff) are disordered, so trying to understand and predict their behavior makes physicists go bonkers. Though at common temperatures glass is obviously solid enough to keep your cabernet from running all over the table, glass is not exactly either a liquid or a crystalline solid. It’s called an amorphous solid, which is what makes it so perplexing.

Or perplexing in three-dimensional reality. If you take glass into a place of limitless dimensions, you can write equations that work just great. In infinite-dimensional spaces, some glass makes a transition from normal to marginally stable glasses with exotic properties.

The goal has been to translate those equations from unlimited spatial dimensions into our quotidian three.

“Because if it only happens in infinite dimensions,” Yaida asks pragmatically, “why would you care?”

Yaida has a background in particle physics, and he got to thinking. Particle physics uses “renormalization-group flow calculations,” which he calls “a way to determine how the thing you observe can survive” as

“Doing the wrong calculations is kind of organizing your mind and getting to the right calculations.

In this case, it was long.”

you make your way into, in this case, fewer and fewer dimensions, with each limitation making the equation more complex. The contact point between infinite dimensional space and physical reality is called a “fixed point” of the renormalization-group flow, and Yaida got Charbonneau’s permission to take a month and try to find it.

Thirty pages of handwritten calculations later, with cross-outs and corrections and diagrams and symbols and all the stuff that math has, he did. Actually, the pages he spreads onto a work table number more like a hundred. “In writing a paper, you tend to do more wrong calculations than correct ones,” Yaida says. “This process of doing wrong calculations is pretty important. Doing the wrong calculations is kind of organizing your mind and getting to the right calculations. In this case, it was long.”

Yaida smiles. “That’s life.”

One advantage of handwritten calculations is that Yaida can quickly scan columns of equations and graphs to see whether he’s made mistakes. “Also I try not to blindly trust people,” he says, starting his calculations from scratch. “Other people could have made mistakes.” The same applies to computer calculations.

Building from pieces of other source code may accumulate errors. “It’s very important not to have any black boxes in your scientific investigation, whether in calculation or in computer simulation.” Even so, his approach is not an attack on computers. He once would have said computers should not be used at all, but writing code helps organize his thoughts, as it requires breaking things down into pieces simple enough for a computer to understand. And running equations through a computer is a good check as well. “That’s if you code it yourself,” he emphasizes. Unchecked equations are just as dangerous as unchecked blocks of code.

Finally, Yaida says, “Most people prefer to do it by hand—it’s faster that way.” Which led to that month with pen and paper. “The calculation was not inventing new techniques. I was just carefully cranking the knob.

You don’t want to go to the computer each time.” And though handwritten calculation is charming, Yaida does not romanticize it.

“The important point is not that the calculations took thirty pages,” Yaida says. “The point is to not be scared of calculations like this.”— Scott Huler

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LEADERSHIP: President Vincent E. Price heads to his inauguration followed by, left to right, former Duke president Nannerl O. Keohane, University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, and former Duke president Richard H. Brodhead.

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I N A U G U R AT I O N of V I N C EN T E. PRIC E

THE CROWD ATTENDING the October 5 inauguration of new Duke president Vincent E. Price was undeniably larger than the crowd attending the inauguration of his predecessor. Expect no dispute. You may attribute the crowd to golden sunlight slanting across the Abele Quad on a warm early October afternoon.

(Duke’s previous inauguration, in 2004, for Richard H. Brodhead, was moved inside Duke Chapel as Hurricane Ivan threatened the region.) The promise of piles of shrimp afterward in the Brodhead Center you could have attacked with a pitchfork didn’t hurt.

by a drum corps and the university’s ceremonial mace, paused at the entrance to the quad, the guests rose in respect and delight. Bells rang, bands played, and President Price told the crowd, “Again we are called upon to answer the challenges of the day.” In particular he challenged the university community to renew its commitment to lead in teaching and learning, with “an eye toward the scalability and adaptability that our future will surely demand”; in a commitment to discovery premised on the view that “the landscape of human knowledge and human challenge has changed,” and

“Again we are called upon to answer the challenges of the day.”

Then again, it might just be that inaugurating the tenth president of Duke—the fifteenth president of the institution—offered the opportunity to watch Duke be Duke, and that’s always fun.

It was. From a State Fair­–style extravaganza on East Campus the night before called PricePalooza with rides, tattoos, and food on a stick, through the faculty symposium on the modern research university’s role in public deliberation and in expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, through fireworks after that Brodhead Center blowout, Duke and Durham came out to celebrate.

Parties are, of course, parties. But when the procession of academics in brightly colored regalia, led

Megan Mendenhall

“so too must our maps and tools for navigating them”; in acknowledging that “the true shape of the world’s needs and opportunities” demands breaking through “disciplinary logics”; and in reckoning with “a diverse and often chaotic world” through honest and deep engagement with a diversity of perspectives.

Price promised from Duke “a renewed charge to make bold choices of our own, choices that will permit this noble university in the forest to thrive and to shape the course of a still-new century.” So maybe what brought out the crowd to celebrate a new chapter for Duke was hope.

Plus, obviously, that shrimp.

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CELEBRATORY: Top left, scenes from the festive PricePalooza; far right, the president addresses the crowd; more than 3,000 gathered on Abele Quad; the president bows for a blessing; afterward, he chats with students.

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Duke Photography DUKE MAGAZINE

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DR/TL*

Distilled mentions of things going on among Duke researchers, scholars, and other enterprises

ANIMALS

MISCELLANY

Odette and Quintin, two collared LEMURS, on April 5 welcomed to the Lemur Center their new daughter Bijou, one day after Nacho, a male mongoose lemur, was born to parents Carolina and Duggan. McKinnon and Poehler, two blueeyed black lemurs, were born a couple weeks earlier. Given that lemurs breed once a year and are receptive to breeding for less than fortyeight hours, well done, lemurs. | AFRICAN WARBLERS protect their eggs by developing complex shell patterns difficult to imitate for nearby cuckoo finches, who like to hide their eggs in the warblers’ nests. The patterns differentiate from those of other nearby warbler species, too, for good measure. | Rats prefer darkness to light but will enter a brightly lit space to prevent other rats from receiving electrical shocks. This decision does not come from only one part of the brain: Multiple parts of the rats’ brains interacted when they made this decision, meaning BRAINS ARE COMPLICATED. | DRONES helped researchers confirm that gray seal populations are recovering on the coasts of New England and Canada. | Seagulls spread CONTAMINATION and kill underwater organisms by eating from landfills and depositing their nitrogen-and-phosphorous-laden waste in nearby waterways. | According to the shape of their FOSSILIZED ANKLE BONES, the earliest primates may have done less climbing and more prancing.

In DEGRADED COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS, having invasive species is better than having no species at all. Invasive seaweeds can provide many of the same services as the species they superseded: flood protection, shoreline stabilization, food production, and habitat for juvenile sea creatures. | MOUNTAINTOP-REMOVAL COAL MINING causes Appalachian streams to run saltier for 80 percent of the year. The detritus, dropped into river valleys, absorbs water, into which minerals leach; it then releases the water during the drier months, rendering the streams salty. The flows affect much of the eastern United States. | Fungal spores launch from their parent fungi by using energy released when two droplets of water on the spore merge. The surface tension diminishes in the combined droplet, and the released energy flings the spore away from the fungus at A MILLION TIMES THE FORCE OF GRAVITY. Duke scientists figured this out by videotaping homemade polystyrene “spores” and controlling the size of water droplets using ink-jet printers. | The first study of its kind found that a problem with solar energy, especially in the highly polluted places in which it is growing fastest, is AIR POLLUTION, which prevents light from reaching solar panels. | A study that placed meters in cars instead of on roads found that polution during RUSH HOUR is much worse than previously believed. | In economics papers, the word “NUANCE” appears less frequently than in any other social-science field.

PEOPLE When parents lose their jobs, their children become less likely to go to COLLEGE. | When TRADE is liberalized and tariffs reduced, people who work in previously protected industries may lose their jobs, and the effects may last decades. | Liberal websites are more likely to cite FACT-CHECKERS to support their points; conservative websites are more likely to allege partisan bias to fact-checkers. (When the Duke Reporters’ Lab released this study, a conservative website accused the study of having a journalistic bias.) | Children as young as nine years old may show negative bias toward OBESITY, with overweight children showing less bias. | Chemicals used in FLAME RETARDANTS, lubricants, and plastics may trigger receptors in human cells that are linked with obesity, and they may get into human systems through house dust. | It turns out that studies claiming that improved emergency medicine and critical care had led to gunshot victims surviving at a higher rate were simply misinterpreting data; PEOPLE STILL DIE from gunshots at pretty much the same rate they always have. | An analysis of North Carolina school-board candidates and DISTRICT-LEVEL SEGREGATION shows that board members who are Democrats decrease racial segregation across schools more than their non-Democrat counterparts. | When making decisions in a group, white participants were more likely to conform to INCORRECT DECISIONS when surrounded by white peers than when placed in a more diverse group.

DUKE

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Six new members joined the BOARD OF TRUSTEES on July 1. The new trustees are Deloitte partner Kathryn (Katy) Hollister ’81, Pritzker Group founder J.B. Pritzker ’87, and former Aramark Corporation executive vice president and chief financial officer L. Frederick Sutherland ’73. They will each serve a six-year term.

In addition, three observing members joined the board: Duke Alumni Association President-Elect Laura Meyer Wellman ’73, recent Duke graduate Uzoma Ayogu ’17, and Erika Moore, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke. | The GRAINGER FAMILY DESCENDANTS FUND, a donor-advised fund at The Chicago Community Trust, has given $11 million for the construction and operation of a new state-of-theart ship that will expand teaching and research capabilities at the Nicholas School of the Environment Marine Lab in Beaufort. It provides $5 million to build the new sixty-eight-foot oceangoing research vessel and an additional $6 million to support operating costs. | Duke professors wrote two of the ten books nominated for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION. Both Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, from Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of history and public policy, and The Blood of Emmett Till, written by senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies Timothy B. Tyson Ph.D. ’94, made the list. MacLean's book made the further cut for the list of five finalists, with the winning book to be announced November 15.

Go to dukemagazine.duke.edu for links to further details and original research. * Didn't Read?/Too Long? Well, we did, and now we're all smarter.

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MOVING DUKE AND THE WORLD FORWARD Seven years ago we embarked on the most ambitious fundraising campaign in Duke’s history.

It began with each of you, with your commitment to our community and your outstanding support of Duke.

You saw the extraordinary opportunity ahead of us and you believed it was possible.

We worked together to empower the next generation of students and faculty. We made new connections, advanced ideas to solve complex problems and delivered knowledge in the service of society. We partnered for the future.

Now, the campaign ends with you – and the impact you’ve created here at Duke and across the world.

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CAMPAIGN IMPACT:

BY THE NUMBERS Duke Forward, Duke University’s seven-year fundraising campaign, raised $3.85 billion between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2017. Every dollar donated to Duke’s 10 schools and units, Duke Health, and university programs and initiatives counted toward the campaign’s goal.

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$3.85 B

$258 M

18%

1,567

RAISED DURING THE CAMPAIGN

MORE THAN $3.25B OVERALL CAMPAIGN GOAL

RAISED FOR THE ANNUAL FUND

DONORS

INCLUDED DUKE IN ESTATE PLANS

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A WINNING TEAM OF STUDENTS, ALUMNI, PARENTS, FACULTY, STAFF AND FRIENDS More than 315,000 donors contributed to the success of Duke Forward. Your generosity supported key campus priorities, such as sustaining financial aid, recruiting and retaining the best faculty, advancing research and providing more hands-on learning opportunities for students.

$1B+

CONTRIBUTED

BY ALUMNI DONORS

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3,700 +

10,000+

ROLLED UP THEIR SLEEVES

AT DUKE FORWARD: ON THE ROAD EVENTS

VOLUNTEERS

PARTICIPANTS

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Michelle Staggers ’19 (right) and other ACE participants during a cultural enrichment activity outside a Sikh temple.

The students who come to Duke come for the experience of a lifetime. They are drawn to the unparalleled civic engagement programs, boundless hands-on learning opportunities and the generous amount of financial aid they are able to receive. During Duke Forward, your support played a direct role in creating unforgettable experiences for students like Michelle Staggers ’19.

Staggers is a Duke women’s lacrosse player who participated in the Rubenstein-Bing StudentAthlete Civic Engagement (ACE) Program. She received campaign funding to participate in the ACE in India program in 2016 and served as an ACE ambassador in 2017. In her work abroad, Staggers taught and coached children at the Vidya School in Delhi, with a focus on education and leadership development through sports and English.

FULL CAMPAIGN SUMMARY: impact.dukeforward.duke.edu

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Above: Duke students enjoy the many options the Brodhead Center has to offer, from its fresh food to the open spaces to socialize and mingle. Right: The Brodhead Center at night.

PHOTO BY ALEXA ROMANO

Expanding experiential learning

She saw the remarkable opportunity as a step toward pursuing a career in international affairs. From her experience, Staggers says, “At the end of the day we are all people looking for happiness, fighting for safety and seeking out love.”

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NEW SCHOLARSHIP AND FELLOWSHIP ENDOWMENTS

CREATED ACROSS ALL 10 SCHOOLS

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Mentoring leaders for tomorrow To solve the world’s most elusive challenges, Duke faculty members often look across disciplines for answers. For many of the esteemed researchers, innovators and mentors at Duke, this type of interdisciplinary problem-solving is key to finding success.

A faculty member who embodies this in spirit and in practice is Dr. Ray Barfield, an associate professor of pediatrics and Christian philosophy. He examines the human side of medicine through the lens of philosophy and Christianity through his work in the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School, which was launched and sustained during Duke Forward.

Building spaces for community Foodies, gourmands, bon vivants, come get a taste. Among the stunning changes across campus as a result of the Duke Forward campaign is a sweeping update to West Union. Now the Richard H. Brodhead Center for Student Life, this is the new heart and hub of campus life.

Carefully preserving chief designer Julian Abele and Horace Trumbauer firm’s original 1920s design, Grimshaw Architects completed the renovation project in 2016. A portion of funding for the renovation project came as part of

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CONSECUTIVE YEARS

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an $80 million gift from The Duke Endowment of Charlotte — the single largest philanthropic gift in Duke University’s history.

Reopened in September 2016, the Brodhead Center combines the best of the iconic campus you fondly remember while adding contemporary upgrades that will leave you breathless. Already earning top marks in college dining within the first year, the Brodhead Center boasts 13 new eateries where students, faculty, staff and alumni can converse and relax over po’boys, pizza, poke bowls and more.

OF RECORD-BREAKING GIVING

For Barfield, the opportunity to actively listen to patients allows for a more narrative approach to solving health care challenges — to uncover the human side of medicine. For the students, clergy and health care practitioners in the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative, this means opportunities to reimagine and re-engage contemporary practices of health care in light of the Christian tradition.

In 2015, Barfield took his insights on the road as a speaker at Duke Forward in Dallas.

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NEW ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS

ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY

Forging ideas into innovation “Entrepreneurship for me means high growth, a lot of responsibility and building value in communities I care about,” says Tatiana Birgisson ’12, founder and CEO of MATI Energy.

Birgisson’s now-thriving beverage company started as an idea during her senior year at Duke. She was one of the first students to take part in entrepreneurship programs to lift her idea to new heights.

The Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative at Duke — which raised $59.1 million during the Duke Forward campaign — has helped students like Birgisson turn their ideas into innovations that power knowledge in the service of society.

After winning the top undergraduate prize in the Duke Startup Challenge in 2013, Birgisson was able to complete the first production run of MATI energy drinks.

Above: Tatiana Birgisson ’12 has grown the idea she had as a senior into a thriving energy drink company. Below: The Bullpen is home of the Duke I&E Initiative, a nexus for innovation and entrepreneurship activity.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to have Duke at my side as we grow and develop,” says Birgisson.

Since then, she’s won Google Demo Day in 2015, had 130 percent year-over-year growth in 2016 and appeared on Forbes’ 2017 30 Under 30 list in the Food and Drink category.

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RAISED FOR SIGNATURE INTERDISCIPLINARY INITIATIVES IN ARTS, ENERGY, INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP, GLOBAL HEALTH AND BASS CONNECTIONS

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Discovering new therapies for old maladies

1M

SQUARE-FEET OF NEW HEALTH FACILITIES

In medical research, intuition and keen perception are skills honed over years of experience.

So it’s no wonder that Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, founder and director of the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank since 1998, knew she had to follow an encouraging trend she and her team discovered.

Cord blood transplants to treat children with metabolic disorders showed significant improvements in cognitive development.

Expanding her scope, Kurtzberg partnered with Geraldine Dawson, director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development.

Their collaboration produced similar advances in patients’ brain function.

Kurtzberg (left) and Dawson (right)

Thanks to more than $40 million in support from the Marcus Foundation during Duke Forward, Kurtzberg and Dawson’s research grew into a five-year project using cord blood to treat autism, stroke, cerebral palsy and other brain disorders. If they are successful in developing therapies to restore brain function to people with these currently incurable disorders, they could potentially decrease disabilities and improve the quality of life for millions of children and adults.

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FOR PATIENT CARE, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Left: Michelle Nowlin and Bass Connections students presenting their work at a poster session.

Below: Bass Connections students conducting research out in the field.

Uncovering new paths to sustainability As Michelle Nowlin puts it, agriculture has to be part of the conversation around climate change. Nowlin, a clinical professor at Duke Law School and supervising attorney at its Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, leads a Bass Connections project team that is amplifying the discussion around agriculture’s effects on global health and the environment.

Her students examined animal husbandry in countries like China, Brazil and the Netherlands, and did field research on North Carolina farms. By studying policy abroad and practice at home, they hope to enact U.S. policy change that results in more sustainable

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BASS CONNECTIONS PROJECTS

animal waste management and healthier meat production processes.

The Bass Connections Initiative, which raised $91.4 million during Duke Forward, has created opportunities for students like Nowlin’s to partner with new communities for positive global change.

“These students are morally courageous. They were not just looking at PowerPoint slides or images on Google Earth,” says Nowlin. “Confronting this out in the field — in its totality — allowed us to have a shared experience, identify solutions and create meaningful impact.”

CONNECTED THE CLASSROOM TO THE REAL WORLD

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THANK YOU Because of you, we raised $3.85 billion.

Because of you, we enriched the experiences of our students, invested in exceptional faculty and supported initiatives that address society’s most pressing challenges.

Because of you, we moved Duke and the world forward.

THANK YOU FOR PARTNERING WITH US FOR THE FUTURE.

Explore more stories of impact.

impact.dukeforward.duke.edu

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ROOMMATES DORM300 Swift Ave.

Hometown: Long Island, N.Y. Major: Global health and biology Career goal: Pediatrician First impression of Alexa: In the Class of 2020 group chat, “she was famous.

I thought she would just hang out with the Early Decision kids, but she didn’t.”

Hometown: Columbia, S.C. Major: Biomedical engineering Career goal: Physician First impression of Yesha: “She’s like sunshine and flowers, a very positive person, always smiling and super happy.”

Yesha Desai and Alexa Eyring, Class of 2020, are also part of another class at Duke: the first group of under-

graduate students to live at 300 Swift, a recently purchased apartment complex between East and West Campus. The duo received a housing reassignment because their original assignment, Crowell Quadrangle, was closing for renovations.

“We’re pretty spoiled here,” says Alexa. The apartment complex’s amenities include free in-unit washers/dryers, valet trash, a cable package, and every college student’s dream—a private bathroom. Perhaps most important, there’s been a valuable lesson in independence. “It’s definitely shown us how much work it is to keep up an apartment,” Yesha says.

Meet cute: The pair’s relationship goes back to Blue Devil Days, where Alexa claims their friendship was “immediate. We were Chris Hildreth

inseparable.” Alexa was an Early Decision applicant. Yesha, however, had “basically already committed to Johns Hopkins.”

Her future roommate changed her mind. “I just knew I wouldn’t experience the same type of community at any other university,” Yesha says. “I have absolutely no regrets.”

Love and hip-hop: The best friends share a love of rap (they recently went to a Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, Tory Lanez, and Cardi B concert) and enjoy weekly rom-com movie nights on Netflix.

BookClub INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Karl M. von der Heyden ’62 led a storied career in business, holding C-level executive positions at H.J. Heinz Company, PepsiCo, and RJR Nabisco. But his youth is the subject of his new book, Surviving Berlin: An Oral History (MCP Books). Born in Berlin in 1936, he grew up during the heart of World War II and its aftermath, came to America as an immigrant in the late ’50s, and noted the cultural changes of the U.S., particularly in the South, in the following decade with an unusual perspective, one he maintains today. Now retired, he recently spoke with the magazine; this is a condensed version of the conversation.

Rod Goodman

What were the provisions of your student visa?

Well, getting a student visa through the consulate in Berlin—in those days, the capital of West Germany was in Bonn, not in Berlin, so we only had a consulate—that was a piece of cake. There was a provision that you had to come back when you were no longer a student and that you couldn’t work without permission. So, when I decided to stay for a second year [his sophomore year], I had to get permission from Washington, which I did.

And when I came back the second time [von der Heyden went to Berlin after his sophomore year but returned for his senior year studies at Duke], I actually applied for a student visa again, and the consular officer said to me, “You want a student visa, or an immigration visa?” He said, “It’s all the same to me.” That was really unusual, because in those days there was a quota by country. Germany had been a big provider of immigrants in the nineteenth century, and the U.S. has a large German-American population, but the German quota was not fully used, not even fractionally used, at that time. Now, we’re talking ’61. So, I thought about it, and I said, VON DER HEYDEN:

“Well, it can’t hurt, right?” First of all, if I need to work, I don’t have to apply for permission, and also if I decide to stay, I can stay.

And so I said to him, “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take the immigration visa.”

In the book, you describe finding old German newspapers in Perkins Library that describe the war and the atmosphere in Germany at that time. In light of recent events in Charlottesville and in other cities, do you see any similarities between now and your youth?

I’m not all that surprised about what happened in Charlottesville, although Charlottesville is a lovely town and quite tolerant, and these racists came, from what I understand, from all over the country. So, you can’t necessarily blame it on the South.

But it’s not a surprise to me that these strains of racial prejudice, anti-African American, and anti-Semitism are below the surface—and maybe not so much under the surface in America— and even this Nazism.

In the final part of the book, I mention that these same sentiments are still below the surface in Germany, as well. The book is really about some parallels beVON DER HEYDEN:

tween the discrimination against the Jews in Germany and the discrimination against the blacks in the South. That is one of the features of the book that made my upbringing a little bit unique, because a lot of people went through the Nazism time, and then other people went through the segregated South time, and I did both, and that’s relatively rare.

In another interview, you mentioned that you’re optimistic by nature. So much of your childhood and upbringing was affected by war and the aftereffects of war. Have you thought about how your optimistic nature developed, either in spite of these circumstances, or maybe even due to making it through these circumstances?

VON DER HEYDEN: Well, yes, I’m optimistic because of my experiences in America. I was constantly amazed how fair people were to me. I mean, I was an immigrant; I was a foreigner; I had an accent; and it never developed into any kind of discrimination.

I saw America at its best, and I’ve been here for almost sixty years now, so that’s a long time. And, to be an optimist in America is not that hard.

—Lucas Hubbard

To read the rest of the Q+A, go to dukemagazine.duke.edu 18 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

A Surgical Path In his new book, Healing Children: Stories from the Frontiers of Pediatric Medicine (Penguin Random House), Kurt Newman M.D. ’78, president and CEO of Children’s National Health System, explores the resilience of the children he has treated over three decades as a pediatric surgeon.

Here he explains how he first was drawn to this role.

My journey began during my third year of medical school with an unlikely discovery while working in the lab of Duke’s Robert Lefkowitz, a future Nobel Prize winner. The assignment was inspiring, and the scientific breakthroughs were incredible, but my world changed when I felt a lump in my neck while leaning over a microscope. I needed surgery to remove the mass—it was thyroid cancer.

Being a cancer patient at my own medical school was emotional and intense. Wearing a hospital gown instead of a white coat or scrubs was totally disorienting. However, being fixed by someone else’s hands opened my eyes to the magic and possibility of surgery. In an incredible act of grace, at the post-op visit, my surgeon unbuttoned his shirt, showed me a scar on his neck, and said, “I had thyroid cancer as a resident, and I’ve had a happy life—you can, too.” And with that, I was hooked.

Several years later, as a surgery resident at one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals, I had a rotation at Boston Children’s Hospital. This was a new world for me—a hospital devoted solely to children. Contrary to my expectations, it was filled with music, art, light, and fun. But it was the children that sealed the deal.

During my first month, I was called to the Emergency Department to work up a twelve-year-old girl for appendicitis. At the end of my exam, I could tell she was terrified. Channeling my past, I pulled down my collar, showed her my scar, and joked, “See, it’s not so bad, and your scar won’t even show.” She laughed, and I made sure to do my best suturing job ever in the OR that day. n R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S from Lane Windham ’90

BY DUKE ALUMNI

Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma (Duke University Press) Karlyn Forner A.M. ’11, Ph.D. ’14 You, Me, and the Violence (Mad Creek Books) Catherine Taylor Ph.D. ’98

Regroup: The How-To of Never Giving Up (Inkspiration Press) Jaunique Sealey ’00

The Launch Book (LID Publishing) Sanyin Siang ’96, M.B.A. ’02

Author of the new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (UNC Press), Windham suggests: Amy Goldstein’s Janesville really nails the current crisis facing America’s working class. She digs into people’s lives after a General Motors plant shuts down, showing how hope and determination will get you only so far when there are no decent jobs.

Kathleen Barry’s Femininity in Flight is great airplane reading. It’s about flight attendants’ labor activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Airlines used to fire women when they turned thirty-five!

To protest that injustice, stewardesses donned their high heels and perfectly coiffed hairdos at a Capitol Hill press conference and dared lawmakers to

guess who among them was above the age of thirty-five.

Heather Thompson’s Blood in the Water won the Pulitzer Prize for good reason. It’s an emotionally wrenching story and brings in a missing piece to today’s conversation on race, policing, and civil rights.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Lawrence Goodwyn’s classic, The Populist Moment. Like generations of Duke students, I learned in Goodwyn’s undergraduate course “Social Movements in the American South” that movements thrive within a culture of change.

Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World (Corwin) Ana Homayoun ’01

Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870–1967 (UNC Press) Joan Marie Johnson ’90

DUKE MAGAZINE

FALL 2017

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THEQuad

Their SciRen song

Duke researchers are out to prove science is fun, even in the classroom.

Jacob Harrison and Patrick Green

N

early thirty graduate students from around the Triangle listen intently in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences on a mid-August Saturday, trying to answer one pressing question: What is making that sound?

“You guys know a little bit more than my first-grade students,” says Tammy Lee, assistant professor of education at East Carolina University, as a number of doctoral candidates pair the audio recordings with specific frog species. Today’s exercise, though, is less about amphibian grunts and more about how to construct a lesson plan for pre-college students. It bridges the gap between those doing cutting-edge lab work and those teaching in classrooms—precisely the goal of the Scientific Research and Education Network (SciREN).

“We as researchers have a bunch of expertise about what we do. Not just doing new stuff in our field, but also the basics of the field we’re interested in,” says Patrick Green, a Duke Ph.D. candidate in biology and one of the leaders of SciREN Triangle, which enables graduate students in the sciences to create lesson plans that current K-12 teachers can use in the classroom. But because the scientists’ explanations invariably get too advanced, Green says, “we’re very bad about being able to communicate to a K-12 audience.”

SciREN originally began at the Duke Marine Lab in 2011, where researchers from both Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill realized that such a gap existed. Researchers needed to improve their ability to “talk more coherently” about their studies to non-academics, and educators needed modern activities and new science to keep students intrigued, a desirable outcome for researchers as well. “There are so many things that we don’t understand, and there are so many new minds that we need to come in on these problems and really push this forward,” says Jacob Harrison, a Duke biology Ph.D. student and SciREN organizer.

The solution was for the researchers to convert their work into classroom exercises: For example, a recent analysis of lemur gut lengths and digestion became a game of rolling marbles (food) down various slides (the gut) and timing the

BRIDGING THE GAP: Above and right, Educators mingle with researchers during SciREN’s event at the state Museum of Natural Sciences.

progress of the marble. “At the simplest level, it’s about how do you get students to think like scientists?” Green says.

The program quickly expanded throughout the Southeast; all told, approximately 25,000 K-12 students have

“We’re very bad about being able to communicate to a K-12 audience.”

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now experienced SciREN lesson plans. In the Research Triangle, these plans are presented to teachers at a networking fair each year (the region’s fourth was held in September) and uploaded to an online library that educators can access. During the 2016-17 school year, the Duke leaders of SciREN Triangle—Green, Eleanor Caves (biology), and Rebecca Lauzon (earth and ocean sciences)—also secured

SciRen

a Duke Support for Interdisciplinary Graduate Networks grant to pair Master of Arts in Teaching students with researchers to help structure these activities.

For the researchers, adapting their studies for anyone else can be liberating. “We all just think by ourselves all day, the specifics of our project: this experiment, this temperature, this timing, this exposure. It’s like, nobody else cares about that but me,” says Aastha Garde, a cell biology Ph.D. candidate at Duke. But when describing research to non-experts, she says, you “get to go out and tell people all the good bits about your science.”

Garde is building a genetic-inheritance activity with Katie Jacobs, a Ph.D. candidate in the University Program in Genetics and Genomics. They’re figuring out how to relay these concepts to preteens without using words like “phenotype,” “genotype,” or “Punnett square.” “It just won’t be,

like, Mendelian genetics,” Garde says, the goal being to get students to distinguish patterns among different organisms.

“It’ll be furry things and feathery things.”

SciREN recognizes two concurrent facts: Science is fun, and it requires creativity to unleash science’s inherent joy in the classroom. It requires unexpected ideas like Lee’s task of building noisemakers out of cups, rubber bands, and balloons to understand how a frog’s air sac works; turning questions of resource management into a simulated townhall debate, as Duke ecology Ph.D. student Emily Ury’s lesson does; and giving students, in a more complicated activity that Garde and Jacobs describe, the genetic omnipotence to create “a glitter-sneezing worm that has blue eyes.”

These attempts converge on a core tenet of scientific education: “If you figure out the right way to say it,” Green says, “you can teach it to anybody.” — Lucas Hubbard

DUKE MAGAZINE

FALL 2017

21

BREAKAWAY: Transfer backup goalkeeper Erik Hanson is making the most of his move to Duke.

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SPORTS

Transfers of Power

NCAA rule has led to a string of graduate student-athletes joining the Blue Devils.

E

rik Hanson has ten months at Duke, and by the second week of August, it’s clear he’s making the most of it.

“I don’t want the coaching staff to be mad at me for staying up late, but…,” he says, laughing, before rattling off his robust daily schedule—training, an ice bath, two classes (“Intro to Financial Accounting” and “Quantitative Business Analysis”), a film session, a nutrition meeting, practice, and more schoolwork—a lineup that, all told, runs about sixteen hours.

Hanson is the backup goalkeeper for the men’s soccer team, and he’s also the latest graduate transfer at the position for Duke. This year marks the third straight year—and fourth year in five—where the roster will include a graduate-student goalkeeper who’s new to campus. The trend mimics a national uptick in “graduate transfers” as a result of NCAA bylaw 14.6.1, the “One-Time Transfer Exception” stipulation that enables graduate students to use remaining athletic eligibility at a school other than their undergraduate alma mater. In Division I sports, such transfers more than tripled from 2011 to 2016. In Hanson’s case, the rule allowed him to graduate from Brown in May and start classes at Duke in July.

The situation also reflects a Duke-specific educational opportunity that, in athletics, becomes a recruiting advantage: the one-year Master of Management Studies program at Fuqua. The four most recent graduate transfer goalkeepers have all enrolled in the program, which was launched in 2009. Graduate student Bego Faz Davalos, a potential starter for the women’s basketball team this winter who transferred from Fresno State, and starting right tackle Evan Lisle, a two-year letterman for the Ohio State Buckeyes, are also M.M.S. students.

Before coming to Duke, head coach John Kerr ’87 coached at Harvard, where he gained some insight into Ivy League athletics. The league, Kerr says, has “restrictive rules where players can’t return back to the Ivy League, even if they redshirt. So obviously the coaches want to help their kids, and Duke is a very equivalent-type school to the Ivy League. Playing in the ACC is exciting for them, and it’s a great opportu-

nity for us to add someone who’s been around and can bring something different to the table.”

Hanson, an Honorable Mention All-Ivy selection in 2016, isn’t the first goalkeeper to come to Duke from the academy’s de facto Elite Eight. Former Princeton Tiger Ben Hummel M.B.A. ’17 played briefly in net last year while mostly backing up Binghamton alumnus Robert Moewes M.B.A. ’17, and Mitch Kupstas M.B.A. ’16 was Hanson’s former teammate at Brown for a couple of seasons before earning nine starts for Duke in 2015. The pattern persists on the baseball diamond, where three pitchers have come to Duke from Ivy League schools in the past two years.

As Kerr explains, the arrangement benefits everyone, although in soccer, jumping from the Ivies to the ACC necessitates different on-field skills.

The ACC game is more possession-focused and less reliant on long balls; the goalkeeper has to be comfortable with the ball at his insoles. “I found out very quickly, the first day, that my feet are one of the main things I’ll need to improve on here,” Hanson says. “There’s definitely no way out—you’re gonna get found out here if you have a weakness.”

Hanson won’t make many appearances this season—freshman keeper Will Pulisic, who has played for the U.S. Under-19 Men’s National Team, is the starter—but his seniority and background provide him a different outlook. The second perspective that graduate transfers bring, Kerr says, has been “a massive asset” to the program.

“I’m a guy with experience. I’ve played in big games,” says Hanson. “So I was open with the freshmen that I can be a resource that’s different from the other guys because I have an experience outside of Duke, and I know what two totally different teams are like. Any kind of issue they can imagine, I’ve probably been through.”

While he has amicable ties with his Ivy League coaching peers, Kerr notes that witnessing a fired-up motivation in their former players—as they’re inspired by the chance to play in the ACC—can produce a bit of jealousy. When Hanson’s former college coach saw him this summer, Kerr recalls, “he’s like, ‘The kid’s working out all the time. He never worked out that hard when he played for me!’ ” —Lucas Hubbard

“I’m a guy with experience.

I’ve played in big games.”

Reagun Lunn DUKE MAGAZINE

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Jared Lazarus

There’s no place like Epworth A lint czar, a Purple Parlor, and roach infestations. Just some of the reasons Duke’s oldest building might be its most lovable. | By Scott Huler

F

enella Saunders ’95 leaned across a restaurant table: “They’re talking about tearing down Epworth,” she said urgently. “You must find out about this.

They must not knock down Epworth.”

She was far from alone in her concern: a rumor had spread. Letters came in, to Duke Magazine and to the administration: What was up with Epworth? Epworth was under siege. Save Epworth!

So: deep breath. “The bulldozers are not on the way,” said Tallman Trask III, Duke executive vice president, through whose office any such bulldozers would drive, so to speak. Epworth’s years as a dorm may be numbered, but “I don’t think people will demolish it,” he said. “To my mind it falls in the category of the Ark,” a beloved and historical building that has gone through many changes in purpose but remains ineradicably part

24 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

of Duke’s identity. Epworth may work as office space. If renovation ends up costing less than expected it might even continue on as a dorm, though that seems unlikely. But it’ll stick around.

Epworth is Duke’s oldest building—along with the red-brick Crowell Building, next to it on East Campus, it opened in 1892, when Trinity College moved from Randolph County to Durham. Every Duke grad remembers the chapel and Cameron Indoor Stadium.

What those who never lived there don’t realize is its alumni hold Epworth in almost as high regard. Though nobody ever wonders whether to tear down Cameron or the chapel.

Whereas wondering whether to tear down Epworth has been a hobby at Duke for a century.

Walk around Epworth now, behind the East Campus main quad near Buchanan Boulevard, and it at first strikes you as weird but hardly noteworthy. From one

angle it looks like a hotel, from another a house, from a third, a barn. It has two stacked and sloping porches, a few somewhat scattered dormer windows. It has a couple of oddly placed bay windows, and the whole package does seem a bit off-kilter. Which makes sense once you understand that the building is only a third of its original self.

Epworth originally “covered nearly an acre of ground and faced to all points of the compass except north,” according to C.B. Warren, a 1906 Trinity graduate, a Virginia newspaper editor. It housed happenings and batik tie-dyes in the bathtubs when it was home to Duke’s first arts-themed dorm. As home to the SHARE living group (Student Housing for Academic and Residential Experimentation), Epworth ultimately became known for its collection of, by its own description on a flier, “freaks, weirdos, nuts, deviants, [redacted] loons, [redacteds], Marxist [redacted] [redacteds].

“We,” the SHARE flier archly continued, “prefer the word ‘individualists.’ ” Some might say Epworth was the natural home for a group like SHARE, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Whatever the building’s future, Epworthian Diane Weddington ’72, M.Div. ’76 probably has expressed it best: “It doesn’t matter,” she recently said. “It’s still our old Epworth.”

Epworth was not, as lore BIGGER: Above, an has it, the original hotel for 1895 rendering of the racetrack and fairground then-College Inn; that occupied what is now opposite, today’s East Campus before Julian Epworth.

Carr donated the property when Trinity came to town.

The property did indeed hold a racetrack and fairground, but Epworth was built in 1892, along with the Crowell Building and Old Main (later called the Washington Duke Building). Epworth was initially called the College Inn, though in 1896, at the suggestion of President John Kilgo, the board of trustees changed its name to Epworth Hall, after the birthplace of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, whose father was rector of Epworth, England. It occasionally shows up in various publications as the Epworth Inn or Trinity Inn, but its name is now officially Epworth Residence Hall.

And though it’s true that Epworth was once about three times its current size, fire did not remove the parts that no longer exist. A fire in 1911 did destroy the Washington Duke Building (itself scheduled for demolition anyway), and in 1914, when Epworth was a mere twenty-two years old, the board of trustees decided that most of it was too much trouble to maintain. They knocked down two-thirds of it, including a four-story square tower, a round tower, and everything else that wasn’t pure dorm. Though a framed history in the dorm itself refers to “a major fire,” the only fire the university archivists know about was the 1911 Washington Duke fire. That may, in memory, have been conflated with the renovation.

Duke University Archives

BUT EVEN BY THAT 1914 RENOVATION, Epworth was the beloved old wreck that nobody quite knew what to do with. The very first issue of the Trinity Alumni Register, in April 1915, included C.B. Warren’s “Memories of the Old Inn.” Warren makes the comment about the building facing every direction except north, and he goes on to describe the enormous, multistory collection of towers, bay windows, dormers, gables, and porches—a fantasy in shingles. “It had a roof which from above looked like most anything you might think of that had no special shape or outline,” Warren writes. “I can not describe it, for I am not sure that I ever saw it all. Every time I ever looked at it there was some nook, cranny, or parapet, which I had never seen before.” He compares it to a labyrinth and tells a story about a visitor, lost in the twists and turns, finally asking a student how to get out of the building. The

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Not so unanimous. In 1949, Duke modernized the building instead of razing it. By the 1960s, Epworth was again filled not with men but women—it housed female graduate students, which Brenda Neece, a onetime Epworth faculty-in-residence whose mother attended in those days, recalled earned it the name “Menopause Manor.”

But in 1967 Epworth started on the course that now in many ways defines it: as a safe place for the artists and contrarians looking for a home on a campus that for decades felt conservative and judgmental.

A home for, as it were, Duke’s freaks and geeks.

Opening as Contemporary Art House made Epworth Duke’s first theme dorm, “a community whose members choose to live together in an atmosphere unique to the Duke campus,” as its mimeographed application form from 1968 puts it. In 1966-67, Epworth was an all-freshman dorm, and the women that year liked the house—and each other—so much that they petitioned to stay together, based on their shared interest in the arts. “They went to the deans and said, ‘We need someplace on campus where people who love the arts and aren’t very happy with traditional dorm living can live,’” recalls Diane Weddington, who lived there starting in 1969. Petition granted, and Epworth started out with standing committees in music and dance, drama and literature, graphic arts and photography, and crafts.

“We would have poetry readings,” Weddington says.

“People would get a new play in from England and perform it in the living room. We would take an old truck and go to the city dump and make found art. We had musicians, we had artists, photographers.”

The Ark had a photography lab, and the university instituted a key-card system, in part to let Epworth women come and go. (“Because artists keep weird hours,” Weddington says.) The artists had group meals; ad hoc music performances; and “in the big bathrooms people would tie-dye batiks in the tubs,” she laughs. “It

“We would have poetry readings. People would get a new play in from England and perform it in the living room.” student solemnly points to his open window. Even now, with a downstairs porch you can’t enter through, counterintuitively placed stairwells, and off-center corridors jutting this way and that, Epworth confuses the casual visitor.

The original Epworth had a chapel and a dining facility that could seat 250. In addition to seventy-five rooms, it had parlors used by campus societies; it had a laundry, a shoe store, a barber shop, and a convenience store. But the heating barely worked, and it was a project to maintain—the college renovated Epworth once in 1905 and then less than a decade later knocked down everything but some of the dorm rooms. “It’s a wood-frame building, occupied by teenagers for 120 years,” Trask says now. “So it has its share of issues.”

By World War II, though East Campus housed mostly women, Epworth housed the men of the engineering school. In 1944, one of them, William Becker ’46, wrote a sort of counterpoint to Warren’s 1915 love letter. He expressed sadness that Epworth was no longer what Warren had called a “hotbed of college spirit and American manhood,” concluding that “it is the unanimous opinion of all who have lived in Epworth that after the war this…should be razed and a new building be erected in its place.”

LIKE HOME: Charles Bagley 1914, A.M. 1915 included these images in a 1909 scrapbook.

26 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

was unique in that way. Someone was always creating something.”

Notable among the creations was a found-sculpture grandfather clock, crafted of an old gym locker as the case, an oil drum lid for the face painted with numbers and a big smiling sun, its midsection stuffed with a chaos of springs and gears.

“This is where the big sign was,” said Gail McMurray Gibson ’70, A,M. ’72, who during a quiet winter break revisited Epworth, as she stepped up to the door.

“With a sun on it.” Then, walking through the door, “And here’s where the famous clock was.” The smallness of the dorm compelled her then and it does still—it looks like a house, and so for its residents it feels like a home. “It was like a rooming house, a home,” she says.

“Because it was small, it had such a sense of freedom and possibility.”

Gibson was part of the opening crew in 1967-68, the first year it opened as the Contemporary Art House; she invited Weddington to join. She pointed out her old room and a public area that had been a formal parlor, with elegant Victorian furniture. Whether a long, odd wooden bench that lines one side of the entry hall was there at the time she cannot recall, though it’s hard to make a good case that it would fit anywhere else. They staged “happenings,” involving the porches as performance spaces: “On a Sunday afternoon, anyone in the dorm who wanted to perform” did what they felt, says Gibson. They hung paintings on lines strung between the trees surrounding. “It was such a different time.”

Epworth has never left her life—Epworth friends had a wedding shower for her in the nearby gazebo, and when she married and moved off campus, she heard about a sale of Epworth furniture and bought one of the two-person desks that once populated the dorm rooms. She still owns it.

EPWORTH REMAINED AN ARTS-THEMED DORM through the 1970s, but it didn’t get what you might call its biggest break until 1983-84, when the SHARE living group moved there from Alspaugh, where it had spent a purgatorial year between its first home (it was founded in Wilson in 1970) and its ultimate expression in Epworth. The academic and residential experimentation of SHARE’s acronym included coed living and house courses. But it had from the start a happy reputation as a home for the “rabidly radical, a flophouse full of drug-crazed ne’er-do-wells who somehow managed to keep their GPAs high enough to remain at Duke,” according to Roger Corless, then professor of religion, who was invited to be faculty-in-residence several times over the group’s existence. “In short,” he continued in a piece he wrote in the Duke Faculty Newsletter in 1996, “it was more like the real Duke University Archives

world than the nervous, conservative kitsch that Duke so often presents as its public image.”

Which is exactly what the people who lived in Epworth as part of SHARE in those days sought. “Here’s the thing about Epworth/SHARE,” says Robert Clough ’98, the group’s historian. (Clough matriculated in 1987 and left school in 1990, returning to finish his degree in the late 1990s, itself an Epworthian journey.)

“There’s a synergy to the two, but they’re two different things.” Started as a more academic experiment, SHARE “became a place where its original roots changed very quickly. Some of the academic stuff fell by the wayside, and the residential stuff got played up as a place where everybody could be freaky in their own individual way.”

In a Duke then perceived, Clough says, as “a very J. Crew kind of place that was dominated by fraternity culture,” SHARE offered more as a character refuge than a place of academic experimentation. It lost members (a struggle that dogged the group for its entire existence) and thus had to leave its home in Wilson, ending up in Epworth.

“To me it was the perfect blend,” he says, “because the building itself is so strange and beautiful in its own way.” Its history of scattershot renovation left “this odd stub of a building, where you can enter the side way; the front porch looks a particular way; there’s a phone booth that became a study room; these huge, huge ceilings; these large expansive stairs; and the upstairs common room, which we called the Purple Parlor.”

Oh yes, the Purple Parlor. A tradition from its early days in Wilson, SHARE had a large room painted purple for its group meetings. At Epworth, that translated into the second-floor common area, where the two hallways connected. The Parlor may have been the heart of Epworth, though the connection directly below it, called “the Crossroads,” in some ways competed.

If within Epworth there were divisions, overall it DUKE MAGAZINE

DORM LIFE: Elizabeth Hatcher ’39 lived in Epworth 201 in 1935.

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GOOD TIMES: Right, the study nook of Elizabeth Hatcher ’39; below, the “Loyal Order of Cockroaches” gather, spring 1934.

teasing from fraternities. It became so associated with LGBTQ rights that it called its (terrible) flag football team “The Agenda,” a play on claims that residents were dupes of a nefarious homosexual agenda.

That sense of freedom to be yourself at Epworth “was the reason I want to Duke, frankly,” Holifield says.

He stayed there during A.B. Duke Scholars weekend, and “you could pick up on the sense of humor there.

You could pick up on the absurd. Epworth really stood out as a place where you could be yourselves.” As a homesick freshman the next year in Trent Hall, then a notoriously rowdy freshman dorm, he went to an Epworth party, learned they had an empty room—again, a constant problem for SHARE—and was home. And that sense of humor was central from the start. “We appointed ourselves,” he recalls, “the lint dorm.”

Which may be the apotheosis of Epworth. Steve Newman ’92, the first-ever Epworth Lint Czar, recalls.

Theme dorms had started at Duke, and Epworth/SHARE was surprised to see another dorm called the arts dorm.

“There already was an arts dorm,” he says.

“It was Epworth!” But the university still wanted a theme for Epworth. This clearly required action.

“I came up with lint,” Newman says.

“It’s not visible, but when you put something through the dryer, it appears. It’s a mystical substance.” They wondered: “If you put lint in the dryer, would little shirts come out? That didn’t turn out to be true.” They saved a year’s worth of lint in a cardboard box.

They had lint parades. “That in some sense sums up Epworth,” Newman says.

“Somewhat subversive, frankly somewhat self-congratulatory.”

That sense of freedom to be yourself at Epworth “was the reason I want to Duke, frankly.” was Epworth against the world. Epworth stands out as the first place at Duke that LGBTQ people could be themselves, many Epworthians note. “In the early ’90s Duke was still a fairly homophobic place,” says Ryan Holifield ’93. “Epworth was one of the very few safe spaces. Where people could be comfortable with sexual orientation, whatever that might be.” Epworth painted the East Campus bridge pink—and received scornful 28 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

THOUGH WITH THE LINT CZAR, SHARE had probably attained Peak Epworth, its constant trouble filling room slots never abated. SHARE regularly faced threats to its place in Epworth, but things always somehow worked out. Then in 1997, as Duke filled East Campus with only first-year students, SHARE moved.

Not for lack of fight: Current and historical residents created a telephone-book-sized scrapbook of letters, imag-

es, and pleas to keep SHARE in Epworth: “I learned far more in Epworth than in any other building on campus,” said July Hruby ’96; Clough said, simply, “There will always be the need for an Epworth.” But move SHARE did, to Central Campus, and it soon expired. Epworth itself became just another first-year dorm.

Or maybe not. Sophomore Alex Pierson says that when he tells people he lived in Epworth, “they either don’t even know it exists or they say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ” Its reputation for poor heating and cooling hasn’t changed much in a century, and now adding to the adventure are fierce roach infestations—at least once bad enough that students were moved to hotels during treatment.

Just the same, “we play Frisbee in the halls, we set up a little mini golf,” says Pierson, who follows with a highly Epworthian comment: “Everyone seems to have something against Epworth,” he says, “except people in Epworth.”

Sophomore Annika Sharma got her Epworth assignment at her home in India, so she didn’t know what to think. She reached out to an upperclassman she knows.

“It’s a house,” he told her. “It’s like a home.” And she says that perfectly sums Epworth up. “It’s like a community, and you don’t get that community in other dorms.

All photos, Duke University Archives

When I was filling out living HISTORY: In the early 1900s, Epworth was the site of the Trinity College applications for this year, I Historical Society Museum. realized how much I would miss this place.”

Just the same, don’t get crazy. “Epworth is nice, but do I want to live here for four years?” she says. “Not so much. Not with the roaches. And if the radiators had more in between, not like either sauna or freezer.” Epworth should stay a dorm, she’s convinced, but it does need some upgrades. She leads a little tour. “Get rid of that carpet,” she says, pointing at the framed rug that has hung in the Crossroads for years. “And the sofas need to go, I can attest to that.” She leads down one of the wide halls with those high ceilings. She points to that long wooden bench. “And I don’t see the point of this,” she says. “No one sits on this. Who would sit on that and stare at the bulletin board?”

Sharma’s walk through the dorm echoed Gibson’s, though Gibson had gone more slowly through the wide, empty halls, running a finger along the hip-height chair rail atop the wainscoting, still there under layers and layers of thick institutional white paint. “It was always a kind of shabby chic,” Gibson said. “But that was what I loved about it.” n DUKE MAGAZINE

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Dr. Feelgood Using sartorial style and a patient-centric approach, Richard Bedlack offers optimism in his quest to cure and treat those with ALS.

I

BY DANNY HOOLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX BOERNER + SHAWN ROCCO

n the examining room at the Duke Neuro- doesn’t show much reflex. Stephens tells Bedlack her logical Disorders Clinic, Richard Bedlack left hand is weaker than it was at the last visit. She’s looks more like the eccentric rock star he right-handed. wanted to be growing up than the physician “Are you still cutting your food okay?” Bedlack asks. he became.

“I get…a lot of help,” she answers, as her husband, At a youthful fifty-one, he wears his salt-and-pep- Jim Stephens, watches nearby. per hair in an upswept typhoon wave. On this SepIn his chair, Bedlack leans in to listen as she talks. tember day, he’s wearing a midnight purple suit and He tells her that the weakness in her arm and both black pointy-toed boots, his long, lanky frame evok- legs has not progressed as much as he expected. “You ing a mid-’60s Carnaby Street style à la British mod- were progressing pretty fast for a while there,” he says. rock hero Paul Weller (or singer Elvis Costello, if your “I don’t know why you’ve leveled out, but I’ll take it. eyes fixate on his big black-rimmed glasses).

Have you been taking any supplements that might But there’s a weathaccount for that?” She ered black leather docreplies that she hasn’t. tor’s bag on the floor Before he leaves “I save my best outfits for Tuesday, next to him. It was a the room, Bedlack offers to help her get in gift from his parents when I see my patients.” touch with a techniwhen Bedlack graduated from the University cian to adjust the motorized wheelchair at of Connecticut School of Medicine in 1995. Despite the finery he’s wearing, home that’s been vexing her. Then he asks her to look it’s the old-fashioned accessory that reveals the most over some upcoming ALS studies when she gets back and perhaps choose one to participate in—preferably about him.

At the moment, sixty-eight-year-old Martha “Mar- one that doesn’t involve too many doctor visits, for ty” Stephens has his full attention. She was diagnosed her own comfort and convenience. with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS) in March Her husband drives her from their home in 2016.

Fuquay-Varina about every ninety days for an apShe’s still verbal, and she gets around mostly on a pointment here. As always, the Stephenses have a three-wheeled Pride Go-Go scooter. Stephens does a long day ahead of them. They already had visited with lot less walking with her braces now. She gets winded occupational and physical therapists that day, before they even got to Bedlack. “It’s a multidisciplinary when doing simple tasks, like getting dressed.

Bedlack performs a quick but thorough physical thing,” says Jim Stephens. “We see somewhere beexam, tapping her elbows and knees. Her right knee tween six and eight people every time we come out.”

ALS

30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Alex Boerner

regularly wore his suits.

Bedlack’s colorful style, patient-centered philosophy, and open mind have made him the face of optimism against a terrible disease—not just in the media, or behind a speaker’s podium, but in the examination room, where optimism really counts.

T

he exquisitely tailored dark-blue suit he wears one Wednesday, as he sits at a table in a conference room at the clinic, is rather demure by his famously flashy standards.

“I save my best outfits for Tuesday, when I see my ALS patients,” he says. “You can imagine—it’s a scary place for those folks to come. Because a lot of measurements are made. Unfortunately, sometimes those measurements are worse than they were Shawn Rocco the time before.”

Progression of the disease necessitates a ick Bedlack, as he likes to be called, is a renowned discussion of options that can be hard for a patient to expert on ALS—sometimes known as Lou Geh- hear. Do you need to stop driving? Do you need to start using rig’s disease—an often-baffling disease that attacks a breathing machine? “I try to break the ice by dressing in nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord in diverse ways, a fun way,” Bedlack says. He also strives to empower his and progresses at different rates with different patients. patients during a period that can feel lonely and hopeless.

ALS can’t be diagnosed with one definitive test. Approved Bedlack says he’ll never forget the words of one speaker treatments can slow the progression but not reverse the with ALS, at a previous event in Iceland. damage of ALS on the body.

“He said: ‘All the doctors and scientists out there, I just want you to remember something.

This disease is about people. It’s not about test tubes, and mice, and things like that.

And nothing about us should ever be done without us.’”

“It’s so to go there. Even with no Bedlack pauses a moment to let that sink promised cure in sight. These people are doing in. “And he’s right.”

R

uplifting

their best to try to make your life better.”

Bedlack is an active advocate for research and an innovator in his approach to clinical trials. He’s been seen on CNN, ESPN, and Fox News. He’s been covered by The Wall Street Journal. He’s in three ice-bucket challenge videos on YouTube. He travels the world (recently, to Reykjavik, Iceland) about sixty days a year to speak at ALS conferences and participate in golf and poker events to raise money for research.

He even walked the runway for 2015 Men’s Fashion Week in Paris with British fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, who invited Bedlack and his wife, Shelly Miller, as guests, after he heard from a store manager that Bedlack

GENTLE MAN: Richard Bedlack examines Martha Stephens, as her husband, Jim, watches.

32 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

D

uke’s ALS Clinic runs from 8 a.m. until around 7 p.m. every Tuesday. When he created the clinic in 2001, Bedlack was only given half a day, once each month.

It’s grown from a skeleton crew to a staff of three speech therapists, two occupational therapists, two physical therapists, two respiratory therapists, a pulmonologist, a social worker, a clinic coordinator, an ALS Association representative, an ALS research nurse, and Bedlack.

“We have, probably, one of the largest, most comprehensive ALS clinics in the world,” Bedlack says. “We have more than 400 patients that we follow.” He adds that more than a hundred are on the waiting list. That infuriates him. “We’re booking people for March 2018,” he fumes. “That’s not acceptable for a disease that rapidly

a crushing blow to the patient.

“We went back in, and the attending basically said, ‘This is what it is, and there’s nothing anybody can do for you. You should go home and get your affairs in order.’

And there were more tears, and we just walked out.”

Bedlack recalls what he said to himself that day as he was driving home. “This is Duke. There’s gotta be more things we can do.”

He couldn’t jump into lab research like McNamara, because “it’s become a more complicated life for physicians” since McNamara started, he says. “We have a lot more administrative duties in and out of the hospital than physicians ever had before.”

But he could do clinical research. After he finished his residency, he did a neuromuscular fellowship. He went through the Duke Clinical Research Institute Master’s in Clinical Research program.

Then he decided to open an ALS clinic.

Bedlack says that doubters were hung up on the importance of relative value units FEARLESS: Marjorie Lynne Bryan texts (RVUs), a measure of sentences on her cell phone to communicate. value for physician services in the U.S. that originated with Medicare reimbursement. “That’s one way that the bean counters determine how useful you are,” he remarks, clearly irritated at the thought. To this day, Bedlack is obligated to participate in similar budgetary discussions, and he’s not a fan. “They always tell me how much money I’m losing for the university. It’s never been about RVUs for me.”

His main champion in 2001 was the head of Duke Neurology at the time, Warren Strittmatter, now a professor emeritus. Bedlack recalls that Strittmatter liked his obvious passion for fighting ALS and decided to give the proposed clinic a year and “see what happened.” At the time, says Bedlack, there were two ALS clinics in the state.

Even supporters of Bedlack’s idea had to question whether North Carolina needed another clinic for such a rare disease. How would Duke’s ALS clinic compete for pharmaceutical sponsors?

Bedlack started showing up at ALS conferences, and he thinks now that his “crazy appearance” may have helped him get noticed. He sat down with experts. He asked questions. He offered his clinic as a site for clinical-trial pharmaceutical tests on volunteers.

Within two years, Duke’s ALS clinic got its first trial, for creatine, a supplement used by athletes to increase Shawn Rocco

progressive, [that] massively disabling, where we know they may not be getting options they should be getting, wherever they are.”

Bedlack says it’s gotten to the point where he needs at least one more full day to devote to ALS. So far, he hasn’t gotten his department to agree. “We have so many folks that are waiting for appointments, and so many research opportunities, that we need another day. And that’s one of the battles that I’m fighting right now.”

As of early October, he’s getting much-needed help from Ashley Whyte-Rayson, a Neuromuscular Fellow and one of his former residents. Now, she’s his partner— and maybe someday, the inheritor of his legacy.

Bedlack came to Duke in 1995, a decision he made years after passing it up for his undergraduate studies in favor of The College of William & Mary, whose smaller size he found more relatable to his working-class upbringing in Cromwell, Connecticut. That sensibility lingers.

Even though he lives right by the private Hope Valley golf course in south Durham, he’d rather tee off on the public Hillandale course with his friends on the weekend.

His father, whom he affectionately likens to Homer Simpson, worked at a nuclear power plant. His mom slowly worked her way up at Farmers and Mechanics Bank—from a sixteen-year-old teller to vice president— after putting herself through night college when he and his younger brother were little.

By the time he was thirty and fresh out of UConn, he was no longer even slightly intimidated by the size of Duke. “I came to Duke because I had this idea that I would specialize in some rare neurological disease,” Bedlack says, “and build a clinic around it that was different—that offered some research.”

He found a hero in Duke neuroscience professor James McNamara.

“He’s built his life around epilepsy, with the idea that it’s fixable,” Bedlack says. “He’s got one foot in clinic, trying to treat people with epilepsy with the drugs that we have. But he’s got his other foot in the lab, trying to unlock the molecular mechanisms of different kinds of epilepsy in animals.”

Bedlack found “his” disease that year when he was making his rounds as a resident with an attending physician.

Then, as now, the resident goes in and talks to the patient, reports to the attending, and they go back in together to discuss findings with the patient.

One day, Bedlack examined a patient with ALS for the first time. “I thought it was the most amazing disease I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “I thought the exam was the most stunning physical exam—I mean, it’s an incredible collection of neurological abnormalities. And I was very excited to go out and see how we were going to take this terrified, tearful person and their family and empower them to have some control over what’s happening.”

The next conversation was a letdown for Bedlack—and

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muscle strength. “It didn’t work” for ALS, says Bedlack, “but that wasn’t the point.” The point was to establish that his ALS clinic could quickly enroll patients for clinical trials, while maintaining compliance with protocols and avoiding dropouts.

It helped that by this time, Bedlack had a lot of patients he could recruit. Word-of-mouth about a clinic where patients were made to feel like they were involved in the process of their treatment brought in a lot of them, quickly.

M

arjorie Lynne Bryan, a sixty-six-year-old retired middle-school art teacher from Flowery Branch, Georgia, who goes by the name Lynne, was ready to hear tough news when she first came to see Bedlack back in January of 2017. She started experiencing slurred speech nearly four years ago. “She had difficulties, not just getting misdiagnoses, but not getting the care that she

lack they plan to head out the next day to the beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina, maybe for the final time.

Bryan is adamant that she doesn’t want a tracheostomy tube as a life-saving nor life-prolonging measure, in case the worst happens at the beach or anywhere else. She asks Bedlack to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order for her. He does, and he advises her to keep it with her at all times while she’s at Hilton Head.

“She’s brought that up, almost every visit,” Hammett says afterward. At one point during her time with Bedlack, she types, “I’m not afraid to die,” and shows it to the doctor.

Hammett praises Bedlack for the team he’s assembled.

The couple usually stay in Durham for two or three days, to be available to the staff for any follow-up. “It’s so uplifting to go there,” Hammett says, “even with no promised cure in sight. These people are doing their best to try to make your life better.”

T

he ALS clinic is one of four “I thought the exam was the most stunning physical exam—I mean, main initiatives Bedlack creatit’s an incredible collection of neurological abnormalities. And I ed. He cofounded the ALS Clinical Rewas very excited to go out and see how we were going to take search Learning Inthis terrified, tearful person and their family and stitute in 2011. The annual two-day event them to have some control over what’s happening.” in Clearwater Beach, Florida, is dedicated to training selected ALS patients to learn wanted in Atlanta,” says her husband, Mike Hammett. more about studies and new therapies and become reBryan’s initial diagnosis was for myasthenia gravis, a search ambassadors (advocates for clinical research). “It gives neuromuscular disease that disrupts normal communica- them the tools that they need to be thought leaders,” Bedtion between the brain and muscles. About a year’s worth lack says. of treatments weren’t showing any progress, and Bryan He also created the ALS Untangled website, a forum noticed that the symptoms weren’t really matching the di- for patients, clinicians, and scientists to review “alternaagnosis, according to her own online research. tive and off-label ALS treatments.”

She and Hammett went to another neurologist, who Soon after Bedlack started his clinic, he discovered concluded she had primary lateral sclerosis (PLS), a mild- that patients were going online in search of “something er, slower-progressing and non-fatal form of ALS. That di- else out there” to cure ALS. Some were self-experimentagnosis seemed less likely when Bryan lost speech abilities ing with supplements and other alternative therapies. and had difficulty swallowing and eating. Her right hand Not surprisingly, they were reluctant to discuss it with a continued to lose function. doctor. “They’re afraid they’re going to encounter some It took about six months, from the time Bryan found serious paternalism,” Bedlack says.

Bedlack on the Internet to their first visit to Durham in In other words, they anticipate hearing well, that’s just January of this year. Bedlack diagnosed her correctly in silly and if that really worked, don’t you think everybody February, after exhaustive tests. would already be doing it? ALS Untangled opens a diaBryan can no longer speak at all. She communicates logue that is respectful, empowering, and informative. by texting sentences that appear in large type on her cell- “I’ve come to believe that most people aren’t snake-oil phone display. Every so often, she’ll comically raise her salesmen,” Bedlack says. “Even the proponents of these alternative therapies. I think that most of them have a hand to shush Mike when she wants to say something.

On this visit, the couple, married for six years, tell Bed- good heart. Most of them are true believers.” They just

empower

34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

haven’t pursued the science, he adds.

Another of his websites, ALS Reversals, opens its first page with: SOMETIMES PEOPLE WITH ALS GET BETTER. That’s rare, of course. Bedlack only knows of thirty-four verified reversals, which he defines as “dramatic improvement in at least one objective outcome measure”—in layperson’s terms, a significant gain in at least one motor function. And that conclusion is only reached after the possibility of a condition that may be mimicking ALS’s symptoms is thoroughly ruled out.

He wants to find more reversals, if they’re out there, in hopes of someday replicating them. The website asks patients who may have experienced a reversal to report it and to supply medical records to verify that, indeed, a reversal has occurred.

The project has yielded potentially useful information.

Dan Harrison, a medical student Bedlack worked with last year, compared demographics of those patients who showed reversals, noting the kinds of supplements they were taking. That information was compared to larger databases of people with more typical ALS. The reversal patients were found to be younger and less likely to be white. They showed quicker initial progression. Their symptoms were more likely to start in the legs.

He also found that three out of thirty-four were taking a curcumin supplement that he plans to study next. (Curcumin is a chemical derived from the spice turmeric.)

That’s not to suggest he favors alternative theories over conventional medicine.

He’s working on a Phase III clinical trial of the drug Tirasemtiv, a fast-skeletal-muscle troponin activator (FSMT) developed by the San Francisco company Cytokinetics. Very few drugs even make it past Phase II of the four-phase process, so Bedlack is excited by the possibilities. “We’ll have results by the end of the year,” he says. “And we’ll see if this becomes mainstream therapy— something that helps people hold on to their strength and breathing muscles.”

He’s also optimistic about a trial for the anti-epileptic drug Retigabine. “This comes from a brand-new model of ALS,” he explains. “Traditionally, our models have been based on abnormalities inserted into animals. That might not be a great model for someone who doesn’t have a genetic abnormality.” That includes most of his patients, whose ALS is sporadic (which means that the patient is the only member of their family to have ALS). The cause of that is still a mystery.

Experiments using skin scrapings from ALS patients have shown that cells were abnormally excitable. “That might be part of the reason why they die,” Bedlack says, adding that Retigabine works well in restoring cells to normal excitability and resistance to toxins.

Bedlack says he’s also happy about a yearlong trial for lunasin that’s just wrapping up. Based on suggestions

from his research ambassadors, he designed it so that patients at any stage of ALS could participate, and that patients could take their own measurements at home, which cuts out extra doctor visits. Plus, there was no placebo. ALS patients tend to frown on placebos.

In the absence of placebos, Bedlack used “historical controls” for comparison. For each patient enrolled in his study, he noted their progression rate prior to taking lunasin, then found, on a database of ALS patients, three documented cases not taking lunasin who had matching progression rates.

Like the creatine study that helped get him started, the lunasin trial doesn’t appear to show dramatic results. But again, there’s a positive to consider. The success of the

Shawn Rocco

TREATMENT: The ALS trial’s design is what excites him. clinic is one of four “It was the fastest-enrolling trial in the initiatives Bedlack history of ALS,” he reports, proudly. He created to research says he plans to use this model for future and treat the disease. studies.

He’s also seeking funds from outside the university to add more days to the ALS clinic. An annual $30,000 Tele-ALS Grant from the North Carolina chapter of the ALS Association allows him to spend Thursday afternoons connecting with patients over secure video conferencing. For one thing, he says, it allows patients at home to still see him and laugh at his crazy outfits.

“As I get funding for things, I can buy my way into doing more ALS,” he says.

“I would do ALS every day if I could.” n

Hooley is a Durham-based writer, musician, and adjunct lecturer at North Carolina Central University.

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o the tenure track…and beyond As Ph.D. candidates deal with a shortage of professorships, they’re being challenged to discover different ways to use their skills and new definitions of success.

BY LUCAS HUBBARD PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX BOERNER AND DANUTA OTFINOWSKI

36 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Inside one of Durham’s brick-faced, vestigial tobacco buildings, Nick Troester Ph.D. ’10 speaks quietly. “I don’t know that anyone at any point in time says, ‘You’re a failure if you don’t find a tenure-track job somewhere,’ but it’s an expectation that I think I had,” he says.

The space, now featuring neon-toned walls and open-desk designs—the employees clad in flip-flops, the La Croix freely flowing—is less ivory tower than Instagram. Troester, who studied humanitarian intervention for his doctorate in political science, seems comfortable working at Research Square, which primarily helps non-native-English-speaking authors better communicate and prepare academic papers. Yet his role of learning and development coach falls into a category that “didn’t become appealing until I was a few years outside of the Ph.D.,” he says. The shift from the academy to a new environment doesn’t always come easily.

Those set on becoming professors have to, as Troester says, “psychologically and emotionally make peace” with the fact that they’re leaving such a path behind.

Many Ph.D.s do end up with what are commonly termed “alt-academic careers.”

They’re responding to a not-so-new problem: Advanced-degree holders, whose quantity greatly outstrips the number of

vacant professorships, face towering odds to secure tenure-track positions. As this supply-demand imbalance has gained notoriety, and as institutions move to better support students, the pivot has become easier. But after investing five-plus years doing coursework, fulfilling teaching responsibilities, and generally becoming creative scientists or dogged scholars, many graduates find that anything less than the ideal role will seem lacking.

“There’s this belief that you might dedicate seven years of your life to this project and then you might have to go work in Starbucks,” says Ashley Rose Young, a current Ph.D. candidate in history at Duke.

Or, if you’re not a fan of pumpkin spice lattes: “It’s professor or McDonald’s, really,” says biology professor Sönke Johnsen, of how he felt when he was getting rejected from jobs after earning his doctorate.

“Graduate students put a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed, and sometimes they’re working with a very narrow definition of what success looks like,” says Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, who came to the Duke graduate school in late 2016 as director of graduate-student advising and engagement for the humanities, a new role. Students, particularly within the humanities, may believe they need to become a faculty member, to the exclusion

Alex Boerner

VERSATILITY: Nick Troester, left, says the work he does now is similar to teaching a class but uses the skills he learned from pursuing a Ph.D. in political science.

“Graduate students put a lot of pressure on themselves to succeed, and sometimes they’re working with a very narrow definition of what success looks like.”

of any other possible path; they often carry the perception that their advisers, too, feel the students should.

Higher education also isn’t kind to half measures. The need to not violate what Johnsen calls academia’s “underlying assumption that you have this continual upswing in productivity” means that a brief break—testing another industry, even taking leave to have a child—may put a fledgling career on involuntary hiatus. “If I want a job as a Duke professor one day,” says Lindsay Leverett, a doctoral candidate in the university program in ecology, “it’s gonna be very hard to get that job if I take time off between a Ph.D. and a postdoc.”

These inescapable pressures—overwhelming competition in pursuit of a college or university teaching position, potentially lifelong regret if they ever abandon this pursuit—can frustrate graduate students. But one side effect of such a clogged system could be beneficial: By needing to survive in the world beyond the academy, these students could have an even wider impact than they initially thought.

They may just enjoy it, too.

THE EXPLANATION for how the Ph.D.

PERSPECTIVE: Maria LaMonaca Wisdom oversees the VH@Duke program, an attempt to rethink doctoral training.

field became so crowded, sometimes termed the “Ph.D. glut,” is straightforward. “Do the math,” says Johnsen, who was the biology department’s director of graduate studies for much of the past decade. “Most professors are training ten to thirty people in their career, and academics—of all types—isn’t really a growth industry. So those ten to thirty people are competing for that spot the person already held.”

While the system turns away a striking majority of candidates, the most direct solution of reducing the competition probably isn’t the right one. “It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which we have too many highly educated individuals participating in society. This idea that we’re graduating too many Ph.D.s I find misplaced,” says Kathy Franz, chemistry professor and department chair at Duke.

Producing more people with Ph.D.-level skills implies a citizenry that can understand and engage with complex issues, from income inequality to climate change.

Alex Boerner

Richard Strauss, Courtesy of the National Museum of American History

However, those well-educated non-pro- businesses, in K-12 education, for non- and Chicago—but it steadily became clear fessors do need to turn elsewhere. Stu- profits or other public roles in the “Be- that the right opportunity wouldn’t arrive. dents have a well-worn path to follow in yond Academia” classification; 52 percent After six years in the Ph.D. program, his higher education: persistent scholarship, of those scientists do. passion had diverged from the duties of a innumerable job applications, and perIt’s partly due to the opportunities that research-university professor: Notably, he haps a postdoc or short-term teaching exist for scientists: There are simply more preferred teaching to conducting research. role in hopes of an eventual appointment jobs in private labs than in, say, private li- Plus, life happened. His now-wife had fallas a tenure-eligible faculty member. Oth- braries. Those opportunities further mani- en in love with the Triangle area, and the erwise, they have to innovate academic job search presaged when hunting for jobs: Had potentially living in far-removed places. “I mean, I had he not landed where he did, a phone interview at a college Johnsen says, he would be an whose [town’s] full-time popAlaskan hiking guide or designing biomorphic playgrounds. ulation is 300 people,” Troester says.

And while it’s sometimes assumed that the doctoral deInstead, what he does now gree will give students a leg up, is similar to teaching a class. In finding a good job is never easy. a class, “you’re having twenty “There’s an idea sometimes, esto thirty meetings with five or pecially early in grad school, ten or forty-five people, where that if you don’t go the academyou have to get everybody ic track and say, ‘Oh, I’m more on the same page in order to interested in outreach,’ that that advance them through the will make things easier. But it same set of expectations over doesn’t,” Johnsen says, referring and over again,” he says. “You to jobs like running the science make sure the people who are TASTY: Ashley Rose Young hosted a cooking history show desk at National Public Radio. really talented are being suffor the Smithsonian’s American history museum. ficiently challenged and that “Because there are more people you’re helping out the people applying for those jobs, because fest themselves in soft differences, as Ph.D. who are struggling to get them to an acmore people can apply for those jobs.”

It’s especially tricky in one particular graduates who enter the private sector ceptable level. And at a certain level, that is area of study. “For people who focus on build a bridge to the outside world. Franz’s project management.”

Troester, despite a teaching-assistant the humanities, it’s often harder to see the chemistry department, for example, conobvious connections between what their venes a yearly alumni panel highlighting debut that he deems “miserable,” now enlists those honed skills daily. That skill sets actually are and non-faculty jobs the potential of these other paths.

Conversely, humanities graduate stu- type of translation is what Duke’s gradthat exist,” says Wisdom. And while there are these job opportunities, she says, “we dents are “looking for role models,” Wis- uate school and Provost’s Office hope to don’t have obvious or easy ways to talk dom says. “They’re looking to see, ‘Who achieve with a new program called Verwas like me and what did they do, and satile Humanists @ Duke (VH@Duke). about those kinds of transitions.”

Such a move is indeed less common for how can I emulate that?’ ” These students Originating from a Next Generation these students. The most recent data from must learn to do what workers everywhere Ph.D. Implementation Grant from the Duke’s graduate school—based on stu- have had to do in today’s economy: adapt. National Endowment for the Humandents graduating in the decade leading up ities, VH@Duke, which is led by Vice to May 2017—show 74 percent of humanProvost for Interdisciplinary Studies Edities Ph.D.s working in what the school WHEN NICK TROESTER first entered ward Balleisen, marks an attempt to “recalls “Academia / Higher Education,” as the job market, months before com- think doctoral training,” says Wisdom, faculty (either tenured, tenure track, or pleting his Ph.D. in political science, he who oversees the day-to-day activities of non-tenure track), staff, or administration. found himself the victim of circumstance: the program. There needs to be a “culture For the physical sciences and engineering The fall of 2009 was the first hiring sea- change” for graduate students, she says, to cohort, 13 percent of Ph.D.s landed under son after the financial crisis. “Universities destigmatize nonacademic careers.

In a sense, the program—which feathis umbrella. (When including postdocs work on multi-year funding cycles, and and similar “Further Training” positions, 2009 was the first year for many universi- tures curricular experimentation, advising, internship opportunities, and the numbers change to 79 percent and 44 ties on that cycle,” he says.

He bounced around—a postdoc at networking—aims to enable students to percent, respectively.) Only 29 percent of the humanities cohort work for private Princeton, then adjunct positions at Duke navigate both office culture and higher DUKE MAGAZINE

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education, to gain fluency in grant writing and business-speak, to understand how to work well with either a supervisor or an academic adviser, and to be, generally, “capable of sharing knowledge with different audiences....It’s not like we’re trying to turn out two tracks where these students are going to be professors and these students are gonna go do other stuff,” says Wisdom. “It’s the idea that we’re going to have a humanist, a doctoral student who’s so well-rounded that they can pivot at any moment in their career.”

public,” Young says. “So often with a dissertation you’re in your own head, you’re spending hours a day writing about your topic, and you’re not necessarily communicating it to anyone.”

In short, Young relearned the notion of accessibility. “You get to a place like the Smithsonian where they’ll say, ‘We have to tell this story in 150 words—that’s how long this label can be, so what is the key idea?’ ” she says. As she edited her dissertation this past summer, weighing the major concepts that deserved emphasis,

“It’s the idea that we’re going to have a humanist, a doctoral student who’s so well-rounded that they can pivot at any moment in their career.”

Like Ashley Rose Young, who will complete her dissertation this fall. By mid-July, she hadn’t ruled out an academic job, yet she envisioned for herself a role more directly serving the public. Young’s studies reflect her idea of bringing knowledge to a broader audience: She’s a food historian.

“Food is brilliant because it’s relatable,” she says. “People have very personal connections to food. It informs their identity; it informs their sense of community.”

This past summer, as one of eight interns sponsored by VH@Duke, Young found herself at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. In addition to curating an update to the FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2015 exhibition, she hosted a program called “Cooking Up History,” which featured a live demonstration kitchen of historically themed dishes, during which Young would comment on the impact of both migration and food culture through the years. The internship bolstered her public-speaking skills; it also improved her dissertation about the role food played in historical New Orleans. The experience “more than anything gave me a space to talk through my ideas with the general 40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Young realized a principle of the humanities that Wisdom highlights: Clear ideas, meaningful ones, are paramount.

This perspective, maybe more so than any other, links the academy to the outside world. Among Ph.D. students, a common theme is that “you can study something incredibly complex, and you become an expert in something so incredibly specific that you didn’t even know it existed when you started,” says Leverett.

“But you can still explain to your grandmother or the president, maybe, why it’s important for society and what it actually means at a fundamental level.”

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST QUESTION

facing Ph.D.s is not about success or failure, but rather contentment. “I see what my adviser does for a living, and they seem very happy and they’re very good at it, but I don’t know that that’s what I want for myself,” Leverett says. “The earlier that you can realize that, the better.”

After a Ph.D., odds are you’re burnt out, crippled by imposter syndrome, hyper aware of your competition, or interested in something different. By virtue of meticulously completing a dissertation,

PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: Working as an intern at the Smithsonian helped Ashley Rose Young relearn the notion of accessibility, which dovetails with her desire to bring her knowledge to a broad audience.

Danuta Otfinowski

every Ph.D. student has the ability to do research, to learn something very quickly and then communicate it, skills that will be useful in most any job. In this way, the Ph.D. glut indirectly serves society in the way Kathy Franz described: Those landing outside of higher education can have a positive impact across a variety of sectors.

They can impart knowledge to business leaders, to the next generation of thinkers, to a cross section of America—such as the millions who will view Young’s curation in the D.C. museum, where she’ll start working in January as the historian of the Smithsonian Food History project.

Of course, the transition won’t be as smooth for everyone else. During the post-Ph.D. period, fear and regret will still simmer. Academic CVs and résumés, while in theory representing the same person’s accomplishments, will still have wildly different formats. For some students, the monomaniacal priority they place on tenure-track jobs will still make good options seem like barista work. Others will still get ensnared in the short-term numbers game and ignore the long-term likelihood of success. “Everyone ends up having a happy outcome,” Leverett says, “but for some reason we still think that there’s no hope.”

So if feeling hopeful is too ambitious, perhaps graduate students can simply take solace from a few precedents: The journeys of Young and Troester show that such challenging, enjoyable positions really do exist beyond the tenure track. And given that he still can read and teach the theories of Albert Hirschman and Thomas Schelling in the office, Troester is proof that the academy doesn’t have to be cordoned off from the rest of society. Knowledge can be applied anywhere.

“I think I held back from making the full transition for a while, because I was frightened of the possibility of having to give up something essential that I really valued about myself, that the process of getting a Ph.D. was an expression of,” Troester says, now two years into his time at Research Square, four years into the business world.

“Something that I’ve come to realize is that I didn’t have to give any of that up at all.” n DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke 2017DAA Awards Every year, hundreds of alumni give back to Duke through their service to the university and to their communities—and the Duke Alumni Association honors them with annual awards.

This year, these 40 alumni show what it looks like to take Duke into the world as leaders, teachers, mentors, and agents of change.

Charles Randolph-Wright ’78 DAA Distinguished Alumni Award

The Duke Alumni Association’s highest honor, given exclusively to alumni who have made outstanding contributions through their field of work, in service to Duke, and toward the betterment of humanity.

As a freshman at Duke, Randolph-Wright was on a premed track. But when his roommate showed up to his organic-chemistry lab with an extra ticket to the musical Pippin, everything changed. He skipped class and went to the show—a first step that led to a nearly forty-year musical-theater career in New York City.

Randolph-Wright says that he was looking for a sign when he moved to New York following graduation be-

cause he still was holding out for medical school.

“I wanted to know, should I go to med school or should I pursue theater? I began to audition, and the first show I got was Pippin. That was it for me. I have yet to enroll in med school,” he says.

What he did enroll in, however, was a life committed to the stage. As his career developed, so did his roles: Randolph-Wright was part of the original cast of the Tony-nominated musical Dreamgirls.

He led a revival of Guys and Dolls; directed the musical Blood Knot, featuring music by singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman; and wrote and directed a musical with gospel singer BeBe Winans called Born for This.

And, in perhaps his most meaningful role thus far, Randolph-Wright directed Motown the Musical both on Broadway and throughout a national tour.

“Directing Motown the Musical was the ultimate life-changing event in every way,” says Randolph-Wright, who grew up during desegregation in the United States.

Music, he says, had the power to unite. “Motown music is what saved us. It’s what brought us together.”

And that kind of experience is what Randolph-Wright says he tries to do every night in the theater. “We bring people together, and it is a gift that I get to give to audiences.” n Yunghi Kim

42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Lauren Fine J.D. ’11 Beyond Duke Award: Young

Alumna

Recognizing alumni who have distinguished themselves through service to their community, their country, or to society at large. Awards are given in three categories: Young Alumni, Local Community, and Global Community.

Fine, above left, was at her Duke-sponsored internship on cases to move them out of the adult system and to at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia in 2010 ensuring that individuals who were sentenced to life when she found a cause worth fighting for: the rights without parole as children have the opportunity for a of young people in the justice system. resentencing hearing.

For the first time in her journey from Yale to Duke Working alongside many of her juvenile clients, Fine to becoming a lawyer, Fine learned the high number trumpeted a change in policy—eventually halting the of juveniles sentenced in the adult justice system— mounting incarceration bills families were receiving.

Pennsylvania has 25 percent of the world’s juveniles “Parents are no longer receiving these bills, and in sentenced to life—and heard from teenagers who felt fact, any parents who are currently still paying, are powerless to advocate for themselves or to even explain being released from the obligation,” she says. what happened. Even more shocking, Fine learned that Then, just last year, a Supreme Court ruling that the parents of the juveniles were it was unconstitutional to uphold HERO OF HOPE being charged for the cost of their mandatory sentencing of life without parole for juveniles was made children’s jail time. retroactive, meaning that incarcerated persons who had “My eyes were opened not only to the injustice and received life sentences as children could be considered issues within the system, but also to the potential to for release. Three hundred Philadelphians and their help and to restore hope to young people and their families were affected by that decision—keeping Fine families,” she says. busy with resentencing hearings and preparing reentry Under Pennsylvania’s current system, a youth who services for the hundreds nearing release. is fifteen years or older can be tried as an adult under The work, Fine says, is rewarding because of the certain conditions—including situations in which he or she is found with another juvenile who has a deadly teens she works with every day.

“My biggest source of hope is in the young people weapon. Those stipulations don’t leave room for bad who are facing these difficult, incredibly overwhelmdecisions a person could make as a youth, Fine says. ing, and often unfair situations, yet are able to mainThat led Fine and a fellow lawyer to quit their jobs tain their dignity and humanity. They never fail to and launch the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, a Philadelphia nonprofit that is committed to working inspire me.” n

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ForeverDuke Juan Batlle ’78, M.D. ’79 Beyond Duke Award:

Local Community

In 1972, Batlle arrived at Duke mentored by Batlle and to VISIONARY FOR LIFE with plans to become a doctor and receive critical eye care, such as then return home to the Dominican Republic. cataract surgery, that never before had been available.

What he didn’t know was that thirteen years later, One of the most rewarding parts of Batlle’s job, the his plans would include starting a hospital for the doctor says, has been restoring the sight of hundreds poor that has revolutionized eye care for an entire of blind patients. country.

“I have so many remarkable stories of people who have come to me either blind or on the verge of losing their sight and thanks to my training, experience, and the advancements we’ve made in the field, I’m able to restore their sight or prevent blindness,” he says.

His journey as a leading ophthalmologist wouldn’t have happened without Duke, Batlle says, where he met Joseph A.C. Wadsworth—the driving force behind the Duke Eye Center—who became his “adopted father.”

“He mentored me, and both he and his wife provided a great deal of encouragement and emotional support,” Batlle says.

Batlle opened the doors of Elias Santana Hospital Today, Batlle lives in the Dominican Republic, in 1985, meeting with about twenty patients a week. where he remains involved in Elias Santana and Today, hundreds—including Dominican Republic teaches the next generation of ophthalmologists at President Danilo Medina—flock to the hospital to the Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo how to visit with twenty-eight faculty members trained and carry on the work he started. n

Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service: Honoring alumni volunteers who serve in Duke leadership roles and have devoted themselves to extraordinary, long-term efforts that help Duke further its mission.

Ross Arnold ’67, J.D. ’76 and Yum Arnold | Melissa Bernstein ’87 | Dan Dickinson ’83 | David Feldman ’80, M.D. ’84 | Virginia Lang B.S.N. ’67

Chris HIldreth 44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Neal Keny-Guyer ’76 Beyond Duke Award:

Global Community

On a recent humanitarian trip to the Gaza Strip, Keny-Guyer joined with Google to create a tech incubator for young entrepreneurs with big dreams for business. Out of that incubator rose two of the top 100 businesses in the Middle East.

of such turmoil and instability in the region,” he says.

As the CEO of Mercy Corps, Keny-Guyer travels to where aid is needed most—among more than forty countries throughout the world—to deliver swift humanitarian aid and to enact innovative programs to bring about social and economic change.

“We are zeroing-in on solving issues like clean water and clean energy through nanotechnology as well as being able to provide access to first-world options like financial security with mobile,” he says.

Looking back, Keny-Guyer can trace the beginnings of his path to his undergraduate years at Duke. He arrived in 1972, at the end of the Vietnam War and during a pivotal time in the civil rights movement. He double-majored in religion and public policy, a combination that prepared him for a future pursuing social change. After Duke, he would go on to work with at-risk youth in Washington, Cambodian refugees in Thailand, and tens of thousands of children in developing countries as a director at the international NGO Save the Children. In 1994, Keny-Guyer joined the ranks at Mercy Corps, and he hasn’t looked back.

“I know change can happen in these areas; MercyCorps I’ve witnessed it during my lifetime,” he says. “I spend 75 percent of my time traveling around It was the perfect example, Keny-Guyer says, of the the globe to precarious places, where life is incredibly hope and resiliency he encounters on his trips as the difficult. And yet, I continue to meet the most extraordinary people committing daily acts of heroism despite head of global aid agency Mercy Corps.

“It was so exciting not only for the young people but their circumstances. It is so inspiring and fills me with great hope.” n also for us that these results were possible in the midst

AGENT OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Forever Duke Award: Recognizing alumni for excellent recent volunteer service to Duke, to the DAA, and to other alumni groups.

Maria Acebal ’90 | Bruce Barlow M.B.A. ’87 | Kate Bennett ’81 | Josh Bissu ’03 | Margaret Brackett ’93 | Michael Calvo ’02 | Zela Chin ’03 | Lea Courington J.D. ’77 | Debbie Roy Crumpler ’86 | Wendy del Real ’90, J.D. ’93 | Claire Florian ’09 | Heidi Guisto Ph.D. ’12 | Mary Gregory ’88 | Ana Homayoun ’01 | Nicholas John Leonardy ’81, M.D. ’85 | Rachel Mangoubi ’03 | Phil McKenzie M.B.A. ’99 | TJ Morales ’06 | Allen Nelson ’86, J.D. ’89 | Uche Osuji ’95, M.B.A. ’01 | Lynn Rauch ’85 | Ari Redbord ’97 | Russ Richards ’03 | Heidi Eads Spies ’01 | Fred Steckler ’83 | Mark Vahradian ’89 | Josie Witte ’02 | Lynn Wolitzer ’87 | Elizabeth Woodcock ’92 | Gregg Wurster M.B.A. ’03

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ForeverDuke Duke’s professional schools also recognize and honor the great work being done by alumni.

Isela Bahena M.B.A. ’04 Fuqua School of Business

May-Penn Award of Excellence

Bahena may have graduated from Fuqua, but she’s never far from returning. That’s because Bahena regularly visits to advise Fuqua students along their Duke journey and to recruit Latino and Hispanic students to business-school programs to help ensure Duke remains a diverse community of the best and brightest.

Bahena’s commitment to Latino and Justin Cook Hispanic students—and her active volunteerism with the Duke University Hispanic and Latino Alumni Association (DUHLAA)—makes her an ideal choice for the May-Penn Award of Excellence, given every year by Fuqua’s Black and Latino MBA Organization to honor alumni who exhibit extraordinary leadership and service to students and alumni. n Jared Lazarus

Roger Coke Barr ’64, Ph.D. ’68 Engineering Alumni Association

OTHER FUQUA AWARDEES: Alumni Impact Award Laurie Gomer M.B.A. ’13 | Award for Exemplary Service Terry Sobolewski M.B.A. ’03 and Mike Wade M.B.A. ’03 | Leader of Consequence Award Tom Mitchell M.B.A. ’07 and Peter Warlick M.B.A. ’94

Distinguished Service Award

Barr broke ground at Duke as one of the first students to pursue study in the biomedical engineering field. As both a professor of biomedical engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering and an associate professor of pediatrics at Duke’s School of Medicine, Barr has focused his research on developing computer systems for understanding the “bioelectricity” of human tissues.

Nerves, the brain, and the heart are all electrically active tissues, and Barr has devoted his research to developing platforms for the heart, in particular, that simulate how it works and that record voltages of the tissue to better understand how the heart functions. n OTHER DUKE ENGINEERING AWARDEES: Distinguished Alumnus Award Philip J. Hawk ’76 | Distinguished Young Alumnus Award Max D. Cohen ’03

46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Sara Danius Ph.D. ’97 The Graduate School

Few-Glasson Alumni Society

When the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced in Stockholm, Sweden, last year, Danius was there.

That’s because she was making the announcement.

As permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel laureate each year, Danius not only had the honor of being the voice of the Academy that day, but is the first woman to do so in her role. Until Danius’ post in 2015, the permanent secretary had been a man since the role was established in 1786.

A native of Sweden, Danius is a professor and a scholar who earned a Ph.D. in literature. n OTHER GRADUATE SCHOOL AWARDEES: Distinguished Alumni Award Kenneth Gergen Ph.D. ’63 | Other Few-Glasson Alumni Society Inductees

Penka Kouneva Ph.D. ’97 and Nathan Kundtz M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’09

Robin Goff B.S.N. ’68

Duke University School of Nursing Humanitarian Award

Goff has committed her career to developing ways to serve and nurture people. For twenty-two years, she has been the spiritual leader at The Light Center, a nonprofit that promotes renewal with nature and personal healing.

During the past twelve years, Goff also has led the nonprofit’s Love Light program, which provides support to South African youth affected by AIDS and provides scholarships for the program’s participants to attend college. n OTHER SCHOOL OF NURSING AWARDEES: Distinguished Alumnus Award Robert T. Dodge M.S.N. ’96 | Distinguished Contributions to Nursing Science Award Eun-Ok Im | Honorary Alumna Award Brigit

Carter

Jared Lazarus

Karen Winkfield Ph.D. ’04, M.D. ’05 John R. Wester J.D. ’72

Duke Law Alumni Association

Charles S. Rhyne Award for Professional Achievement

In 2016, Wester received the first national pro bono award in the history of the American Bar Association for his defense of disabled citizens in a case that resulted in more than 150,000 North Carolinians receiving Social Security benefits.

The case, Hyatt v. Shalala, spanned nearly twenty years Leonard Godwin and required Wester and his partners at Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson in Chapel Hill to oversee multiple trials and two petitions before the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of their work, the case led to changes in other states and new Social Security rules for persons with disabilities. n OTHER DUKE LAW AWARDEES: Charles S. Murphy Award/Service

Mary Ellen Coster Williams ’77 | International Alumni Award Paul W. Hespel LL.M. ’95 | Young Alumni Award Linton Mann III J.D. ’07

Duke Medical Alumni Association

Emerging Leader Award

With a passion for closing the gaps in healthcare disparities, Winkfield is making it her mission to reduce cancer disparities in vulnerable populations.

Early in her career as a radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, Winkfield oversaw a $3 million grant establishing a cancer-care program aimed at improving clinical-trial access for underserved people.

And she hasn’t stopped. Now at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, Winkfield is an associate professor of radiation oncology and the codirector of the Office of Cancer Health Equity at Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she is committed to removing barriers across the cancer-care spectrum. n OTHER DUKE MEDICAL AWARDEES: Distinguished Alumni Award David Ginsburg M.D.

’78, Diane Havlir M.D. ’84, and Allan D. Kirk Ph.D. ’92, M.D. ’97 | Distinguished Faculty Award Michael Merson and Anna Mae Diehl

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ForeverDuke

Ready to be

of service Michael Sorrell has revived a once-struggling historically black college by emphasizing the philosophy and practice of servant leadership.

By Katti Gray | Photography by Roberto Hernandez

FDCONNECTIONS

T

he run-on of requests for Michael Sorrell A.M. ’90, J.D. ’94 to hold forth on higher education’s peaks and rock-bottom lows landed him, this spring day, alongside two experts from colleges quite unlike the one he’d snatched from the brink of a slow, protracted death.

“My constituency is probably the most vulnerable of those who will be impacted by this administration,” begins Sorrell, the president of Texas’ 145-year-old Paul Quinn College, the oldest historically black university west of the Mississippi River.

From his seat on a panel of experts, Sorrell was calculating the human toll—if President Donald Trump’s budget proposal didn’t change—of paring federal Pell Grant funding and wholly eliminating the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant and a host of other safety nets for the least resourced students and their families.

For fuller context, consider some essential facts about Sorrell’s campus: One recent fall semester, he sanctioned some social-media crowd-funding to buy eye glasses for students who needed but couldn’t afford them. Eighty-five percent of Paul Quinn’s 521 students hail from households with incomes meager enough to qualify them for a Pell Grant. Seventy percent have earnings so low that their “expected family contribution” is zero.

A fifth of them are Latinos. And, in that mix, some are quaking over both the president’s immigration crackdown and his directive for Congress to replace President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order with an actual law within six months. (At this writing, the future of DACA—which lets undocumented college student “Dreamers” continue their studies without being legal U.S. residents—is unclear.)

“The day after the election, we had to call a town-hall meeting,” Sorrell tells members of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges convening at a top-dollar Dallas hotel.

“Our campuses should be sanctuaries for all our students,” Sorrell riffs, answering a follow-up question about undocumented collegians during the discussion.

By “all students,” he was acknowledging—no doubt—the particular barriers confronting those who don’t legally reside in the United States. But, really, he was homing in: Sorrell believes colleges and universities across the nation ought to welcome and accept exceedingly more individuals than they’re enrolling.

Race, region, gender, and, unequivocally, finances, ought not be cause to leave any academic aspirant behind.

As he forges ahead in his self-styled fight to help create a network of institutions akin to Paul Quinn—Sorrell’s “new urban college model” is bent on educating the poorest people, while improving distressed communities—the former corporate law-

yer and Clinton administration White House aide is doubling down. He’s upending conventions about who is educable in America. How do we ensure, he asks and demands, that the poor, working, and struggling middle classes also get into and graduate from the institutions that sometimes are egregiously out of reach and out of touch?

He’s conveyed this to audiences at the Aspen Ideas Festival, TEDx, and Ashoka; the George W. Bush Presidential Center; at gatherings of the College Board, where he’s a trustee; in front of the corporate chiefs on Paul Quinn’s growing list of allies; and at a slew of universities, including Duke.

That the message has been well-received points to Sorrell’s singular appeal because of his revival of Paul Quinn. There, “We over Me” is the slogan. Christian faith-fueled “servant leadership’’ is a core standard in classrooms and extracurricular campus and community activities.

One of Sorrell’s most-noticed steps was to cut tuition in half.

And his most recent, much-lauded achievement was to win the school’s certification as a U.S. Department of Education “work college,” where paid student internships are a graduation requirement. Paul Quinn became the eighth such college this past March.

It’s the first historically black college or university and first urban institution with that designation.

“I’ve come to believe that people don’t believe in the possibility of things they’ve never seen—until they see it. And that’s especially true of higher-education elitists, with all their class-consciousness” and view that only kids from certain kinds of communities and academic backgrounds are college-ready and -worthy, says Sorrell, who has twice been named HBCU President of the Year by HBCU Digest.

After serving on Paul Quinn’s board of trustees, Sorrell became president a decade ago—having been turned down for the job twice. At the time he took over, the small college was mired in debt and administrative scandal. It was going to lose its accreditation. Fifteen of its twenty buildings were in shambles.

(Sorrell, gauging cost-effectiveness, had them demolished as redevelopment plans also got under way.)

Paul Quinn verged on being shut down.

Key to keeping students coming through its open doors was the tuition cut in 2014, which put tuition for on-campus students at the private college closer to what Texas residents pay at that state’s public universities. It also meant that Paul Quinn Class of 2018 Pell Grant recipients whose families cannot help pay their colleges costs, for example, could arrange, if they choose, to graduate with less than $10,000 in student loan debt. That’s almost a fourth of what the average student borrower in the United States owes post-graduation. (Indeed, some

“We over Me” is the slogan.

38

Duke alumni and their families toured Paul Quinn’s We over Me Farm in October.

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ForeverDuke students leave college in the red by as many as six figures.)

Sorrell says the college is managing that tuition overhaul, in part, by having students fill some jobs that previously went to higher-paid professionals and by ramping up its fundraising.

Sorrell also required all students to work an on-campus gig, their salaries paid in the form of tuition credit. It was a first step toward the work-college designation. Paul Quinn has lined up several major corporations, other companies, and organizations where students will be paid interns.

“The work-college model gives students and graduates adaptable skills they can transfer between industries and enhance over the course of their careers,” says Tashni-Ann Dubroy, president of Raleigh’s Shaw University.

Work colleges, Dubroy says, “not only provide a favorable outlook for [students’] long-term earning potential, but the potential for families and communities to have a foundation of higher education and social mobility. Dr. Sorrell’s approach to redefining and executing a novel liberal-arts model is ambitious and disruptive.”

Which is Sorrell’s precise intent: “For people trapped by urban and rural poverty, we need to get this right,” he says.

S

ORRELL IS CHICAGO South Side-born and reared. His educator mama and entrepreneurial daddy—owner and operator of Sorrell’s Painted Doll, a popular barbecue joint—schooled him in the civic imperative of attending to one’s neighbor’s needs and one’s own personal uplift. He rolls out that pivotal bit of biography during the three-week summer course he teaches to students starting their first semester at Paul Quinn.

Alumni helped plant

50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

1,800

Sorrell’s summer bridge course is where New York-born Vincent Owoseni, twenty-one, a Paul Quinn senior majoring in business, first heard the words “servant leadership.”

“I understood its essence before I got here. Coming here quantified and solidified what that means,” says Owoseni, who produced his own line of hoodies, T-shirts, and other attire bearing slogans of personal and community advancement during what was his single semester at New York City College of Technology. At sixteen, he had been valedictorian at Polytechnic High, one of Brooklyn’s most competitive public schools, which adjoins the tech college.

Paul Quinn’s graduation rate was abysmally low when, through a high-school counselor, Owoseni got word that Sorrell was crisscrossing Texas and other states, scouting scholars and would-be scholars willing to take a chance on his rebounding college. The native New Yorker’s father initially scoffed at the idea of his son transferring to Paul Quinn, where 60 percent of students are native Texans. But Sorrell convinced the skeptical dad, in person, inside the Owosenis’ home.

Since landing on Paul Quinn’s pastoral 144-acre campus in a South Dallas neighborhood dotted with modest, mainly well-kept homes, pawnshops, and checking-cashing stores, Owoseni says he has soared. “I was vice president of the freshman class.” He was tapped for Duke Immerse, a Paul QuinnDuke student collaboration on environmental justice, and for a semester of study in Southern Methodist University’s engineering school, another collaboration. He has interned for a Texas legislator who is a Paul Quinn alumna in JCPenney’s corporate procurement and finance division, and at Civitas Capital Management. He mentors younger Paul Quinn men and tutors the neighborhood’s elementary- and secondary-schoolers. He is a member of Paul MARCHING ON: Quinn’s chapter of My Brothers’ Keeper, Michael Sorrell a nationwide “cradle-to-career” initiative supports an for black males that the Obama White event organized House birthed.

by Latino The school was named the 2011 activists.

HBCU of the Year and, in 2013, was a finalist for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

As Paul Quinn shows what it and its students are capable of achieving, it has kept its immediate neighbors in mind.

The college led efforts yielding a fall 2016 opening of the first full-service grocery store in twenty years in the mostly black, largely blue-collar and working poor Highland Hills, just two blocks from campus.

Paul Quinn has drafted blueprints for a 200-unit apartment complex to be erected on campus, reserving several units for families headed by single parents. “We’ve got a builtin audience here. And we’ve got people to serve,” Sorrell says.

transplants—broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and cabbage—

I

TINERANT, sometimes barely literate black preachers major from Oakland, California, who, as an eighth-grader, from the African Methodist Episcopal Church found- got herself into one of San Francisco’s top Catholic girls’ ed Paul Quinn in 1872 in Austin. Initially, it taught schools on her own, be joining them for dinner as planned? blacksmithing, carpentry, tanning, and other trades to “Yes,” he confirmed. freed slaves and their children. The college later moved Butler, raised by her grandmother and aunt in a house also to Waco, where AME Bishop Paul Quinn began adding Lat- shared by her drug-abusing father, was in Sorrell’s back seat, in, letters, and other kinds of learning he hoped would propel flipping through her phone. black people in racially fraught, hierarchical America. On the “That’s my child, too,” Sorrell says.

Dallas campus, where the college moved in 1990, the bish“He has kindness and love for his students that is unreop’s grave is on the grounds of a chapel now housing a public lenting,” says Kelsel Thompson, lured to Paul Quinn from charter school.

Austin College to be the school’s Paul Quinn’s abiding, faith-based dean of student life. That faithfulness extends to the staff, she says, history was evident during the 2017 and it’s reciprocated. Few among Founder’s Day honors ceremony in the college’s faculty and staff do the student life building across the just one job. way from that chapel.

Says Maurice West, a former It was like church. public-school educator and Sor“Oh, dear God, this morning rell’s friend of twenty-five years we thank you, and we accept your who doubles as Paul Quinn’s dean provision today,” invoked Dexter of men and men's basketball coach: Evans, Young Alumni Council “What Michael is doing here, what chair and a Paul Quinn alumnus we all are doing is impact work.” bound for graduate studies at the So, Sorrell tasked the stuUniversity of Pennsylvania’s school dent-athlete who wanted a camof education. pus soccer team with laying the “We are tasked with being repairers of the breach,” said Don groundwork for that. The field got Clevenger, who chairs Paul Quinn’s built, the team kicked off. That multiracial board of trustees. He student was its paid coach. was borrowing from the biblical So, Sorrell or his staffers, on any book of Isaiah. given day, might drop off “We over And Jeremy Thomas, who is slatMe” T-shirts at the same neighbored to graduate from Paul Quinn in hood post office where they helped KUDOS: Sorrell celebrates with an honors 2019, belted a gospel song: … He’s get the stray dogs rounded up. student on Founder's Day. gonna ful-fill e-ve-ry promise to you So, the We over Me Farm, on … Oh-oooh-ooo-oh … He’s able. what was an unused football field, The honchos from Toyota’s philanthropic arm who sat in the sells its organic produce and henhouse eggs to local restaufront row, the elders of a reinvigorated alumni association, stu- rants but also gives some to local food pantries and soup dents, and most everyone assembled took to their feet. kitchens.

Sorrell clapped. He sang. He threw his head back in flat-out And so, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra does summer conworship. He testified. He all but preached. In his comments, certs on one of Paul Quinn’s lawns.

“The college has to—has to—be visible to everyone,” says he did not forget that an infinitesimal number of people struck by sudden cardiac death live to tell about being revived. In Sorrell, noting that he is the only one among his college-edu2008, he did die of that. God raised him from the dead. How cated kin who didn’t attend an HBCU. “But everything I am is because of what HBCUs did for boundless must this miracle-working God be, Sorrell summarizes, without actually articulating that question. my people,” he says. “My being at Paul Quinn? This is about Days before, on the fifteen-minute drive back to Paul me saying thank you.” n Quinn from the downtown Dallas hotel where he had addressed those university administrators, trustees, fundraisers, Gray’s work has appeared in, among other print and online publiand influencers, Sorrell’s wife, Natalie Jenkins Sorrell, rang cations, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, through his Bluetooth: Would Trezeur Butler, the business Salon, The Sun magazine, and The Washington Post.

which will yield about

4,000

pounds of produce to sell to local restaurants and AT&T Stadium to support the college.

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ForeverDuke Newsmakers

(Larry Steagall | Kitsap Sun)

Loren Robinson M.D. ’09 was named to Essence magazine’s Woke 100 list, which honored trailblazing women fighting for equal rights and inclusion for black Americans.

Amy Scarton ’98, J.D. ’01 is the new director of Washington state’s ferries.

Enuma Okoro M.Div. ’03 curated a spread for Essence magazine that highlighted northern Nigerian female designers to fight stereotypes of women in that region.

Courtesy of The Valory Music Co.

Hilda Pinnix-Ragland M.B.A. ’86 was named Triangle Business Journal’s 2017 Women in Business Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

Ian ’07 and Eric Holljes ’09 wrote their new folkrock album, A Long and Happy Life, with inspiration from writers Reynolds Price ’55 and William Styron ’47.

Former Duke football player and coach Brad Sherrod ’93 joined the Wake Forest University football defensive coaching staff.

Anuj Rakyan ’98 founded Raw Pressery, India’s largest cold-pressed juice brand, which recycles bottles into uniforms for underprivileged school children.

Desiree Deli

Phil McCarten

Sebastien Di Maulo Photographie

David Spiegel ’85, M.D. ’90, pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was the 2017 recipient of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons’ Humanitarian Award.

Paul Siefkan ’92 continues the legacy of children’s television pioneer Mister Rogers as president and CEO of The Fred Rogers Company.

52 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Amy Arundale D.P.T. ’11 will compete with the U.S. Australian Football League Women’s National Team.

Award-winning reporter Hannah Karp ’02 was named news director at Billboard.

Jairy C. Hunter Jr. Ph.D. ’77 is president emeritus of Charleston Southern University and a professor at CSU’s business school.

1.2.3.

QUESTIONS FOR...

Chris Hildreth

Steve Dalton M.B.A. ’04

Robert Bonnie M.E.M. ’94, former Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, returned to Duke as a Rubenstein Fellow to explore conservation in rural America.

Jada Brooks B.S.N. ’05, Ph.D. ’11 launched a cardiovascular study of Lumbee Native American women in southeastern N.C. after receiving a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Steve Dalton M.B.A. ’04, the director of daytime career services at the Fuqua School of Business and the author of The 2-Hour Job Search (Ten Speed Press). In his role at Fuqua, Dalton is charged with helping the business school’s 900 daytime M.B.A. students master the job search before they leave Duke.

You started off your career as a chemical engineer. How did you find your way into career services at Fuqua?

no amount of work on your résumé will ever get you a job.

But if you can consistently turn strangers into advocates, you are going to be employed for the rest of your life.

Before business school, I had played it safe. I became a chemical engineer, but I really wanted to go into marketing.

I eventually did that, got my dream job at General Mills, realized I hated my dream job—and then had no idea what to do next. I didn’t know how to navigate the real world and how to find jobs after the college career center goes away.

I decided to interview people who were happy with their jobs—and that included two colleagues at Fuqua. The next thing I knew, I was working in career services at Fuqua.

How can alumni and students leverage technology for their job search?

So how can job seekers figure it out?

What are they doing that isn’t working?

Adam Baker

Shirley Collado A.M. ’96, Ph.D. ’99 was named the ninth president of Ithaca College in New York.

—Sarah Haas

7

Have news to share about your achievements and milestones? Submit a class note and read your classmates’ latest news by logging into alumni.duke.edu.

I think people get overwhelmed by treating the job search process as infinite. For example, the likelihood of success from applying for an online job posting is close to zero, but it costs you definite time and definite energy. A job seeker can apply for job after job online, but the reality is that’s not the way companies hire. The bottom line is that

I’m a big believer in right tech rather than high-tech. I think there’s always going to be a new app, a new website, a new flavor of the day that will demand an hour of your time and then discourage you more. Take the example of LinkedIn. You could devote a lifetime to learning all that LinkedIn does and building out your profile. But in reality, only a couple things are critical to learn how to use—such as LinkedIn groups. When you join a group, you can look up members and message them for free. Similarly, think about the new Duke alumni network.

It’s a wonderful resource that alumni and students can use to exclusively message alumni who may be able to help them in their career journey. Or, take the example of a website I like called www.email-format.com.

Let’s say you’re looking for the e-mail address of someone at a certain company and you can’t find it online. This site will suggest the format of that e-mail. In the end, it’s less about using all technology and more about using the technology that moves the needle.

—Edited by Christina Holder

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ForeverDuke DUKEIS EVERYWHERE!

SPAIN Number of alumni:

106

As a career diplomat who loves Duke basketball, Marcos Mandojana ’96 coined the phrase “sports diplomacy.” And readers need look no further than the official Twitter feed of the U.S. Consulate General Barcelona to understand what he means. As the consul general of the U.S. Consulate, Mandojana not only works with citizens needing consular services in the region, he also spreads his Blue Devil Love come basketball season via the Twitter handle @USConsulateBCN. In his spare time, Mandojana also organizes basketball watch parties—no matter the time—and says he’s spent his career spreading the Cameron Crazie spirit across the globe.

Previously, Mandojana served as a U.S. diplomat in Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, and the United States.

What are you up to in your city?

Share a photo on social media using #DukeIsEverywhere

54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

An icy retreat

A visit to the Arctic gives Duke alumni an up-close look at changing conditions.

PHOTOGRAPHY and TEXT by LUCAS HUBBARD

G

o to Norway, and then head further north, three hours by plane. You’ll end up in Longyearbyen, the main settlement of the not-quite-sovereign archipelago of Svalbard. Formerly a mining town, Longyearbyen focuses now on tourism and climate research, an area of obvious interest, given its position in the Arctic. If you leave the settlement on foot, you’ll have to carry a rifle to protect against polar bears.

The Arctic manages to both follow and upend your expectations. Polar bears present a threat, but they’re rarely seen. Svalbard has quaint limitations—its governor doubles as the region’s chief justice and head of police—but also luxuries: Longyearbyen has an airport, a university, and a number of museums. On the ocean, the wind whips but rarely stings; increasingly, the water can be traversed without breaking ice. Perhaps that’s the greatest shame: The Arctic is disappearing before people truly know what it’s like.

This June, a number of Duke alumni (myself included) made this northern pilgrimage before hopping on the National Geographic Explorer for a week at sea.

The Lindblad Expeditions “Land of the Ice Bears” trip itself marks the decline in

Arctic conditions. Launches are trending earlier each year; the next time Duke offers the trip, in 2019, it will be even earlier in the month. It’s a simple pattern: Less and less ice covers the ocean.

“There’s always good ice years and bad ice years, but what we’re seeing is a string of consecutive ‘light’ ice years, which results in really bad conditions for these animals,” according to David Johnston Ph.D. ’04, associate professor of the practice of marine conservation ecology in the Nicholas School. Previous extremes of low ice levels have become the norm. “What we were seeing would happen once every five or seven years; it now happens every year or four years in a row with only one good year in-between.”

As the ice that’s so iconic in the region—that’s so elemental to the region— disappears, an already-fragile ecosystem becomes threatened. Loosely speaking, the food chain flows steadily to its terminus of the polar bear, and the polar bear diet relies upon a surplus of seals. (To maintain body weight, a grown polar bear eats roughly one seal a week.) Johnston has studied harp seals at length in Arctic Canada and Greenland, and in numerous papers he has documented declines in sea-

“I don’t think there’s any question that we saw things that people in the future won’t be able to see.”

sonal sea ice and associated deaths of entire cohorts of their pups.

He also explains how tenuous the situation is for another type of pinniped, the hooded seal. Like harp seals, they can’t give birth to their pups in the water, nor can birth/reproduction occur on land, as those seals would be sitting, well, seals for the predatory polar bears.

What they need is pack ice—the floating ice that forms seasonally and increasingly unpredictably during their breeding season each spring.

“They’re kind of walking this amazing evolutionary dance, where they’re using this ephemeral habitat, and they time their reproductive stuff so closely to take advantage of that,” Johnston says. “So if the ice is just a week late, then it makes a big difference to the animals, because then all their pups die.”

What we saw in the Arctic, primarily, were hungry polar bears prowling the ice, looking for their next meal. The bears bolster the trip’s allure, certainly, and the expedition leader admitted to feeling relieved when the passengers saw polar bears in the first few days, as that freed up the chance to explore other wildlife and natural elements, like reindeer, walruses,

and arctic foxes, or glaciers and ice floes.

We became expert ornithologists capable of spotting kittiwakes and eider ducks at a distance, even finding interest in their guano and the purple saxifrage (flower) that it aids in fertilizing. Since every species affects one another, and because there aren’t that many species to account for, the Arctic system makes sense. Its barrenness, however, stands out.

“For me, one of the moments was flying into Longyearbyen. You’re seeing all the snow-colored mountains, the lack of vegetation,” said Juliet Sadd Wiehe ’85, who traveled from Raleigh for the trip. “It really felt otherworldly to me—it was like a landing on a different planet.” We spent many an afternoon making landings and trudging through snow and melted permafrost. On the second-to-last day, we floated up above the 80th north parallel, a region where only perhaps expeditioner extraordinaire Peter Hillary (an onboard guest speaker) honestly felt comfortable.

More tangibly, our satellite connection failed often, leaving us at times without the Internet; while the trappers who preceded us here were undoubtedly brave, we were far from the comforts of home.

But while we adapted to the environment, the mammals have the harder adjustment. Early on during the trip, we witnessed a polar bear experience her floor fall out from underneath, the ice melting away and depositing her in the water. We saw a second bear hunting for food for over an hour, so hungry and apparently undisturbed by the ship to allow us the best photographs of the excursion: Wiehe later referred to the bear as “the poser.”

“To me, the polar bear is the mascot of this whole climate change thing that’s getting discussed,” said Rich Frost M.D. ’73, a physician and travel writer who had been looking to take this trip for fifteen years. “I don’t think there’s any question that we saw things that people in the future won’t be able to see.”

The last day on the ship, with the captain steering us down the western edge of the archipelago back toward Longyearbyen, we stopped in the cove at the 14th of July Glacier. As we gathered on the bow, we witnessed two distinct sights: the harsh brown moraine that the glacier has already left in its wake, and the pure blue ice, time after time, breaking off from its shelf and plunging into the ocean below.

It made for a memorable image, showing what we’ve already lost, and what will be next to go. n

DUKE MAGAZINE

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55

ForeverDuke

#TheDoersProfile

On Shark Tank, Yunha Kim ’11 got offers but walked away with no deal for her meditation app Simple Habit.

56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

DukeonYour Phone Facebook: 118 alumni work at the social-media giant—from 2005 to 2011 they included Soleio Cuervo ’03, who invented the “Like” button.

Despegar.com: The “Expedia of Latin America.” Fuqua classmates Roberto Souviron M.B.A. ’99 and Mariano Fiori M.B.A. ’99, and Martin Rastellino M.B.A. ’99 cofounded this air travel and hotelbooking app for flights throughout the region.

Houzz: Emily Poplawski ’10 works as the product lead for mobile at Houzz, one of the leading apps for redesigning homes and Google’s Best App of 2016.

Lyft: Seventeen alumni work at the car-hire service, where Carlos Whitt ’01 is in charge of all passenger experience as the director of engineering, and Cheri Yu ’98 is the head of local marketing.

Box: Dylan Smith ’08 is the cofounder and CFO of this cloud-based file-sharing service.

CBS Sports: Sean McManus ’77 heads CBS Sports and brings Duke basketball exclusively to your TV during March Madness.

Walla: Senior Judy Zhu is the CEO of this social-networking app, which won the $50,000 grand prize at the 2017 Annual Duke Startup Challenge. The app allows users to create social events or meet-up requests—and to see people nearby who are interested in participating.

Pocket: Matt Koidin M.B.A. ’05, Kaitlin Gaiss ’13, and Tushar Kirtane ’05, M.B.A. ’14 developed this read-it-later app that allows you to drop articles, videos, and other content you find online into one place. Pocket recently was acquired by Mozilla.

Apple Podcasts: Mangesh Hattikudur ’01 and Will Pearson ’01 will tell you how you can be a “Part-Time Genius” via their new podcast in partnership with HowStuffWorks.

Draft Kings: Jason Robins ’03 is the CEO of DraftKings, a fantasy sports company that he cofounded in 2012.

Apple Maps: Eddy Cue ’86 is the senior vice president of Internet software and services at Apple and oversees the Apple Maps platform as well as the iTunes Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music, iCloud services, original entertainment strategy, and Siri.

Duke Alumni: Search for other alumni to build your network, access on-campus benefits, and (eventually) register for alumni events. Plus: Follow @ DukeAlumni on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

United Airlines: Azim Barodawala ’00 is the CEO of Volantio, a third-party aviation technology platform that is helping United Airlines reduce the number of overbooked flights.

Talking Bodhi: Poman Lo ’99 is the founder and CEO of Century Innovative Technology, a multi-million dollar “edutainment company” responsible for Bodhi and Friends, a popular cartoon series in Asia that teaches children lessons in honesty, respect, and compassion.

Vamoose: Cefi Menda ’16 launched this app to help users skip the line at favorite restaurants and pick up their orders in record time. n

Sima Sistani ’03 is cofounder of Houseparty, a group video-chat app gaining popularity among teens.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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57

ForeverDuke

THENNOW

Retro “I don’t recall having the privilege or inclination to establish ‘safe spaces’ to avoid the discomfort of intellectual conflict. It’s a weak and destructive position. And ‘trigger warnings?’ That’s a new one too.”—Pearce Godwin ’08, in an essay on the free speech on college campuses

“I’m living proof that it is all going to work out, and I have a stack of rejection letters to show for it.”— Amanda Lamb ’88, in an essay about filling out college applications with her daughter

Duke University Archives

Uncle Terry saves the day

When student behavior at basketball games got crazy, President Sanford wrote a note that helped pave the way for Crazie-ness. | BY VALERIE GILLISPIE

A

“I love basketball and love being in the gym.

I like a great meal.

I like to write. I am drawn to artists and creatives, dedication and dreams.”—Mason Plumlee ’13, writing to the people of Denver after signing with the Denver Nuggets

58 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

s a former governor, Terry Sanford often used his political skills during his tenure as Duke president, from 1970 to 1985. One of his best-known missives, the “Avuncular Letter,” was sent to the undergraduate students in 1984. At once humorous and chiding, effective but gentle, the letter, signed “Uncle Terry,” is a triumph of Sanford’s acumen. The story behind the letter, however, tells the tale of the long-standing problem facing Sanford, as well as the path it set toward the creation of what we now know as “Cameron Crazies.”

Student rowdiness at basketball games didn’t begin in 1984.

In fact, correspondence about the issue in Sanford’s presidential records dates back to 1973. Even then, opposing teams accused enthusiastic Duke fans of spitting on them in Cameron Indoor Stadium. A number of student cheers also contained words some alumni and other viewers felt were unfitting for a school of Duke’s caliber.

After a particularly nasty incident in 1979, in which the wife of the North Carolina State University coach was taunted, Duke fans were reviled in the press. A Richmond Times-Dispatch column by Mike Bevans suggested, “If ABC ever expands its Superstars competition to include collections of raving idiots, put your money on the Duke students who assemble behind press row for every game at Cameron Stadium.”

Sanford wrote a letter to the student body in February 1979, remarking on the volume of letters sent to his office—“more than I have received on any other issue since I have been at Duke.” He warned that the conduct was beginning to interfere with Duke’s reputation, as well as its fundraising. He concluded the letter by saying, “We can have plenty of fun, kid others to whatever degree we want to, but there is a line that decent people simply have to draw. I contend that a Duke student has enough sense to know where to draw the line. I am counting on you to draw it.” The following day, Sanford wrote a letter to all fraternity presidents, asking them to do what they could to keep their members in line.

The presidential caution didn’t curtail all bad behavior, however. At a game in February 1983, Virginia coach Terry Holland found himself with Duke students sitting immediately behind the visitors’ bench, and was on the receiving end of constant insults and enough noise that he had difficulty communicating with his players. “While I admit that I enjoy some of the ideas that Duke students come up with,” Holland wrote dryly to Duke Athletics Director Tom Butters, “the profanity and the personal attacks on coaches and their families really have no place in the college game.”

As the 1983-84 season approached, Sanford wrote, perhaps wearily, to Butters: “With the approaching basketball season, I turn once more to a favorite peeve of mine, and that is the ‘dehumanizing’ conduct of a number of our students at home games. I hope you can devise a plan to minimize this kind of conduct, and to improve the rather sorry reputation our student body has in this respect.” It didn’t take long, however, before the antics in Cameron earned the school renewed attention from the press.

At a game against Maryland in January 1984, a number of students threw underwear and contraceptives onto the court—a dig at a Maryland player who had been accused of sexual misconduct—and sang chants containing four-letter words, hurled personal insults against players and coaches, and created general mayhem. Clippings of critical articles were sent to Sanford, along with letters expressing shock

and distaste at the behavior. One read, “To think that some of those same students might within just a few years be our doctors, dentists, lawyers, and legislators boggles one’s mind.” Many asked when the administration was going to step in.

Even his friend Peace Corps founder and politician Sargent Shriver wrote him, expressing sympathy: “What can be done? Short of evicting the ‘fans’ (if they’re worthy of that name) or fining the home team points for foul behavior by home team rooters, I can’t imagine what can or should be done. But I’m guessing you can. So, the purpose of this letter is solely to tell you that a lot of fathers & mothers would rally around a president with the courage to put an end to this kind of despicable conduct.”

It was in response to all of this outcry that Sanford penned his avuncular letter. In it, he implored the fans to be creative, but to keep it clean. “Think of something clever but clean, devastating but decent, mean but wholesome, witty and forceful but G-rated for television, and try it at the next game.” He concluded the letter with a single sentence: “I hate for us to have the reputation of being stupid.”

Duke students demonstrated their new and improved behavior at the next home game, against the University of North Carolina. A group of students attempted to deliver a bouquet to UNC coach Dean Smith, and the crowd, many of who were wearing halos, shouted, “Hi Dean!” in greeting. The referees received a standing ovation when they walked onto the court, and when the fans objected to their calls, they shouted, “We beg to differ” rather than their previous favorite cry, which referred to barnyard droppings. Even the signs in the stands were cleaned up: “Welcome honored guests,” and “Sorry Uncle Terry. The devil made us do it.”

The new behavior received positive feedback from almost all, including from UNC. Dean Smith told The Durham Morning Herald, “I’m impressed with the Duke officials and Duke student body that they tried to do something about it.” Slyly, Smith continued, “Of course, I didn’t ever notice the other things.”

The Avuncular Letter didn’t end misbehavior, but it did usher in a new era for Duke men’s basketball fans and began some practices that continue, including line monitors.

Within a couple of years, the remarkable fan base was bestowed with the “crazies” moniker. Sanford, with his typical finesse in working with students, alumni, administrators, and colleagues at other schools, helped make the Cameron Crazies into the creative and powerful force they are today.

“I hate for us to have the reputation of being stupid.”

Gillispie is the university’s archivist.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

M. Douglas Sackman ’38 of South Deerfield, Mass., on March 26, 2017.

Lloyd F. Timberlake ’38, M.D. ’41, H ’47 of Atlanta, on May 31, 2017.

1940s

More Duke memories online Find links to full obituaries for Duke alumni at

Mary Elizabeth Averill Harkey ’40 of Charlotte, on June 6, 2017.

Stanley F. Whitman ’40 of Miami Shores, Fla., on May 24, 2017.

Frank G. Light ’41 of Durham, on June 21, 2017.

Dorothy Sink Perry ’41 of Amelia Island, Fla., on May 13, 2017.

Charles Richard Bayman B.S.M.E. ’44 of Warren, Ohio, on June 13, 2017.

Walter G. Gobbel Jr. M.D. ’44, H ’45, H ’47, H ’48 of Nashville, Tenn., on June 9, 2017.

Mary Gordon Holland ’44 of Statesville, N.C., on June 20, 2017.

Frederick H. Hennighausen Jr. ’45, B.S.M.E. ’47 of Roswell, N.M., on May 4, 2017.

Ullin W. Leavell Jr. M.D. ’45, H ’46 of Lexington, Ky., on July 17, 2017.

William Miles Wells Jr. ’45, B.Div. ’48 of Laurinburg, N.C., on June 13, 2017.

Robert T. Cottam Jr. ’46 of High Point, N.C., on May 22, 2017.

Michael Fisher ’46 of New Orleans, on Jan. 29, 2017.

Emmanuel M. Gitlin M.Div. ’46, Ph.D. ’53 of Hickory, N.C., on June 13, 2017.

Robert L. Scott ’47 of State College, Pa., on July 6, 2017.

Margaret Zehmer Searcy ’47 of Tuscaloosa, Ala., on May 27, 2017.

Beryl A. Baker B.S.M.E. ’48 of Rockville, Md., on Jan. 14, 2017.

James H. Ball ’48 of Lady’s Island, S.C., on June 25, 2017.

Marjorie V. Goff B.S.N. ’48 of Charlotte, on June 25, 2017.

Anne Henderson Love ’48 of Charlottesville, Va., on May 10, 2017.

Robert E. Lowdermilk Jr. ’48 of Greensboro, N.C., on May 29, 2017.

Chris Hildreth

alumni.duke.edu

TURNING PASSION INTO PROGRESS The Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative fuels personal passions, enabling participants to create meaningful ventures that bridge communities and make a global impact.

Learn how Duke I&E is encouraging innovation and inspiring entrepreneurship. releaf.ng entrepreneurship.duke.edu

60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

UZOMA AYOGU Class of 2017 Y Combinator Fellow Co-founded Releaf to help agribusinesses in Nigeria connect with customers and scale their operations.

An Active Life

I

n the summer issue, the In Memoriam section had an incorrect surname for Savannah Mackenzie Goodman ’18.

The valedictorian of her high school in Jacksonville, Florida, Goodman came to Duke in fall 2014 as a biology premed major. A proud Duke basketball fan, she worked in the Duke Student Wellness Center, as a campus tour guide, and in two different research labs. She also was active with Jewish Life at Duke, and she studied abroad in Singapore and St. Johns. n

Courtesy of the Goodman family

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FALL 2017

61

William F. Miller M.F. ’48 of Jesup, Ga., on May 16, 2017.

Henrietta Secrest Peery ’48 of Charlotte, on June 2, 2017.

Harriet Jones Davis ’49 of Winston-Salem, N.C., on June 6, 2017.

Irwin H. McNeely ’49, M.D. ’53 of Salem, Va., on June 15, 2017.

Allan H. Meltzer ’49 of Pittsburgh, on May 8, 2017.

Charles A. Raebeck ’49, M.Ed. ’52, Ed.D. ’55 of Greenport, N.Y., on May 24, 2017.

1950s

Charles L. Brewer ’50 of Durham, on July 4, 2017.

Benner B. Crigler Sr. ’50 of Charlotte, on June 12, 2017.

Doris Ramalho Hardin ’50 of Coalville, Utah, on May 31, 2017.

Homer C. Hollar ’50 of Cedar Park, Texas, on June 4, 2017.

Henry O. Lineberger Jr. ’50 of Raleigh, on July 11, 2017.

Maude Purkall Shirley B.S.N. ’50, R.N. ’50 of Santa Maria, Calif., on June 25, 2017.

Robert B. Yudell ’50, M.D. ’54 of Charlotte, on June 26, 2017.

Robert L. Clement Jr. LL.B. ’51 of Charleston, S.C., on June 9, 2017.

Farish Sizemore Cochran ’51 of Charlotte, on May 18, 2017.

Tom W. Gore Jr. ’51, M.D. ’55 of Oklahoma City, on July 28, 2017.

Benjamin T. Jackson ’51, M.D. ’54 of Weston, Mass., on June 28, 2017.

Giles Yancey Mebane ’51, M.D. ’54 of Mebane, N.C., on July 9, 2017.

Marie Smith Rentz A.M. ’51 of Washington, on April 26, 2017.

Joseph I. Bobbitt ’52 of Bradenton, Fla., on July 14, 2017.

Spencer Spainhour Brewer Jr. M.D. ’52, H ’56 of Atlanta, on July 9, 2017.

Paul Hardin III ’52, J.D. ’54 of Chapel Hill, on July 1, 2017.

Mary Early Hardison ’52 of Tallahassee, Fla., on June 26, 2017.

Franklin Montross III ’52 of North Chatham, Mass., on June 10, 2017.

Mary Winters Phillips Acker ’53 of Stuart, Fla., on July 1, 2017.

Thomas T. Cole ’53 of Mount Dora, Fla., on March 22, 2015.

Betty Jane Larson Fischer R.N. ’53 of Mobile, Ala., on June 26, 2017.

Thomas T. Miller ’53 of Annapolis, Md., on June 21, 2017.

Margaret Dunn Toms ’53 of Raleigh, on May 29, 2017.

Thomas L. Dulin ’54, M.D. ’57 of Charlotte, on May 26, 2017.

Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey Ph.D. ’54 of Denton, Texas, on June 27, 2017.

Yancey G. Culton Jr. M.D. ’56, H ’57, H ’61 of Durham, on June 14, 2017.

Richard W. Moll ’56 of Portland, Maine, on May 24, 2017.

Barbara Nettles-Carlson ’56 of Chapel Hill, on June 5, 2017.

William N. Walter B.Div. ’56 of Auburn, N.Y., on May 21, 2017.

Susan Edgerton Boles ’57 of Murrells Inlet, S.C., on July 2, 2017.

David Aro Bruton Jr. ’57 of Crossville, Tenn., on June 30, 2017.

Jessie Propst Kiser B.S.N.Ed. ’57 of Spencer, N.C., on June 16, 2014.

James Edwin Saltz Jr. ’57, M.D. ’67 of St. Petersburg, Fla., on June 1, 2017.

Donald Charles Sedlack ’57 of Timonium, Md., on June 1, 2017.

Frank Deaver Thomas ’57 of Sarasota, Fla., on Feb. 8, 2017.

Charlotte Meadows Gandy ’58 of Hartsville, S.C., on May 17, 2017.

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DUKE MAGAZINE

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63

ForeverDuke Alan M. Henion ’58 of Jacksonville, Fla., on May 30, 2017.

Virginia Keister Hotelling ’58 of Durham, on April 27, 2017.

Charles Betts Huntley ’58 of Cary, N.C., on June 26, 2017.

Havner H. Parish Jr. H ’58 of Southern Oines, NC., on June 1, 2017.

William Joseph Spencer ’58 of Winston-Salem, N.C., on June 9, 2017.

Birk Smith Stathers Jr. ’58 of Exeter, N.H., on May 17, 2017.

Merrell L. Stout Jr. ’58 of Augusta, Ga., on July 4, 2017.

Donald Gray Wasson B.S.C.E. ’58 of Panama City, Fla., on April 13, 2017.

Kaye Kamrath Barnard N. ’59 of Greensboro, N.C., on May 29, 2017.

Anne Kennerly Berger ’59 of San Francisco, on May 18, 2017.

Elaine Mygrant Gleason M.S.N. ’59 of Lakeland, Fla., on May 3, 2017.

Walter Byron Starnes ’59 of High Point, N.C., on May 24, 2017.

1960s

Donald T. McRae ’60 of Covington, La., on July 14. 2017.

Jacob Crawford Caflisch III ’61 of Riverview, Fla., on June 25, 2017.

Ernest Boyd Goodwin Jr. M.D. ’61 of Canton, N.C., on June 30, 2017.

J. Peter Reitt ’61, M.D. ’65 of Northampton, Mass., on June 2, 2017.

Carl K. Staas LL.B. ’61 of Thousand Oaks, Calif., on Nov. 6, 2016.

Catherine T. Betz M.S.N. ’62 of El Paso, Texas, on May 11, 2017.

Peter Crosby Smith ’62 of Lynchburg, Va., on June 11, 2017.

William H. Faggart M.Div. ’63 of New London, N.C., on May 18, 2017.

Donald R. House ’63, LL.B. ’66 of Winston-Salem, N.C., on June 25, 2017.

Patricia Nasser Prinz ’63 of Seattle, on April 21, 2017.

Fred Lawrence Adair M.A.T. ’64 of Alexandria, Va., on May 18, 2017.

David B. Lewis M.Div. ’64 of Richmond, Va., on July 7, 2017.

Harold J. Lynch Jr. H ’64 of Savannah, Ga., on July 1, 2017.

Paul Clayton Summitt A.M. ’64, LL.B. ’64 of Paragould, Ark., on June 19, 2017.

Charles Hill Yarborough Jr. A.M. ’64 of Louisburg, N.C., on May 26, 2017.

Eugene A. Garand Jr. B.S.C.E. ’65 of Ormond Beach, Fla., on May 29, 2017.

James McAndrew Jones Jr. ’65, H ’73 of Portland, Ore., on May 17, 2017.

James J. McLeskey III Ph.D. ’65 of Silver Spring, Md., on July 22, 2017.

Jonathan L. Richardson Ph.D. ’65 of Morris, N.Y., on Oct. 2, 2016.

Charles F. Wells Ph.D. ’65 of Minneapolis, on June 17, 2017.

George J. Ellis III H ’66, H ’68 of Black Mountain, N.C., on June 18, 2017.

Paul T. Forth Jr. ’66, M.D. ’70 of Hendersonville, N.C., on May 25, 2017.

Edwin L. Jones III ’66, M.D. ’70 of Hollywood, S.C., on July 18, 2017.

James W. Kausch ’66 of Winston-Salem, N.C., on May 30, 2017.

Frank M. Mock ’66, J.D. ’69 of Orlando, Fla., on July 21, 2017.

John C. Zeren B.S.M.E. ’66 of Cambridge, Md., on June 6, 2017.

Roger P. Thomasch LL.B. ’67 of Denver, on July 14, 2017.

Stephen C. Woodard ’67 of Shrewsbury, N.J., on June 2, 2017.

Henry E. Seibert IV J.D. ’68 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on July 5, 2015.

Donald Frank Berns B.S.E. ’69 of Pasadena, Calif., on June 5, 2017.

Jeannette Opperman Mellinger A.M. ’69 of Durham, on May 11, 2017.

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64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

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The Medici’s Painter

CARLO

DOLCI and 17th-Century Florence

On view through January 14, 2018

Carlo Dolci, Angel of the Annunciation (detail), early 1650s. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. This project was supported by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.

This exhibition was made possible by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, with additional support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; the E.T. Jr. and Frances Rollins Family Foundation; Patricia Roderick Morton; Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation, in loving memory of Jenny Lillian Semans Koortbojian; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; Kelly Braddy Van Winkle and Lance Van Winkle; Caroline and Arthur Rogers; and Karen M. Rabenau and David H. Harpole, M.D.

ForeverDuke 1970s

Jean Paul Powell A.M. ’70 of Laurinburg, N.C., on May 16, 2017.

Thomas R. Scott Jr. Ph.D. ’70 of San Diego, Calif., on May 15, 2017.

John A. Fuller Ed.D. ’71 of Midland, Mich., on July 18, 2017.

James Hershel Wiygul M.Div. ’71 of Tupelo, Miss., on May 15, 2017.

Henri E. Isabella P.A. Cert. ’72 of Asheville, N.C., on July 21, 2016.

William D. Koons ’72 of Austin, Texas, on June 21, 2017.

Karla W. Simon J.D. ’72 of Cornwall Bridge, Conn., on July 8, 2017.

Deborah Groves Black ’74 of Greenwich, Conn., on June 12, 2017.

Barbara Ann Bunce ’74 of Aspen, Colo., on May 10, 2017.

Martha Jane Elson ’74 of Louisville, Ky., on July 6, 2017.

Karen Hilbert Pandolfi B.S.N. ’75 of Pensacola, Fla., on May 16, 2017.

Carl Huber Andrus A.M. ’76 of Rochester, N.Y., on July 11, 2017.

Timothy C. Edwards B.S.E. ’76 of Huntsville, Ala., on March 19, 2016.

Howard C. Lee Jr. B.H.S. ’78 of Cedar Grove, N.C., on Feb. 26, 2017.

Doreen Lynn Miller ’78 of Franklin, N.C., on June 20, 2017.

Douglas E. Nordlinger ’78 of New York, N.Y., on May 16, 2017.

Marcus Carroll Smith Ed.D. ’78 of Salisbury, N.C., on June 7, 2017.

Marcia Brown Tyree ’78 of Columbia, Md., on July 23, 2017.

Walter Samuel Pullar III ’79 of Virginia Beach, Va., on June 10, 2017.

1980s

Laurie Jeannine Giesen ’80 of Lake Forest, Ill., on June 15, 2017.

66 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Tommy Lewis Evans M.Div. ’85 of Mebane, N.C., on March 27, 2015.

Glenn Eldridge Mason M.Div. ’86 of Holly Springs, N.C., on June 1, 2017.

Mark Edward Pardo ’88 of Washington, on May 23, 2017.

Willis Goodrich Eshbaugh Jr. M.D. ’89 of Fort Myers, Fla., on May 16, 2017.

1990s

Frances W. Lineberger A.M. ’90 of Durham, on July 7, 2017.

Kevin Patrick Scollard M.B.A. ’90 of Atlanta, on July 2, 2017.

Paul McGroarty H ’92 of Lexington, Ky., on June 9, 2017.

Dana Yousif Al-Shirawi ’94 of Palo Alto, Calif., on March 6, 2017.

Leslie Lowry M.S. ’97 of Pembroke, N.C., on June 21, 2017.

Mary Harris Pappas ’97 of Houston, on July 12, 2017.

Sydney Kincer Byrum M.B.A. ’98 of Wytheville, Va., on May 12, 2017.

Frederick Carl Kaes M.B.A. ’98 of Irving, Texas, on May 10, 2017.

2000s

Saundra Alcantara Charles M.B.A. ’02 of Bloomfield, N.J., on March 2, 2016.

Sandra Louise Terry M.S.N. ’04 of Hope Mills, N.C., on Nov. 10, 2016.

Allison Marie Stankavage Morris ’08 of Orlando, Fla., on July 10, 2017.

2010s

Russell Ames M.Div. ’15 of Durham, on July 29, 2017.

Michael Joseph Doherty B.S.E. ’19 of Franklin, Mass., on May 20, 2017.

Travel with Duke

Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

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Romance of the Douro River (including Lisbon & Salamanca) October 11 - 22, 2018

Australia & New Zealand, Oct 3-24

Photos courtesy of iStock

Galรกpagos aboard NG Endeavour II, Aug 17-26

Adriatic Odyssey aboard Sea Cloud II, Oct 11-21

DEVILIST

DUKE MAGAZINE • SPECIAL ISSUE 2017

NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO

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And here are a few of our favorite submitted captions for the back-page image featured in our recent “Secrets” issue:

Les Todd

We asked; you answered.

Here are six signs that fall has arrived at Duke, including submissions from students and alumni.

“All-American Jack Dunlap says, ‘Ernest, at dinner we’ve got to tell Mom and Dad that this photo will be in Duke Magazine, but the guy putting it in doesn’t know much about football.’ ” — Art Hutzler B.S.E.E. ’64

“No, 10 to 2 means we are ahead by 8, not seven. Now pick straws to see who has to go tell all of these people.”

— Anthony Galanos ’75, H ’92, A.H.C. Cert. ’94

“Hey! What the Devil’s going on down there?”

— Steve Jayson ’75

Your biggest assignment is the building of the benches.

— Ashley Johnston ’02

••• Your e-mail exclusively consists of updates from Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta.

••• You’re trying to dodge the puddles in the slate walkways of the West Campus quads, which are filled with fallen leaves.

— Andrew Clayton M.Div. ’10

••• You take your first chemistry test, get a 79%, and think your life is over.

— Shiv Sudhakar ’01

••• You’re actually excited to talk to people on the C-1 bus.

••• You realize that the weather has bipolar issues.

— first-year student Ted Choi

68 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

FUQUABusiness Prepared exclusively for FUQUA

Alumni

FUQUAFOCUS: CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (CASE)

The business of bettering the world

For fifteen years, CASE has prepared business leaders who want to make a social impact.

FUQUAFOCUS: CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (CASE)

J

By Bridgette A. Lacy | Photography by Alex Boerner

onathan Woodward’s passion to change educational opportunities for minorities is taking shape at Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers, better known as TROSA, a comprehensive program in Durham that helps people recover from addiction.

Woodward is observing a lesson in how to turn former addicts into productive, recovering individuals. “Their system is interesting,” he says. “They bring folks who struggle with addiction and put

them to work so they can heal and create a new life for themselves…. Much of TROSA’s revenue comes from businesses they started. They have a thrift store and a moving company, where people can learn vocational skills and earn money.”

The trip to TROSA is part of Day in Durham, an annual pilgrimage for firstyear M.B.A. students like Woodward who come to the Fuqua School of Business. It’s when students begin to understand how their business skills can be used for social, environmental, and economic impact.

Woodward, a former English and histo-

A little help Lauren Gardner M.B.A. ’06

(see page 75) calls Fuqua’s loan assistance program an “impact multiplier.”

Now named the Rex and Ellen Adams Loan Assistance Program, after Fuqua’s former dean and his wife, the program provides financial assistance, in the form of loan forgiveness awards, to qualifying Duke M.B.A. “Thank you for investing in me so alumni who work in the that I can invest in this community.” nonprofit or public service sectors. It was originally launched with a gift from the Daytime M.B.A. Class of 2001; during the Duke Forward campaign, the F.M. Kirby Foundation made a $2.5 million gift to endow and re-name the program.

Alumni are eligible to receive assistance annually toward both federal and private loans.

With that kind of help, students pursuing careers in the social sector are more interested in attending Fuqua, and graduates can choose careers that align their skills with their passions. Gardner, a recipient, is grateful.

“Thank you for investing in me so that I can invest in this community. Thank you for making sure the Loan Assistance Program has been endowed so that someone right now who is in the Peace Corps, or working in an inner-city school, or working for a start-up social enterprise can be confident that Fuqua is not only feasible, but a place that will support them for the long run as they invest in their communities after graduation.”

For more information, http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/financial-aid/loan-assistance-program/.

70 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ry teacher from South Central Los Angeles, is one of several recipients of Fuqua’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) scholarship.

The scholarship is awarded to individuals with social-sector backgrounds who are looking to acquire business skills for use in their pursuit of social impact.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of CASE, an award-winning research and education center based at Fuqua. It was founded by the father of social entrepreneurship education, Greg Dees, and Beth Anderson, a former student of Dees and currently the executive director of the Hill Center, an educational nonprofit that serves students who struggle academically. “CASE has been one of the crown jewels in the business school,” says Fuqua dean Bill Boulding.

Boulding reflected that Greg Dees had a strong belief that businesses that were trying to create a positive social impact could also adhere to the same market standards of excellence. “You don’t need a totally different playbook for social impact. You need a commitment to making a difference in lives through your company,” Boulding says.

“At Fuqua, we strongly believe business can be a force for good and solve tough challenges in society in ways that government or other entities can’t,” says Boulding. “It’s possible to reasonably sustain a business by making it profitable while improving lives. Nonprofits and other social sector organizations can use business principles to achieve greater impact as well.”

D

ees, who died in December 2013, knew that people suffering from various ills and conditions in the world needed solutions right away.

And he believed that a center like CASE

“You don't need a totally different playbook for social impact.”

AROUND TOWN: Above, top row left then clockwise, first-year M.B.A. students saw ELF cars at Organic Transit, visited the Durham Hotel, and explored Fullsteam Brewery, owned by Sean Lilly Wilson M.B.A., M.P.P. ’00, during the Day in Durham foray.

had the power to accelerate the pace of change.

Erin Worsham, CASE’s executive director, says that CASE does just that. The center trains hundreds of students each year through classes and extracurricular activities. And CASE’s work doesn’t stop

in the halls of Fuqua. The goal is to make the entire social impact field better.

“We think of ourselves as a hub for research, teaching, and practitioner engagement in social impact,” Worsham says.

“Over the years we have educated thousands of students and have also worked

with thousands of nonprofits, for-profits, government agencies, funders, impact investors, and researchers to develop and share best practices and tools. We want to empower leaders and organizations to change the world and to do so faster, better, and at greater scale.”

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FUQUAFOCUS: CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (CASE)

Social entrepreneurs have noticed.

“I don’t think there’s been a more important academic institution for social entrepreneurship than CASE,” says Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, which invests in and connects social entrepreneurs and innovators to help them solve the world’s most pressing problems.

“It’s the one people turn to. It’s the one that was actually launched by Greg Dees.

And it’s no accident that it’s now coming up on fifteen years, that even when its founder is no longer, sadly, very sadly,

here to guide it, that the people he put in place, the people he inspired, the academics who have really flocked to CASE should be ensuring that it’s poised for its next fifteen years, too.

“So, in terms of research, in terms of contributing to this field, in terms of offering both practical and really smart counsel to students, CASE is really the institution that sets the agenda and sets the pace for us all.”

For Loree Lipstein M.B.A. ’15, CASE and Fuqua are interwoven. Lipstein is the founder and principal of Thread Strate-

Monty Montoya M.B.A. ’03 works to solve real problems. In 1997, Montoya joined an organization called SightLife, a nonprofit that recovers and processes corneas for transplant. “The impact of restoring people’s sight is literally lifesaving,” Montoya says. Giving people the gift of sight generally translates into making them self-sufficient—able to go to school, to read, and to work.

When Montoya first came to Fuqua he had ten years of technical experience but lacked the leadership, business, and marketing skills to scale his organization. He has worked closely with CASE, interacting with the team as a student and then later participating in CASE programs as an alumnus. “CASE has really set the standard nationwide and worldwide to help social ventures scale and have impact,” he says. “It’s allowed me the inspiration and knowledge to grow SightLife’s annual budget from $1 million to $45 million.”

Before connecting with CASE, SightLife provided about 700 people a year with corneal transplants.

This year, more than 30,000 people will receive new corneas.

But Montoya was not satisfied. With the skills and inspiration he gained at Fuqua, Montoya and his team developed a plan —as he says, borrowing a phrase from former Duke Rebecca Mill

72 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

gies, a fundraising consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., that helps nonprofits and social enterprises raise the funds needed to advance their missions. She assists them with their fundraising, their organizing, and ways to measure their impact to prove to funders their programs work. Their causes include supporting literacy, solving clean-water issues, assisting adults with disabilities, and mentoring children through college.

Lipstein says she was attracted to the general business foundation Fuqua provided, coupled with CASE’s attention to

President Terry Sanford, an “outrageous ambition”—to eliminate corneal blindness worldwide by 2040.

But as Montoya and his team work tirelessly to eliminate corneal blindness, they knew they needed to do more. One of the challenges of transplants is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are only 150,000 corneas available annually from organ donors, but more than 10 million people need the sight-restoring surgery.

To accelerate and scale their work, Montoya led his team at SightLife in launching a new for-profit subsidiary, SightLife Surgical, which is focused on raising capital and driving innovations in research, products, prevention, and policy.

“How do we get patients treatment better and faster? How do we make an impact so they don’t need transplants?” he asks.

CASE executive director Erin Worsham called Montoya a great example of how the CASE team is preparing leaders and organizations to change the world.

“He has an insatiable drive and passion, truly understands the complexity of the problem he seeks to solve, and is using his business skills—regardless of whether we are talking about a nonprofit or a for-profit structure—to drive to scale,” she said.

In business, to scale typically means to grow, adding more locations, or hiring more people. But at CASE, scale does not necessarily mean building a bigger organization.

“Achieving scale is not about budget size or number of locations,” Worsham said. “When we are talking about social problems, scale is about the amount of social change we can achieve. Monty is not satisfied with tens of thousands of corneas transplanted each year, or even millions.

He wants to transform the entire system and eliminate the problem. Scaling social impact is not an academic exercise; it’s real people with real problems. And we are thrilled that we have been a part of Monty’s journey to achieving impact at scale.” n

the social sector. CASE’s programs made her keenly aware of the nuances of the social sector. The hands-on learning and start-up support offered through CASE gave her the opportunity to refine and implement her business venture.

“I came from a purely nonprofit background,” Lipstein says. “And I started a for-fee business that works with nonprofits. I am now able to come at it using a business lens. I’m able to use business constructs and strategies to help my clients.”

O

ver the years, CASE has continued to innovate and expand its work to stay at the cutting edge of social impact. One way CASE has changed is the addition of impact investment—the practice of investing for social and environmental impact as well as financial return—as one of the center’s focus areas. Established in 2011, CASE founded the globally recognized Initiative on Impact Investing (CASE i3), which includes a two-year student fellowship program, research partnerships, and innovative tools such as CASE Smart Impact SMART Capital, an online START: M.B.A. toolkit for entrepre- student chats neurs seeking impact with former Durham mayoral investment.

CASE has also led candidate and efforts such as the Blackspace Social Entrepreneur- founder Pierce ship Accelerator at Freelon.

“I don’t think there’s been a more important academic institution for social entrepreneurship than CASE.” Duke (SEAD), a global-health scaling accelerator, funded by USAID. The ventures raised more than $56 million and improved health outcomes for more than 30 million beneficiaries during their time in the SEAD program.

After his Day in Durham visit, M.B.A. student Woodward wonders out loud about running a high-quality teacher-placement service that would match school districts with the right teacher for their environment. Or maybe bring in

master teachers to train new hires.

Before enrolling at Fuqua, he worked in various positions in education from program management for a national teacher policy-advocacy group (Teach Plus) to talent acquisition at the largest charter-school network in Los Angeles (Alliance College-Ready Public Schools).

He wants to help organizations in the urban-education sector create more sustainable business models and talent-management practices.

“I want to make changes so that students have access to high-quality education,” he says. Woodward says that education nonprofits depend heavily on state grants and wealthy contributors. “I like the idea of creating an organization that can sustain itself, like TROSA.” He’s just at the start of his CASE journey, but he’s sure his coursework and experiential-learning opportunities with CASE will guide him in implementing best practices.

“The thing I know above anything else is I want to make a social impact,” says Woodward. n DUKE MAGAZINE

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FUQUAFOCUS: CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP (CASE)

FAC U LT Y

PR OFILE

Helping to spread a good idea

CASE’s faculty director Cathy Clark is a leader in social entrepreneurship.

C

athy Clark’s aha moment came more than twenty years “CASE is about the discipline of what business principles can ago, when she had lunch with Lloyd N. Morrisett, add to the pursuit of social impact,” Clark says. “What can you one of the creators of the groundbreaking children’s learn about marketing? How can finance propel a good idea fortelevision show Sesame Street. Clark was working in ward faster? How do you take good ideas and grow them? How communications technology at the Aspen Institute in Washing- do you grow innovation? How do you figure out if it’s working? ton when Morrisett, the president of the Markle Foundation, How do you attract people to help you?” explained he was a venture capitalist.

Recently, Clark served as the lead author of CASE’s online Clark, now CASE’s faculty director, didn’t know what he was learning series, CASE Smart Impact Capital. She also coauthored, talking about. along with CASE Executive Director Erin Worsham and DirecMorrisett explained that there were financial institutions that tor of Programs Robyn Fehrman, the Scaling Pathways series, a partnership among CASE, the Skoll Founinvested in growing companies that want dation, USAID’s Global Development Lab, to make a social impact. “I thought this and Mercy Corps that explores strategies to was amazing—how you can use money to solve widespread, seemingly intractable sobuild enterprises,” says Clark, who, at that cial problems. point, had only a bachelor’s degree with a She was named, in 2014, one of the major in French literature. top-twenty women in the U.S. working in Clark quit her job and moved to New philanthropy, social innovation, and civic York to find out how Morrisett was able to engagement. Clark has been an active piuse new technology to solve educational issues. She wanted to see how he was able to oneer, researcher, educator, and consultant prepare children for kindergarten by using for over twenty-five years in the fields of commercial television production elements impact investing and social entrepreneurship. She also founded and directs CASE and techniques to teach children their A-Bi3, the Initiative on Impact Investing, and C’s. co-leads the Social Entrepreneurship AcShe was a part of the generation that, with celerator at Duke (SEAD), an accelerator many of her classmates in inner-city Philadelphia and the rest of the country, mastered working to scale impact of global health reading and arithmetic by watching Big Bird ventures in India and East Africa. and Elmo. “As a teenager, I “When Dees started recall being a counselor at CASE, social entrepre“CASE is about the discipline of what business neurship was not well summer camp putting kids principles can add to the pursuit of social impact.” understood," Clark says. in front of Sesame Street on “He explained what it TV, to complement the was. He basically said this is not a hobby, this is a discipline. We books we were reading to them.

“I was in awe,” she says. “How do I learn to do that?” She can see patterns. These problems are urgent for the people who wanted to master the knowledge of taking a good idea, testing it are suffering. We need to do everything we can to help the perin a small enterprise, and then sharing it to address the needs of son trying to read or to provide food for people in a food desert. the masses. This became her first lesson in how to scale a project. Our team lived and breathed that sense.”

“What’s happened in the past fifteen years?” Clark asks, rhetorMost ideas stay really small, but Clark says she wanted to examine how to reach more people with a good idea. Encouraged ically. “There are CASE networks now around the world. There

by Morrisett, Clark eventually earned an M.B.A. at Columbia are university programs helping them grow. At CASE, we are University. Then she returned to Columbia to teach for nine focused at the graduate level on really going in-depth in the discipline of businesses scaling up a good idea. When we talk about years before coming to Duke.

Clark was recruited by Greg Dees, the founder of CASE, in scale, we are not talking about ideation but more about when 2007. She started as an adjunct professor teaching social entre- people hit a wall. When your enterprise is not the shiny new preneurship. Dees and Clark had compatible views of the field, thing, and you hit a roadblock. When you need to hire a mandespite coming from different backgrounds. She came with a ager or the environment has changed.

“That’s where the business skills are needed. How do social enNew York network of for-profit enterprises interested in making a social impact. Meanwhile, Dees had worked in rural Kentucky terprises pivot smartly? They have to pivot toward impact. And that takes a different level of skills.” n with nonprofits wanting to do the same.

74 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ALUM N I

P ROFILE

A striver now helping strivers

Discovering CASE helped Lauren Gardner put her non-traditional business background to good use.

W

hen Lauren Gardner M.B.A. ’06 was living in a fishing village in St. Lucia, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer for small-business development, she realized she lacked some of the concrete skills needed to make a big social impact.

Gardner began researching M.B.A. programs to gain those skills. “The more I read about Fuqua’s reputation as a challenging, team-oriented program with a cutting-edge commitment to social entrepreneurship, I knew that I wanted to apply,” she says.

Gardner is now the chief operating officer at the Emily Krzyzewski Center, a nonprofit organization that serves as a hub to help propel academically focused, low-income K-12 students toward success in college.

But she credits CASE with providing her that opportunity.

“I’m not sure I would have been accepted at Fuqua with“We went from an out CASE,” Gardner says, exempty building to plaining that she was a non-traan organization that ditional M.B.A. candidate. Her is changing the face work experience was not fiof college access in nance, marketing, engineering, or business.

Durham—opening But after reading about Greg our doors to any Dees, the founder of CASE, she high-school student knew Fuqua had the best prowho wants to go to fessor in the country for teachcollege and working ing social entrepreneurship.

Gardner had a bachelor’s with more than 700 of science in foreign service elementary, middle, with a focus on international high-school, and economics from Georgetown college students University. While she benefited from scholarship and family this year alone.” support for her undergraduate degree, for her graduate studies she only had a readjustment allowance from the Peace Corps to start her life in Durham.

Fuqua’s Loan Assistance Program, which provides financial support to graduates who take jobs in the social sector, offered a path.

“I had this safety net on the other end that meant I didn’t need a

big corporate job in order to pay off these loans. I wanted to take a job that matched my passion and to use my skills for a nonprofit.”

During her first summer at Fuqua, Gardner found that opportunity at the Emily K Center. It was 2005, and the center was operating out of a trailer behind the construction site for its new building. Outfitted in a hard hat, Gardner assisted in needs assessments, developed marketing materials, and helped create programs.

By Gardner’s second year at Fuqua, the bricks had been laid. Construction on the Emily K Center was completed in February 2006, and by the end of that spring semester, the center had found money to pay for an operational staffer. Gardner started working full time that summer.

Back then, there was one program and thirty-eight kids. The program, Pioneer Scholars, was designed to help elementary and middle-school students prepare for high school and college.

Now, the center offers four programs, including Scholars to College and Scholars on Campus, and works with students from first grade through college. And last year when some seniors in the Scholars to College program realized their classmates also needed support to get to college, the center started the Game Plan: College program to help even more high-school students.

“We went from an empty building to an organization that is changing the face of college access in Durham—opening our doors to any high-school student who wants to go to college and working with more than 700 elementary, middle, high-school, and college students this year alone,” says Gardner.

Last May, thirty seniors in the center’s intensive Scholars to College program walked across the stage in their caps and gowns and announced where they would be attending college. “Most of these students will attend college on a full scholarship and graduate with little or no debt,” she says. Two students from the Scholars to College program are attending Duke this fall. They’re both the first in their families to go to college.

As she continues her work, Gardner keeps showing how her education has made her a premier teammate. Just ask the coach.

“We have personally benefited at the Emily K Center from the top-notch business education Lauren received at Fuqua,” says Mike Krzyzewski, chair and founder of the center. “We are so grateful she had the opportunity to join our team.” n DUKE MAGAZINE

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CASE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Preparing leaders & organizations to change the world through: Education, Thought Leadership, Practitioner Engagement

I N S P I R I N G

+

A C T I O N

T O U C H I N G

T H E

W O R L D

2174 643 193 $56M+ 1.8M 1945 1st year MBAs participating in Day in Durham

in loan assistance funding provided to alumni working for nonprofits and government agencies

500+ Attendees at the 2017 Sustainable Business & Social Impact (SBSI) conference

Students in Fuqua on Board assisting area nonprofits

Students receiving summer internship funding

Amount of capital raised by global health social ventures in our Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) program since entering

Duke students in CASE courses

29,910 miles traveled studying social enterprises for the Scaling Pathways series

S O M E

Top 5 social impact center

O F

O U R

75 Net Promoter Score for our Smart Impact Capital online learning platform

A C O L A D E S

2

Ashoka Innovation Awards

2016

Outstanding Specialty Center winner Learn more at www.CASEatDuke.org

76 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

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FALL 2017 SALUTE: At the end of a memorial service, a medical flight-team helicopter flies above the chapel in honor of three Duke Life Flight members and their patient, who were killed on September 8 when their helicopter crashed.

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