Winter 2017

MAGAZINE

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

DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2017

DUKE

NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO

WINTER 2017

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

Made possible by you.

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

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 Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

Go out there and learn 10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

M AG A Z I N E

Knowledge in service to society

Rare manuscripts. Original collections. Unprecedented access.

Thanks to a planned gift supporting the acquisition of historic materials by Duke Libraries, students can use the ever-expanding collection of historical resources to elevate hands-on learning experiences.

Made possible by you.

Andy Tan-Delli Cicchi ’17 sorted through historic maps and planning documents in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of the Duke History Revisited program. His project maps Duke’s relationship to affordable housing in Durham.

Read about alumnus Ronald Marcello’s planned gifts to benefit the libraries on page 78.

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,

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. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

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

INSIDE Winter 2017 | Vol. 103 | No. 5

FEATURES:

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4

Learning by doing

FORUM

7

By Scott Huler

THE QUAD

For the last decade, DukeEngage has sent students around the globe to further the university’s bedrock mission of civic engagement.

Art for medical students, a faculty member comes home, reading recommendations from Chris Myers Asch ’94 Sally Vitsky

Chris Hildreth

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Inside out

24

By Barry Yeoman

SPORTS

A Duke clinic offers information mixed with humanity for youth grappling with gender dysphoria.

On and off the wrestling mat, the Finesilvers—two sets of fraternal twins—keep things competitive.

52 FOREVER DUKE

Alex Boerner

Building on their lifelong community involvement, Steve Schewel ’73, Ph.D. ’82 and Charles Francis J.D. ’88 aimed to lead Triangle cities.

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Music on his mind

80 DEVILIST

By Lucas Hubbard

Alumni with winter Olympian skills.

Signing with Small Town Records forces a student to begin reconciling his artistic ambition and his professional goals.

COVER: Illustration by Sally Vitsky Chris Hildreth

FULLFRAME CRANES UP: Construction has started on “The Hollows,” a new set of dorms planned to house 550 students on West Campus off Towerview near Keohane Quad. Photo by Chris Hildreth

Forum

UNDERTHEGARGOYLES

I

t’s hardly surprising that a place like Duke, as a research university, engages with what’s conventionally called, in these parts, the “real world’—as if there’s something surreal or unreal about the campus world. But it’s worth noting that scholars at the Fuqua School have a record of studying the workings of the real world’s most valuable company. That, of course, is Apple. And its CEO, Tim Cook, happens to be a 1988 Fuqua graduate, an occasional speaker at the school, a current Duke trustee, and, as announced in January, Duke’s graduation speaker.

Writing recently for Forbes, Fuqua professor Christine Moorman explores what makes Apple “one of the greatest marketers of all time.” Apple, she observes, can make the occasional stumble. Consider the admission that it slows older phones; critics complained, even as the company said the idea is to prevent shutdowns and crashes. Still its successes provide a template ready-made for the business-school classroom.

For example, create an “experience ecosystem.” Apple ensures that the universe of Apple-mediatOpinions are pretty ed behaviors continually expands.

That happens, in part, by fostering entrenched, but a community of evangelists. Apple when a CEO like has been turning its retail locations into lively “town squares,” and Cook speaks out, nurturing future users through free there’s at least coding classes for kids. As for the “some power” to products, simplicity is central. In the Apple ecosystem, design is all the message. about making products—showing off as they do a minimalist aesthetic—intuitive, meaning that, as Moorman says, “there is tremendous attention to every last detail,” even the experience of unpacking your purchase.

“Experience” comes up a lot in Moorman’s analysis. Apple markets itself not as a technology company, but rather as a company that awards you benefits and responds to your aspirations. So if you’re keen to pump up your phone with more memory, Apple will emphasize that it’s not the gigs that count; it’s all of those additional photos,

4 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

texts, and videos you can experience.

Part of the Apple advantage, in Moorman’s view, is doing what’s right as a company. Just before the launch of Apple Music, Taylor Swift publicly lamented that artists—particularly starting artists not yet on the touring circuit—would be hurt by the payment plan. Apple changed course. Similarly, the company has resisted law-enforcement efforts to have it unlock the phones of, say, the suspect in the San Bernardino massacre. Such a stance responds to the concerns of its consumers around data privacy.

That notion of Apple as a good citizen comes up in the work of another Fuqua professor, Aaron Chatterji, who has been teaching a class about activism among chief executives. With the perceived fraying of traditional checks and balances, he says, a lot of business leaders are feeling an obligation to speak out—which can be fraught as well as appealing.

In one research project, Chatterji asked those in a survey group whether they supported Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He wondered: If you share concerns that the law might allow discrimination, would it matter whether those concerns are pegged to a local politician, the CEO of a local company, or Cook as Apple’s CEO? Support for the law declined steeply and roughly the same when it came from any of those three leaders. Opinions are pretty entrenched, but when a CEO like Cook speaks out, there’s at least “some power” to the message.

Digging a bit more deeply, Chatterji assembled another group of respondents to figure out how likely they were to buy Apple products. Some were told beforehand about Cook’s strong views against discrimination; some were told about his business philosophy; some weren’t given any additional information. It turned out that when Cook was contextualized as a leader standing against discrimination, people were more likely to buy Apple products—a response mostly driven by those who already agreed with his views.

When Cook speaks to the newest graduates this spring, his message may reflect these insights from Fuqua: It’s one thing to build a product. It’s another, more powerful thing to build a community of stakeholders.

—Robert J. Bliwise, editor

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LETTERS & COMMENTS Epworth as antidote

I lived in Epworth my last two years at Duke [“There’s no place like Epworth”], which were, I suppose, the heyday of the SHARE years. I wasn’t (to my knowledge) a part of SHARE, but I was a part of Epworth.

What I remember is a large family of engineers, actors, designers, dancers, computer programmers, and more than a few A.B. Duke Scholars and artists. My Kappa sisters were secretly (or not so secretly) horrified that I lived there, but it was the only place on the Duke campus (other than the theaters) that felt welcoming or sane. I found it to be an antidote to the relentlessly selfish, money-oriented, succeed-or-die frat culture that seemed to dominate Duke in the 1980s. (Not that all, or even most of the school was like that, but it was the loudest trope.)

Also, where else could I have a 200-square-foot single with twelve-foot ceilings? Or a 400-square-foot double with private bathroom? The view out my window was of huge trees and lawns, no buildings, and no cars. Just a gazebo in the distance.

Emilie Talbot Brooks ’86 Burlingame, California And a great view, too I loved Epworth in the mid-’70s; I had a big corner room that looked out on graceful trees, with gorgeous light that streamed through the windows. Even though we were on the second floor, it was easy to take our dorm dog, Pooch, down the back stairs and in and out the door. So many colorful characters in Epworth, a celebration of creativity and individuality.

Lisa Krieger ’77 Palo Alto, California

DUKE MAGAZINE • FALL 2017

DUKE

Lint was a choice Thanks so much for this vivid story of a place I love so dearly. One minor correction: I may have misspoken in our interview, but I don’t believe the administration ever put pressure on us to adopt a theme. Lint was just our way of making fun of what we found an artificial practice of theme dorms that seemed to be coming from the top down.

The sort of thing that Epworthians never liked and tended to mock.

now lasted more than thirty years and many states of residency. It was worth the challenge of having a corner room with a drain pipe that was a “hole” to the Frisbee golf course. Nothing like the thud of the Frisbee to rouse from an afternoon nap. Who’d believe I’d still be most thankful for the college education due to the friends I made?

Steve Newman ’92 Philadelphia Not a generic place As a J-frosh in Epworth in January 1981, my preppie roommate from Maryland barely tolerated the colorful, Ocean Pacific, Hawaiian-flowered Floridian (me) who was forced upon her as her roommate. Rather than let me hang with her friends, I had to make new ones and ended up meeting my roommate for the next two years. The rambling old structure made my parents think, as they dropped me off with a bag of mini-Snickers bars to stave off my homesickness, “So, THIS is Duke? This is what we’re paying umpteen dollars for?!”

Where we all got along I moved to Epworth the second half of freshman year, 1984-85, and I think I had to agree to subscribe to the SHARE philosophy (whatever that was), but honestly, it was as diverse as Duke itself, with art and business majors, Republicans and Democrats and socialists, Christians and Jews, sorority sisters and noncomformists, etc. But there was something about that old building that made us a family. And not a dysfunctional family. One other memory I have is the crowd that watched General Hospital in the Purple Parlor every afternoon.

I know everyone else on campus thought Epworthians were weird, but, honestly, I think we were the most normal dorm.

Jill Zima Borski ’84 Tavernier, Florida

Eleanor Ivey Campbell ’88 Asheville, North Carolina

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

p.24

Jared Lazarus

Forever friends I have to say that I think Epworth saved us all. It was a home to come back to and nourished friendships that have

M AG A Z I N E

Suzanne Johnson ’84 Brunswick, Maine

Free to be, you and me Epworth/SHARE (fall 1989-spring ’91, and then unofficially and somewhat regularly as a fixture on the Crossroads

CORRECTION: In

the Fall 2017 issue, the Sports story “Transfers of Power,” incorrectly identified three graduates as having M.B.A. degrees. As graduates of Fuqua’s Master of Management Studies program, they should have been listed as Ben Hummel M.M.S. ’17, Robert Moewes M.M.S. ’17, and Mitch Kupstas M.M.S. ’17.

DUKE MAGAZINE Winter 2017 | Vol. 103 | No. 5 | 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 EDITOR: 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.

DUKE MAGAZINE

WINTER 2017

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sofa for another year) was the first and only place at Duke where I felt I could breathe and feel accepted and could live the true college experience of all-night conversations, absurdly creative parties, spontaneous performances, and experimentation. It was, I believe, the only on-campus residence at the time where we all knew one another and could leave our doors unlocked without apprehension. We often debated what SHARE really stood for. The best answer I heard, from Rob Clough ’98, was that if you want to be here, then we want to have you. Acceptance. We may have practiced it imperfectly, but we saved one another and freed ourselves to be ourselves. And I believe that so many of us who lived there continue to practice radical acceptance in our own ways and share.

Christopher Pelham ’91 New York Always home Thanks for the history. I lived in Epworth as a freshman, 2003-04—this was when Epworth was just another freshman dorm, not a shared interest group.

However, as anybody who has lived in Epworth knows, it’s never been “just another dorm.” While we may have been randomly assigned, we’re nothing less than family now—some more literally than others: We’ve had two marriages of Epworth couples. It will always be our home—we even returned to have wine and cheese on the bench at our tenth reunion last spring.

Brittany Greenfield ’07 Boston Anybody have that cookbook?

I lived in Epworth during the arts-dorm days (1972-75) and reveled in the diversity among us. I don’t think I would have survived Duke at any other dorm.

I was the very lucky resident (lottery) of the big room with the bay window my senior year, which I shared with my roommate Elaine and my illegal kitty cat, Cordelia. Epworthians felt we were labelled by others as odd misfits and lesbians, both of which described some of us more than others.

In 1973, we put together a cookbook (Epworth on the cover). Many of us had 6 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

a limited meal plan, so we could cook for ourselves on the weekends. I still have my Japanese bowl that I used for my lentils and rice every Sunday night.

I’d love a copy of that book for Kitty Ward’s Indian curry recipe and Debbie Smith’s caramel recipe. The dining hall even used our recipes a time or two.

Alas, my copy disappeared.

Sara Power ’75 Philomath, Oregon Making a difference Dr. Bedlack [“Dr. Feelgood”] is a transformative, compassionate physician-leader who is clearly making a difference for his patients. I also imagine he is an inspiration to the medical students and residents at Duke. Measuring a physician’s value must move beyond simple RVU’s, but I have a feeling Duke knows that already.

Dr. Bedlack has thrived in his career in this world-class hospital, and I hope he keeps going strong for many years to come.

Scott Rodgers ’88 Jackson, Mississippi Kudos Post-academic precarity [“To the tenure track…and beyond”]. A great piece!

Anne Allison Professor of cultural anthropology An approach with benefits I read with interest Lucas Hubbard’s article and have noted similarities with advanced training in other areas. Many piano majors dream of a career as a concert pianist. After twenty or more years of practicing and competing, few have their dream become a reality.

During years of attending a yearly neuroscience conference, I have observed the hallway conversations change from excitement about starting “my own lab” to complaints about being in a second or third postdoc program without a prospect of an academic position. Even some tenured faculty members express concerns about the ability of bright young researchers to find faculty positions.

From the article, I assume Hubbard does not favor a solution reminiscent of the pyramidal system of training once

used to train surgeons. Initially, my reaction to the Versatile Humanists’ approach was negative, because I disagreed that society, in general, needs citizens with Ph.D. skills; a good high-school education equips us to be good citizens.

After thinking about the issue, I changed my opinion of the “versatile” approach.

De-emphasizing the goal, in all graduate studies, of a tenure-track academic position can make graduate school more enjoyable and, eventually, be more beneficial to society.

James S. Dorsey ’70, M.D. ’74 Berwyn Heights, Maryland

Government work

I read with interest your article regarding employment challenges faced by Ph.D. graduates in the humanities and social sciences. I experienced similar challenges after completing my doctorate in political science in 1980. Over time, however, it became clear to me that federal government agencies valued the leadership, communication, analytical, and foreign language competencies that Ph.D.s typically possess. This understanding led to a fulfilling, thirty-twoyear career at the Library of Congress, the last ten years of which were as the Library’s director for human resources before retiring in July 2015. Although budgetary pressures have reduced federal employment, opportunities still remain.

I encourage Ph.D.s to pursue federal internships wherever possible, thereby establishing connections with potential hiring officials. I congratulate Duke for its Versatile Humanists program and wish it much success.

Dennis Hanratty Ph.D. ’80 Ellicott City, Maryland

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.

MATH GLOW Dye represents fluid movement.

Quad

THE

LIFE ON CAMPUS FROM EAST TO WEST

Megan Mendenhall

SKY SHOW Clouds caress the chapel.

Megan Mendenhall

DEM BONES The underpass along Campus Drive

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Chris Hildreth

Jared Lazarus

PET THERAPY Cancer Patient Support Program XXX

THEQuad

DR/TL*

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

ANIMALS The DUKE LEMUR CENTER greeted a new baby aye-aye named Agatha, after mystery author Agatha Christie. One of only twenty-four aye-ayes in the United States, Agatha weighed seventy-four grams at birth, or almost exactly one-sixth of a pound. Pick up your lunchbox bag of chips; that’s the weight of your baby aye-aye. • CORALS, like other marine animals, mistakenly eat bits of plastic; it turns out they may do so because it tastes good. • The world for sea creatures is about sixteen times louder with people around than without them; scientists discovered this when the March 2011 tsunami silenced activity near a science center in Hawaii and they could benchmark current NATURAL SOUND LEVELS. • Bonobos are nice to other bonobos without any expectation of QUID PRO QUO; they just do nice things for one another.

RESEARCH BRAND COMPATIBILITY—whether you like the same brands of food and drink as your partner—correlates highly with life satisfaction. • Diseases during pregnancy that produce symptoms including HIGH FEVERS have long caused fear of birth defects. It now appears that the fevers themselves, not the underlying diseases, may cause the defects. • Three million Americans regularly walk around carrying a HANDGUN. If you live in a state that makes it harder for police to exercise discretion over who gets to carry a concealed gun, you are more likely to be killed, to be killed by a gun, and to be killed by a handgun. • BABIES as young as six months old can recognize relationships between objects, and they learn more quickly when talked to about present objects. • It seems one rare type of neuron in your brain functions as the “master controller” of habitual behavior. It may be possible to control that neuron with drugs and thus change HABITS.

MISCELLANY Using quantum ENCRYPTION techniques—like those used for quantum computing—scientists have developed a system that can create and distribute encryption codes at megabit-per-second rates, making them theoretically hackproof. • INEXPENSIVE SENSORS placed directly on tires can for the first time monitor tire wear in real time.

Printed, flexible electrodes made of carbon nanotubes set up an electrical field that can tell the thickness of surrounding material—like tire tread. • INVASIVE CELLS evidently force their way into places where they’re unwanted.

Like pushy salespeople, they put a sort of foot in the door and then squeeze in.

HONORS A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Benjamin Duke Scholar, senior classical languages major Gabrielle Stewart had pretty much tapped out the awards she could win in these parts, so she turned to Oxford, England: She has won a RHODES SCHOLARSHIP, the forty-sixth in Duke history. • Seniors Meghana Vagwala and John Lu and 2016 Duke graduate Antonio Lopez won MARSHALL SCHOLARSHIPS, the 25th, 26th, and 27th in Duke history. • Jackson Skeen, a senior English major and Robertson Scholar, has been named a GEORGE MITCHELL SCHOLAR, giving him four years to study in Ireland. • Seniors Riyanka Ganguly, Amy Kramer, and Aron Rimanyi were named to the third class of SCHWARZMAN SCHOLARS, giving them a year to study in Beijing. • Judith Kelley, an expert on human rights, democracy, and elections, has been named dean of the SANFORD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY. • Neurosurgeon John H. Sampson has been named to the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE. Sampson is the Robert H. and Gloria Wilkins Distinguished Professor of neurosurgery and researches the use of the poliovirus to help the immune system attack brain tumors.

• Three faculty have been elected fellows of the AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE: David Kirsch ’93, Barbara Levine University Professor of radiation oncology and vice chair for basic and translational research; Thomas Mitchell-Olds, Newman Ivey White Professor of biology; and Ana Barros, James L. Meriam Professor of civil and environmental engineering. • Duke Athletics director and vice president Kevin White is the chair of the new USOC Collegiate Advisory Council, which will work to increase collaboration with NCAA member institutions and promote OLYMPIC SPORTS. • The DUKE HUMAN VACCINE INSTITUTE has received a $12.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a system that will be capable of halting viral pandemics within sixty days. • The Duke Carbon Offsets Initiative (DCOI), created in 2009 to steer Duke toward carbon neutrality, provided $40,000 of matching funds to Durham nonprofits for TREE PLANTINGS this fall. • A U.S. Senate resolution honoring SAMUEL DUBOIS COOK, who died earlier this year, was introduced by a bipartisan group of senators to salute Cook’s six decades in higher education. Duke’s first African-American faculty member and the first African American to hold a regular tenured faculty appointment at a predominantly white Southern college or university, Cook taught at Duke from 1966 to 1974 and later served as a trustee. • The Association for Computing Machinery recognized Hai “Helen” Li as a Distinguished Member for contributions to her field, developing next-generation COMPUTER HARDWARE BASED ON THE HUMAN BRAIN. • The State Board of Transportation has named a section of I-85 running through Durham as the JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN HIGHWAY for the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree and James B. Duke Professor of history, who died in 2009.

$12.8M

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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ROOMMATES THEQuad

WHAT’S SO SMART ABOUT IT: Solar panels, rainwater collection tanks, vegetated roofing, hardware, and software labs. Operated by the Pratt School of Engineering, this “living laboratory” encourages students to pursue a more energy-efficient, sustainable, and technological-integrated residential experience.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE: The pair initially met as members of the Project WILD pre-orientation program, but didn’t truly bond until they took Wilderness First Responder training together during their second semester. They also share a mutual love of climbing and frequent the rock wall in Wilson Gym.

PACKAGE DEAL: Both roomies did their research before becoming Blue Devils and nearly applied to the Smart Home last spring. They dropped out at the last minute after deciding they would prefer living on West Campus. Fate, however, had other plans.

The Smart Home members “knew us from rush, so they contacted us.

We both said that we would join the Smart Home on the condition that we roomed together,” Andie comments.

“Now I think that I would get sick of living, breathing, studying on West.”

SHARK WEEK: One quick glance around the room’s décor quickly reveals truths about each roommate’s quirky interests. For Candice, it’s sharks: shark rug, shark bedding, shark makeup bag, shark wall prints. “I honestly don’t know how many shark things I have,” she says. Andie likewise displays love for her favorite animal— goats—through her own items, “but it’s much harder to find goat decorations than sharks,” she says.

– Erin Brown, Photo by Chris Hildreth

DORM SMART HOME

F

or sophomores Andie Kolarova and Candice Sheehan, two members of the ten-person Smart Home dorm, the best part isn’t the futuristic appliances (although turning off their room lights via a phone app is a nice perk). Rather, it’s the community. “It’s nice coming home to a real home at the end of the day and leaving school at school,” Candice says.

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Candice HOMETOWN: Cincinnati, Ohio MAJOR: mechanical engineering, marine science and conservation leadership certificate

Andie HOMETOWN: Asheville, North Carolina MAJOR: environmental science and biology, sustainability engagement certificate

THEQuad

Grease pencils and stethoscopes

T

A drawing class helps medical students see patients as more than mere bodies. he fifteen or so first-year medical ry.” Liu and fellow third-year Emma Fixsen started this students, most in blue scrubs, sit around program during the 2016-17 academic year to encourage a conference room table in the Trent the wide-open, “wiggly, in-motion” way of perception Semans Center. They are looking at their Skurnick describes: to see people, not symptoms. hands through little horizontal frames, Fixsen studied art as an undergraduate and brought little more than pieces of clear plastic. that perspective with her to medical school. As a prospective student, she encountered at NYU an anatomy “These are called picture planes,” says artist Emma Skurnick, who passed them out along with grease pencils; curriculum that included drawing, and when she came to Duke, she brought the idea with her. She knew Liu from the students have charcoal and erasers and other drawing the Music & Memory program, which engages patients supplies in little plastic bags. “This exercise compares the suffering from Alzheimer’s disease through music, and open-ended view of the world with the crystallized view.” with support from the The crystallized view Trent Semans Center puts things in boxes—a the two created “Art and nose looks like a nose Anatomy,” which adds because we know what a five drawing classes to the nose looks like. For the students’ three-month open-ended view, she says, anatomy course. Currentthink of, say, Picasso: a ly, she is doing research in glimpse of nostril here, a Lima, Peru, but she deflash of bridge there. “A scribed the program she much more natural and and Liu created before comfortable way of looking at people as they move she left. through time and space.”

“Drawing forces you She has the students gaze to take something that’s through that frame at their three-dimensional and hand, using the grease mentally configure it pencil to not draw but into a two-dimensional trace it, turning it from a plane,” she says, “and on HEAD START: First-year medical student Faye Oakes’ concept they know to a a subconscious level that skull rendering series of landmarks they allows you to engage with perceive: knuckles, lines, your subject in a very pads. “The world,” she says, “is this amorphous, wiggly, intimate way.” Making choices about what to represent sharpens your awareness of what you see. Drawing in-motion place,” yet artists—like physicians looking at brings in other aspects of the physician/artist’s character. patients—need to accurately perceive, document, understand it, not as they unconsciously categorize the world Fixsen describes drawing a diseased kidney during a time but as the world actually is. “Distancing yourself,” she when she was working with kidney-transplant patients. goes on, “from what your brain thinks it knows.”

The kidney was interesting anatomically, but transplant She is teaching them another way to see. surgery is both amazing and often sad. The drawing itself, Third-year student Winston Liu gently helps guide the she says, “helped me emotionally process what I was class. “You guys have this running checklist of things you doing.” have to cover,” he says of the way new doctors are taught Emotion is very much present after the students working with Skurnick troop to the anatomy lab. In a long, to extract information from patients. This program is silent room with two halls, each lined with cadavers on designed to counter that check-box method of seeing. which the students work, first-year student Elena Drews “There was a point this year,” he tells the students, “when addresses the heart of the person she has been dissecting I actually learned how to let the patient tell their sto-

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THEQuad

PAST LIFE: Elena Drews, a first-year medical student, says drawing cadavers offers the chance to reflect on the person that was.

in anatomy class. “I just felt like a lot of the structures here are so beautiful,” she says. And though she could draw anything she chose, she has returned directly to her usual station. “I felt like our cadaver has served us well, so we wanted to keep working with him.

“We’re always really rushed when we’re dissecting. It’s nice to have some time to be like, okay, this is a person,

to reflect on the experience a little more.”

Fixsen sees drawing as just one way to help bring the fundamental human process of creativity into medicine.

“I think science and technology are fantastic. But I think there’s an ineffable quality to the humanities that can really add a lot of value to your interactions with patients.”

—Scott Huler

DUKE MAGAZINE

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THEQuad FROM THE PRESIDENT: A CAMPUS VIEW

Trying and failing at the Pod

A

s I tried and failed and tried again to get the IV needle into the artificial arm, it occurred to me that this looks much easier on TV. No wonder nurses need training.

The arm was one of the projects in development at the Pratt School of Engineering’s new Design Pod, a makerspace that’s home to an innovative new course for first-year engineering students.

In the program, as I learned, student teams are challenged with using the engineering design process to solve problems for clients from the Duke community and the surrounding region.

In addition to the IV arm—meant for training Duke nurses—one team from this fall’s inaugural class spent the semester building new adaptive feeders for the Duke Lemur Center; others designed lids that automatically raise and lower on planter boxes at Duke Gardens or a water sampler for a research drone for the Marine Lab. Their clients consulted them in the initial stages, but it was mostly up to the students and their technical advisers to explore, design, prototype, and build.

When I visited in early December, the students were in the last few days of their projects, with a final presentation to their clients just a few days away. We met in their bright and airy new lab, a space that used to be a campus restaurant. Prototypes of various sizes were scattered on the teams’ workbenches, sitting next to laser cutters, 3D printers, and more low-tech tools that I recognized from my woodworking days.

Dean Ravi Bellamkonda and Professors Ann Saterbak and Sophia Santillan, who lead the new course, guided me to the table with the artificial arm and encouraged me to try my hand at inserting an IV. Nursing students had brought the project to the Design Pod teams because the skin on the old arms felt too rubbery and unrealistic.

First-year Taylor Huie told me that her team went through several synthetic gels over the course of the project in an effort to create a more realistic “skin” for the arm. Each one failed until they finally settled on the right formula.

“The biggest thing I learned in this class is that it’s okay to fail,” said Taylor, as she finally took over and deftly succeeded on her first try. “I am on the pre-med track, and I was considering transferring to Trinity. But this class convinced me to stick with

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engineering.”

Saterbak and Santillan followed up on her comment, telling me that by engaging students in the problem-based design process from the start, Pratt is reversing the traditional pyramid of engineering education. It’s typical to begin with math and science classes early on, with no applied engineering design until the final years of study.

I found it easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of Pratt is these instructors reversing the for this innovative approach—an early traditional introduction to pyramid of the creative side of engineering. The engineering experience, I could education. see, will inspire more students to pursue engineering degrees.

Early evidence suggests that it’s working: A survey by engineering senior Jessi Daniels showed that students in the class felt far more confident in their design and engineering skills by the end of the semester.

As we finished up the tour, Dean Bellamkonda told me he plans to expand the program over the next several PRESIDENTIAL TAKEAWAY semesters and make it a required course Duke is leading the in the near future, along with new way in fusing research introductory classes in data science and and education to give computational thinking—part of his students more practical, vision for preparing creative engineers on-demand learning who are inspired and equipped to solve opportunities on campus complex social problems. and throughout the world.

The opportunity to help provide With expanding digital that kind of training to future engitechnology and access neers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, and to faculty expertise and academics excites me. And as I left the external partnerships, lab, it occurred to me that all of our pilot programs like the students, as they immerse themselves in first-year engineering problem-solving activities, will get an design course could invaluable lesson: In the world beyond soon be scalable to every campus, there are bound to be a few student in nearly every bumps along the way.

—Vincent E. Price

Chris Hildreth

department.

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He sees the value of a good laugh

H

In the classroom with award-winning economics professor Thomas J. Nechyba ere’s an economics joke: One day, it goes, a student asks the professor if he believes the adage that economics is the “dismal science.” “Well, if you think our science is dismal,” the professor replies, “you should hear our poetry.”

But poetry, specifically, a Dr. Seuss-ian scheme outlining the basics of consumer theory, comes in handy for Thomas J. Nechyba. (A sample couplet, outlining the expected effects of a price change on a budget: If the good is inferior, just ask your mother, / Substitution points one way, income the other.) The lack of pretension in the classroom—during the semester, he’ll also sing a version of the “Barney” theme song to convey the fictive concept of an all-knowing social planner—forms a sort of ethos.

A professor of economics and public policy and director of the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Nechyba leans on this silliness to give “students a sense of, ‘Okay, there’s a human being behind this professor.’ ” It also reflects his genuine excitement for teaching core economic concepts. “When I first started teaching [microeconomics] at Stanford, I was a first-year assistant professor, and they threw me into this large course. I later found out it was the most-hated course on campus,” says Nechyba. “I just didn’t know it was supposed to be hated, so I didn’t approach it with this attitude.”

Nechyba, who won the 2017 Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award based on nominations from his students, has used his positive vibes to make economics more palatable at Duke—and elsewhere. In 2010, he published his textbook on which his course is based; now, he hears from “students all around the world who seem to feel comfortable enough to e-mail me a question about some part of the book.”

It’s the rare textbook written in the first-person, which stems from Nechyba’s teaching style. In both the book and his class, Nechyba makes points through pop-culture references and caricatures of himself and students. Professors tend “to start in the abstract and go to the concrete. Going in the other direction works for a lot of students and allows them to anchor concepts in the examples,” he says.

For instance, the first chapter of his textbook explores the economic assumption of self-rationality using Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And in one lecture, he begins a discussion of externalities by gesturing to the students in closest proximity: “If I choose to skip a shower for a

week, the people in the front row will be affected.” Later, he turns the standard Tragedy of the Commons problem into a competition for candy: Using duct tape to cordon off a single area at the front of the lecture hall, he sprinkles candy on the ground. In the initial stage, nine students can claim the candy in the circle for themselves, but if they wait, the candy (a stand-in for trees and other natural resources) will double the output students can claim at first.

No one waits. “Turns out, we don’t have to have a stage two, because these are not very good people,” Nechyba jokes. Then, he gives each student their own plot of land with one piece of candy each. With the problem now “solved,” the behavior is different: Everyone paHe turns the tiently waits to harvest his or her candy. “Look how standard nice they’ve become,” he Tragedy says to the other students looking on. of the The energy he brings to Commons class has selfless and selfish origins, he says. He’s taught problem into this course for twenty-five a competition years. While he tweaks things slightly each year to for candy. keep himself engaged, he knows that these students are learning it for the very first time, and he is obligated to pique their interest.

But he also commits to the lectures, the additional review sessions he schedules each semester, the ultimate night-before-exam scrambles “where you see more lightbulbs go off than any other time,” because for him they’re essential.

“Teaching is core to my identity. I mean, I am a teacher,” Nechyba says. He mentions the balance of teaching with research and administrative work where, in those other areas, the process can be a slog. “On any given day, the moments of feeling exhilarated about what you’re doing are rare. To me, teaching is much more immediate gratification. If you give a great lecture and you feel like, ‘Boy, I just nailed it today,’ then you feel good for the rest of the day, and all that other stuff is much easier.”

—Lucas Hubbard, Photo by Chris Hildreth

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A different wavelength

Duke researchers helped create a device that uses sound to inexpensively sort particles in fluids.

I

f you go canoeing through rapids, you’ve encountered standing waves—spots where the flow of water off various rocks and impediments creates diffraction patterns among the waves formed by the obstacles. A standing wave is a wave shape that stays in one place even though the water creating it continues to flow.

If the standing wave is strong enough, it changes the direction of your canoe when you run up against it.

Tony Jun Huang, professor of materials science and mechanical engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, is part of an international team that has created a device that uses the same principle to quickly, gently, and inexpensively sort tiny particles in fluids like blood, urine, saliva, and even breast milk. It uses sound to create standing waves, which sort particles in a fluid, moving them differently based on characteristics like size and density. Combining the fields of microfluidics and acoustics, Huang says, the nascent field is called acoustofluidics.

The group’s current research focuses on exosomes, particles on the scale of 100 nanometers—in the neighborhood of one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair—secreted by virtually all cells. Exosomes facilitate intercell communication by transferring RNA and proteins, which carry information about cells and health. “By separating them and doing analysis of the proteins, you can get a lot of information,” Huang says. “Exosomes have been identified as a potentially transformative circulating biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of multiple diseases.” But it’s almost impossible to find exosomes from specific cell types; even a few drops of blood contain billions of cells and particles.

So how to isolate exosomes from the greater chaos?

Currently most labs use a centrifuge, which requires highly trained staff and a lot of time. Plus, the force of all that spinning can damage the very exosomes you’re looking for.

Enter acoustofluidics. Using the device Huang and his team (including scientists from MIT, the

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University of Pittsburgh, and other institutions) have designed, a nurse will be able to draw a blood sample and feed it into a very small device—the components Huang brought out of an office cabinet to demonstrate fit neatly into a petri dish. The first of two pairs of tiny interdigital transducers creates a standing wave that separates out larger objects 1 micrometer or larger—red and white blood cells, for example. The second pair of interdigital transducers, working at a different wavelength, pushes objects smaller than 130 nanometers (like exosomes) into a separate channel.

Not only are the exosomes chemically and physically unchanged by the procedure; the device yields samples with a yield of greater than 80 percent of the pre-separation exosome population, far higher than the purity yielded by centrifuges, which can be as low as 5 to 25 percent.

The inspiration for this approach was ultrasound.

“Ultrasonic imaging is not the most powerful or the most high-resolution,” Huang says, but it is compact and inexpensive—and more, “it’s very gentle. We use it to monitor the health of pregnant mothers.” Acoustofluidics uses similar power intensities and wavelengths and is just as gentle. Plus looking for markers in cells in bodily fluids obviates the need for needles or other invasive procedures on, say, the placenta.

Since placental exosomes will show up in the mother’s bloodstream, you can look for markers of placental problems by doing nothing more complex than taking a blood sample from the mother and using the device. Exosomes with markers for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are other candidates for pursuit, possibly enabling doctors to diagnose those conditions long before they show up clinically, allowing patient care to start far earlier.

The technology Huang is working on has great promise. “It’s noninvasive,” he says. “It can be very compact, very inexpensive, and very point-of-care.”

And if the tiny people from Fantastic Voyage show up in someone’s bloodstream, they can have some fun canoeing. —Scott Huler

Science Picture Co/SCIENCE SOURCE

The technology is noninvasive. "It can be very compact, very inexpensive, and very point-of-care.�

BookClub WE ASKED

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n his latest book, Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter (Harper), cowritten with Jeff Kreisler, Dan Ariely Ph.D. ’98, James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics, turns his

eye to the question of finances—providing insights into the behavioral psychology of what we happily pay for and what we refuse to. So we asked him: “What was your largest financial mistake?”

What kind of creation could be more customized and personal than a home? When I worked at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we owned a house close to the university. We loved the house and went to a great deal of inconvenience and expense to customize it. We renovated rooms, removed walls, and enlarged windows.

After it was done (to the extent that renovations are ever done), we marveled at the open, airy feeling we’d created.

A few years later, when we moved to Duke and Durham, we had to sell the Cambridge house. It sat on the market for a disturbingly long time. After several months, our real-estate agent pointed out that most people didn’t want to live with an open floor plan and recommended that we reinstall a few walls to make

the space more closed and sectional. We were certain that she was wrong. Who would not appreciate the beauty of our open floor plan?

Who would not love the feeling of warmth that comes from being able to see your children playing in the other areas of the house? So for a while, we resisted her suggestion.

But after ten months of waiting, with the house still unsold, we decided to follow her advice. And as soon as we added walls and closed up some rooms, a buyer snatched it up.

The lesson: We have an egocentric bias, and when we build something, we fall in love with it, feel it is worth more—and we expect other people to see our amazing creation in the same way that we do. And when money is involved, this kind of over-attachment can be costly. n

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

Sneak Preview: Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World (OR Books) is the latest set of essays from Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Research Professor Emeritus of literature. The collection focuses on the current state of affairs in America, exploring its similarity to those of repressive regimes— such as General Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, which Dorfman, an Argentine-Chilean American, witnessed firsthand. The pieces range from hopeful to elegiac, lighthearted to fatalistic; a portion of one essay, Revisiting Melville in Chile, is reprinted below.

I also recognized in Melville’s masterpieces the very forms of resistance that many of us contemplated during those seventeen years of tyranny. Confronted with regression, shattered by grief, abandoned by the judges who were too craven and cowardly to defy the despotism of General Pinochet and his oligarchical civilian acolytes, we had to choose between the armed rebellion of the slaves on the San Dominick or the “I would prefer not to” of Bartleby. Though there were some—a small group—among the military’s challengers who embraced violence against such a nefarious regime as righteous and the only path to victory, the enormous majority of the democratic opposition were wary of this insurrectionary strategy. It was a tactic destined to fail, we thought—and we were wary of the consequences of that violence, even in the unlikely case that it could be successful rather than counterproductive.

History had taught us the same lesson that Melville had presaged in Benito Cereno: Far too often have the revolutionaries of today become the oppressors of tomorrow, repeating the mistakes and coercion of yesterday. And so, with the infinite patience of an Ishmael and the insubordination of a Bartleby and the angelic resolution of a Billy Budd, we vanquished the Claggarts of Chile.

Would the American people be able to do something similar? n R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S from Chris Myers Asch ’94 In Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (UNC Press), the instructor and researcher at Colby College, along with coauthor George Derek Musgrove, detailed how, for four centuries, the city’s populace has had to fight both new and recurring battles with regard to race. Here, Asch talks about books and authors that have influenced his work.

• My parents got me Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters as my highschool graduation present, and I read it cover to cover that summer. I remain in awe of his storytelling ability.

• Peter Wood (professor emeritus of history) was my mentor at Duke and remains a good friend. His pioneering book Black Majority was part of a scholarly revolution in the 1960s and 1970s as historians finally began to reckon with and write about the full scope of black history.

• I love when books upend conventional wisdom and force me to change my thinking and behavior immediately. Quiet, by Susan Cain, did just that by challenging our culture’s glorification of extroverts and emphasizing the power of introverts.

• As a dad of three young kids, I spend a lot of time reading children’s literature.

I love the work of Lois Lowry (The Giver and Number the Stars) and Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry trilogy), two master storytellers who address deep, difficult themes without being didactic or losing the humanity of their characters.

BY DUKE ALUMNI

Maranatha Road (Vandalia Press) Heather Bell Adams ’96, J.D. ’98

From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel (Temple University Press) Patrick Elliot Alexander Ph.D. ’12 M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press) Alexis Pauline Gumbs Ph.D. ’10

For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism (University of California Press) Sarah M. Pike ’83

Emergent Strategy and Grand Strategy: How American Presidents Succeed in Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press) Ionut Popescu Ph.D. ’13 Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty (Intercollegiate Studies Institute) Lee Edwards ’54

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’18

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f there’s a common theme that comes up in commencement addresses, it might be…commencement addresses. While you wait to hear what message Apple’s Tim Cook M.B.A. '88, the 2018 commencement speaker, delivers on May 13, try matching these orators to their bits of graduation wisdom:

2. “All commencement addresses, like all Gaul, are divided into three parts: predictions, promises, and pleas. The prediction heralds the coming of a bigger and brighter world; the promise is that you will run that world; the plea is for you to do a better job than your parents.”

1. “There really is only one graduation speech. There are many versions, but it’s only one speech…. It goes like this: With tools and values we have given you here at this university, go forth now and at some personal sacrifice bring those values to make a better world. Do well economically so you can return a little bit of it in contributions to the alma mater.”

4. “The best commencement

3.

“Modern-day commencement speakers are often like poor Everett [Edward Everett, whose two-hour speech preceded the Gettysburg Address]: long on swank credentials and honors, short on inspiration or ideas, their oratory oozing through the drowse of a spring afternoon, and with no Lincoln in sight to save the day.”

5.

“It is not my intention this morning to place the weight of the world upon your shoulders—for that is always to be the job of your parents.”

speech I ever heard, or heard of, was the humorist Art Buchwald, who gave a very short one. He looked at the sea of young people in front of him and he said, ‘Now remember boys and girls, we are leaving you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.’ ”

6. “When it comes to graduation speeches it’s generally conceded that time—a generous dollop of time—is of essence. This is because the chief function of the graduation speaker has always been to prevent graduating seniors from being released into the world before they’ve been properly sedated.”

A

B

C

D

E

F

Madeleine Albright

Stephen Jay Gould

Juanita Kreps A.M. ’44, Ph.D. ’48

William Styron ’47

Garry Trudeau

Fareed Zakaria

(2004)

(1989)

(1977)

(1981)

(1988)

(2012) Answers: 1.B, 2.C, 3.D, 4.F, 5.A, 6.E

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DEEPENING DIFFERENCES

Charles Clotfelter ’69, Z. Smith Reynolds professor of public policy and professor of economics and law, is the author of Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity (Harvard University Press).

How would you characterize the trajectory of elite private higher education?

In the fall of 1980, Duke’s chancellor, Ken Pye, wrote a report lamenting the prospects for these elite schools; Duke and its peers would have to scale back and “concentrate our resources on what we do best.”

As smart and visionary as Pye was, he, along with just about everybody else, was completely wrong. From about 1980 on, it’s been a field day for the very top private institutions.

A field day in what sense?

The share of the nation’s income received by households in the top 20 percent has been going up, and the incomes of everybody else have stagnated. Those who have seen their wealth grow are able to pay the rising tuition of the most selective colleges. Affluent individuals are able to be more generous in their donations. The stock market has been going to town, and the money managers at these institutions have been seeing fantastic returns for their endowments. So even as you have social scientists, almost with a single voice, decrying a growing income inequality, elite higher education has benefited from that inequality.

And the elites have become ever-more elite?

Right. The number of seats at these selective places hasn’t increased with the number of potential applicants. So every seat is more desirable. And the response to that competition has been, for those with financial means, more test-prep courses; more internships that don’t pay anything but provide the fodder

Chris Hildreth

for great college essays; more involvement in sports that can make an applicant stand out, like tennis and golf. College admissions over this period has become less discriminatory, more meritocratic. But there’s a built-in advantage for those with money.

Are there other ways in which the elite have broken away from the non-elite?

Look at the grades that highschool students report having made. The grades gap has grown over time between those headed for the elite schools and the others. Also, it used to be that the non-elite colleges could feel confident about attracting the top students from their region. Now the elite schools draw from every region.

But haven’t we seen, especially in top-tier schools, student bodies that are more representative of national demographics?

The change in the racial and ethnic composition of these student bodies, over time, has been dramatic. Still, comparing the most selective private colleges and the less-selective public colleges, the income gap has been increasing.

Can you break that down?

The Harvards of the world, the Amhersts of the world—50 percent of their students come from families in the top 10 percent of income earners.

For the University of South Carolina and its peers, it’s about 15 percent. So you ask, “What share of their students come from the bottom onefifth in earnings?” For the elite

Q&A

private colleges, it’s less than 5 percent. Why don’t the elite schools simply increase that percentage? Well, it’s not necessarily in their interest. If you said, “We’re going to go out and get as many low-income students as we can,” your budget people would say, “Hold on, because that’s going to cost us a whole lot of money.”

You seem to be sketching a higher-education ecosystem that’s distorted.

What we have is a giant matching process, where the brightest students—and at the top, they are as bright as you can believe—are being matched with the colleges that have the most resources, with the professors who are publishing the most, with the classrooms that have the most gadgets. The question

is, does that very extreme matching make sense

economically? Would it be better to take some of those resources and spread them around a little bit? We don’t have to be quite as unequal as we are.

When you look at the recent tax legislation, it’s clear that some lawmakers don’t see higher education as a pure social good, and now there’s a tax on schools with the highest per-student endowments.

Higher education is one of the strongest, most desirable exports that the United States has, and the rest of the world is trying to figure out why U.S. universities are as good as they are. But in my book, I quote a scholar who says that a college is like a combination of a church and a car dealership.

It’s partly charitable and partly business. When you look at a place as big and as successful as this university, it looks pretty corporate.

—Robert J. Bliwise

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A meandering return

As a child, he spent summers going to work with his grandmother at Duke Hospital. Now he’s a faculty member.

G

azing out at the titian leaves of Duke Forest, Professor Taylor Black and his aunt, Jean Black Carden, recline on her back porch and reminisce about their family’s five-decade connection to the university.

Carden began as a secretary at Duke Regional Hospital Auxiliary in 1965 and worked her way up to director over her thirty-five-year career. She gave Black’s father, her little brother, a job running the snack bar at the hospital one summer. Black’s mom occasionally worked temporary jobs in the auxiliary. And Black’s grandmother worked at the hospital gift shop.

At six, his parents moved their family out of the city, but Black returned every summer to visit his grandmother and ride the tram with her to work at the hospital. The stockroom for the gift shop was next to the morgue, so the smell of formaldehyde lingers in his memories of Duke’s campus.

“I’d usually wander off during the day over to West Campus, where I’d go and sit in the chapel,” Black recalls. “Then I’d go to the Bryan Center, which seemed huge and fancy to me then, and down to the Duke Barber Shop, which was run by a family friend, Mr. [David] Fowler, who cut my dad’s and uncle’s hair.”

Now, after more than twenty years away, Black has returned to Durham and to Duke as an assistant professor of English.

“The campus doesn’t feel as big as it did when I was six years old,” he wryly notes.

Black found out he got the job last March, minutes after landing on the tarmac at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. He was back in North Carolina visiting family during spring break at New York University, where he was working. After the phone call from Sarah Beckwith, the chair of the English department, telling him he got the job, he immediately drove to Durham to tell Aunt Jean the good news in person.

“She was the first person to know,” Black says. “Actually, the second. I called my mom first.”

For Black, who was born at Durham General Hospi-

tal, it was a meandering return to the Bull City.

After graduating from R.J. Reynolds High School, where he was the president of the theater club, Black started at UNC-Asheville. But Asheville felt too small for him, so, in January 2002, he dropped out and moved to New York with just a duffel bag and a guitar.

There he worked for Greenpeace for two years soliciting donations on the street. He enrolled at Hunter College, where he got a bachelor’s degree and focused on black studies, then later earned his Ph.D. in American “Unkind studies from Rutgers people might University.

“Growing up in the say that I’m South, if I wasn’t an acaa bit fatuous, demic, I could have very easily been a preacher,” but I might Black says. “Because I can get very evangelical say that I about my figures.” look at what Black writes on, among other things, I love.” stylist Quentin Crisp and authors Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor. He is interested in “style,” which Crisp defines as “being yourself, but on purpose.”

“I’m really devoted to the figures I write about,” Black says. “Unkind people might say that I’m a bit fatuous, but I might say that I look at what I love.”

This semester, he is teaching a course about Nobel laureate Bob Dylan.

“I’ve been gone from North Carolina since I was eighteen years old, so it’s great to actually be around my family again,” he says. “And it’s really cool to have that small-town experience of being able to just invite them to come to things on campus.”

—Katie Fernelius, Photo by Chris Hildreth

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Mitch

BIRTH WEIGHT: 5 lbs, 4 oz CURRENT WEIGHT CLASS: 157 IN BROTHER WORDS: “We could be fighting it out for days, and all of a sudden, he’ll just come up to you and make up with you.” - Zach “We had a weeklong argument about whether salsa verde or salsa rojo was hotter.” - Josh

Matt

BIRTH WEIGHT: 5 lbs, 15 oz CURRENT WEIGHT CLASS: 174 IN BROTHER WORDS: “I know stubborn has this negative appeal, but he’s stubborn in a really good way.”

- Zach

Zach

BIRTH WEIGHT: 5 lbs CURRENT WEIGHT CLASS: 165 IN BROTHER WORDS: “He’s the most honest person I know, and it makes me mad sometimes.”

– Mitch

Josh

BIRTH WEIGHT: 3 lbs, 12 oz CURRENT WEIGHT CLASS: 133 IN BROTHER WORDS: “He’s super down-to-earth.

He gets along with all of us.” – Mitch “The softest.” – Matt

SPORTS

Their own tag teams On and off the wrestling mat, the Finesilvers—two sets of fraternal twins—keep things competitive.

F

or twin brothers Zach and Mitch Finesilver, an added pressure influences each wrestling practice: the fear of losing a bout to a family member.

But it doesn’t really arise when they face each other. No, it’s when they wrestle one of their younger twin brothers.

“I don’t wanna say I take it too far,” says Mitch, laughing.

“But I’ll just…maybe throw an extra hard crossface or club, so they know who big brother is.”

This winter, with the two sets of fraternal twins covering four separate weight classes, the brothers Finesilver—redshirt juniors Zach and Mitch, first-years Matt and Josh— constitute a near plurality of the Blue Devils’ starting lineup. The multitude of brotherly talent is unprecedented in Duke varsity athletics. For the brothers, the setup has its perks. “It’s a huge support system,” says Josh. “You know, I got three guys who are not only blood-related, but we all have the same goals. We’re always pushing each other and working toward those goals.”

“There’s just this competitive edge—you don’t want to stray from the pack,” adds Matt. “If you see the three other guys progressing in something, you don’t want to be left behind.” The competition extends beyond sports: For example, as they were growing up in Greenwood Village, Colorado, with their three older sisters, the battles for who would ride shotgun in the family’s fifteen-passenger van were so unrelenting that their parents assigned each sibling a day of the week in the prized spot.

The brothers began wrestling at the same time—the elders at age nine, the younger twins at seven. They soon honed their focus on the mat, trading football for cross country in the fall season to boost their conditioning during matches.

Today, even though each has his individual technical nuance, a Finesilver trademark is endurance, having “the gas tank to push for seven minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes, however long the match is gonna be,” says Josh.

After each culminated his high-school career with a Colorado state championship, Mitch and Zach blazed the path to Durham. The Duke wrestling program, compared to that of other schools they visited, has room for them to leave a mark, Zach explains. “We were like, ‘Hey, let’s join this program where we can build something up and…’ ” “…be Duke’s first national champion,” says Mitch.

The duo agreed to attend the same school, realizing that, as Mitch says, “most of our success has come from being together.” By the time the younger pair went on their round

of college visits, there was little debate. “In the back of my mind, it was a clear-cut choice that Duke was the way to go,” says Matt.

Unsurprisingly, with four Division I athletes rampaging in close proximity for nearly two decades, there are stories of destruction. A swim workout that too prominently featured a PVC pipe and left Matt with a handful of staples in his head. Basement dodgeball that led to the quartet having to mend drywall in their suburban Denver home. On-cam“They’re my pus volleyball matches that Matt estimates cause “50 perbrothers; I cent of our fights,” featuring love ’em to trash talk that occasionally crosses the line. “I guess verdeath.” But bally we all know how to push out on the each others’ buttons...which be a problem,” Mitch practice mat? can says.

But the brothers are a well“I’m trying knit bunch. They grab lunch to rip their a few times a week, peppering their conversations with heads off.” quotes from MacGruber and Step Brothers. The older twins try to make sure the other two are prepared while also not seeming overbearing. “One thing that’s made it difficult is we kind of see where we were as freshmen, and we say, ‘Hey, this is what you need to do,’ ” says Zach. “And we need to kind of take a step back and understand that they’re different people and they’re gonna have a different college experience.”

At the same time, “you only have like a four- to five-year window to do something in the sports world in wrestling,” says Mitch, who has twice qualified for NCAA tournaments already in his career. (Zach, too, qualified his red-shirt freshman year.) The older brothers encourage Josh and Matt to not give their opponents excessive respect; even as freshmen, they’re capable of winning against almost anyone.

Excluding a couple of foes, of course.

“It’s weird how we’ve kinda teamed up a bit,” Zach says, describing how, in training, he and Mitch informally share notes on how to best their younger siblings. “But they’re competing with us, and that’s what’s exciting—it’s definitely caused us to up our game.”

“They’re my brothers; I love ’em to death,” says Josh. But out on the practice mat? “I’m trying to rip their heads off.”

—Lucas Hubbard, Photo by Chris Hildreth

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LEARNING

BY D ING

For the last decade, DukeEngage has sent students around the globe to further the university’s bedrock mission of civic engagement.

By Scott Huler | Illustration by Sally Vitsky

T

he most frustrating thing was the mason. “He spoke, like, two words of English,” says senior Lily Coad, who spent the summer after her sophomore year as a DukeEngage student in Kochi, India, surprisingly, building a garden. Nobody expected him to speak English, of course.

But nobody had expected to be working with him in the first place.

Expecting to spend eight weeks teaching English in a needy school, Coad’s cohort of ten DukeEngage students found themselves beaten to the classroom by another group of volunteers. One day per week they did prepare lesson plans and teach English vocabulary by getting the kids coloring and using flash cards, pretty much as they’d expected. But the rest of the time they spent creating a sustainable garden for the school instead. “So the kids would have something to eat besides rice,” Coad says. The work was far from unnecessary, but the students had expected to teach, not garden.

After a couple of weeks pulling weeds with no equipment more advanced than their hands, the group, under the tutelage of that mason, built two large brick-and-mortar raised vegetable beds, communicating with the mason mostly by gesture. And, incidentally, trying to learn a most counter-Duke lesson: how not to excel.

26 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

“Some of us were engineers,” recalls Coad, a linguistics major. But the mason did not want to use his limited time and his few words of English to discuss whether the corner angles of the boxes measured exactly ninety degrees. “It just had to be good. It doesn’t have to be done this exact right Duke way,” Coad and her cohort finally understood. In a far-off place, in a different culture, speaking a different language, trying to do what was needed rather than what they expected to do, perfect was neither possible nor perhaps even desirable. “It took a lot for us to get past that.”

In the sometimes-counterintuitive world of civic engagement, letting go of the need to excel is part of the lesson. You may give Coad an A in DukeEngage, the ten-year-old civic-engagement program that has become one of Duke’s prime differentiators. In fact, applicants to Duke mention DukeEngage in their essays more than anything else—even more often than basketball, almost everyone connected with the program will tell you at one point or another. And as Coad experienced, DukeEngage has a complex mission, with two hoped-for outcomes in some ways at odds. You’re a Duke student! You can do anything! Go out there to some nonprofit, whether as near as Durham or as far off as Kochi, and change the world! On the other hand, go humbly, and come back changed yourself, and learn how small you truly are, how little you really know about this enormously complex world, and how hard it is to make real change.

“I think we, as universities, institutions like Duke, we’re a little bit schizophrenic,” says DukeEngage executive director Eric Mlyn. “We tell our students they can walk on water—and then we tell them, ‘Not so fast, you need to learn to walk first.’ We’re talking about making humil28 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ity the theme of this year.” That, too, is a complex project: DukeEngage wants to teach humility while itself absorbing applause as Duke’s signature program and

narrative people thought of when they considered Duke. So apart from the work it was doing to address the problems the case brought to light, by the next fall administrators decided to do something about that narrative.

“We had a project,” says then-president Richard H. Brodhead, “trying to change the monotony of that story.”

They called it the Big Idea.

Then-provost Peter Lange, now professor of political science and public policy, had regular meetings

TOILING: Left, senior Lily Coad is dressed for garden work in Kochi, India; above, the two completed vegetable gardens.

possibly the strongest program of its kind in the country. There’s complexity, too, around the program’s beginnings—with the lacrosse scandal.

YOU KNOW THE BASICS.

In March 2006, false accusations of rape were made against members of the Duke lacrosse team. Then claims, counterclaims, allegations, charges, and the resulting cancellation of the team’s season. Along with ultimate settlements and damage assessments from various angles, it certainly spurred a great deal of reconsideration at Duke of its relationship with its community and the rest of the world. More, the cause célèbre of the case threatened to become the dominant

with what he called “the den of ten,” a group of administrators who considered many aspects of undergraduate student culture and “the kind of experience we were giving students.” Looking at Duke’s various projects in civic engagement—in getting its students out of the classroom and into the world through the many agencies trying to improve it—“the idea started to percolate that we should do something that would strengthen our identity in social engagement and civic involvement and that would be an appropriate substantive response to any reputational damage from lacrosse,” says Lange.

A task force led by Mlyn, then-director of the Robertson Scholars program, got the job of producing an actionable pro-

gram, and its members didn’t tarry. “We convened in September 2006,” Mlyn recalls. “We had a report in December.

We had raised $30 million in February 2007, and we had ninety students in the field in the summer of 2007.” Yes, $30 million. While Mlyn was thinking through what a fully funded program, with domestic and international community partner organizations, available to every student who wanted to participate would look like, Brodhead went to Seattle and sat down in a coffee shop with Melinda Gates ’86, M.B.A. ’87, who has served on the Duke board of trustees and as chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “She just got it in one second,” he says, and gave $15 million to

ing of classroom and outside.” A new strategic plan for Duke adopted late in 2006 included “knowledge in the service of society” as one of Duke’s enduring themes. DukeEngage is “a program that caught the wave of what is an emerging interest in civic engagement in American higher education,” says Stephen Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education. “It was something that was in the air.” DukeEngage and programs like it have grown partially because, says Mlyn, “across the globe the role of the state has diminished. When was the last time you heard a student say, ‘I want to work for the betterment of the planet—I want to work for government’?”

“It just had to be good. It doesn’t have to be done this exact right Duke way.” get the program started.

When news of the gift came out, Brodhead says, “The Duke Endowment then called me to complain that we hadn’t asked them to match the gift.”

He asked, the endowment matched, and DukeEngage had $30 million for its brand new civic-engagement program.

Ten years later, nearly 25 percent of each graduating class has participated in DukeEngage.

NOT THAT DUKE was new to civic engagement—or social entrepreneurship, as it’s sometimes called, or social innovation. Whatever the name, the programs always have some variation on the same theme: getting students into community organizations working for public good, where they can see how their classroom learning applies in the “real world,” provide some hands-on help, and develop their own skills. “Civic engagement, though not always called that, had already been a theme for several years,” Lange says of Duke. “The blend-

“For institutions like Duke,” he says, “we are elite, relatively wealthy institutions. It would be unethical for us not to use our resources to improve the world.” And institutions are doing so. Campus Compact, an organization focusing on civic engagement, was founded in 1985 by the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, and Stanford universities and the president of the Education Commission of the States; it has grown to a coalition of more than a thousand colleges and universities. And Ashoka, the global organization promoting social entrepreneurship, was founded in 1980. In 2008, it expanded to create AshokaU, focused on higher education, which now sponsors the Changemaker Campus program, designating institutions leading in social innovation. Forty-four campuses worldwide have attained that designation (including Duke); Duke helped design the program, and many of the initial meetings took place on the Duke campus.

Lange says that though DukeEngage emerged from the lacrosse scandal, “it wasn’t a PR move.” The very indenture

of James B. Duke that created the school noted that initial training should focus on those who “can do most to uplift mankind,” with the ultimate goal of “lives of skilled and ethical service.” Duke was concerned with affecting the world around it from the start.

That focus became somewhat somnolent as Duke weathered the Depression, World War II, and the civil rights era. Like students around the nation, students at Duke became more active in the 1960s, but regarding its modern focus on the community around it, then-president Terry Sanford, in his famous “Outrageous Ambitions” speech—his final address to the annual meeting of the faculty, in 1984 —in some ways laid the groundwork for this mindset. “Duke aspires to leave its students with an abiding concern for justice,” he said, “with a resolve for compassion and concern for others, with minds unfettered by racial and other prejudices, with a dedication to service to society, with an intellectual sharpness, and with an ability to think straight now and throughout life.”

Things happened fast: The Hart Leadership Program, a yearlong program in what has since become the Sanford School that includes a community group internship, took shape in 1986, becoming what original director Bruce Payne called the “ ‘thinking’ wing of the emerging student community-service movement.” The presidency of Nannerl O. Keohane, which saw, for example, the founding of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, further developed that dedication to service. In 1996, students started LEAPS (Learning through Experience, Action, Partnership, and Service), a student group that served as a liaison among faculty, staff, and community groups to encourage service learning. Under Keohane’s presidency Duke hired J. Gregory Dees, one of the pioneers of social entrepreneurship in education when he was at Stanford in the 1990s. He came to Duke in 2002 and was instrumental in setting up the DUKE MAGAZINE

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AND THAT EDUCATION COMES IN MANY FORMS.

Meredith Casper

OUT IN THE WORLD: Top, assisting education in Southern India; above, working alongside Vietnamese college students to improve school facilities

Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Fuqua School of Business, which, though it focuses on graduate rather than undergraduate students, shares much of the get-the-students-out-there DNA with DukeEngage.

In fact, Brodhead says he associated Duke with civic engagement by the time he came to serve as president, recalling his own inaugural address focusing on Duke’s already strong tradition of public service. “What I’ve always thought is crucial to understand,” he says, “is DukeEngage is not an extracurricular activity.

These things are education. They’re not something you did in the summer during your education. They are education.”

30 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Consider the story of sophomore Tommaso Babucci, who got some rather unexpected education in the summer of 2017 when he rode his bicycle to a Detroit grocery store. With Nalini Gupta, his fellow DukeEngage Detroit participant working at the Detroit Food Academy (DFA), he was preparing material for the group’s social-media sites; they went to the store to buy food for a photo shoot.

After the bike ride, things went south rather rapidly.

With a life-threatening food allergy, Babucci had asked at the restaurant where he ate lunch whether the food contained any sesame. The owner assured him it did not—incorrectly, it turned out, and at the grocery Babucci recognized the first stirrings of anaphylactic shock. Naturally, he had left his backpack containing his epi pen and medication in the DFA office, so he called for help from his cell phone. “I was like, ‘Hello, I’m about to have an allergic reaction.

Can you come in less than five minutes?

Because I’m going to die.’”

Within two minutes Wayne State University police arrived and guided an ambulance to Babucci. Everything worked out—because Babucci called the Wayne State University police instead of dialing 911, which would have connected him to the city of Detroit Police Department. Trying to make do with the limited funds of a struggling city, the Detroit Police Department is stretched thin, and students participating in DukeEngage Detroit are told in orientation that should a crisis arise, Detroit police could

and, eventually, menu planning for a pop-up restaurant. Gupta, a sophomore economics major, says, “I learned so much—mostly about my incompetence.”

Growing up in a family where she was sometimes counseled to limit extracurriculars so as not to be too busy, she had her eyes opened when DFA workers explained that among DFA programming benefits was simply offering students somewhere to go after school. “It’s so easy to make poverty into food and shelter,” she says. “But something to do,” she says amazed—it had never occurred to her that simply having access to programming could be life-changing. What’s more, for all her academic skills, “the kids who came out of that academy knew more and were more capable and able than I was.”

“DukeEngage is not an extracurricular activity. These things are education. They’re not something you did in the summer during your education. They are education.” take hours to arrive. They should instead call Wayne State, in whose dorms the sixteen students spend their eight-week Detroit sojourn. A small detail—tiny, in some ways. But it probably kept Babucci’s adventure a story instead of a tragedy.

Each DukeEngage program has a faculty leader, and the Detroit program is led by Matt Nash, Duke managing director for social entrepreneurship. Nash grew up in the area, so he has even deeper Detroit relationships, but all faculty leaders foster local relationships. It’s part of the way DukeEngage works.

Mlyn loves this story. “Ah!” he says.

“The police are overwhelmed in Detroit.

That’s experiential learning.” He also notes that DukeEngage handles such problems quickly and confidently: A DukeEngage administrator was on the phone with Babucci soon after he arrived at the hospital.

As DukeEngage has become immense, its capacity to know its communities has grown. It’s one thing to coordinate

organization placements, living quarters, and light supervision for a dozen or so students in dozens of places all over the world, but for DukeEngage, assisting students who become ill or getting students safely away from unexpected unrest all over the world has become quotidian. The program has contracts with agencies like International SOS and one staffer on call twenty-four hours a day over the summer. In recent years staffers have raised a ceremonial glass of prosecco when the last student returns safe in August, but Mlyn says it’s all par for the course now: “These incidents that happened early on were crises; now they’re what we do.”

Babucci and Gupta learned, experientially, a lot more than the difficulties of policing a sprawling city with few tax dollars. Among the projects DFA offers is an afterschool program that brings kitchen equipment to high schools; students learn things like recipe and portion math, kitchen skills, and money management,

THAT HUMILITY has become

one of DukeEngage’s main goals—and one of its main challenges. To prepare students, each summer the program runs the Fortin Foundation DukeEngage Academy on East Campus just after the spring semester ends. To give students some training in what their experiences might be like, whether abroad or in Detroit or Seattle or Durham, over two days the Academy offers panel discussions of community partner organizations, classes on the ethics of social engagement, and games reminding students of all they do not know. They play Barnga, for example, a card game of shifting rules and rotating players that students play mostly silently—they are allowed to say only the word “barnga,” a stand-in for linguistic and other challenges of communication.

Players also move from table to table, learning, presumably, that even when they think they know the rules, they probably don’t. Participants experience DUKE MAGAZINE

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“We are elite, relatively wealthy institutions.

It would be unethical for us not to use our resources to improve the world.�

32 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

the frustration that many low-income and minority people contend with growing up, and emerge with a deeper understanding of the real world.

Community partners regale students with advice as simple as the importance of showing up on time and of treating their commitment as a work obligation, not as a volunteer opportunity that can give way to weekend travel or a cousin’s wedding. And among other things, the seminars discuss respectful story-sharing, warning DukeEngage students against producing thoughtless blog posts and Instagram feeds by showing them, for example, BarbieSavior.com, which satirizes privileged ecotourism by placing Barbie dolls against backdrops of exotic poverty.

(Barbie Savior’s Instagram motto: “It’s not about me ... but it kind of is.”)

Some of it takes, and some of it doesn’t. After her 2017 summer in Detroit, sophomore Leah Abrams expressed frustration in her Chronicle column. “I read countless blog posts that made it

Addison Howenstine

that nonetheless students sometimes make them just the same. Abrams still yearns for more training or selectivity, and Mlyn still leans toward giving every student a chance.

Mlyn sees Abrams’ experience as, if not entirely positive from her perspective, a complete DukeEngage win.

life-changing: “not necessarily because I found the career I wanted or even that I learned about concepts I had never learned before.” She spent her days working with TechTown Detroit, a downtown business incubator that provides space for struggling start-ups, especially those by minority entrepreneurs. Abrams

“Across the globe the role of the state has diminished. When was the last time you heard a student say, ‘I want to work for the betterment of the planet—I want to work for government’?” clear that the student had not come in with sufficient knowledge of their summer destination,” she wrote, suggesting a semester-long course to fully prepare the four hundred-plus students Duke unleashes each summer. Mlyn doesn’t see that as necessary, but he invited Abrams to visit, and they spoke at length. “They were receptive to my experiences,” Abrams says. “They’re not trying to pretend that this is a perfect program.”

They agreed both that the academy gave students warning against making ill-considered or thoughtless posts, and

“That’s what we dreamt of eleven years ago, was having this conversation,” he says. “Students come back and say, ‘Was that worth it? Your investment in me?’

We’ve problematized civic engagement on this campus. And civic engagement needs to be problematized”—thoroughly and critically examined like any other topic. Through DukeEngage, civic engagement has become, as Brodhead says, not an augmentation to education but part of the Duke education itself.

Despite her criticisms, Abrams describes her summer in Detroit as

IMMERSION: Left, senior Kira Panzer and Nicole Yoon, a junior, in a yam field high above the village of Kuwdé, in Togo, where student projects included monitoring a local health-insurance system; above, students observing their sea-turtle patients at a sea-turtle nursery at Phang Nga Navy Base in Thailand

Max Westerkam

certainly gained actual work experience there. “Our project was first looking at the way TechTown records demographic info,” she recalls.

“Like—they weren’t doing it.” That was a problem a Duke student could sink her teeth into, and she set about organizing their information, interviewing clients, and coming up with ways TechTown could make its client base look more like their community. “There were a couple of moments for me where, ‘I’m doing the coolest stuff right now!’ ” she recalls. On the other hand, different organization members would have different spreadsheets tracking information in different ways, and getting answers and coordination or even attention from busy people was rarely easy. “So there was a lot of DUKE MAGAZINE

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“That’s what we dreamt of eleven years ago, was having this conversation. Students come back and say, ‘Was that worth it? Your investment in me?’ ”

EXCHANGE: Teaching in Zhuhai, China, where participants join with a middle school to provide arts education and English lessons

waiting for that,” she says. “That was very important for me to learn.”

Like Coad in Kochi, she had to learn to provide the kind of work her client wanted. “I may have thought of the perfect application to use hypothesis testing and p-values to represent their demographic reflectivity,” she says. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what’s going to be most helpful to the community partners themselves. And that’s what the summer is actually about.”

Beyond that real-world business lesson, Abrams noticed that the machine in the women’s restroom that dispensed sanitary products was always empty. She wrote a blog post about that, and about the message it sent to women working at the incubator. “By the time that I left,” she says, “they had a cart of free female hygienic products. That was really cool: That’s one tangible thing I left there.”

SMALL ACTIONS, small lessons, small accomplishments. Which raises the question: Is it working? Is it worth it? It costs about $9,000 to send each DukeEngage student hither or yon to help some nonprofit. Mlyn often gets the question: If helping some community group is your goal, is that the best way to spend $9,000? The answer, of course, is no—if your only goal was to help the nonprofit, you’d send them the money.

But Mlyn notes, “My job is to educate Duke students” to a lifetime of considering the social impact of all their actions, whether they join a nonprofit or become 34 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

a bond trader, and that shows up in any number of ways.

Peter Shi ’16 calls his DukeEngage experience “transformative”—he had planned to become a doctor; now he’s a data scientist at Cisco. “I think the best way to do civic engagement is if you have the time and resources to give back to the community,” he says. Outside of work he’s involved in a couple of app start-up ventures. But also, he joined the highly civic-minded Rotary Club. A small thing, perhaps, but meaningful.

Or consider Alex Sonageri ’14, who in 2012 went to Guatemala, where he worked on health-and-wellness projects, working with a special-education school called Mayan Hope that provided services to special-needs children in Nebaj, Guatemala. “During my dayto-day, I work in finance,” he says, “like many Duke alumni.” But he’s never lost touch with Mayan Hope. “We’ve rebuilt the website, started a fundraising campaign”—and the campaign raised enough money to buy a piece of land on which to construct a new school. “I couldn’t agree more with Eric [Mlyn]’s line of thinking. What he and the program have done for me will stay with me to the end of my days. And it will encourage me to do far more good than $9,000. You can go into other careers and still have an influence, and still remain true to the credo of DukeEngage.”

Erin Worsham, director of CASE, the social entrepreneurship program at the Fuqua School of Business, says her students address the same issue. Half the

student population of Fuqua participates in CASE, so “there’s a question sometimes: Is half the student body going into social impact or nonprofit?” Of course not. “What we’re hoping is that through their engagement with us they’re learning how their decisions have an impact on more than just the bottom line.”

TOMMASO BABUCCI USED

almost exactly those words when he described his takeaways from his summer in Detroit. “I wanted to learn a mindset that I can carry with me throughout my life.”

He thinks he and Gupta did. For example, the two helped redesign the process by which the DFA students made Mitten Bites, a healthy snack the group sells to raise funds. And as much as they enjoyed practicing and learning about

“We didn’t have desks. We brought our own computers and set them up on filing cabinets and used other filing cabinets as our chairs.” cost optimization, they may have learned most when they realized they couldn’t improve things by cutting employees. Of the DFA managers, Gupta says, “their job was not just to teach [students] how to cook. It was…also to make sure they have someone to talk to about their dreams and hopes.”

Students go, encounter the reality of making the world a better place, and return changed—each changed in his or her own way. According to DukeEngage statistics, 70 percent say they grew personally; 80 percent say the experience influenced their career plans. Like Jennifer Heffernan ’08, one of the original 2007 DukeEngage cohort, a then-premed student who spent her summer in New Orleans, cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina. She was shocked at how much still needed to be done years after the levees breached: “City hall was kind of in mayhem,” she recalls of her time helping

with the city’s public-health department.

“We didn’t have desks. We brought our own computers and set them up on filing cabinets and used other filing cabinets as our chairs.” She says she definitely arrived naïve—shocked by the social and institutional problems she witnessed, and thinking “that by showing up at a protest for two hours, a cute little Duke kid, I was going to help.”

Her time in New Orleans left her not overwhelmed but inspired. She realized that changing the world was going to take a lot more than knowing statistics about injustice—and that thinking on a more global scale was her strength.

Instead of the one-at-a-time approach of medicine, she realized, “I’m much better equipped to work at more of a macro scale,” so she left being a physician behind. Today she’s an administrator with Health Care Service Corporation, the largest customer-owned health insurer

in the United States. “Take a little bit of politics, a little bit of common sense, put it together with behavioral economics,” she says, “and it’s health care.”

Small transformations, small things learned, and small changes made, but they add up. DukeEngage looks back on ten years with a clear record: 4,000 students have given 1.25 million volunteer hours to seventy-nine countries on six continents—and thirty-seven cities in the United States. But this is a moment for improvement, not self-congratulation. Like the students, DukeEngage itself grows and changes, and Mlyn sees that as one of the great benefits of the program. “Duke did not wait and reflect on how to do this and then do it,” he says. “Just as students learn to be global citizens by doing, DukeEngage modeled what we believe in.

“We learned how to do DukeEngage by doing it.” n DUKE MAGAZINE

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INSIDE OUT ACCEPTANCE: Books on a cart at the clinic relate to gender identity; Kristen Russell, a clinical social worker, speaks with Jeremy Gottlieb, a cultural anthropology student who is writing a thesis on the clinic, and Deanna Adkins; Atom Edwards, at school.

A Duke clinic offers information mixed with humanity for youth grappling with gender dysphoria.

BY BARRY YEOMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX BOERNER

A

tom Edwards is a highschool junior who carries himself with a confidence that not all his peers possess.

The youngest of four siblings, he has a lanky frame and a hi-top fade that lightens at the tips like icing on a cupcake. He makes A’s and B’s; plays guitar, piano, and saxophone; and sits on the Teen Council at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art. He counts his friends by the dozen.

Atom inhabits his seventeen-year-old body with grace, but it’s a hard-earned grace. Assigned female at birth, he rejected, early on, every marker of femininity.

When he was five, his parents walked into the living room and found him with scissors in his hand and thick hair scattered at his feet. “He had a stoic look on his face,” says his father, Derlvyn, a mill worker. “It reminded me of that scene from X-Men when the little boy went in the bathroom

and cut his wings off because they said he was a mutant, and there were feathers all over the floor.”

When he was younger, Atom clung to his older brother, favoring him over their sisters. He wanted to look like his brother, learn karate together, and play the same Dragon Ball Z video games. By seven, he refused to wear dresses. “No big deal,” recalls his mother, Delores, a state employee. “I didn’t wear dresses. I grew up as a tomboy, so I was cool with it.”

What did concern Delores was that her youngest child was a loner. “All the [other] kids had little friends that they would stay over and spend the night with,” she says. “Atom never had friends.”

She knew he was different. But she didn’t know how.

“I think you were in denial,” Derlvyn tells Delores.

“I was in denial,” she agrees.

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Atom, for his part, was muscling through big questions. “In sixth grade, I had a little sit-down chat with myself,” he says. “Am I gay? Am I straight? I was trying to understand myself better.” There was something about his identity he couldn’t quite discern, and it went beyond his penchant for thrift-store neckties: “Everyone else, it seemed, knew themselves.”

During his freshman year at Hillside High School in Durham, Atom figured it out: He was a boy. By then he was no longer solitary. He had joined theater and the marching band, and he was expressing himself through visual art and photography. Toward the end of that year, he began telling classmates he was transgender and asking them to use his new name and male pronouns. The reactions were uneven, he says: “It was a mixture of students who were really accepting and students who were very shunful, or students who didn’t know how to feel.”

The next step, Atom believed, was aligning his body with the new identity he was carving out. In March 2016, shortly after he turned fifteen, he and Delores met with their family physician, who gave them a referral. That’s how he found his way, a few months later, to the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care clinic and its pediatric endocrinologist, Deanna Adkins.

A

dkins, at the time, was still relatively new to transgender medicine. In 2014, while working at Duke, she had received a call from a fellow endocrinologist in New York. “I have this patient,” she recalls him saying. “They’re from Chapel Hill. They are coming to see me for potential hormonal transition. I would really like to refer them to someone closer to home. Do you think this is something you could do?”

Adkins had grown up surrounded by medical culture. Her single mother was the chief financial officer at a hospital, and young Deanna spent a lot of time at that workplace. “I kind of lived there,” she says. “We ate meals there. I got used to that environment.” Still, when she entered Georgia Tech, Adkins followed her friends into engineering instead.

As part of her studies, Adkins worked 38 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

at a chemical plant—a disillusioning experience, she says. “Some of the women in the plant had bloodwork done every so often to look at their lead levels. They had to make sure they didn’t get pregnant. I was beginning to think, ‘I’m not sure this is the environment I want to spend the rest of my life in.’ ” She shifted her focus to medicine, a return to her family roots. At the Medical College of Georgia, she realized that endocrinology suited her temperament.

“The engineer in me was like, ‘Oh, look.

She also realized the work was well within her wheelhouse. “I found it fascinating that what they were using to treat [transgender] people was exactly what I use in my clinic for people who don’t make their own hormones,” she says. “I was trained.

I just didn’t realize I was trained to do the gender-affirming part.”

Adkins treated that first patient, a teenage girl: slowly rebalancing her hormones while taking care not to trigger any mood destabilization. Then more referrals arrived. “First it was one, and then

“I don’t really UNDERSTAND it.

I don’t know how to do it.

They didn’t teach me that.”

You increase this hormone and that hormone goes up,’ ” she says. “It all fit together in little puzzle pieces.”

Adkins arrived at Duke in 2004 as a clinical instructor. She has worked with hormones ever since, treating children with a wide range of disorders. But when the New York doctor called, she had never used hormones to help patients conform their physical traits to their gender identities. (This is called gender-affirming therapy.) “I don’t really understand it,” she told her colleague. “I don’t know how to do it. They didn’t teach me that.” During medical school in the 1990s, Adkins had learned about gender dysphoria, the stress some people feel when their assigned gender conflicts with their experienced one.

But treating transgender youth was a new arena in the United States, and she had not kept up with the literature.

The doctor assured Adkins that the work “is really not difficult” for someone with her skills, and he sent her some of his research. As she read more, she was encouraged by data showing that older trans teens suffered less depression and anxiety after starting hormone therapy.

it was two, and then all of a sudden it was seven,” she says. Working alone was not viable, she realized; someone needed to maintain contact with all her patients’ mental-health counselors. She tried to coordinate this by herself, but couldn’t. “It needed to be a team approach.”

Adkins approached Jonathan Routh, a Duke urologist who worked with a different set of children: those born with ambiguous genitalia. Their conditions are collectively known as “disorders of sex development” (DSD), though some advocates prefer the term “intersex.” Routh, in 2011, had tried to start a DSD clinic at Duke. “I failed miserably,” he recalls, in part because “I didn’t have great buy-in from our mental-health providers. In the face of that, I gave up on the whole idea.”

Routh recalls what came next: “Deanna called me and basically said, ‘I’m seeing more and more trans kids. I know you have an interest in the DSD side of things.

Clearly these are two discreet populations, but there’s a lot of overlap.’ ” Both involve gender; both sometimes require endocrinologists and urologists; and intersex youth have a higher rate of gender dys-

they warn that delays could take an emotional toll.

Underlying this consensus is a growing understanding that gender identity has a substantial biological component. “We have no clue what the biology is,” says Joshua Safer, medical director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston Medical Center. But even without understanding the mechanism, he says, researchers can point to four lines of evidence for a biological basis.

The first (and strongest) is what Safer calls “an accidental experiment”: the experiences of intersex children assigned the wrong gender. “We in the medical community, over many decades, were supremely confident that gender identity was malleable and not biological, and that we could therefore manipulate it,” he says. Genetic males were often assigned female because the surgery was easier, then raised as girls and given estrogen as adolescents. “Despite a very, very aggressive program, when those kids were queried, the majority say they have male gender identity,” Safer says. “We had a hypothesis, we tested it, and we were wrong.”

TRANSITION: Deanna Adkins in the lobby of the Duke Children’s Hospital.

Second are twin studies Before 2014, the endocrinologist had never treated gender dysphoria. that show identical—but not fraternal—twins of phoria than the general population. Plus, as a one-day-a-month operation—and transgender people are dramatically more “if we combine them as one functional as soon as it opened, there was a three- likely than the general population to be clinic,” he says, “we gain some economy month wait for appointments. “We gross- trans themselves. Third is the experience ly underestimated the underlying need in with genetic females exposed to an excess of scale.”

Routh and Adkins recruited Kris- our community,” Routh says. of male hormones in the womb; a substanten Russell, a clinical social worker, and tial minority identifies as male. Fourth, opened Duke Child and Adolescent and weakest, are brain studies that show he idea that someone too young some differences in structure correlating Gender Care in July 2015. It was the to vote could be ready for a gen- to gender identity. first of its kind at a university hospital der transition might not be inin North Carolina, and the idea was to Along with that research is this psytuitive for everyone. But doctors chological reality: Gender dysphoria, left tap into Duke’s vast resources to provide comprehensive services. The clinic began say there’s good reason to start early, and untreated in kids, can be devastating.

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One study out of Boston showed that trans youth suffer substantially more depression, suicidality, and self-harm than their non-trans peers.

“Depression and anxiety accelerate a lot when [children] start to go through puberty and it’s the wrong puberty,” says Duke’s Adkins. “It’s really the best to keep them safe just to address it early.”

In November 2017, the Endocrine Society published new guidelines for treating gender dysphoria. For kids, the society recommended a graduated series of steps.

Early-stage adolescents can take a drug that delays puberty. This treatment, which is reversible, blocks the onset of menstruation and the development of breasts, adult genitals and bone structure, body hair, voice changes, and prominent Adam’s ap40 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

SERVICES: Deanna Adkins and Kristen Russell talk with a client in one of the rooms at the clinic. New patients wait five months for appointments.

ples. These traits, once they develop, are hard to correct later, as any trans woman with broad shoulders and a square jaw could tell you.

One thirteen-year-old Duke clinic patient, who is taking a puberty blocker, says that he had dreaded growing breasts, wearing a chest binder, and having to deal with menstruation. As a result of the medication, he’ll avoid a mastectomy and will likely be less identifiable as transgender.

“Being recognizable is not just an issue of discrimination,” says his mother, who asked that the family not be named. “It’s also, in some places, related to your per-

sonal safety.” More than two dozen transgender Americans were killed in 2017, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which works to ensure equal rights for LGBTQ Americans.

Next, for many, comes the sex hormones: testosterone for men, estrogen for women. These therapies are not fully reversible, so the Endocrine Society advises waiting until the teen is mature enough to make an informed choice. (Mental-health professionals are always involved.) This usually comes around sixteen, though in some cases it might be earlier or later.

Some, but not all, transgender people

make surgical transitions, too. The Endocrine Society recommends waiting until eighteen before genital surgery. It allows for some trans men undergoing hormone therapy to receive mastectomies before their eighteenth birthdays.

Research indicates this early intervention works. A study from The Netherlands looked at fifty-five transgender adults who, on average, underwent puberty suppression at thirteen, hormonal treatment at sixteen, and surgery at twenty. Their psychological well-being, the authors wrote, was “similar to or better than” their peers in the general population.

“He always wanted [a] brother,” their father adds.

Still, when Atom announced he was male, his parents were caught up short on knowledge. “We had no idea there were so many young people going through the same thing,” Delores says. “In our old, old world, we thought we were the only people.”

At the Duke clinic in October 2016, the family spent a couple of hours with Russell, the social worker. That included a one-on-one meeting with Atom. “Having

care. No one pathologized him. “Remember back in the old days when you had people who were disabled and they put you in this special class?” That’s not what it was like, she says. “We were okay to be in the real hospital with other kids. They didn’t make it seem different than any of those other people, and that made it so easy for us.”

Atom wanted to start taking testosterone immediately. He learned that’s not

“We had a hypothesis, we tested it, and we were WRONG.”

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tom Edwards is fortunate; he comes from a family that welcomes diversity and knows what ostracism feels like.

Delores grew up with a lesbian mother and still remembers the whispers in their Durham public-housing community. “It was like a shame, like a shun on the family,” she says. Derlvyn says he was initially attracted to Delores, in part, because she embraced his disabled brother. “We took him to a Hillside football game,” he recalls. “I don’t know how we got the wheelchair in the stadium, but she wasn’t embarrassed by his presence.”

One of Atom’s sisters dated a transgender man, who spent a summer sleeping on their sofa when his own family rejected him. Both sisters belonged to their schools’ support groups for LGBTQ students and their allies. Older brother Devyn, surrounded by sisters, was happy to have a guy to hang out with.

“I was kind of outnumbered,” Devyn says.

WELCOME: Greeting visitors at the sign-in table.

someone ask questions and not be super-judgmental was very nice for me,” Atom says. “It was like: ‘I’m really happy that you’re feeling comfortable with yourself enough to tell others. This is what you need to know about name-changing. Do you want your name to be changed?’ It was information mixed with humanity.”

Atom impressed Russell with his certainty about transitioning, and with his school accomplishments and strong support network. “Even then, at that first visit, I was thinking this kid’s going to be a good candidate for hormones,” she says.

The family then met with Adkins, who noted Atom’s enthusiasm and clarity. “It was obvious he really understood where he was coming from,” the endocrinologist says.

What struck Delores was that so many professionals were invested in Atom’s

how it worked. First, he’d need to go through counseling, outside the Duke system, to make sure he was truly experiencing gender dysphoria. His therapist also needed to ensure there were no psychiatric issues that would preclude a hormonal transition.

“They didn’t try to push this thing too fast, which was great,” Delores says.

“Great for you,” Atom interjects. “Terrible for me.” He was itching to get on with the process.

Six months later, in March 2017, Atom returned to the Duke clinic for his final education session. Shortly afterward, Russell, the social worker, says, Atom received his counselor’s blessing. “She sent me a letter saying she didn’t have any reservations or concerns of him moving forward with his transition,” Russell explains. “So we started.”

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B

y the time Atom arrived at Duke, the gender clinic had already outgrown its original ambition.

“It was incredibly overwhelming, the response we got,” says Adkins. She started with seven cases, “and by the end of the first year, we were over 100.” During that year, they scaled the clinic schedule from once a month to once a week. The case load, not including Routh’s intersex patients, now exceeds 200.

Part of the appeal of the Duke clinic is its relationships throughout the health system. Patients have access to experts from nutrition, adolescent medicine, ob-gyn, pastoral care, family medicine, psychology, and psychiatry. “We began building an infrastructure, so we have places to send these folks to, no matter what their needs might be,” says Russell.

The ties, she notes, extend beyond the hospital: When staff members at two Duke law clinics offered their services, “we said, ‘Yes, we need some help with name changes and discrimination in school and bathrooms.’ ” 42 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

“He’s so comfortable in his skin now. He’s jumping out.

Not AFRAID anymore.”

For mental-health care, the clinic relies primarily on outside providers. That has proven tricky, say Adkins and Russell. Therapists are essential to help trans youth live in their new gender roles and navigate relationships with family, friends, and classmates. For patients like Atom, who lives in Durham, there are plenty of nearby counselors who under-

stand gender identity. But many patients live in far-flung parts of North Carolina and beyond, including remote counties where therapists’ good intentions outpace their expertise.

“For those folks out in the rural areas, it really is tough,” says Russell. “It’s hard to find providers that have any knowledge related to trans health.”

COMFORTABLE: Atom Edwards and his friend Yairy Escobar walk to the cafeteria to set up microphones during their music production class at the Durham School for Creative Studies.

Even identifying a sympathetic therapist can be hard. “I use a few websites to try to locate people who are at least interested,” Russell adds. “And I rely on the families to try to find somebody through word of mouth. I’ve had lots of conversations with providers who are supportive of their patient. They want to know more. They don’t know where to start. I send them articles [and] websites to start doing their homework, just as I had to do. ” The clinic’s other challenge is its own rapid growth. New patients wait five months for appointments. Adkins says she wants to build her clinic’s capacity and Duke’s to keep up with the demand.

She is also looking outside the system— for example, helping colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill launch their own clinic. She says the uptick in patient load reflects shifting social attitudes toward transgender people.

“There’s a huge amount of acceptance and understanding,” says Adkins. “People are able to talk about it and not have as much stigma around it.” While transgender people still face discrimination, harassment, and violence, “the fact that it’s safer to come to medical care makes a huge difference.”

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tom Edwards gives himself a subcutaneous injection of testosterone every two weeks.

When he started hormone therapy in April, he needed his mother’s help. “Now I can do it while I’m watching TV,” he says. “You just get used to it.”

Before he started taking testosterone, the clinic staff told him what to expect— plus, he says, “I researched like nobody’s business”—so when the hormone took effect, the changes already felt familiar.

“Each week would be a different thing,” he says. “It was like my body was trying on a new suit.” For a while, it toggled between masculinity and femininity: “We’re going to make your voice drop, but then it’s going to go back, like ‘delete, delete, delete.’ ” Or his menstruation volume would taper off before growing heavy again.

Over time, the transition became less halting. The changes took firmer hold.

“My voice is way lower,” he says. He has

grown leg hair, and it’s become easier to put on muscle mass. His weight is redistributing to look more male, and his face carries a hint of peach fuzz. “And I’ve been more energetic. Testosterone has made me much more prone to working out or going for a run. I’m eating better— just feeling happier about myself.”

For the first time, Atom says, he can look in a mirror without recoiling.

“Whenever we go to the store, and I have to change and try something on, I’m like,

Duke. “He’s so comfortable in his skin now,” says his mother, Delores. “He’s jumping out. Not afraid anymore.”

One benefit of living as a male, Atom says, is that he can start planning for the future. He wants to go into music, possibly as a producer, “helping others be able to showcase their voice,” he says. “Being the helping hand is something that’s very important to me. I can see myself traveling around the world, trying to make music with other people.”

SUPPORT: Atom Edwards, left, with dog; nephew; mother, Delores; and father, Derlvyn

‘Whoa, I look cool.’ I don’t try to point out certain things about myself that are terrible. I try to see the positive side.”

After his freshman year at Hillside, Atom wanted a fresh start. He transferred to Durham’s School for Creative Studies, a small public magnet school, where he has always been known as a boy. Atom has made a lot of friends there, including a favorite companion who’s also trans.

“Having a friend like that—an equal relationship with give-and-take—makes such a difference,” he says.

This fall Atom served as a semi-public face for transgender youth, speaking on panels to first-year medical students at

This is big for Atom: being able to look beyond everyday concerns like how his acquaintances view him and which pronouns they use. “I’m not entirely sure I would have had a future if I didn’t make my transition,” he says. “Or else I’d be very depressed, and not happy with anything I did. Now that I’ve gotten my identity out of the way, I can worry about more important things.” n Yeoman is a freelance journalist living in Durham. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The American Prospect, and Audubon Magazine, among other publications.

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MUSIC ON HIS MIND Signing with Small Town Records forces a student to begin reconciling his artistic ambitions and his professional goals.

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BY LUCAS HUBBARD PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS HILDRETH

n the Duke Coffeehouse on East Campus, against a backdrop of glitzy streamers and dodecahedral disco balls, Serges Himbaza saunters around onstage, enlivening the feverish crowd. There are nine talented artists here tonight, he explains; they’ll each play two pieces. The audience—staring down both barrels at course registration, Family Weekend, and the fiery 2016 election—has earned an emotional outlet. Roars greet every song. After Himbaza, the emcee, cedes the microphone, he retreats and takes the scene in: the performance, the crowd response, the potential. Soon, he and his cohort will have decisions to make.

Himbaza ’17 is president of Small Town Records, the student-run record label that’s one of Duke University Union’s thirteen committees.

Tonight is the label’s audition show, during which it’ll find the next artists to follow in the footsteps of Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter

Mike Posner ’09, as well as Ian Hölljes ’07 and Eric Hölljes ’09 of Delta Rae, who all played for Small Town Records while at Duke. As Himbaza explained a few weeks earlier, it’s the chance to find the “people who have the music in them,” and to make sure they foster it through their time on campus. “It’s definitely something that’s a gift,” he says. “And if you don’t treat it well, you’ll notice.”

The sixth performer is sophomore Kalif Jeremiah, a spoken-word poet from Brooklyn auditioning as a rapper. Two days earlier, he finalized and memorized “Soul to Take,” his original composition about not fitting in, frustration with the world, and striving in spite of both. In the next year, he would build a fifteen-song repertoire and record in one of the country’s top studios; he would be streaming on Apple Music and Spotify, have a music video, and star in Duke’s version of National Public Radio’s “Tiny Desk Concert,” recorded in a few Blue Zone parking spaces.

STAR SEARCH: With the help of Small Town Records, Kalif Jeremiah is exploring his hip-hop dreams.

44 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

But first, there is the audition, and for Jeremiah the audition is momentous.

Nearly a year later, his dreams of becoming a rapper are no longer mere fantasies; more than ever, they’re palpable. “Before Small Town, I didn’t take music as a career seriously. I think I was always ambitious enough to hope,” he says, “but I think now it’s more of a plan.”

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n the spring of 2006, Colin Tierney ’09 wanted to build something.

After playing music through high school, running his school’s radio station, and hearing a Duke alumnus mention his regret in not starting a record label, an inspired Tierney drew up a $12,000 budget to pitch Small Town Records to Duke Union (now DUU).

That fall, the studio opened in the basement of West Union (now the Brodhead Center). Despite a break-in that cost the label its early recordings, STR managed to remain afloat, recruiting more than thirty students to the team and creating “a home,” Tierney says, “for musicians and music fans who previously didn’t have the resources or the opportunity to pursue music.”

Over the years, the organization’s operation has evolved: Originally, artists weren’t formally signed; instead the label, which was open to anyone looking to improve as a musician or launch a career, produced compilation albums for physical and digital distribution, including on iTunes U. Live performances, too, found an audience at Duke. Tierney recalls an STR event his senior year that transformed Durham restaurants Alivia’s, Mt. Fuji, and Skewers into music clubs, all three brimming with students.

Almost a decade later, Himbaza wants to find that same energy with live shows and informal jam sessions on campus and by nurturing artists. Under his leadership, the executive board reorganized; its six departmental vice presidents now head their own teams. Artists, too, have different support structures; each signee now has a full student network—manager, marketer, producer(s), etc.—to aid in making music and building a brand.

With no returning artists in the fall of 2016, the label had to reload; from seventy applicants it signs five—including Jeremiah—in December. To underpin this larger portfolio of artists, STR’s general body mushrooms from twenty people to sixty-five. “It needed to expand because Duke’s investment in the arts is expanding, and I think as a label we need to expand because we have a unique stake in this arts conversation,” Himbaza said in October of that year. The studio, also home to Duke Student Broadcasting, has grown from a storage closet to a professional-caliber environment: When rapper Wale came to

IN THE STUDIO: Above, Jeremiah shares a composition with his producer, sophomore Eric Morgenstern; right, taking a moment before recording.

“This sounded better in my head.

46 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

campus for the annual K-Ville concert the following spring, he popped in to punch up a recording.

Himbaza rediscovered music’s value in its absence—that is, when he shoved his songs aside to major in economics and electrical engineering. A multi-instrumentalist (much like Tierney), he had to revive his latent musical talents, jamming on a friend’s guitar for eight hours daily over his sophomore summer. “To come back and for it not to feel the same really made me say, ‘Okay, this Small Town thing is important.’ Because if there’s another student like me that’s like, ‘I can’t do this music thing, because I want to pursue this business track, or I want to pursue such-and-such...,’ ” he says. “There has to be something that expands the conversation of music and says there’s more room at the table.”

In one sense, Small Town Records operates like a crash course in entrepreneurship, providing students the chance to run a venture in a riskless space. The bonus, of course, is that students get this experience while writing songs and cutting albums. It’s “a little trick,” Himbaza says: They learn keys to business but never have to forfeit their artistic ambitions. “If you can interrupt the track you’re on, or even just color it or inform it with all the music that you can make—I think that’s a job well done.”

front of a packed Coffeehouse, he wouldn’t have done it. He’s a perfectionist, wary of taking such a public risk on untested work. Growing up, he would stay quiet in social settings, preferring to go home and write. He never shared any of his compositions with a wider audience until his junior year of high school, when he helped form the school’s spoken-word club.

While Jeremiah tries to build his own sound, he lists Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Eminem as influences as well as the spoken-word poet Anthony McPherson. His lyrics don’t hold back. Thirty seconds into the first verse he wrote for the audition, he’s confronting race relations and examples of police brutality in America—like the death of Eric Garner just six miles from his high school.

“Our problem don’t got solution / Ain’t no potion for pollution / He’s confused, what’s the confusion? / All he said was that he’s human / He’s only breathing, why you shooting? Why you shooting? / I said he’s only breathing, why you shooting?”

In the subsequent lines, he relishes the chance to have an audience, while also acknowledging that his efforts to effect change will, most certainly, be futile.

Delete that right now!”

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uring the first week of February 2017, Jeremiah is running late for an interview. A member of the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program that’s shared between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he’s trying to return to Durham, but today a water failure in Orange County causes the line for buses back to swell. Jeremiah’s manager, sophomore Chris Welland, covers for him, dutifully explaining it’s not his client’s fault.

STR likes to pair managers with artists whose style they appreciate. “Some rap lacks substance in a way, but I feel that [Jeremiah’s] really interested in having lyrics that mean something and have a social-justice message,” says Welland, a math and public policy double-major who finds small businesses like STR intriguing. And given that Jeremiah is in the nascent stages of his music career, Welland’s role becomes more interesting. The artist’s brand right now is putty; Jeremiah hasn’t even found a stage name. “We’re figuring out who he wants to be,” says Welland.

Upon Jeremiah’s arrival, he tells his story, starting from his encounter with the STR studio as a freshman, when he wrote an intro for an EP by three of his fraternity brothers. He paints the leap to auditioning for the label as a logical next step. But he’ll later admit that had he known the final show would be in

“Don’t talk much, nah, but got a lot on his mind / If he speak, they don’t hear him only listen to rhymes / He spit it on the ones and twos, now they hear him just fine / But they way too busy bumping to even notice the signs” He thinks his music may contrast enough with the standard party fare to find an audience. “Most of what you hear on a conversation basis on a college campus is very surface-level,” Jeremiah says. “If you can go to a performance and hear someone preach to those other parts that maybe they don’t get to talk about all the time, then that connection can be made.”

Regarding long-term goals, however, he hesitates. While this is intriguing, ultimately he wants to pursue law. “But I want to get as far as I can [with rap] in the next two years,” he says, “and then I can hopefully re-assess at the end of that and see where it takes me.”

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ny journey will start with the debut single.

On his Instagram, Jeremiah shares his personal philosophy that “sleep is for the successful,” a luxury the driven-but-unaccomplished can’t afford.

Later that February, the motto seems apt when the studio—tucked behind the Bryan Center—begins filling up at 10 on a Tuesday night. Jeremiah, Welland, and Himbaza are all there, as are producer Justin Baez and engineer Eric Morgenstern, both sophomores. Symphony Webber, a fellow sophomore who delivers the chorus for the single, shows up after a few minutes, tackling her homework on a couch beneath a lighting panel dotDUKE MAGAZINE

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ted with neon tape until she’s needed. Baez, “too stressed” to sit, makes small talk with her about Fitbits while Himbaza fiddles on the keyboard.

The single—“Cannot Stay,” a restructured version of “Soul to Take” with a new chorus—should be out the following week.

But the right vibe for the song proves evasive. Himbaza, helping produce, isn’t happy with the bass and wants more “boom in the pads”; once that’s settled, he wants the beat to “groove, not move.”

He shuffles the layout of the tracks in the Ableton Live recording tool. The puzzle pieces are there; the final product isn’t.

Himbaza likes the new cut (“that chorus bangs!”), but the fix

48 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

has created inconsistencies. “I listened to the beat to get the vibe for the song,” says Jeremiah. “So when you change the beat….” It’s an imperfect science. Himbaza takes the controls again; the others bet on whether the result will work or not. Production is a meticulous, binary exercise: Either the song’s right, or it needs tweaking.

Jeremiah finally approves the beat, much to Himbaza’s relief.

“There’s a moment at the end of every project when you’re like, ‘This is s—-, f—- everything,’ ” says Himbaza. “And we’re past that point. Hopefully.”

The producers call upon Webber. She warms up (“mama made me mash my M&Ms”) as Morgenstern adjusts the mic

to prevent feedback as well as “clipping” (too loud sounds that lead to distorted recordings). Her voice a necessary salve to Jeremiah's lyrics, Webber glides through countless takes, well past the point when everyone can recite the refrain of both disenchantment and endurance: “Seen the same walls since I was little / Holding my breath till I see the light / Had to let it fall to survive / I cannot stay, no” Himbaza gets a good cut and layers it—twice, three times to build a more robust sound. But once momentum has built, Himbaza seems to make the wrong keystroke and suddenly delete all the team’s work and progress. “You can’t blame Ableton for that,” says Morgenstern, with a laugh.

The crisis, thankfully, is a false alarm. Still, it’s past midnight, and Jeremiah hasn’t recorded. The song won’t come out on time.

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our weeks later, the newly signed STR artists deliver their first live show on the outdoor patio by Devil’s Krafthouse, right below the Plaza. With students getting wristbands to earn access to the roped-off area, it’s the rare concert that occurs fifty feet from an Au Bon Pain.

The nervous energy of November has vanished, superseded by a free-flowing ebullience fitting for the open bar. “You see that white thing back there?” Himbaza says between songs, pointing to the red-carpet photo backdrop stationed in front of ABP. “We paid for that, so please use it.”

Himbaza, in his sendoff for the show, gives thanks to STR’s advisers, Ali Shumar and Tom Wilson. The two work for University Center Activities & Events (UCAE)—Shumar as the assistant director for arts and media on the student-involvement team, Wilson as the production supervisor on the media-services team—and meet with STR’s president and vice president each week. They’re informal counselors, keeping an eye toward preventing burnout, making sure the students stay “holistically healthy.” Calling them taskmasters is too severe, but they aid in the minutiae involved with running a record label— hitting deadlines, submitting samples to awards shows. A checklist for STR and other DUU groups consumes Shumar’s entire office whiteboard.

What’s daunting for the group is maintaining year-to-year momentum. Jeremiah has to focus on the trajectory and progression of his music, but he at least has the benefit of continuity. The STR executive board cycles through each spring; shortly after the signed artist show, Himbaza will step down for rising senior Samantha McLendon (although until his graduation, he’ll help with the transition). Each April, when the DUU budget gets finalized, STR’s focus invariably shifts. “Every one of them has their different vision—this student wanted to buy all this new equipment, but this one wants to do more live shows,” Wilson says. “You try to funnel in a certain direction so the program keeps building.”

But even with the advice and counsel Wilson and Shumar provide, the students remain the catalysts. “They really do run their own ship,” says Shumar. “We’re here to help navigate the ins and outs of the semester...but they are the ones—the president and executive vice president and leadership—they’re the ones moving it forward.” And without the professional guidance that’s available at a performing-arts school, these students bear an extra responsibility: When it comes to actually making the music, Wilson says, “these guys are on their own.”

“When I like my music, that translates into more energy for the show.”

ON STAGE: Jeremiah, as Apollo J, trying to move the crowd.

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n August, Jeremiah sends an e-mail that reads, almost to the letter, like his correspondence in late March. “The single is estimated to be released next Friday…. Trust me, I know it’s very frustrating.”

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ward. The Robertson Scholars program features an “Exploration Summer” meant to target academic and cultural interests. Originally, Jeremiah anticipated traveling to South America to teach English. But with the winds of STR behind him, he changed course and instead spent the summer studying at the University of California-Los Angeles with music producer Adam Moseley, who has worked with (among others) John Cale, U2, and Beck.

The six-week schooling affirmed his interest. Moseley, who broke into the industry by working as a cook at a music studio, helped instill patience; in August, Jeremiah cites Kendrick Lamar’s careful, inching development—Lamar signed onto a label but didn’t release a debut album for seven years—as a path worth appreciating. And once Jeremiah spent time surrounded by music figures, with the chance to record at UCLA’s top-tier studio, his mentality changed. He started writing daily. He journaled, trying to find the fat to eliminate in his artistic diet. Mostly, he now aims for his output to reflect more consistency. “The best people don’t just have one hit,” he says. “They work at their craft every day, and they get to a point where they’re good enough to consistently put out music.”

That commitment contributed to the delays with “Cannot Stay,” which saw many edits and multiple final versions. The delays also reflect the fact that STR is a college label with high turnover; at one point, the files get sent off to be mixed and mastered, but they’re damaged. The originals only exist on the computer in the STR studio, which this summer gets renovated. And the communication for a fix remains in the inbox of the now-graduated, now-working Himbaza.

Once the single is eventually finalized, the timing’s poor. It doesn’t make sense to release such a song in July, Jeremiah notes, as the campus buzz will be subdued; they delay the launch until the fall semester. “I feel as though I’ve created much better music since then,” he says, disappointed by all the hiccups. “So for me, the more time that passed, I felt like I’d be releasing something that’d be farther and farther away from my current capability, which is always something that I’m cognizant of, because I want my best to be out there.”

He beelines to the studio before the fall semester, knowing that’s the best chance to record before classwork starts competing for his time. He finds new producers on Central Campus whose apartments are a short walk away; they’ll be perfect collaborators. Even without the unreleased EP he completed over the summer, on Soundcloud his tracklist ticks upward throughout the fall semester, from four to seven.

As his audience builds, it validates his decision to resist making trendy, “cool” music. The notion became cemented when he chose his stage name, Apollo J. It stems from a few interests— his appreciation of Greek mythology, his childhood fascination with space, his conception of himself as “the man on the moon, an outcast.” The lengthy search resolved once he embraced himself. “That was the first time [in music] that I learned that just being honest is better,” he says. “People were like, ‘Yeah, I really like the name Apollo J,’ even before I explained what it meant

to me.... So I thought, ‘You can just be honest, Kalif, and sometimes it’ll come out better.’ ”

D

ays before fall break, STR artists liven up PricePalooza, the carnival-esque portion of President Vincent E. Price’s inauguration. The performance, set between Giles and Wilson dormitories, features the singular backdrop of fair attractions and inflatable slides. A few buildings down, it’s impossible to hear the music over the elated screams and generators keeping the toys aerated.

Apollo J closes the show. Seconds after taking the stage, he’s imploring the audience to get moving, fighting to take the vibe from the autumnal picnic to something a bit more buoyant. He shouts out the men’s basketball team members in attendance; he describes a song that features United in Praise, Duke’s gospel choir, as “trap music for Jesus.” “I don’t know if you can have a classic if you’ve been rapping for nine months,” he says, teasing

“You can just be honest, Kalif, and sometimes it’ll come out better.”

50 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

INSPIRATION: his final freestyle, “but this is the one Jeremiah’s dorm people like the most.” room has a chalk By the end of the six-song, twenwall where he can ty-minute set, the crowd has transwrite lyrics as they formed from four rows to eight, now come to him. all standing. The last couple of lines underscore both his new assuredness and his same old celestial focus: “Got a grip on his bars / Aim high, might fall on the stars.”

“I’m more confident in the music I have now,” Jeremiah says matter-of-factly two weeks later, during a recording session with Eric Morgenstern, now STR’s vice president of audio engineering. “When I like my music, that translates into more energy for the show.”

They take an hour and a half to record a two-minute freestyle, six-or-so seconds at a time. Reading off his phone in his right hand, scything his left through the air to mark his rhythm, Jeremiah gets the beat fed through his headphones and raps in the pin-drop-quiet studio. Every word—every syllable—is up for debate. “You can still go low,” says Morgenstern, regarding the entry to the last word of a line, “but you need that energy.”

When Jeremiah listens to the playback, he’ll clasp the mic stand, almost as if to brace himself against a bad recording. He yelps, at his rapping volume, when he doesn’t like it. “This sounded better in my head,” he says, or, more than once, “Delete that right now!” Morgenstern, a longtime collaborator and aspiring rapper himself, needles Jeremiah when he uses the same vocal warmups as always, not to mention when he tries to see past Morgenstern’s unflappable façade. (Morgenstern: “Analyzing my

facial expressions?” Jeremiah: “Your faces tell a whole story, bro.”)

STR creates two things: music and communities—between the artists and support players, among the performers who disseminate ideas from their particular genres, and across the arts, business, and myriad other wings of student life. The label has traditional success stories, but mostly the joy stems from livening up campus. “I try to not think of everything in terms of boosting my career. I think that’s a very, like, Duke mindset,”

says now-president McLendon. “If I’m enjoying something and if I’m creating something that’s cool that other people are enjoying, too, then that’s good enough for me.”

Moreover, it shows students something new, opening doors that had been locked or obscured. Jeremiah, from signing with STR and “being forced to talk” to people with whom he never discussed his music, has begun to heed his older brother’s advice to give music “the attention that you would give anything that you’ve done before in school,” he recalls.

Jeremiah still thinks he’ll go into law—just not yet. The two-year allocation for rap he mentioned in February is now four years, maybe five. It’s a moving of deadlines that echoes the resistance Himbaza described when he thought he’d have to give up his music at Duke: “You can’t cut out that much time—that entire part of your life—that quickly,” he said.

Back in the studio, the recording appears finished until Jeremiah asks to hear the full version. “Whoa, that’s where I started?” he asks, concerned about his low energy level in the first verse. He and Morgenstern trace back, locating where the sound is acceptable and, more importantly, where they need to go to work.

Jeremiah admits he’s a tough critic, but he has a threshold in mind. “The songs [of mine] that I really like,” he says, “I can listen to them forever.” The constant tinkering and pursuit of perfection are features, not bugs. On “Cannot Stay,” at Himbaza’s suggestion, the final edit—implemented months after the song’s conception—added a sample of a preacher’s exhortation.

“You want something? Take it!” the preacher screams over the roar of the crowd. “You want it? You want it? Take it!” And there, the song fades out.

As Jeremiah prepares to finalize the freestyle, it’s almost like he’s answering the preacher. “We’ll get it,” he says, partly to Morgenstern, partly—maybe mostly—to himself.

And with that, Jeremiah puts his headset on and returns to the microphone. n DUKE MAGAZINE

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FDCONNECTIONS

ForeverDuke

Grabbing the bullhorn Building on their lifelong community involvement, Steve Schewel and Charles Francis aimed to lead Triangle cities.

By Scott Huler | Photography by Chris Hildreth

S

TEVE SCHEWEL ’73, PH.D. ’82 used to carry in his wallet a picture of Terry Sanford holding a bullhorn, addressing a crowd of students who in 1970 had staged a sit-in on the traffic circle. In the wake of the Kent State shootings two days before, Schewel, then a freshman, had joined the crowd that stopped traffic to protest the war and the shootings.

Sanford, inaugurated as Duke’s president only seven months before in the hopes that he could manage just such crises, showed serious leadership cred. “President Sanford came out with a bullhorn and asked us to meet him at the chapel,” Schewel recalls.

“We all marched down to the chapel.” At the chapel—and in other meetings in Page Auditorium during those hectic days— Sanford discussed what the students wanted. Students, upset by the war and stunned by the violence against them by the National Guard at Kent State, could see no point in returning to class, and they raised a proposal that Sanford brought to the faculty.

“The faculty voted, and Sanford supported the idea, that students could stop taking classes before the end of school. They would get a pass-fail in class rather than a grade, if you wanted to kind of work your conscience on the war.”

With the faculty and the president on board, Schewel says, “for hundreds of us, school ended that day. We cut our hair, and we canvassed in Durham,” on behalf of two amendments to congressional spending bills that would have required the United States to withdraw its forces from Cambodia and Vietnam.

The bills never passed, of course, but Steve Schewel had taken his first steps on the five-decade path that, in November, led to his

t

Francis, left, and Schewel’s first-ever meeting featured their shared amazement with the West Union they knew versus today’s Brodhead Center, comparisons of their class years, and the basketball team's win-loss records during their stints as students.

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ForeverDuke election as mayor of Durham. On that same day, Charles Francis J.D. ’88 stood for mayor of Raleigh, Durham’s partner and rival in the Triangle.

Schewel won; Francis lost. Francis, a Raleighan by birth and choice, says he’s far from done running for office in his home city and has a cheerful, “wait ’til next year” demeanor. Schewel, whose win advances him from a city council seat he won in 2011, bears the weight of power he saw Sanford wield.

“There’s a difference between mayor and city council,” he says. “Now I do have the bullhorn. And using it wisely is important.”

N

EITHER SCHEWEL’S nor Francis’ runs would surprise those who know them: Both come from political families, both have been deeply involved in their communities throughout their lives, and both look to experiences at Duke as foundational to their lifelong commitments.

At the pleasantly disheveled dining room table of his book-lined home in Durham’s Watts Hospital-Hillandale neighborhood, Schewel thinks back on that picture. And though he looks back now at Sanford’s leadership with that bullhorn, the years he carried that color photograph had more to do with the crowd than the leader. “I think that he made a really good decision under really tough circumstances,” Schewel says, but “I carried it because of the kids.

“You know: us.”

Us. The world was changing, and Schewel felt that change right on the Duke campus. He remembers his English class reading Yeats when the Kent State shootings happened. “I had a wonderful English professor, Ron Butters, and I remember he read ‘Easter 1916’ [Yeats’ meditation on the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising in Ireland] right after the kids were killed. And I just remember the tears were streaming down his face. It was just a time when the campuses were really fraught with change. The war was right outside our doors.”

About those days Schewel quotes Wordsworth—accurately—from memory: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ but to be young was very heaven!” Schewel identified so strongly as a Duke student in those turbulent times that he served as president of the student government. “It was a time of tremendous ferment in the country,” he recalls: The Kent State and Jackson State shootings came after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. “But you felt there was a time for a lot of positive change and a lot

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54 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

of possibilities for that.” And something important to remember, he says, is that “a lot of that happened.” Earth Day. The environmental movement. The women’s movement. The peace movement. Continued progress on civil rights. “So for me rather than a time where I thought things were terrible, it was a time when things were really hard, this war is awful, and we need to make changes.”

When he graduated, he went to Columbia and gathered up a master’s degree in English, though perhaps the main thing he learned was that “I didn’t want to be an English professor.” He returned to Durham, working first as a teacher, then for a news service, and then for N.C. Public Interest Research Group, which focuses on the rights of consumers in relation to influences like large banks and corporations, and then returned to graduate school, in 1982 getting a Ph.D. from Duke in education. He spent part of 1975 helping his father run a successful campaign for Virginia state senate (Schewel grew up in Lynchburg; his father, Elliot, served as state senator from 1976 to 1995), and it was his activity in Durham and North Carolina politics that led him to the work for which he has been most known, as the founder and publisher of the North Carolina Independent, (now Indy Week), Durham’s longstanding alternative newsweekly. Protesting the Shearon Harris nuclear plant, Schewel engaged in civil disobedience “and went to jail for eight days in Wake County.” Throughout the trial, “we kept saying we didn’t like the way the newspapers were covering

t

After a

“The war was right outside our doors.”

-year career at Duke, Ron Butters retired in 2007 and is now professor emeritus of English.

what we were doing,” he recalls, “and why didn’t we start a newspaper?”

So he did, with David Birkhead ’69, once editor of The Chronicle. “I had a baby, got my Ph.D., so it took us a while to do it,” he says. “But in April of ’83, we published our first issue.

“So I was publisher and majority owner for the next twenty-nine years.”

He’s proud of the Indy’s decades of service to Durham and the state, recalling breaking stories on abuses by the state Department of Transportation, work on the death penalty, stories on workers’ rights. The struggle to keep the paper in print was always a challenge, but Schewel thinks of the paper more generally. “There were a couple gifts the Indy gave,” he says, “one of which was helping to create an alternative culture in the Triangle, both in terms of politics and art.”

“We promoted all these local musicians for thirty years,” to say nothing of local artists, playwrights, and artisans, he says.

“And we published thousands of freelance writers who made their bones at the Independent. That’s something I’m really proud of.” By the time he sold his interest in the paper in 2012, he had served on the Durham board of education for a term and run successfully for Durham city council in 2011.

He had also in 2000 begun teaching in the Hart Leadership Program at the Sanford School. There, along with Alma Blount, now director of the program and also the first photography editor of the Independent, he most recently taught “Political Participation and Leadership.” And if Schewel has always been unapologetically liberal, as a teacher he plainly reaches even students who identify as “outspoken conservatives.” Sophomore Mitchell Siegel, reflecting on Schewel’s teaching in a November column for The Chronicle, expressed “the utmost respect” for Schewel and characterized him as “an advocate for learning and listening to diverse perspectives,” a teacher who “demonstrates political acumen by facilitating constructive discourse and connecting with people on a true, personal level.”

Siegel says Schewel “is not a phony politician who has his own self-interest at the forefront”—high praise, given that Schewel has been in politics since the early 1970s, when he worked on the first political campaign of one Bill Bell, who served as county commissioner for twenty-eight years and then mayor of Durham for sixteen. When Bell decided to retire, Schewel was one of many ready to step forward.

T

HE CURRENT POLITICAL MOMENT reminds him of his college days—there’s significant turmoil, but he sees great opportunity. One of the things he appreciates about his run for mayor was that he and his opponents differed mostly in degree. They all seemed to agree on the basic issues Durham faced: “The

issues are the issues in most urban areas: affordable housing, gentrification, crime and policing, and what will our quality of life be as we grow. Let’s make the city we love a city for all.

We are prospering, but 20 percent of our population is not sharing in that new prosperity. How are we going to change that? How are we going to embrace all the different people here in Durham?

“Farad [Ali, Schewel’s final opponent] and I had differences in emphasis, but Farad’s slogan was ‘One Durham.’ I think we were very much on the same page in terms of vision, of our city as an inclusive place where everybody needs to share in our newfound prosperity.”

Standing up for inclusiveness and doing things that mattered were things Schewel learned growing up in Lynchburg.

People ask Schewel whom he models himself after and he answers quickly. “My parents. My father was a Democrat from Lynchburg at the time Jerry Falwell was in his heyday.

He and my mom were Lynchburg civil-rights liberals in the ’50s and ’60s, running against a very difficult segregationist tide.” Along with his father’s decades in the state senate, his mother was such a passionate volunteer and activist on behalf of women’s rights, racial justice, the arts, and education that when she died in September 2017, the Lynchburg News & Advance ran a piece headlined “Lynchburg loses ‘a wonderful friend.’ ” She helped found, among other things, the Lynchburg public library and a local chapter of the League of Women Voters. She died only months before her son was elected mayor of his adopted town.

S

TRONG WOMEN played a powerful role in the education of Charles Francis, too. Francis’ father died when Francis was nine, but his mother, who has an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, was far from his only example. “My aunt, Vivian Irving, who ran the [family] printing business, was one of the founders of Democratic Women of Wake County, and she along with others integrated the League of Women Voters here,” he says, in a conference room in the downtown Raleigh historic home he has renovated for his law practice. A registrar for the Wake County Board of Elections for thirty years, Irving would check in during elections. “I remember hanging around polling places when she was looking after me,” Francis laughs now.

The printing business, Francis says, was where “we mixed commerce and politics and civic service—printing jobs and talking politics,” with a parade of Raleigh political heavyweights, especially from the African-American community.

Francis remembers seeing in the shop Clarence Lightner, Raleigh’s first publicly elected mayor and the first African-American mayor of a Southern city larger than 50,000 people. He also remembers John Winters, the first black city council-

t

David Birkhead ’69 was one of the students involved in planning the protest march that accompanied the 1968 Silent Vigil on West Campus; April marks the 50th anniversary of that event.

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ForeverDuke man, and people like now-congressman David Price, who also taught political science at Duke. “That type of political involvement was just something I came up with.”

His great-grandfather, James Irving, was a freedman, born in Onslow County and a slave until he was twenty-five. Francis’ grandfather, Charles Irving Sr., was born in 1896—“the same year as Plessy v. Ferguson, ironically,” Francis notes. “The first sixty years of his life he was living under the veil of segregation, but still he rose.” From a large family, Charles Sr. went from being farmed out to work in wealthy people’s homes throughout the county, to boarding school, to training in Kinston, where he got a community-college certification as a printer, though from college he went to serve in World War I. Returning from the war, he came to Raleigh to set up his printing business—“but they were hiring at the post office,” Francis says.

Charles Sr. could recognize a good gig when he saw one, so he had stable employment all through the Depression. When he retired from that—and from a side business as an impresario, bringing performers like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington to Raleigh—he formed the printing business, eventually run by his daughter, Francis’ Aunt Vivian. Charles Sr.’s certificate of his training in printing still hangs in Francis’ office.

Francis’ mother, Florence, graduated from high school at fourteen and college at eighteen, and in those days of Jim Crow had, Francis notes wryly, “all the qualifications to go to business school at Chapel Hill, except for one.” She went instead to the University of Chicago, and Francis notes that under arcane laws trying to retain Jim Crow before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, states refusing to allow African-American students to attend their schools commonly paid the difference between state tuition and the tuition charged elsewhere. So the state of North Carolina helped pay for his mother’s University of Chicago M.B.A.: “I know a number of people in their nineties who had their graduate education paid for by various Southern states,” he says. As a college administrator and teacher at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, she met Francis’ father, a student there, and they married, moving first to Antigua, where Francis’ father was from, and then back to Raleigh just before Francis was born in 1963.

His father died young but that didn’t stop Francis. Princeton.

Duke Law. A judicial clerkship. A couple of years as a U.S. attorney in the Middle District of North Carolina, where he was happy, “but I proposed marriage to my co-clerk, and she didn’t want to stay in Winston-Salem,” so they moved to Raleigh.

Practicing law at an international firm, he quickly got back into the work of running the city of his birth: Raleigh Planning Commission, then an appointment to a vacant position on Raleigh City Council at age twenty-nine, a seat he ran to retain, though he lost. “So I thought this would be a good time to leave the big firm and start a law firm. So that’s what I did.”

At a

2009

56 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

And with roots running as deep in Raleigh as his did, Francis found that running his own law firm also meant constant community activity: years on the boards of the Democratic Party of Wake County and the Raleigh-Wake Citizens Association; membership on the board of directors of North Carolina Advocates for Justice and the Wake County Bar Association. He has served on the board of the YMCA of the Triangle—the same Y he hung around when he was growing up—and the Centennial Authority, which built the entertainment and sports arena now called the PNC Center. He was a director of Rex Healthcare and Rex Hospital and then, when it was sold to UNC Health Care, he served as a trustee of the John Rex Endowment, which manages the proceeds of that sale: “We have given away $40 million over sixteen years,” he says, broadly targeting health care for low-income people, and the principal from the sale still remains.

Francis still serves on the board of the Research Triangle Park Foundation and was a founding director and remains vice chair of North State, a community bank.

W

ITH ALL THAT INVOLVEMENT, and with his kids growing up and moving out, he felt moved to get back into politics—for almost the exact same reasons that Schewel mentions. “Most of the problems are the challenges of growth,” Francis says. “How we’re going to keep the public infrastructure up with the sixty or so people moving here every day, and how we can include more people in the blessings of growth.

“It was clear to me that some parts of town and many people in town were not being included in growth. Growth should not just be for buildings and population—it should be for people who live in the city now, and for their quality of life.”

Just like Durham, Raleigh is experiencing enormous growth and prosperity, but the growth raises “a larger conversation that progressives need to have on the future of progressive politics.”

More starkly, “the lack of diversity on Raleigh City Council, which has existed for over fifty years, has policy implications. I think if we had a more diverse and representative council there would be more equity in city budget decisions.”

John Winters—one of the people who frequented the family print shop—was Raleigh’s first black councilman. “And here we are fifty-five years later, and there’s one African-American city councilman. And Raleigh is far more diverse now than when I grew up here.”

The matter of the map comes up—a map widely publicized after Francis lost the race for mayor, showing the precincts in Raleigh’s prosperous north and west uniformly voting for

luncheon, after John Hope Franklin’s death, William Leuchtenburg spoke of their legendary course.

“Most of the problems are the challenges of growth.” three-time incumbent Nancy McFarlane. To the less prosperous (and less white) east and south? Uniform support for Francis. Francis doesn’t accuse Raleigh—or McFarlane—of racism. But “the community is not reflected in the council,” he says, and he believes that affects policy decisions.

Schewel, meanwhile, believes though the Raleigh precinct map got a lot of attention, Durham’s map would look similar. In fact, it does show an almost exact copy of Raleigh’s distribution. The prosperous and white center and west precincts voted for Schewel; those on the east went for Ali. “Race is still the dominant overlay in American electoral politics,” Schewel says.

Looking at his time at Duke, Francis recalls his financial-aid package, arranged in decreasing amounts—a good deal of aid his first term, diminishing to nothing his final semester. “I’m not that good at math,” he says, “but I quickly realized I was going to run out of money if I didn’t do something.” He became an RA, contemplating such questions as “Why the hell would water be coming through the ceiling in the basement?”

The answer: After the men’s soccer team’s national championship, kids in the room above his had a sauna party.

But you don’t make a public servant by asking him to clean up after sauna parties. “The two classes that formed the big-

gest impression on me both pointed me in the direction of public service,” he says. One was a third-year practice clinic.

He worked with the Orange-Chatham District Attorney’s Office, and once a week he handled the office’s needs in District Court in Pittsboro. “I saw just the range of people that came through Pittsboro”—a growing Latino community, the people who had been there for decades, the university community. The sense that justice involved serving every segment of a community left a lasting imprint.

His most powerful Duke experience, though, was Walter Dellinger’s course in constitutional history. Dellinger, who as solicitor general argued many cases before the Supreme Court, taught the portion of the course on the constitutional convention; John Hope Franklin—“who was a family friend,” Francis notes—taught the portion about the constitution’s changes after the Civil War and Reconstruction; and William Leuchtenburg, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on Franklin Roosevelt, taught the portion about the Depression and the New Deal. “A trio of giants,” Francis calls the professors, and, he says, “That type of teaching and scholarship whetted my interest in public service. I would stay after class and talk with Dr. Franklin for as long as he would talk.”

That’s a long time ago; many elections have come and gone since then. And Francis plans to run again for office, though which office he hasn’t yet specified. Schewel, meanwhile, holding that metaphorical bullhorn in Durham, sees in the turbulence of today’s politics something not dissimilar to what he saw in his days as a student activist. “It was a time of tremendous ferment and opportunity,” he recalls. People believed they could make change then, and Schewel believes they can now. “And we can,” he says. “That was the thing. We can.”

Does he have any advice for Francis, or even for the victorious McFarlane? “The last thing either of them would want,” he says, laughing, “is advice from me.”

Au contraire. “I would like to speak with Steve Schewel,” Francis says. They share a background at Duke, a deep commitment to the good of their communities—and the willingness to put themselves on the line. They both took lessons from their time at Duke. And now that Schewel, at least, has that bullhorn in his hand, he feels the same optimism he felt on the Duke traffic circle: The challenges are great, but he knows the people can make change. In fact, after decades of experience, he thinks he knows something more.

“The difference between now and then is that I still know that we can,” Schewel says. “But I hope the difference now is that now I know how.” n

t “I know he appreciated the enthusiasm of the students. And because I followed John Hope, I knew…how much they admired him.”

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ForeverDuke Newsmakers

Remy Steinegger / Wikipedia

As the first woman to give more than $40 billion to charity, Melinda Gates ’86, M.B.A. ’87 is featured in “Firsts,” a Time multimedia project featuring trailblazing women.

Former Duke football player Akhil Ross ’02 was named the 2018 National Principal of the Year.

Helen Zou B.S.E. ’13 cofounded Free Will, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to make a will online.

Megan Kime Photography

Humanitarian Paul Farmer ’82 won the 2017 MacLean Center Prize in Clinical Medical Ethics, the largest such award in the field.

Former Duke field hockey player Laura Tierney ’09 works with students to fight cyberbullying through her organization, The Social Institute.

Ade Hassan ’05 has founded Nubian Skin, an undergarment company for women of color.

Catherine Gilliss B.S.N. ’71 is the new dean of the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco.

Olympics medal-winning fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad ’07 is the face of Mattel’s first-ever Barbie wearing a hijab.

Shoshana Bucholz-Miller ’95 helped spearhead the creation of the first-ever holographic testimonies of Holocaust survivors for the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center.

Kathy Tran ’00 became the first Asian-American woman elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

Former Duke golfers Yu Liu ’16, left, and Celine Boutier ’16, right, earned 2018 LPGA tour cards.

58 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Jeff Stern ’07 joined the nationalsecurity team of journalists of The Center for Public Integrity.

1.2.3.

QUESTIONS FOR...

Fourteen alumni have made Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list: Jacob Tobia ’14 (Media), Caroline Fairchild ’12 (Media), Charlie Neiman '10 (Media), Mike Posner '09 (Music), Scott Martin ’14 (Energy), Karim Khalil ’12 (Energy), Hannah Kate Sieber ’13 (Energy), Michael Dechert '10 (Finance), Tom Dadon ’13 (Finance), Thea Neal A.M.'12 (Marketing & Advertizing), Jake Stauch '15 (Games), Daisy Jing'10 (Manufacturing & Industry), and Ivonna Dumanyan ’16 and Gabby Levac ’14 (Health Care) —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.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Kara Medoff Barnett ’00, a Tony Awardwinning theater producer, the former managing director of Lincoln Center International, and the current executive director of the American Ballet Theatre. She is the keynote speaker for this year’s Women’s Weekend held on campus.

What does the executive director of a ballet company do?

I run the business side of the ballet. (I have a partner, Kevin McKenzie, who is the artistic director. He stewards the product, hires the dancers, and largely decides what we are going to perform.) My job is to strengthen the enterprise and to build a team around the artistic work to propel it and help it reach the next generation of audiences. We have an administrative staff of seventy-five, ninety dancers, an orchestra, a board of forty-eight, and a following in the handful of cities where we perform.

We were designated—by an act of Congress in 2006— as America’s National Ballet Company, and we take that really seriously. At our heart, we see ourselves as cultural ambassadors.

It’s an exciting job.

When you began at Duke, you thought you might pursue studying medicine but you never really let your dancing dreams die. How did you give yourself permission to change direction and find new passions at Duke?

Rosalie O'Connor

Chris Duke M.B.A. ’87, cofounder of Anna’s Gourmet Goodies, published “Outside the Oven,” a collection of insights and lessons learned from running a gourmet cookie gift business.

Kara Medoff Barnett ’00

Chris Hildreth

Grant Hill ’94 and Martin Dempsey A.M. ’84 joined the Commission on College Basketball.

“Broadway Production.” I had maybe seen two Broadway shows in my life. Eventually it was Manny’s class and the experience of working backstage on a couple of shows that made me come home at Thanksgiving one year, and say, ‘I’m not going to be a doctor.’ As a dancer, I was used to being out there in costume in the footlights. Manny showed me how it might be possible to have a rewarding career in the arts that didn’t involve putting on a costume.

So while I was originally premed, I ended up becoming a theater producer, going to business school, working as the managing director of Lincoln Center—and now I run a ballet company. Shifting directions wasn’t planned. I learned to give a chance to things that were total unknowns.

What’s your advice for Blue Devils—both students and alumni—in their career journeys?

Be open to opportunity and possibility. Move toward fear.

If you’re a little bit afraid of an opportunity that comes your way, that probably means you should give it a go. And, not everything you do needs to have a brand name associated with it. Start something new that you don’t know is going to succeed or fail. Work for people who inspire you.

—Edited by Christina Holder

Manny Azenburg’s class.

I loved the sciences, but I signed up for his class called DUKE MAGAZINE

WINTER 2017

59

Seek and find

In the DAA alumni directory, a helpful community awaits students and job seekers.

D

uring the search for his first internship, sophomore Kevin Ma hit a dead end. He had started off by going to career fairs, but came home only with swag. He stalked LinkedIn and job sites.

He finally found his way to the Duke Alumni Association’s website—and there his career course shifted.

Ma logged into the new DAA alumni directory and began searching for alumni in his area. He messaged several dozen—and much to his surprise, nearly everyone messaged him back.

One of them was Lin Chua LL.M. ’00, the cofounder of financial tech start-up Internex in New York, who thought she could use the help of a dedicated Duke student as she got her company off the ground. Before long Ma had an offer for his first internship, working alongside Chua this past summer.

The experience was rewarding, says Ma, who learned from Chua to “have grit, to be passionate about what you want to do,” because he got real hands-on experience and was expect-

60 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

ed to be a contributing member of the team. But it also was surprising—that, at the end of the day, a “cold e-mail turned into a full-time internship.”

“If you think about it, it’s pretty bizarre—to have someone you’ve never seen, talked to or even know about send you an e-mail out of the blue and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk,’ ” he says. “But once you connect with Duke alumni, they are very willing to help you.”

Helping other Blue Devils get a start is certainly something Chua says she can relate to. After graduating from Duke Law School, Chua went on to work for GE Capital for ten years—rising as an executive and then pivoting to launch Internex, which helps small and medium-sized businesses secure lines of credit they typically might not get approved for by traditional banks. In the journey, Chua says, Duke alumni have been there every step of the way.

“It is extremely empowering to have that network out there that you can reach out to,” Chua says. “I’m a big believer in paying it forward. I’ve been the lucky beneficiary

ForeverDuke

DUKEIS EVERYWHERE! “I’m a big believer in paying it forward.

I’ve been the lucky beneficiary of help from so many people.”

GERMANY Number of alumni:

424 THE INTERN: Kevin Ma spent last summer at work in New York because of a Duke connection.

of help from so many people.”

That message of paying it forward is what Chua wants students to know—that the alumni community really does want to help.

For many students trying to find that first internship or job, the process can feel overwhelming, Ma says. But what the experience of reaching out to Duke alumni taught him is that it’s actually not that bad.

Even if the alumni he messaged didn’t have available internships, they were willing to give advice and make connections for him, Ma says. “It wasn’t so much a chore as it was talking to real people and hearing real stories.”

That spirit of generosity encouraged Ma even more. Ma considers the journey from lugging home career-fair swag to messaging dozens of alumni to getting his first internship a 100 percent summer success.

“I’ve learned that if you want something, there’s a way to get it—and there are people who have taken that path and who are willing to help you,” Ma says. “All you need is one.”—Christina Holder

In October, Estlin Haiss ’16 visited his late great-grandmother’s home in Bavaria, Germany. This is the view from her kitchen, where she sat by the table and ate all of her meals as she looked out over the mountains.

The house has remained “a time capsule,” as Haiss writes on his Instagram post, since his grandmother died in 1982. “There’s no Internet, no phone, no TV, no frills—just a tiny, primitive cottage in paradise. And it’s one of my favorite places in the world.”

What are you up to in your city?

Share a photo on social media using #DukeIsEverywhere.

Start building relationships with fellow Blue Devils who can help you in your career journey by logging into alumni.duke.edu.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke Meet Duke’s only winter Olympian After competing in track, Randy Jones tried bobsledding.

T

Cris Bouroncle

famed yacht harbor. “Man, if this is bobsled,” Jones recalls o tell the story of Randy Jones ’92, you need to thinking upon his arrival, “I’m all in.” include two phone calls. The first came to his His first Olympics in 1994, besides the opening ceremoapartment at 1905 Erwin Road—walking distance from Uncle Harry’s General Store and the ny, proved unmemorable. But four years later, in Nagano, Central Campus pool—in the spring of 1991. The Dallas Japan, Jones experienced heartbreak: His four-man bobsled Cowboys wanted to chat about a possible tryout. team finished two hundredths of a second from a bronze But the offer didn’t take with Jones. “I just told the medal. “We had the fastest start, and...we don’t know what guy, ‘You know, I’m really not even interested in football happened,” says Jones. It was a clean run, with none of anymore,’ ” says Jones, who finished his senior season with the “boongy-boongy-boom,” the colloquial term for when the ninth-most kick-return yards in the nation. His first “you hit every wall going down,” as Jones describes it. “Everything felt perfect.” The unsuclove was the track, where he cessful run—to this day—doesn’t would set the school standard make sense. in the 60-meter dash and trail Salt Lake City in 2002 seemed only Dave Sime ’58, M.D. ’62 to portend a similar fate. After in the Duke record books for the first day of competition, Jones the 100-meter dash. An injury, recalls, his team led the field. The though, derailed his efforts to next day, though, was “like sixty make the 1992 Olympic Trials degrees,” and the sled—which can’t in June. be adjusted after a certain time The second phone call took before the race—was equipped with place in track coach Al Buehler’s office, weeks before the cold-weather runners. The team fell Summer Games in Barcelona. back to third, on pace to drop off The man on the phone posed the podium with one attempt left. a question: “You wanna go to Improbably, it started snowing.

Europe?”

For every team, navigating the The catch: Jones’ internationtrack, Jones says, was now compaal opportunity wouldn’t come rable to “trying to drive through a during the Summer Olymbunch of Styrofoam.” His fourpics—but during the Winter some squeezed past the second Games. The U.S. Olympic U.S. squad, and the Switzerland Committee wanted him to try team, the final remaining threat, out for the bobsled team, a slogged through its worst run of prospect that was less exciting the Games, handing Jones’ team at the time. “About twelve the silver medal. people watched the Winter That medal was the first for Team FAST TRACK: Jones, standing, on ice Games,” Jones says, “and two USA in the bobsled in forty-six and a half million watched the years. Jones and teammate Garrett Summer Games.”

Hines became the first black American men to earn a medal at the Winter Olympics. Jones His father—citing the neglected Cowboys opportunity—talked Jones into making the twelve-hour drive from remains Duke’s only Winter Olympian.

Durham to Lake Placid. He learned how to push, showing “You don’t want to be, ‘What if, what if?’ ” Jones says, promise during the dry land sessions. But after winning the mentioning that he still thinks back to the Cowboys’ phone competition for side pushers that Thursday, Jones skipped call, wondering what might have happened had he decided the remaining competitions the next day and hit the road to try out. back to Durham, unhappy with the forty-two-degree July His regret makes some sense: In track and bobsled both, weather. every run counts. Then again, when it comes to answering The locations improved. Soon, he was traveling to Monapotentially life-changing phone calls, one for two isn’t bad. co for Prince Albert’s summer push competition next to the —Lucas Hubbard

62 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

In tune with giving

KEY MOMENTS: Left, the death of their son spurred the Townsends' mission; a teacher with a student.

A nonprofit that offers pianos and magic.

O

n a search for a piano for a friend in the 1980s, Tom Townsend ’80 ended up in a St. Louis warehouse of forgotten ones—uprights, spinets, and baby grands in rows that seemed to go on forever.

At the time, the lifelong pianist lamented the thousands of instruments gathering dust. He went home wishing there were a way the pianos could come home, too.

Then in 2010, Townsend’s oldest son, Alex, a twenty-oneyear-old musician and a sophomore at Savannah College of Art and Design, died in a car accident. Looking for a way to honor their music-loving son, Townsend and his wife, Jeanne ’80, acted on that idea of resurrecting forgotten pianos by founding the nonprofit Pianos for People with Alex’s former piano teacher.

They set up shop in a former piano storefront in St. Louis and began offering free pianos and free lessons to beginners in the area.

“In a way, the more responsibility that Pianos for People brings to us on a daily basis, the more we’re still parenting Alex,” Townsend says. “Alex stays in the family.”

But the Townsends also feel a responsibility to give children in St. Louis access to pianos because, as their tagline says on the front of their building: “People need pianos, and pianos need people.”

The Townsends sold the ad agency Tom cofounded in St. Louis more than twenty years ago to begin Pianos for People. They bought the two-story building where children take lessons today—and slowly, they began creating their own warehouse of pianos, filling the first floor with old but durable consoles and placing a shiny baby grand in the storefront window. To date, they’ve given away 200 pianos to area children.

For Tom Townsend, who grew up with a piano in his home, learning the instrument as a child helped him to channel his emotions and develop self-confidence. It also unlocked talent he never knew he had.

When he sees students catch on to playing, when they realize they have abilities they never knew they had, that is gratifying.

“It’s that available. It’s that accessible,” he says.

That was true for students like Royce Martin and Aaliyah Fowler. In three years, Martin went from tinkering with his sister’s keyboard to being accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston in December. Fowler had dabbled with violin but had never played the piano before her mother heard about the free lessons.

“I didn’t know I could play,” she says. Two years later, she works as an intern at the nonprofit, where she teaches lessons to children and can often be found effortlessly playing the nonprofit’s baby grand. And Fowler keeps getting better because she now has a piano in her home, too.

As the word about Pianos for People has spread, so have its offerings; it has expanded to include a free piano school, summer camps, and monthly community piano slams. A sister site in a church in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, was particularly needed, Townsend says, as the community began to rebuild itself emotionally after the controversial death of Michael Brown.

Music, Townsend says, can’t heal all wounds, but it certainly can make great strides in helping people grieve, heal, and break down barriers. Banging on, and eventually learning to play, a piano helps children begin a relationship with the instrument and with each other, he says.

That’s the case on an afternoon this past April, where lessons for a gaggle of children were in full swing at the non-profit Pianos for People. Pianos lined the walls, with teachers paired with students on each of the benches. In one exercise, the children got comfortable with the keys by learning to play glissandos, sliding Jerry-Lee-Lewis style from high C to low C. At the end of the lesson, the children gathered in a circle to form a human metronome, practicing rhythm by passing a ball to music and clapping for one another for a lesson well done.

For Townsend, those moments make it worthwhile.

“I’m anxious to hurry up and give that magic to other kids,” he says. “More and more and more.”

—Christina Holder

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ForeverDuke

#TheDoersProfile

CHOCOLATES Andrew Deister M.B.A. ’03, CEO of Russell Stover

T

he world of sweets spins for these Duke alumni working amid cookies, caramels, chocolates, and more.

64 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Monica Kukelhaus M.B.A. ’10, associate brand manager of M&M’s at Mars Chocolate North America Cynthia Liu M.B.A. ’05, director of marketing for global brand equity at The Hershey Company Cassin Chaisson M.B.A. ’03, vice president of marketing at Chocolove Deborah Langsam Ph.D. ’81, chocolatier Joan Coukos ’77, chocolatier Alexandra Whisnant ’05, chocolatier

CANDIES Dylan Lauren ’96, owner of Dylan’s Candy Bar, retailer selling candy and candyrelated gifts

COOKIES, CUPCAKES & MORE Chris Duke M.B.A. ’87, cofounder of Anna’s Gourmet Goodies Jim Comber M.B.A. ’84, senior director of brand marketing at Dunkin’ Donuts Brands Jill Beveridge M.B.A. ’03, senior director of marketing innovation at Hostess Brands

Nicole Rivera M.B.A. ’08, director of marketing at The Topps Company, producer of Bazooka, Crunchkins, Juicy Drop and the Baby Bottle Pop Tom Thekkekandam J.D. ’10, M.B.A. ’10, cofounder of Tom & Jenny’s toothfriendly caramels Andrea Patel M.B.A. ’10, general manager of Keri Confections, producer of Sweetcicles, a candy made from natural ingredients

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ForeverDuke

THENNOW

Retro “Given the nation’s current drug-use crisis, every second we wait to get these innovations to market is a second too late.”—Patricia Simon ’07, on a training program in entrepreneurship she’s leading for substanceabuse researchers

"People are trying to do too many things. It’s too hard to survive that way.

People just need to scale back and just focus on the hospitality, the food and service."

—Tiffany Yam ’09, aka the “Chef Whisperer,” on the future of restaurants

COMPETITOR: The 1893 football team featured Maytubby, who’s seated on the ground, in the front row.

Entering new territory

In the nineteenth century, Native-American students began excelling at Trinity and then Duke. | By Valerie Gillispie

“The rise of bitcoin foreshadows the emergence of something potent and new in the realm of money and finance, which also happens to be something the world desperately needs.”

—Michael Krieger ’00, in a piece about the issues with our financial system

66 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

I

n an 1893 issue of the magazine Young Men’s Era, Trinity student Joseph S. Maytubby wrote an article titled “Opportunities Open to Educated Indian Young Men.” In it, he urges Native-American men to place a high value on education. “We see the advantages of an education,” he wrote, “no matter to what tribe or race he belongs who bears the brain in which the wisdom is stored.”

Maytubby had particular expertise in this topic; he was a member of the Chickasaw tribe and would go on to be the first Native American to receive a degree from Trinity College. The story of how Maytubby and

a small number of other Native Americans came to the college in the nineteenth century is extraordinary.

A decade before Maytubby’s arrival, the Cherokee Industrial School was established at Trinity College when it was still in Randolph County. Trinity was in serious financial straits, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was pursuing a plan of training for Native-American children, mostly boys. As part of this effort, Trinity received a stipend for each student enrolled.

Beginning in the 1883-84 school year, a group of around twenty Native-American boys and young men attended Trinity. All

Duke University Archives

were members of the Eastern his commencement in 1896, Band of the Cherokee from an honor given to the graduate who delivered the best the towns of Qualla Town and oration of the class. A second Cherokee in western North student from Indian Territory, Carolina. Ranging in age from Benjamin Franklin Harrison, eight to eighteen, they were offered a curriculum intended to was just one year behind Maytubby. Of both Choctaw and teach them about farming and Chickasaw descent, Harrison other industrial skills rather served as the business manager than the liberal arts. Little of of Trinity Archive and wrote an their experience was recorded, “We see the article for the publication adso it is not known how much vocating for higher standards these students might have inadvantages of teracted with the Trinity stufor public schools. He graduatan education, dents. We do know that at least ed in 1897. two returned after their first Both men returned to Oklano matter to homa and enjoyed successful year and attended the prepawhat tribe or ratory school at Trinity. The careers. Harrison established race he belongs school petered out in 1887. a prosperous farm and was an Maytubby arrived at Triniactive participant in local and who bears the ty from Indian Territory (now state government, including as brain in which Oklahoma). He had attended a representative in the Oklahoma State Legislature and as a school for Indian students, the wisdom secretary of state for OklahoWapanucka Institute, run by is stored.” ma. Maytubby continued his Trinity alumnus James J. Scarborough. In 1889, Scarboreducation at the University of ough wrote to Trinity President Texas after graduating from John Franklin Crowell, telling Trinity, and then practiced him: “I have seen the Superlaw in Oklahoma. After eight EXCELLENCE: Maytubby intendent of the [Chickasaw] years, he retired from law and was, by all accounts, an nation in regard to sending established a large farm. Like extraordinary student. students to Trinity as the naHarrison, Maytubby particition pays the college expenses pated in politics and was elected the first mayor of Tishominwhen her young men go. He says there are no more that they wish to send to col- go, Oklahoma. lege now but when they do have some he will conThe history of Native-American students at Trinsider my college. They have been sending most of ity and Duke stretches back longer than one might their young men to New York. We have some very imagine, and there is still much work to be done to fine students here but more who are now ready for understand the experiences of these early students, as Trinity.” well as those who followed in their footsteps. n Maytubby entered Trinity three years later, in 1892—the same year that Trinity opened in Gillispie is the university’s archivist. She would like Durham. He was, by all accounts, an extraordinary to thank senior Kyle Francis, whose historical project student. He was president of the Hesperian Literary on Native Americans at Trinity informed this article, Society, managed the “Literary Notes and Reviews” and junior Amber Hall and the members of the Native section of the Trinity Archive literary magazine, American Student Association, whose interest in the played football, and won the Wiley Gray Medal at topic inspired additional research.

DUKE MAGAZINE

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ForeverDuke In Memoriam

1930s

Mary Elizabeth Poole ’35 of Troy, N.C., on Aug. 30, 2017.

Mary A. Motlow Boyd ’36 of Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 23, 2017.

Sarah E. Rankin Hiatt ’38 of Atlanta, on Sept. 26, 2017.

Dorothy K. Henry Granberry ’39 of Atlanta, on June 26, 2017.

Richard C. Walker ’39 of Scarborough, Maine, on Aug. 27, 2017.

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

1940s

Chris Hildreth

alumni.duke.edu

Yorke Houston Lee Eastwood ’40 of Raleigh, on Aug. 17, 2017.

Harold Haut ’40 of Norwalk, Conn., on Sept. 16, 2017.

Winifred Long Holland ’40 of Mooresville, N.C., on Sept. 26, 2017.

Pauline Anne Ferguson Pickett ’41 of Ithaca, N.Y., on Feb. 19, 2017.

Mary Ellen Buschow Spalding ’41 of Sarasota, Fla., on April 30, 2015.

Sybilla J. Paynter Sharps ’42 of Rockville, Md., on Sept. 21, 2017.

Robert A. Wolff ’42 of South Nyack, N.Y., on July 15, 2017.

J. Kempton Jones ’43, M.D. ’46, H ’50 of Chapel Hill, on Aug. 8, 2017.

Lowell S. Miller ’43, M.D. ’45, B.S.M. ’46 of Nada, Texas, on April 7, 2017.

Anneva French Covey Gates M.D. ’44 of Beckley, W.V., on Aug. 3, 2017.

Edward J. Moppert ’44, J.D. ’49 of Wilmington, N.C., on Oct. 8, 2017.

J. Herbert Reid ’44 of Weaverville, N.C., on Nov. 25, 2015.

Ann Lenore Barry Schneider ’44 of Charleston, W.V., on Sept. 30, 2017.

INSPIRING FRESH THINKING Participants in the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative are taking simple ideas and creating successful businesses that have a meaningful—and healthy—impact on local communities.

Learn how Duke I&E is encouraging innovation and inspiring entrepreneurship. ungradedproduce.com entrepreneurship.duke.edu

68 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

COURTNEY BELL Class of 2017 Winner of the 2017 Duke Startup Challenge Co-founded Ungraded Produce, a company making fresh fruits and vegetables affordable and accessible by delivering “ugly” produce directly to subscribers.

On view through Feb. 25, 2018

nasher.duke.edu/disorderly Don Eddy, Green Volkswagen, 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 66 x 95 inches (167.6 x 241.3 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Gift of Ivan and Zoya Gerhath, 2001.40.1. © Don Eddy. Photo by Peter Paul Geoffrion.

Ruth Barnwell Tallant ’44 of Tampa, Fla., on Sept. 11, 2017.

David S. Willis Jr. ’44 of Stuarts Draft, Va., on July 23, 2017.

Jeanne T. Hilley Crabill ’45 of Charlottesville, Va., on Sept. 26, 2017.

Katherine M. Stewart Holloway B.S.N. ’45, R.N. ’45 of Lexington, Ky., on Oct. 5, 2017.

Kathleen G. Duncan Mayer ’45 of Washington, N.C., on Aug. 28, 2014.

Dottie D. Groome Nelson ’45 of Logan, Utah, on Jan. 1, 2017.

Frank B. Nordstrom ’45 of Farmington, N.M., on Oct. 6, 2017.

D. Leslie Whyte ’45 of Clearwater, Fla., on Oct. 19, 2017.

Lois W. Ritch Hilton ’46 of San Antonio, on Oct. 28, 2017.

Johanna J. Weiland Hoehl ’46 of Jacksonville, Fla., on July 29, 2017.

Roger D. Tuttle ’46 of Allenwood, N.J., on Sept. 3, 2017.

Joanne E. Haigh Black R.N. ’47 of Ormond Beach, Fla., on Oct. 14, 2017.

J. Curtis Hall ’47 of Richmond, Va., on July 20, 2017.

Warren J. Meyer B.S.M.E. ’47 of Maple Glen, Pa., on Aug. 25, 2017.

William B. Pearce B.S.M.E. ’47 of Raleigh, on Aug. 15, 2017.

Grover C. Robinson Jr. B.S.M.E. ’47 of Knoxville, Tenn., on Aug. 15, 2017.

Chispah M. Freeman Ivey R.N. ’48 of Greenville, S.C., on Aug. 3, 2017.

Roberta M. Miller Lea ’48 of Green Valley, Ariz., on April 11, 2017.

James H. Austin ’49, M.D. ’51 of Gloucester, Mass., on July 28, 2017.

Richard A. Bugg Jr. B.S.E.E. ’49 of Sarasota, Fla., on June 21, 2017.

Norman Gilbert Gibson ’49 of Waycross, Ga., on Oct. 30, 2017.

Sarah Brown Hays Hallett ’49 of Irvington, Va., on Sept. 4, 2017.

W. Wallace McMahon B.S.C.E. ’49 of St. Louis, on Sept. 19, 2017.

William W. Taylor ’49 of Monterey, Calif., on Oct. 6, 2017.

Betty Sue Westbrook ’49 of Wilmington, N.C., on July 28, 2017.

1950s

John T. Branham Jr. ’50 of Orlando, Fla., on Aug. 8, 2017.

Thomas M. Dabbs ’50 of Mayesville, S.C., on Sept. 27, 2017.

Jack B. Harris B.S.E.E. ’50 of Castro Valley, Calif., on July 3, 2017.

Sherwood D. Smith ’50, H.A. Cert. ’52 of Lakeland, Fla., on Aug. 14, 2017.

Charles S. Stribling ’50 of Gastonia, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2017.

Charles B. Tutan Jr. ’50 of Miami, on Sept. 22, 2017.

John H. Best ’51 of Chapel Hill, on Oct. 25, 2017.

Gus T. Costis ’51 of Wilmington, Del., on Sept. 4, 2017.

Michaux J. Farfour ’51 of Goldsboro, N.C., on Aug. 30, 2017.

James E. Lee ’51, M.F. ’52 of Manassas, Va., on Sept. 12, 2017.

Marjorie Louise Olds Leenhouts ’51 of Key Largo, Fla., on Sept. 17, 2017.

Robert L. May M.F. ’51 of Abingdon, Va., on June 7, 2017.

William E. Mote Sr. ’51 of Baton Rouge, La., on Aug. 1, 2017.

Act now: make a charitable IRA rollover gift to Duke

Want to make an impact at Duke? With a charitable IRA rollover, you can make a meaningful gift to the university while receiving tax benefits.

The charitable IRA rollover provision allows IRA owners age 70½ or older to make a direct, tax-free transfer of up to $100,000 a year from their individual retirement account to a public charity like Duke.

Visit our website or contact us today to learn more.

EMAIL

giftplanning@duke.edu | WEB giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | BLOG giving.duke.edu/blog | PHONE (919) 681-0464

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ForeverDuke Edward S. Whitesides M.D. ’51 of Clover, S.C., on Oct. 28, 2017.

Maurice E. Blevins ’52, Ph.D. ’58 of Spartanburg, S.C., on Aug. 14, 2017.

Dewey K. Carpenter A.M. ’52, Ph.D. ’55 of Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 9, 2017.

James H. Coble Sr. ’52 of Charlotte, on July 23, 2017.

Clifton N. Cooke ’52 of Walpole, N.H., on Oct. 6, 2017.

Otto W. Dieffenbach Jr. B.S.M.E. ’52 of Escondido, Calif., on Sept. 8, 2017.

Nell Harden A.M. ’52 of Asheville, N.C., on Aug. 15, 2017.

J. O’Neal Humphries ’52 of Columbia, S.C., on March 24, 2016.

William M. Kiger ’52 of Raleigh, on Oct. 9, 2017.

Robert B. Midgette ’52 of Raleigh, on July 25, 2017.

Gerald K. Morton B.S.E.E. ’52 of Winston-Salem, on Sept. 29, 2017.

J. Roger Shull ’52, LL.B. ’54 of Stratford, Conn., on Aug. 21, 2014.

Alan D. Whanger ’52, M.D. ’56, H ’70 of Durham, on Oct. 21, 2017.

Dorothy A. Platte Bittner ’53 of Keene, N.H., on Oct. 18, 2017.

Alexander Byron ’53 of Marion, Mass., on Sept. 5, 2017.

Mary Ann Robinson Clarkson ’53 of Chapel Hill, on Sept. 19, 2017.

Joyce Ann Hoffman Schreffler ’53 of Glen Mills, Pa., on Aug. 5, 2017.

Donald A. Schwartz ’53 of Southbury, Conn., on Aug. 23, 2017.

Ronald M. Schwartz ’53, J.D. ’56 of Stamford, Conn., on Aug. 6, 2017.

Eugene W. Stuart Jr. ’53 of Greenville, S.C., on July 8, 2017.

Eugene A. Arnold Jr. ’54 of Murphysboro, Ill., on July 19, 2015.

William E. Avant ’54 of Georgetown, S.C., on Oct. 28, 2017.

Marcia Randolph Drake Bennett ’54 of Goldsboro, N.C., on Sept. 28, 2017.

James E. Clement M.D. ’54 of Greenville, N.C., on Oct. 26, 2017.

Boyce H. Davis ’54 of Winston-Salem, on Aug. 20, 2017.

William L. Donigan ’54 of Gainesville, Fla., on Sept. 21, 2017.

Warren D. Hypes M.F. ’54 of Riner, Va., on Oct. 19, 2017.

Clara Annie Childs MacKenzie A.M. ’54 of Spartanburg, S.C., on Oct. 16, 2017.

Raymond L. Moore II M.Div. ’54 of LaGrange, Ky., on Sept. 17, 2017.

Douglas F. Smiley ’54, M.D. ’58 of Los Angeles, on Oct. 5, 2017.

Shinobu Togasaki ’54 of San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 3, 2017.

Julia P. McCutcheon Warner ’54 of Durham, on Nov. 4, 2017.

Anne S. Wilson Yard ’54 of Pittsford, N.Y., on July 25, 2017.

Barclay H. Ackerman ’55 of Southwick, Mass., on Sept. 23, 2017.

Virginia Schmitt Bryan Ph.D. ’55 of Durham, on July 13, 2017.

Sally H. Read Hammond ’55 of Danville, Ky., on Oct. 11, 2017.

Helen Ann Lerian Humphrey ’55 of Winston-Salem, N.C., on Aug. 28, 2017.

Arthur E. Justice Sr. M.Ed. ’55, Ed.D. ’65 of Florence, S.C., on Oct. 18, 2017.

Thomas D. Newell III ’55 of Phoenix, on Aug. 8, 2017.

Daniel Trimper IV ’55 of Ocean City, Md., on Aug. 20, 2017.

Cecil H. Williams Jr. ’55 of Gloucester Point, Va., on Sept. 1, 2017.

Baron B. Adams Jr. B.S.E.E. ’56 of Durham, on Nov. 3, 2017.

KEEP SHARING CELEBRATING DISCOVERING DELIGHTING

KEEP GROWING

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Vibrant living. Continuing care.

In the heart of Durham.

800-474-0258 / forestduke.org

C E L E B R AT I N G

72 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

YEARS OF COMMUNITY

Travel with Duke

Your friends. Your faculty. Your dream destinations.

Where do you want to go in 2018? #DukeIsEverywhere www.dukealumnitravels.com

Himalayan Kingdoms, October 30 - November 13, 2018

Photos courtesy of iStock unless noted

Upper Amazon, Oct 27 - Nov 5

Danube Passage Oct 13-25

Amalfi Coast Oct 2-10

Credit: Richard Maack, National Geographic

ForeverDuke James M. Armstrong B.Div. ’56 of Charlotte, on Oct. 22, 2017.

Mary Petersen Attwell ’56 of Houston, on Sept. 14, 2017.

Georganne Staley Coble Bingham ’56 of Lexington, N.C., on Sept. 7, 2017.

Robert S. Brice Jr. ’56, M.D. ’60 of Winston-Salem, on Sept. 27, 2017.

William B. Brideweser ’56 of Akron, Ohio, on Sept. 26, 2017.

Richard O. Flynn ’56 of McHenry, Ill., on Aug. 1, 2017.

Janet Agnes Harrington Hall M.A.T. ’56 of Farmville, Va., on Sept. 26, 2017.

Alison Scott Pope Jones ’56 of Chicago, on Sept. 1, 2017.

Louise Trotter Wooten Talley ’56 of Raleigh, on Sept. 19, 2017.

Virginia A. Tate Williams B.S.N. ’56 of Raleigh, on Aug. 11, 2017.

Andrew J. Acton E. ’57 of Annapolis, Md., on April 28, 2017.

Kenneth C. Bolte ’57 of Garden City, N.Y., on Aug. 24, 2017.

Robert V. Davis Jr. ’57 of Lancaster, S.C., on Nov. 2, 2017.

Dorothy J. Johnson Hulett ’57 of Selma, N.C., on Sept. 26, 2017.

Boris L. O’Mansky M.D. ’57 of Baltimore, on Sept. 14, 2017.

Myron T. Potter ’57 of Makanda, Ill., on April 2, 2016.

Mary Jo Ingalls Purvis B.S.N. ’57 of Sewickley, Pa., on Aug. 16, 2017.

Edward C. Rodgers B.S.E.E. ’57, on July 4, 2015.

Aldos C. Barefoot Jr. D.F. ’58 of Raleigh, on July 25, 2017.

Alan B. Cohen ’58 of Baltimore, on June 7, 2017.

Jerry W. Neal Sr. B.S.M.E. ’58 of Charlotte, on Oct. 26, 2017.

William K. Quick M.Div. ’58 of Detroit, on Sept. 17, 2017.

Winthrop J. Spence Jr. ’58 of Towson, Md., on Feb. 27, 2016.

Carolyn Peters Spencer ’58 of Winston-Salem, on July 9, 2017.

James A. Taylor Jr. ’58 of Ormond Beach, Fla., on Sept. 30, 2017.

Thor Hall M.R.E. ’59, Ph.D. ’62 of Chattanooga, Tenn., on June 27, 2017.

Lawrence Kahana H ’59 of Tampa, Fla., on May 8, 2017.

Virginia Hunter Marshall Simpson ’59 of Richmond, Va., on Sept. 13, 2017.

Anne W. Bassford Townsend R.N. ’59 of Cheraw, S.C., on June 24, 2017.

1960s

Cynthia Stokes Brown ’60 of Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 15, 2017.

Henry A. Hargreaves Ph.D. ’60 of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on July 27, 2017.

Richard I. Katz ’60, M.D. ’65, H ’67 of Wynnewood, Pa., on Aug. 23, 2017.

Anne C. Morris Mooney ’60 of Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 19, 2017.

Robin Lyons Puckett ’60 of Marietta, Ga., on May 1, 2017.

Martin W. Brueggemann ’61 of Cincinnati, on Sept. 7, 2017.

Burt S. Eldridge III B.S.C.E. ’61 of Williamsburg, Va., on Aug. 31, 2017.

Janet M. Binkley Erwin A.M. ’61 of Tallahassee, Fla., on Sept. 9, 2017.

Joseph S. Horrigan ’61 of Houston, on July 28, 2017.

Pursue

Explore

Summer Camps Since 1983

Academic interests

Career opportunities

Discover New interests and talents CONNECT Experience

With other motivated peers

Campus life

74 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

YOUTH PROGRAMS @DukeYouthPrograms @DukeYouthPrograms We provide open enrollment with no application requirement. Just head to: LEARNMORE.DUKE.EDU\YOUTH2018 Youth@Duke.EDU • (919) 684–6259

“A Chancellor’s Tale is important to anyone who has a sincere interest in leadership and the history of Duke.” —MIKE KRZYZEWSKI

A Chancellor’s Tale

Transforming Academic Medicine

RALPH SNYDERMAN, MD 40 photographs, hardcover, $34.95

“Ralph Snyderman was one of the amazing leaders in the history of this great university. Through his leadership, Duke University Medical Center developed a global brand. It was an honor for me to be on his Team and see how he developed a truly championship level environment. ” —MIKE KRZYZEWSKI, Duke University Head Basketball Coach “Here he describes in vivid detail how, as Chancellor, he transformed Duke Medical Center into a powerhouse integrated health system while pioneering the innovative and widely emulated approach now known as prospective or personalized medicine.” —ROBERT J. LEFKOWITZ, MD, Nobel Laureate, James B. Duke Professor of Medicine, Duke University “Dr. Ralph Snyderman is a doctor’s doctor, the best of the best in American medicine. In A Chancellor’s Tale, he effectively synthesizes his extraordinary breadth of experiences into a visionary, transformative view of what true health care can be. If you only read one book on health care this year, this is it. Highly recommended!” —DEAN ORNISH, MD, Bestselling Author

A rich, personal, and intimate story of Ralph Snyderman, MD, the Brooklyn-born son of Ukrainian immigrants, who went on to become Duke University’s Chancellor for Health Affairs at a time of major upheavals in medicine. The book is a fascinating story seen through the eyes of Snyderman, describing the sometimes tumultuous path he and the institution took to redesign itself while creating new, compassionate, and more effective models of health care. Under Snyderman’s leadership, Duke became internationally known for its innovations in medicine, including the creation of the Duke University Health System— a model for integrated health care delivery—and the development of personalized health care, a dominant force in the transformation of health care.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and Ralph Snyderman.

(Courtesy of Sonam Zoksang)

Nan Keohane and Ralph Snyderman (Courtesy of the Duke Medical Center Archives)

Mike Krzyzewski and Ralph Snyderman. (Courtesy of Duke University Archives)

Walter Cronkite and Ralph Snyderman (Courtesy of the Bravewell Collaborative)

Use coupon code E16SNYDR to save 30% on the hardcover edition when you order from dukeupress.edu. dukeupress.edu | 888-651-0122 |

@DukePress |

@dukeuniversitypress

DUKE MAGAZINE

WINTER 2017

75

WHY DUKE? Among the many excellent reasons to choose Duke—world-class academics, outstanding faculty, championship basketball—one reason stands out. When asked “Why Duke?” on their admissions applications, the #1 program mentioned by applicants is DukeEngage.

The word is out. Those students know what we know: DukeEngage prepares students to be global citizens. To solve real-world problems. To be leaders in their careers, in their communities and in their world.

A DECADE OF SERVICE

No surprise, right? No other school is like Duke — and no other program is like DukeEngage.

In 2017, we celebrate a decade of DukeEngage. Over the past 10 years, more than 4,000 Duke students have volunteered more than 1.25 million hours through DukeEngage, working alongside more than 600 community organizations in 37 U.S. cities and in 79 nations on 6 continents.

ARGENTINA AUSTRALIA THE BAHAMAS BANGLADESH BELIZE BOLIVIA BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BRAZIL CAMBODIA CANADA CHILE CHINA COLOMBIA COSTA RICA DOMINICAN REPUBLIC ECUADOR EGYPT EL SALVADOR ETHIOPIA FIJI FRANCE GABON GERMANY GHANA GUATEMALA HAITI HONDURAS HONG KONG ICELAND INDIA INDONESIA IRAN IRELAND ISRAEL ITALY JAPAN JORDAN KENYA KIRIBATI

LATVIA LEBANON LIBERIA MADAGASCAR MALAWI MEXICO MONTENEGRO MOROCCO NAMIBIA NEPAL NEW ZEALAND NICARAGUA PANAMA PERU PHILIPPINES POLAND RUSSIA RWANDA SENEGAL SEYCHELLES SERBIA SINGAPORE SOUTH AFRICA SOUTH KOREA SWAZILAND SWITZERLAND TAIWAN TANZANIA THAILAND TOGO TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TURKEY UGANDA UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES VIETNAM YEMEN ZAMBIA ZIMBABWE

WHY DUKEENGAGE? DukeEngage—an eight-week immersive service experience—is the largest program of its kind in the U.S. Each summer, 420+ Duke undergraduates work with community partners to address critical human needs, from health care to human rights.

Now celebrating its 10th year, the program transforms students, advances the University’s educational mission and provides meaningful assistance to communities in the U.S. and abroad.

PORTLAND 2012

S O U T H KO R E A 2 0 1 6

KO C H I , I N D I A 2 0 1 7

Students assist a variety of nonprofits that focus on urban sustainability and conservation efforts.

Students partner with educational organizations and work with immigrant/refugee populations.

Students work with a nonprofit to empower and advocate for women, children and people with disabilities.

RWANDA 2015 Students collaborated with community members to engineer and construct a pedestrian footbridge to ensure reliable and consistent access to school and work.

VISIT

dukeengage.duke.edu to learn more about DukeEngage, read about student experiences or make a gift to support this transformative program, which is made possible by philanthropy.

“Nothing replaces working in a community and learning how to engage fully in that experience. DukeEngage is transformative and builds the leaders and citizens who embody Duke’s values and that the 21st century sorely needs: people who can listen, empathize, show compassion, think creatively, and are willing to do the hard work of service in their daily lives.”

JAY SULLIVAN ’16 DUKEENGAGE-UGANDA 2014

ForeverDuke Continued from front inside cover.

Elizabeth L. Lacoss Jones ’61 of Fernandina Beach, Fla., on Oct. 3, 2017.

Robert F. Klein H ’61 of Rochester, N.Y., on Oct. 31, 2017.

Jeanne Elizabeth Hansen Kugler ’61 of South Dartmouth, Mass., on Aug. 16, 2017.

Paul E. Price Jr. ’61 of Winston-Salem, on Aug. 20, 2017.

Marcus B. Slater Jr. ’61 of Ellicott City, Md., on Oct. 6, 2017.

Ralph F. Spinnler B.S.M.E. ’61 of Branford, Conn., on Oct. 14, 2017.

Palmer C. Talbutt Jr. Ph.D. ’61 of Blacksburg, Va., on Sept. 3, 2017.

James R. Oliver ’62, B.Div. ’67 of Jacksonville, N.C., on Oct. 6, 2017.

David D. Porter H ’62 of Los Angeles, on April 16, 2017.

Gazie K. Ragep ’62 of Elizabethton, Tenn., on July 11, 2017.

Robert J. Vandewater B.S.E.E. ’62 of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., on July 8, 2017.

Corwin A. Bell ’63 of San Diego, on Aug. 22, 2017.

Charles L. Fincher B.S.M.E. ’63 of Panama City Beach, Fla., on Oct. 19, 2017.

Emanuele Mannarino M.D. ’63 of Washington, on Aug. 11, 2017.

James L. Green Jr. M.D. ’64 of Lexington, S.C., on Oct. 23, 2017.

Mary Winifred Glass Rogers M.A.T. ’64 of Colonial Heights, Va., on April 12, 2017.

Meredith B. Brenizer Sabol ’64 of Norfolk, Va., on Aug. 17, 2017.

Thomas N. Taylor B.S.E.E. ’64 of Huntersville N.C., on Nov. 2, 2017.

William E. Eason Jr. ’65, J.D. ’68 of St. Simons Island, Ga., on Sept. 22, 2017.

M. Camille Combs Hardy ’65 of Mount Airy, N.C., on Oct. 1, 2017.

David F. Krein A.M. ’65 of Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 3, 2016.

Robert V. Kubicek Ph.D. ’65 of Vancouver, Canada, on Oct. 9, 2017.

David S. Odom ’65 of Arlington, Va., on Oct. 23, 2017.

Patricia June Rand Ph.D. ’65 of Lincoln, Neb., on Oct. 1, 2017.

Judith A. Rector Rodger ’65 of Great Neck, N.Y., on Sept. 2, 2017.

James L. Srodes L ’65 of Washington, on Sept. 27, 2017.

Ted W. Steele B.S.M.E. ’65 of Chesterfield, Va., on Oct. 25, 2017.

Rosslyn Troth Zook M.A.T. ’65 of Pound Ridge, N.Y., on March 11, 2017.

Patricia Jones Goodwill M.A.T. ’66 of Tampa, Fla., on July 20, 2017.

Sandra Patricia Stroupe Mooney ’66 of Charlotte, on Oct. 1, 2017.

Richard W. Katzberg ’67 of Clinton, S.C., on Sept. 2, 2017.

Robert F. Boughner ’68 of Washington, on Aug. 30, 2017.

George A. Keyworth II Ph.D. ’68 of Carmel, Calif., on Aug. 23, 2017.

James H. O’Mara Ph.D. ’68 of Palm Coast, Fla., on July 16, 2017.

Richard G. Slaughter ’68 of Austin, Texas, on Oct. 15, 2017.

Lynn E. Wagner J.D. ’68 of Redmond, Wash., on Jan. 16, 2016.

Bobby Jean Mitchell Biddle ’69 of Herndon, Va., on July 26, 2017.

Sharon F. Vanderburg Bost ’69 of Concord, N.C., on Sept. 27, 2017.

Melinda Dean Barker Buchanan ’69 of Santa Rosa, Calif., on May 9, 2017.

W. Andrew Copenhaver ’69 of Winston-Salem, on Oct. 12, 2017.

Louis F. Gregory Jr. H ’69 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 15, 2017.

Virginia L. Anderson Oursland B.S.N. ’69 of Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 29, 2017.

Thomas M. Smith ’69 of Shreveport, La., on July 9, 2017.

Ronald Marcello A.M.’65, Ph.D.’69 is grateful for the guidance of the history department faculty who taught him the importance of the libraries. After retiring, Marcello established an endowed fund to help Duke acquire primary and secondary American history materials. He has designated a bequest, several gift annuities and retirement account assets to this fund.

“The libraries are the heart and soul of the university,” said Marcello. “Duke supported me and provided me with a superior education and intellectual experience.

Now it’s my time to return that support.”

1970s giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | #GivingtoDuke (919) 681-0464 | giftplanning@duke.edu

78 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu GP_Made Possible Jump Ad_Winter 2017_P.indd 1

1/24/18 6:43 AM

Ernest S. DeLaney III ’70 of Charlotte, on Aug. 7, 2017.

Peter R. Heath ’71 of Durham, on Aug. 29, 2017.

John O. McGuire M.D. ’71 of Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 12, 2017.

James J. McMillan ’71 of Orlando, Fla., on Aug. 30, 2017.

Catherine J. Behrens ’72 of Canton, Conn., on Sept. 1, 2017.

Kathryn G. Preston Parks ’72 of Burnsville, N.C., on Nov. 2, 2016.

Jennifer Wallace Linsley Alphin M.A.T. ’73 of Lexington, Va., on Sept. 20, 2017.

Carol Jean Schliemann Piper ’73 of Cary, N.C., on Aug. 25, 2017.

John R. Fuechsel ’74 of Miami, on Aug. 28, 2017.

John W. Langley Ed.D. ’74 of Rockingham, N.C., on Aug. 10, 2017.

Traylor T. Mercer J.D. ’74 of Hagatna, Guam, on Aug. 29, 2017.

Paul L. Tunis ’74 of Miami, on Feb. 2, 2016.

William D. Davies ’75 of Iowa City, Iowa, on Aug. 18, 2017.

Theodore J. Smith B.H.S. ’75 of Oviedo, Fla, on Nov. 19, 2014.

Paul H. Tietz J.D. ’75 of Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 1, 2017.

Nancy Laine Calloway M.Div. ’78 of Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 9, 2017.

Kenneth H. Rathey B.H.S. ’78 of Durham, on Aug. 29, 2017.

1980s

Ava Ann Reynolds Haines M.B.A. ’80 of Raleigh, on Aug. 20, 2017.

William P.Jennings J.D. ’80 of West Branch, Mich., on Oct. 13, 2017.

Genevieve Heafner Moore Ph.D. ’80 of Raleigh, on Oct. 14, 2017.

Robert M. Nash Jr. ’80 of North Chesterfield, Va., on Oct. 17, 2017.

Myra Elizabeth Nunn ’80 of Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 1, 2017.

Aingred Ghislayne Dunston-Coleman Ph.D. ’81 of Lexington, Ky., on Oct. 27, 2017.

Edward C. Mann ’81 of Littleton, N.C., on Oct. 10, 2015.

Lori Matia ’81 of Cleveland, on July 4, 2017.

James B. Powell M.B.A. ’83 of Durham, on Oct. 9, 2017.

Glen Townsend Schultz M.F. ’85 of Hillsborough, N.C., on Sept. 9, 2017.

Melissa Wehba Hedges ’86 of Evanston, Ill., on Aug. 29, 2017.

Monte F. Dewey M.B.A. ’88 of Durham, on Sept. 20, 2017.

Martin J. Dematteo Jr. ’89 of Milton, Mass., on Aug. 22, 2017.

1990s

Alexander L. Ellwood ’90 of Red Bank, N.J., on July 18, 2017.

Phyllis J. Proffer M.B.A. ’92 of Greenville, S.C., on Aug. 11, 2017.

Heather Elizabeth Sutton ’93 of Atlantic Beach, Fla., on Oct. 2, 2017.

Joseph M. Deffner M.B.A. ’95 of The Woodlands, Texas, on Nov. 7, 2017.

2000s

Amy Marie Collinsworth Ph.D. ’01 of Durham, on July 29, 2017.

Char Lyn Yeakley Grujoski M.B.A. ’04 of Connersville, Ind., on Sept. 19, 2017.

Carlton Dale Mutts Rutherford M.Div. ’05 of Durham, on July 15, 2017.

Fulton D. Green M.B.A. ’06 of Charlotte, on Aug. 10, 2017.

Annie R. Langley M.S.N. ’09 of Durham, on Sept. 7, 2017.

2010s

Nabeel Asif Qureshi A.M. ’12 of Houston, on Sept. 16, 2017.

Frederic Sackrider Remington, The Bronco Buster, Sold for $510,000

Downsizing?

Thinking of Selling?

Call us for a Free Consultation.

Representing Duke Alumni and their Friends in the sale of Art, Jewelry and Antiques for more than 30 years.

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www.BrunkAuctions.com

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DUKE MAGAZINE

WINTER 2017

79

DEVILIST Thankfully, Randy Jones ’92, the sole

Winter Olympian in Duke’s history, segued from track to bobsledding (see page 62). But we think there are other Blue Devils who missed their calling.

Below, our top 5 list of alumni with the skill sets for glacial glory.

Ice hockey

Figure skating

Amy Hood ’94 Microsoft C.F.O. Strength(s): Already crosschecks balance sheets; ability to avoid penalties from IRS; can decide to pass or shoot with help from Clippy

Andrew McCabe ’90 Deputy director of the F.B.I. Strength(s): Ice conditions in Pyeongchang preferable to thin stuff he’s been treading on recently; Olympic judges review performances on scorecards, not Twitter

Speed skating Kyrie Irving ’14 Boston Celtics point guard Strength(s): Covers ground quickly—three-point line to the basket in one dribble, high school to the NBA in eleven games, etc.

Red flag(s): Flat-earther might question the track’s layout (how could he return to the start just by traveling in a circle?)

Alpine skiing (slalom) Richard Nixon J.D. ’37 37th U.S. President Strength(s): Sport based on getting to the top and then going downhill Red flag(s): Treading too close to gates; insisting that when he took a shortcut it wasn’t illegal

Curling Anne Tyler ’61 Pulitzer-winning novelist Strength(s): Pops up sporadically with each new book, otherwise eschews publicity—good temperament for game we care about once every four years

80 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Knowledge in service to society

Rare manuscripts. Original collections. Unprecedented access.

Thanks to a planned gift supporting the acquisition of historic materials by Duke Libraries, students can use the ever-expanding collection of historical resources to elevate hands-on learning experiences.

Made possible by you.

Andy Tan-Delli Cicchi ’17 sorted through historic maps and planning documents in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of the Duke History Revisited program. His project maps Duke’s relationship to affordable housing in Durham.

Read about alumnus Ronald Marcello’s planned gifts to benefit the libraries on page 78.

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,

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. giving.duke.edu/giftplanning | (919) 681-0464

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

MAGAZINE

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

DUKE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2017

DUKE

NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE PAID PPCO

WINTER 2017

A student experience like no other

A coveted internship. Real world research. The chance to study with global leaders. The Duke Annual Fund quietly supports the people, places, and activities that take a Duke education from lecture hall to life changing.

Made possible by you.

In the blue waters of Baja, Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Stefanski consults with whale watching companies as part of her research at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She’s studying the economic costs and benefits of regulation on coastal communities and marine life.

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 Duke students and faculty to advance ideas, make new connections and move the world forward. giving.duke.edu | #GivingtoDuke

Go out there and learn 10 Years of DukeEngage p.26

M AG A Z I N E