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The opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of Duke University, its students, faculty, staff, administration or trustees. Columns, letters and cartoons

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of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior, written permission of the business office. Each individual is entitled to one free copy.

DESIGN DIRECTORPHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

ASSOCIATE EDITORASSOCIATE EDITORASSOCIATE EDITOR

ONLINE EDITOREXECUTIVE EDITOR

Maya RobinsonChase OlivieriRyan BrownLaura KeeleyJulia LoveChristina PeñaLindsey Rupp

EDITORS-IN-CHIEFAndrew Hibbard & Lawson Kurtz

CONTRIBUTING WRITERSJinny Cho,Taylor Doherty, Lisa Du, Jessica Lichter, Kevin Lincoln, Rachna Reddy, Zach

Tracer, Eugene Wang, Toni Wei

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERSJennifer Brown, Kate Findlay-Shirras,

Christina Peña, Zach Tracer

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS THE TEAM

The university publication is a constantly changing entity. At its heart is a group of rapidly changing students putting words, images and designs together into a non-saleable commodity. As the university grows and develops, the students constantly rotate through, helping form parts of this place in this time, but seldom sticking around long enough to see the consequences—good, bad or otherwise—of their work. As current editors, we have the transient responsibility to guide this publication until we too have rotated through, and have been dispensed by fate into far differ-ent worlds. We are aware of the 11 volumes of Towerview which have preceeded us, and from this history we derive a sense of guidance and purpose. At this moment though, we birth this monster that is Towerview’s 12th volume. We have spent hours pondering and discussing what this magazine is, what it should be and what it can become. To us, our vision is bold, perhaps even pomp-ous. (Dare we say Towerview should be the 11th item on our 10 to Watch list? Fearing the consequences of hubris and knowing the absurdity of this claim, we bite our tongue. But wouldn’t it be nice?) We hope we have envisaged an engag-ing package which entices readers to ask for more. We hope our coverage expands beyond Duke undergraduates, beyond Duke and into Durham and beyond. We hope to resonate. There is no reward but the satisfaction of a job that may not necessarily be well-liked, but is (hopefully) well done. Once we are finished, this work is beyond us. Our attempts at beauty and some form of truth evade us and become the reader’s—yours. Ultimately, we are at once hindered and enabled by our vision and the history we inherit. Holding artifacts of history, we exist trying to fulfill the potentials of a collective future of which we are not sovereign but certainly a part.

Andrew Hibbard & Lawson KurtzEditors-in-Chief

GENERAL MANAGERADVERTISING DIRECTORPRODUCTION MANAGEROPERATIONS MANAGER

RETAIL SALES MANAGER

Jonathan AngierChrissy BeckBarbara StarbuckMary WeaverRebecca Dickenson

2 TOWERVIEW

TowerviewMag.com@TowerviewMag

Volume 12 | Issue 1IN THE ISSUE

2 | From the Editors

4 | Devils in the GardenThe Blue Devils pay a visit to the President’s house

6 | The Wild ThingsA pack of animals roams wild on Duke’s campus

7 | AppetiteDurham’s Revolution

8 | Top Tweeters8 terrific Tweeters you should be following

9 | Spending GreenThe best products for you and for the earth

29 | GlassDuke Lacrosse: Champions

30 | WisdomAnne Yoder, director of the Duke Lemur Center

12 | Kyrie IrvingA rising star heads to Duke to lead the Devils

16 | Duke AdmissionsDespite great progress, there’s still room to grow

17 | Robert LefkowitzAn esteemed researcher enters the business world

18 | Central CampusRenevation projects attract student interest

21 | The Dean’s SpotMeet the man who took the reigns from McLendon

22 | Smith WarehouseDuke’s artists finally find a place to call home

24 | The Haiti LabAn atypical lab aims to understand the country

25 | EntrepreneurshipThe spirit is alive at Duke and Fuqua

26 | Student ServiceDukeEngage and DPS push the service lifestyle

27 | Rolling HillsThe third time’s a charm for this Durham redevelopment project

KYRIE IRVING, PHOTOGRAPHED EXCLUSIVELY FOR TOWERVIEW BY MAYA ROBINSON IN ELIZABETH, NEW JERSEY, JUNE 2010ON THE COVER:

3TOWERVIEW

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4 TOWERVIEW

or a brief moment, they all just get to enjoy it. The players stand in a cluster in the

Rose Garden as President Barack Obama works his way around, careful to personally greet and shake hands with each and every one of them. Obama compliments Kyle Singler’s finals perfor-mance and calls Jon Scheyer his “homeboy”—the two share Chicago-area roots. It’s 92 degrees and no one seems to notice.

There are no questions about whether or not Duke has lost its luster, whether senior Brian Zoubek could have been a solid college big man had he not been plagued by injuries or whether junior Kyle Singler is not a natural fit at the three. There are no John Wall what-ifs, no whispers that head coach Mike Krzyzewki’s pro-gram has seen better days and no talk of “no Final Fours since 2004.”

As the president formally greets the team from his podium, the Blue Devils can barely con-tain themselves. A group of guys that has been on national television nearly 30 times this year can-not stop giggling. Lance Thomas looks like he’s about to lose it.

Obama brings up the day in 2009 when he

picked rival North Carolina to win the national title to the chagrin of Duke fans across the nation. At the time, Krzyzewski playfully dismissed the president’s prediction and encouraged Obama to stick to politics.

“It wasn’t anything personal. Just trying to win some money,” Obama jokes about his cor-rect pick. “I was right. Coach K wasn’t too happy. He basically told me to stick it. Or stick to my

day job, is what he said. And then, this year, he went out with all these guys and he won, so he could come to the White House and crow about it. Payback is sweet, isn’t it, Coach?”

Krzyzewski, known for his snarky, sharp wit, just smiles as he stands a few feet behind Obama’s right shoulder. No need for a comeback; the coach just listens.

A few minutes later the team heads outside the Rose Garden, and Krzyzewski walks up to a microphone by the North Grounds entrance to answer the media’s questions. He starts by intro-

ducing the five starters that stand behind him—Singler, Scheyer, Thomas, Zoubek and Nolan Smith.

Now a few weeks removed from the whole experience, the players field questions about how the season set up a deep run all the way to India-napolis. A reporter brings up the almost-greatest-shot-in-basketball-history and that brutal mov-ing pick that Singler went crashing into as time

expired, almost changing everything. But the shot didn’t go in, so they can laugh it off.

“It was something that wasn’t called either way,” Krzyzewski says of

the contact on that last play. “There would have been a little bit more controversy on our side if that shot had gone in.” Krzyzewski turns to Sin-gler and says, “But do you even know that it hap-pened to you?”

“No,” Singler replies, laughing. “As long as that shot didn’t go in, I was fine.”

A few more laughs and a bit more reminisc-ing, and all of a sudden it’s almost over. The time for just enjoying the victory is almost up. Report-ers bring up next season; one asks Krzyzewski how his team can keep its edge, another asks the

“Payback is sweet, isn’t it, Coach?” - President Barrack Obama

By Taylor Doherty

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two juniors how today’s experience might make them stronger leaders next year.

The pressure to look ahead and move on, to some degree, makes sense. To the program’s out-siders, the uncertainty of who might compete next year is a hotter story than who won in April. And for the players themselves, it was perhaps their

commitment to constant self-improvement that got them to the title in the first place. It’s an at-titude that doesn’t necessarily disappear, even after Gordon Hayward’s shot rims out. So the day at the White House ends with everyone talking about next season because there just isn’t any more time to stop and savor the moment. Reaching the pin-

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n July 2009, Anna Lieb went for an early morning run through the Sarah P. Duke

Gardens. The scene was void of human company, and white mist hung in the spaces in her path. Suddenly Lieb, an undergraduate researcher in a Duke laboratory, witnessed a sight she felt she might have dreamt: a large dog-like animal ap-peared in the fog, followed by three companions.

They ran with intention, she said, in a straight line with a clear leader, directly past her. She wrote in a journal after the incident that the group of canines struck her as “alternately magi-cal and sinister.”

“They sort of noticed me and kept going as though I was beneath their existence or something,” Lieb said “They didn’t even seem like dogs really.”

The ethereal canines Lieb described did not sprout from her imagination, though the appearance of them, passing by in fluid motion, may have seemed mythical in the quiet garden. Sporting pointed ears and bear-like snouts, they regularly travel campus in a pack and share a coat color—reddish gold-brown, their fur grown thick. The largest ones are equal in height to a German shep-herd, but bulkier, more muscled in the legs and shoulders. They elude most campus dwellers, but come out sometimes to roam the Duke Forest and West Campus at twilight.

Lieb said the canines behaved like wild ani-mals, and reminded her of a wolfpack.

Red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980, have in fact been rein-troduced to wildlife refuges in Eastern North

Carolina. Duke’s canines, however, do not resemble red wolves, which possess skinny snouts and gracile frames. Several students have described the dogs’ appearance as resem-bling that of a sleek Chow Chow.

Aaron Sandel, Trinity ’10, and former presi-dent of Duke Students for the Protection of Ani-mals, said the creatures are definitely dogs, and that the wild, aloof quality they possess suggests that the members of this current pack were born feral and have never interacted with humans.

“They’ve just acclimated to a wild lifestyle,” he said.

Kate Findlay-Shirras, Trinity ’10, made a film

about the dogs for her documentary studies cer-tificate final project. When she began the assign-ment, she had never seen one of the canines.

“I kind of didn’t believe they existed,” she said.The red-dog pack, however, has traversed

Duke terrain for at least a decade, according to Martha Sue Carraway, a consulting associate pro-fessor of medicine, who has resided in a neighbor-hood off Highway 751 for roughly that time.

“I’ve never had an experience with them where they were hostile or aggressive towards me, but they’re frightening because they are unvac-cinated and unsterilized,” said Carraway, who

found the pack on her front porch four years ago, cornering her cat. She shooed them and they ran, led by the largest—who stood howl-ing at the end of her driveway.

Durham County Animal Control set a trap in the neighborhood at the time, but the dogs have their own sources of food, Carraway said, and are unlikely to be lured into a food trap.

Carraway said she did speak to Campus Security once about the dogs, when she called 911 after seeing one chase a raccoon up a tree. By the time the police arrived, it had run away. Officers told her they were aware of the dogs, but there was little they could do about them.

“I don’t know what the best solu-tion is,” Carraway said, “but I do have concerns about them being out there for sure.”

Duke University Police Chief John Dailey wrote in an e-mail that he is not aware of any students reporting dangerous encounters with the dogs.

Findlay-Shirras said most people she in-terviewed described positive encounters with the dogs, though later some friends told her of frightening incidents. When Findlay-Shirras herself first spotted one of the creatures she had spent months learning about, she was ec-static and told her friend to stop the car they were in.

“I thought it’d be excited to see me too, but it wasn’t really. It kind of stood there,” she said. “The dog I saw did not run up to me and lick my hand and ask for snuggles even though I desperately wanted snuggles back.”

The Wild Things

“The dog I saw did not run up to me and lick my hand and ask for snuggles even though I desperately wanted snuggles back.” - Kate Findlay-Shirras

By Rachna Reddy

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AppetiteBy Lawson Kurtz

Photos courtesy

Revolution107 West Main StDurham

Revolution may still be new to the Durham food scene, but it has already established itself as one of the area’s finest restaurants. The fresh, creative dishes and delicious cocktails are right at home in the modern yet elegant dining room. The flavors are as clean and vibrant as the decor. Order a tasting menu, and let executive chef Jim Anile prove to you that he’s the best chef in the Bull City. And don’t leave without ordering a cocktail. We recommend the Agave in Bloom for pure taste bud bliss.

SAVVY

SAVVY

@NewBlackMan AAAS Prof Mark Anthony Neal tweets intelligently and probingly on popular culture and African American pop cul-ture. #sociopolitical #phd

@Everybody Whether you’re new to twitter, or an old hand, these prolific tweeters are the best Duke and Durham have to offer. Follow away.

@goodacre Religion prof from the UK, Mark Goodacre tweets beyond his research on #historicalJC covering all things British #DoctorWho #BBC

@Soccerpolitics History Prof Laurent Dubois (#SeePage24) follows the politics behind the world’s favorite sport. Especially exciting during the #WorldCup

@bullcity Asst. OIT Dir Kevin Davis moonlights as Durham journo on Bull City Rising. Keep up to date on latest news in ever develop-ing #Durham

@onlyburger The best burger in Durham and the Bull City’s origi-nal tweeting food truck. Follow so you can find out #WheresThe-Beef? #Yum

@fhi_duke Duke’s Humanities Institute tweets a nexus of various disciplines including #digitalhumanities, #feminisms, #technol-ogy, #politics and more

@NdotSmitty Senior guard Nolan Smith’s comical Twitter is a mix of ball player & college student. By far the best Twitter from Duke’s #basketball squad

@negaratduke Film theorist/Literature professor Negar Mottahe-deh tweets thoughtfully on #Iran, #theory, #politics and #film

less than 20 seconds ago via Towerview Magazine

1 minute ago via Towerview Magazine

5 minutes ago via Towerview Magazine

10 minutes ago via Towerview Magazine

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30 minutes ago via Towerview Magazine

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3 minutes ago via Towerview Magazine

@DukeChronicle

@ChronicleSports

@ChronicleRecess

@TowerviewMag

8 TOWERVIEW

SAVVY

FREE | Google Documents

$199 | Apple iPhone 4

Four products that will change your world

SPENDING GREEN

Patagonia Lightwire Brief | $79

Tunto LED1 Lamp | $650

If you’re not already using Google Documents, you should be. Paper is anti-quated by Google Docs’ spartan, go-anywhere utility. You may never use tree-killing paper (or MS Word) again.

Apple’s switch to an all-glass and metal design makes the iPhone 4 one of the most earth-friendly handsets out there. If you’ve been considering a switch, there’s no time like the pres-ent. Do it for the Earth.

The Tunto LED1 Lamp simul-taneously lightens your desk and your wallet. The wooden design features a touch con-trol that’s just as nifty as you would expect from a lamp at this price point.

The Lightwire Brief from Pa-tagonia is the perfect bag for the earth-conscious student or professor. Its water-resistant fabric is 100% recycled, and it even has a sleeve to keep your laptop safe and cozy.

kyrie irvingduke admissionsdr lefkowitzcentral campusreplacing mclen-haiti laboratorysmith warehouseentrepreneurshipservice at dukethe neighborhoodten to watch

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7The Up-and-Coming of Duke and Durham

Kyrie Irving - Duke Admissions - Dr. Lefkowitz - Central Campus - Replacing McLendonSmith Warehouse - The Haiti Lab - Entrepreneurship - Service - Rolling Hills

kyrie irvingduke admissionsdr lefkowitzcentral campusreplacing mclen-haiti laboratorysmith warehouseentrepreneurshipservice at dukethe neighborhoodten to watch

The Up-and-Coming of Duke and Durham

Kyrie Irving - Duke Admissions - Dr. Lefkowitz - Central Campus - Replacing McLendonSmith Warehouse - The Haiti Lab - Entrepreneurship - Service - Rolling Hills

E very May, a batch of seniors enters Wallace Wade Stadium wearing caps and gowns to re-cive diplomas. Doctoral candidates become doctors, staff and faculty retire, and the cam-

pus sits quietly for the summer.By the Fall, new students, faculty and staff have filled

the spots vacated by those departed, the campus bristles with activity in the August humidity and Duke once again transforms into that familiar place with that all-too-familiar daily grind.

The process is Sisyphean and cyclical. Duke carries with it the memories, triumphs and problems of the past as it tries to make itself anew. It is entrenched in a con-stant process of becoming itself, changing before it can

actually be achieved. It’s always fun to watch.It’s why, in that in-between, quiet moment of Summer,

we dwell on the possibilities and potentials of Duke – the very ways it can excite us, surprise us, challenge us and disappoint us. At Towerview, for the past decade, we’ve spent the Summer considering the potentials of Duke in the coming academic year by coming up with a list of the 10 stories–people, places, ideas–worth watching over the next 12 months and beyond. Some stories have long-standing histories–even in its new era of remaking itself, admissions is old hat–and some are as new as the grass growing on the Main West Quadrangle.

Right now, we’ll think on the possibilities. We’ve got a whole year to see how they unfold.

11TOWERVIEW

#1

Kyrie IrvingI

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By Laura KeeleyPhotos by Maya Robinson

“N

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-I-T! N-I-T!” On March 6 Cam-eron Indoor Stadium came alive. Literally.

More than 1,200 undergraduates squished themselves into the student section. Jumping up and down on the creaky wooden bleachers, the Cameron Crazies stood parallel to the court so more students could fit. Blue body paint was everywhere—if you had not painted yourself, well, you surely had a smudge or two off some-one else’s sweating body. The Crazies had gigantic printouts of the players’ heads—a four-foot Andre Dawkins, Nolan Smith and Jon Scheyer, and oth-ers, dotted the student section. Some had slept in a tent for two months for this night. Others had braved three days and nights with only a sleeping bag on the concrete sidewalk.

Those decisions were vindicated in the warm, thick air of Cameron Indoor Stadium on that glo-rious Saturday night.

Duke 82. UNC 50.“N-I-T! N-I-T!” The walls themselves ap-

peared to join in as well.Seniors had waited their whole undergraduate

careers for a home victory against Carolina. The entire Duke community had waited four years to let a bonfire rage on the Main Quad. That night in Cameron, though, a 17-year-old high school senior experienced Duke basketball in the hal-

lowed stadium for the first time.Just like the rest of the crowd, he had been

waiting for a certain event too.He had to wait—and still is waiting—for his

chance to see his face blown up on a poster in the student section and to shine on Cameron’s hard-wood floor.

For his chance to dribble up the court, fake left, go right, slash through the lane, jump, change direction mid-air, and throw down a one-handed slam for two points, right in the face of some sorry Tar Heel.

For his chance to hear his name called and for the fans in the stands to think, “this is the future of Duke basketball.”

“A six-foot-two guard from Elizabeth, New Jersey… KYRIE IRVING.”

on’t try to define Kyrie Irving. His persona defies neat packaging in one label. Working out every day with a

coach who does not have a cell phone? That’s old school.

“Old school,” though, does not fully describe a player who drives athletically to the basket at will.

“[Duke fans] are going to see spectacular drives, the acrobatic shots in traffic that are going to amaze people,” said Kevin Boyle, Irving’s high

school coach. “As a point guard, his ability to also dunk the ball—he seems like he jumps and then jumps again when he is already in the air, it’s a second level he goes to.”

Point guards from New Jersey, like Irving, have historically had the type of success at Duke that raises new banners in Cameron. Bobby Hur-ley raised Duke’s first two national championships in 1991 and 1992. Jason Williams hung the third banner in 2001. Hurley’s No. 11 and Williams’ No. 22 now hang in the rafters.

Irivng, bearing the number one on his jersey, will take the floor this season. He’ll be the first to wear the number at Duke—Williams wanted to wear it back in 1999, but Krzyzewski told him no. Duke was number one.

Now, Irving is number one.And he has the hype to go with it. “Kyrie Irving—when it’s all said and done—

he will be arguably as good as any guard who’s played in New Jersey,” Boyle said after a blowout win Irving’s junior year. “Any guard. Ever. Ever.”

he path that would eventually lead Irving to Duke began to take shape before he was born.

The second-seeded Blue Devils defeated Bos-ton University 85-69 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament March 17, 1988. For Duke,

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the season would become the first of five straight Final Four appearances. For the Terriers, it was only their third NCAA appearance, and it was the final game of their then all-time leading scorer: Drederick Irving.

The elder Irving, who wore the same number that Hurley donned the next season, played pro-fessionally in Australia for a year after that loss to Duke. While there, his son, Kyrie, was born.

The younger Irving wasted no time following in his father’s footsteps.

“He just took a liking to the game at a very, very young age,” Drederick said. “It may sound a little peculiar about the age that he started dibbling, but Kyrie was about 13 months, I have it documented on video.... He has always had a ball with him. He has always had an interest in the game.”

Drederick moved his family back to the United States when Kyrie was about 2 years old. When Kyrie was 4, his mother suddenly passed away from an illness. Drederick “can’t put it into words to describe” the bond he shares with his daughter and son.

The feeling is mutual.“I honestly call my father, like, he is my fa-

ther and my brother,” Irving said. “He can attest to that, too. In this relationship that we have, we don’t keep anything from each other.”

Krzyzewski and the rest of the Duke coach-ing staff picked up on the closeness between fa-

ther and son during the recruitment period. Texas A&M was thought to be one of Irving’s three final choices largely because of associate head coach Scott Spinelli, who played with the elder Irving at Boston University. Another finalist, Kentucky, had assistant coach Rod Strickland, a close family friend whom Irving refers to as his “uncle.”

Duke did not have any physical family ties to offer. But, as father and son both noted as a great piece of irony, the Blue Devils did have a tape of Duke’s first-round matchup against Boston Uni-

versity playing in the background when Coach K greeted Irving on his official visit.

rving continued to progress throughout his early years through tournament teams and one-on-one games with his father. As a

seventh grader at Montclair Kimberley Academy, Irving squared off and lost to a small private Jew-ish school that happened to be coached by a New Jersey basketball legend Sandy Pyonin.

As coach of an AUU team, the New Jersey Roadrunners, Pyonin has trained 31 current and former NBA players. Two of those 31 are the famed Duke point guards who raised the first three championship banners: Bobby Hurley and Jason Williams. At the time, Pyonin thought Ir-ving was “a good player, not a great player.” Three years later, Pyonin helped Irving make the jump from good to great.

“Tenth grade going into 11th grade, I was training him every day, and he made a big jump,”

Pyonin said. “He lived down the street from me, like five minutes away. And I picked him up every day, and we just trained.... Monday through Friday and Sundays.”

Irving would sometimes tire dur-ing those four-hour sessions, but they helped develop his insatiable work ethic. Pyonin taught Irving the nu-ances of the game that would make him like a coach on the floor. And

Irving soaked in all that knowledge.“Guys like Al Harrington, who I trained per-

sonally, and Kyrie, they pick up what I’m saying like at the 98th percentile,” Pyonin said. “It’s like one adult speaking to another adult, most of the time you are on the same wavelength.... If a kid meets me halfway, that’s what happens. Kyrie is a kid who met me halfway, he gave his effort and I gave my effort, and, you know, he got high results. Great kid.”

“Kyrie Irving—when it’s all said and done—he will be arguably as good as any guard who’s played in New Jersey. Any guard. Ever. Ever.” - St. Patrick High School Coach Kevin Boyle

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Irving’s big basketball jump included a switch of schools. He left the cozy confines of his nearly $30,000-a-year suburban prep school and transferred to St. Patrick High School, an inner-city basketball power-house at the end of his sophomore year.

By the time Irving landed at the higher-profile St. Patrick, big-time college programs were starting to take notice, including Duke. That Fall, associate head coach Chris Collins came to see Irving play first hand.

“I really kind of fell in love with his game, and it kind of went from there,” Collins said. “He was new to the school… so he was still kind of finding his way. But you could still see in his game, the way he held himself on the floor, the feel for the game he had, the ability to make plays, you could see that there was something special about him that you don’t see in most guards out there.”

Irving led St. Patrick to the state championship that year, and was poised to repeat this past season. St. Patrick started out the season ranked No. 1 in the USA Today’s preseason rankings. By averaging 24.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 6.5 assists, 4.5 steals and 2.0 blocks a game, Irving did his part, but St. Patrick was disqualified from postseason play for violating a rule barring coaches from visiting off-season workouts. Irving and his team watched Trenton Catholic, a team they had beaten by 26 points in the regular season, take the title.

The setback proved to have a silver lining.“It helped me grow,” Irving said of the experience. “Also coming out

of that situation, I got to go to my first Duke game, Duke versus North Carolina. So, I was in attendance there. Out of all of the bad stuff that happened... that was one of the only positives.”

n July 1, Irving will arrive at Duke and immediately jump into summer classes and summer workouts. In the Fall, Krzyzewski will hand him the No. 1 jersey, which will further

deepen the link between Irving, his father and the New Jersey point guards that came before him.

“People who have been in basketball, sometimes you have a num-ber—with Kyrie, it was No. 11,” Collins said of the number Drederick Irving wore. “And because it’s retired and Bobby Hurley had that num-ber, really, it was something that we came up with for him, you know, instead of going with 11 to wear No. 1. It was just a number we had not used, and we felt like he would be a great guy to be the first guy to wear that number for us.”

Duke’s No. 1 stayed in shape by playing in a series of high-profile offseason games, including the Nike Hoop Summit, the McDonald’s All-American Game and the Jordan Brand Classic, where he was Co-MVP along with North Carolina recruit Harrison Barnes. These games, in addition to coming from a national high school basketball power-house, have given Irving a small taste of the spotlight that will be on him at Duke.

“When you are a point guard at Duke, no matter what [your] cre-dentials are, you are going to have high expectations, and you are going to have pressure,” Collins said. “I think that is one of the reasons why he chose to come to Duke, because of that pressure. He wanted to be in that position of being the Duke point guard.”

How long Irving will be the Blue Devils’ point guard is up for de-bate. Almost every NBA 2011 mock draft has him going in the top 10, and nbadraft.net has him as the No. 3 pick. A potential NBA lockout next year might keep him in Cameron longer, but, regardless of the timeline, Blue Devil fans will witness the acrobatic performance of No. 1 for at least the 2010-11 season.

For students, Irving brings the immediate hope of another Carolina bonfire, another NCAA championship.

He is ready for the spotlight.“Yeah I’m definitely excited.” Irving said. “In terms of exposure, col-

lege basketball is just going to be on another level. “In the place where New Jersey point guards have ruled the hard-

wood and lifted banners to preserve the accomplishments of the past, the empty spaces in the rafters hold challenges for the future.

For Kyrie Irving, the future is now.

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Duke’s Gatekeeper

very spring, Duke is eager to announce admissions decisions. And every year, administrators say the incoming fresh-

man class is the best, brightest and most diverse class in the University’s history.

These are not just insincere, ego-boosting compliments intended to make the University look more desirable—the statistics back the superlatives, especially when looking at the last few years. For the class of 2014, the University received a record 26,731 applications, and its acceptance rate dipped from about 17 percent in 2009 to below 15 percent in 2010. In the last two years, Duke has received an additional 6,000 applications per year, a 30 percent jump.

To an outsider, these numbers reflect favor-ably upon the University—as Duke’s selectivity increases, so does its prestige. But what is typi-cally omitted in discussions about admissions is the process itself and the effect a large number of applications has on the system and on those involved in making admissions decisions. The current admissions model the University em-ploys was designed almost two decades ago when it received about 12,000 applications annually. With more than double that number this year, the admissions processes was stressed every step of the way. Among other consequences, readers took longer to finish reviewing applications, less

than half of all applicants were openly discussed in committee sessions and 3,383 students were left hanging on the waitlist.

“Given the size of the applicant pool… given the way the system was stretched, I had to prioritize what we were doing, “ said Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Gut-tentag. “Making sure admissions decisions were right took precedence over denying stu-dents admission who had initially been placed on the waitlist.”

This year, Duke’s waitlist was so extensive that it caught the attention of the New York Times and became the focus of a front-page sto-ry on lengthy waitlists at elite universities. Even though many selective universities commonly postpone admissions decisions for hundreds of students, none that make their data public rival the number of students Duke put on hold.

A sizeable waitlist does allow the University more flexibility in selecting students. Because admissions officers do not know the makeup of the incoming class when they send out ac-ceptances, Guttentag said waitlisting students allows the University to select those who fit best into a given class. Still, after the New York Times article appeared, administrators said they were not pleased that Duke ended up postpon-ing the admissions decisions for so many ap-plicants. Out of the few thousand students the

University has placed on its wait-list, Guttentag told the Times that 60 at most will be admitted, or less than two percent.

To cut down the waitlist, and to better cope with the inundation of applications in general, Guttentag said Duke will be hiring more ap-plication readers, who will be responsible for the first read. Additionally, Guttentag hopes that part of the discussion at the Consortium on Financing Higher Education for admissions deans at selective colleges and universities con-ference this summer will focus on how other admissions officials are managing the growing applicant pools at elite institutions. He’s hop-ing to hear some hints.

STILL PLAYING CATCHUPhile the University’s acceptance rate has plummeted by about a third in the last five years, another prestige

indicator has remained constant. Duke’s yield rate, which represents the percentage of accept-ed applicants that choose to enroll, has fluctu-ated between 41 and 42 percent since 2005, Guttentag said.

This number pales in comparison to many of the other universities Duke considers to be its peers. For the class of 2014, Harvard Uni-versity, Yale University and Stanford Univer-sity had yield rates of 76, 67 and 72 percent, respectively. Brown University and Princeton University had yield rates in the mid-fifties, and the University of Pennsylvania’s was 63 percent. At Cornell, 49 percent of those accepted to the entering class chose to enroll.

Administrators are not concerned that Duke’s yield rate has remained at 42 percent. When looking at quantifiable measures such as the reader ratings admissions officers use to evaluate students, Provost Peter Lange said the quality of students enrolling at Duke has risen faster than it has at its peer institutions. Thus, even though administrators ultimately want the yield rate to increase, they know the competi-tion is stiff for the top students.

“As we attract applicants who are also being admitted to the most selective universities in the country… I don’t want to kid ourselves that getting them to enroll is the same kind of deci-sion as having them apply,” Guttentag said.

Inevitably, it seems that Duke’s next class to be its best and brightest. Finding those applica-tions among the tens of thousands they receive, though, might be the biggest challenge.

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16 TOWERVIEW

Adm

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Better drugs mean better health...and better business.

escribing Robert Lefkowitz’s research journey is like tracing the construction of a house.

“I’ve always had in my lab an overarching vi-sion of what I was trying to do,” he said. “We continue to put floors on the building; there’s never been any kind of discontinuity since we started.”

This particular house, however, has a rather unusual foundation: cellular receptor biology. That’s what Lefkowitz, James B. Duke professor of biochemistry and a Howard Hughes medical investigator at Duke University Medical Center, has been studying at Duke since the late 1960s.

In particular, Lefkowitz’s research focuses on the cell’s plasma membrane receptors—the highly conserved pro-teins that regulate virtually every physiological process in humans. A whopping 40 percent of all modern medicinal products target these tiny receptors, putting Lefkowitz and his research at the forefront of a major pharmaceutical quest for better drugs.

In January 2008, Lefkowitz and his colleague Howard Rockman, DUMC chief of the division of cardiology, co-founded Trevena, a drug dis-covery company that develops pharmaceuticals targeting a particular family of these membrane proteins called G protein-coupled receptors. By many accounts, the young company seems prom-

ising. Trevena was named one of the most suc-cessful U.S. startups in 2008 by Business Week, and in 2009, received an extremely competitive stimulus package grant from the National Insti-tutes of Health, which funds $7.65 million dol-lars for two years.

In drug discovery, targeting GPCRs is a logi-cal choice—by regulating almost everything, they are bound to be involved in some disease symp-toms, and their unique conserved structure seems to make them particularly “druggable.”

Trevena is Lefkowitz’s first commercial ven-

ture, and although his academic research is inter-connected with the company, Lefkowitz says the two entities have different emphases.

“My academic lab is the enterprise in which I channel most of my energies—it is devoted to making basic discoveries,” he noted. “But once an idea is ripe enough that it could possibly serve as a platform for drug development, it’s got to go into the private sector.”

For Lefkowitz, military service sparked the insatiable curiosity that has driven his research program through the years.

“I started to get the [research] bug when I had

to go into the armed services—the U.S. Public Health Service—at the height of the Vietnam War,” he recalled.

That was 40 years ago—a time when receptor biology was truly in its infancy, when most peo-ple “didn’t even believe receptors existed.” Now, Lefkowitz can reflect on a research program that has ultimately structured a blueprint for the field of receptor biology, elucidating some of the mo-lecular properties and regulatory mechanisms that govern plasma membrane receptors for hormones and drugs. And he is pushing ahead, he says, with

the same fascination that has driven him all these years.

“One of the things I pride myself on is that you can take experiments going on in our lab now, and if you look at our lab books, you can trace back every

experiment now to the experiments in 1973,” he said. Lefkowitz notes that his medical training and continuous research focus may not be the norm in research. But then again, neither are the heap of awards he’s racked up in his career—including the National Medal of Science, the Shaw Prize, and more than 60 others—nor his recent startup success in pharmaceutics.

“I guess the key [to research success] is to be passionately interested in an important prob-lem—something you really want to know the an-swer to,” he said. “Here I am 40 years later. What I’m doing has evolved, but I’m just as interested.”

“Here I am 40 years later. What I’m doing has evolved, but I’m just as interested,” - Robert Lefkowitz, Ph.D.

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17TOWERVIEW

4 Centr

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Central CampusIV

By Julia Love

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Welcome to the new revamped Central Campus.

hen sophomore Chris Brown vis-ited Duke as a kid, he peered up at the old rooms of his mother and his

father—two gothic nooks, framed in blue stone, with Main West Quadrangle for a view.

It was only natural to think he would grow up to live there too someday.

It took him about two weeks to come to terms with the fact that he will be calling an apartment on Central Campus home this Fall, he said.

For almost a decade, West Campus has been framed as the birthright of all sophomores. But Brown pledged Pi Kappa Phi, a fraternity that will carve out its first section on Central Campus this Fall. He and 16 other sophomores in the fra-ternity gave up their claim to West to be a part of something novel they see unfolding on Alexander Street. And they haven’t looked back.

“I’m very excited about living on Central,” Brown said. “We all are.”

Dean and Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education Steve Nowicki is pinching himself.

For many students on campus, long before their time on West runs out, Central is preceded by its reputation: a dilapidated, isolated place with scant social offerings and questionable se-curity.

Nowicki hoped students would warm to Central in light of facilities upgrades and the ar-rival of several new selective living groups—but he had braced himself for a longer wait.

“It’s actually really remarkable, rising sophomores saying this is going to be a great place to live,” Nowicki said. “Who would have thought?”

Junior Betsy Klein, for one, is not surprised by students’ change of heart about the middle campus. The Campus Council member has cho-sen to live in the Panhellenic Association’s new space on Central.

“Central is the new place to live,” she said matter-of-factly.

Constructed in the 1970s as temporary hous-ing, Central is far from new, and it reveals its age in less charming ways than the Gothic or Geor-gian parts of campus that ring classically “Duke.” But Klein may be on to something.

With New Campus on the back burner, No-wicki said administrators have shifted to their “fallback position:” making Central more liv-able for the foreseeable future. But it’s the social changes accompanying these physical tweaks that may be truly groundbreaking.

With the April launch of the Devil’s Bistro and the Mill Village complex, administrators unveiled the first phase in Central’s three-year, $13.5 million facelift.

Next up are resurfaced tennis and basketball courts, estate fencing and improved lighting. The apartments, too, will undergo renovations, including remodeled bathrooms, new carpeting, new exterior staircases and fresh coats of paint

from a new color palette. A pilot building will be ready in the Fall.

Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta downplayed the physical improvements that Central will undergo.

“The amount of money for these buildings is enough to maintain them and make them more pleasant,” Moneta said. “These buildings aren’t worth investing so much money that they’ll be around for another 50 years.”

But he cited Ubuntu, a service-oriented selec-tive living group that debuted on Central Cam-pus last year, as something “revolutionary.”

With their new sections on Central, Ubuntu, PiKapp and the Panhellenic Association are help-ing administrators turn back the clock to a time when Duke subscribed to the “house system,” which clustered students into groups of about 40 to 80. Administrators will host a series of discus-sions about the return of the model with students in the Fall, Nowicki said.

In 2002, the Board of Trustees voted to adopt the “quad model,” dividing West into six large blocks and requiring all sophomores to live there. The change stemmed from the designation of East as an all-freshmen campus, Moneta ex-plained in a 2001 guest column published in The Chronicle.

But the quad model did not prove to be the magic elixir. Five years after its implementation, a report released by the Campus Culture Initia-

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18 TOWERVIEW

tive Steering Committee cited a number of flaws in the Duke housing system, including the dis-proportionate number of minority students liv-ing on Central, upperclassmen’s propensity to “self-segregate,” a shortage of social spaces for independents and the perceived prioritization of selective living groups.

Nowicki said the University is still dealing with unforeseen consequences of the decision to house freshmen on East and concentrate selective living groups on West in 1993. The move land-locked Duke real estate, forcing older students into sometimes-uncomfortable social positions. As a consequence, Duke housing affords students “two levels of privilege” today, he explained.

“[East Campus] wasn’t intended to do that, but there weren’t enough beds. What we’re trying to do is to peel back those consequences,” he said. “We need to level the playing field…. Under the Duke house model, all of the issues raised by the CCI would evaporate.”

Moneta said the reasoning behind the class-oriented living scheme is sound, but he now thinks the model is too rigid.

“There are some developmental differences between freshmen and seniors,” he said. “The housing model tried to reflect that. But I think many believed it was too proscriptive.”

Shifting some selective living groups to Cen-tral and permitting sophomores to live off West clears room for the revival of the house model. Moneta cited East Meets West, a section on West

for independents who choose not to block, as an example of the type of living arrangement he hopes will multiply in the coming years—hous-ing that gives independents a sense of commu-nity without forcing them to affiliate as strongly as students in selective living groups do.

The transition hinges on selective living groups’ willingness to give Central a chance. Ad-ministrators insist they don’t want Central to be framed as a punishment. Indeed, the experiences of past generations of selective living groups on the middle campus indicate that once members make the move to Central, they may never want to leave.

Nowicki recalled attending the last supper of a selective living group forced to vacate its section on Central in 1993 when the communities were swept to West Campus.

“It was like they were having a wake,” he said.The irony doesn’t escape him. Student con-

victions and administrative philosophies can re-emerge and retreat cyclically in the Gothic Won-derland. Today, administrators laud the wisdom of a housing model that was first devised well before current undergrads were born, and a grow-ing number of students are embracing facilities that date back to the same era and haven’t seen any significant improvements since.

embers of Ubuntu have come to love their section on Central. But when the group planned rush for the first

time this Spring, they weren’t sure whether fresh-men with visions of West Campus dancing in their heads would take to the idea of calling Cen-tral home.

Central proved to be an easier sell than they had thought.

“Really our issue was with getting people out to see Central,” said Ubuntu President Louis Or-tiz, a junior. “Once they saw the environment we were living in, they saw that it isn’t that bad.”

Ubuntu added 18 new members, far exceed-ing expectations, Ortiz said.

PiKapp President Jordan Stone, a junior, said Ubuntu’s experiences made his fraternity more confident about establishing roots on Central.

In some ways, Central is the perfect place for a fraternity to be, Stone said. When PiKapp throws parties, they will have the space afforded by off-campus venues without having to deal with the Durham Police Department.

With West still the epicenter of the greek so-cial scene, Stone says he knows it won’t always be easy for PiKapp. But he’s confident that he and his fraternity brothers will rise to the challenge.

“There’s a lot more to a fraternity than a loca-tion,” he said. “We’re fortunate in my fraternity that we have a really dedicated group of guys that is going to make this space on Central one to be envied by fraternities on West.”

PiKapp’s new pledge class spent two weeks mulling over whether to live on Central with the upperclassmen in the fraternity, Brown said. M

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Sophomore Matt Fisher said that although many in the pledge class had romanticized West, he was an early advocate of living on Central. He debunked the classic Central hang-ups about physical and social isolation, insisting that he is just excited to live with his brothers.

“In reality, it’s a 10-minute walk to West Campus,” Fisher said. “It’s not like I’m transfer-ring to another college—it seems like it’s built up to be that.”

A Campus Council survey of sophomores living on Central last year found they were over-whelmingly happy with the experience, Klein said, a good omen for the wave of rising sopho-mores who will be relocating to Central with PiKapp and Ubuntu.

Stone added that he feels the move to Central is prudent for the fraternity’s future—Nowicki has promised that groups that choose to move to Central will have their pick of housing on New Campus. It could also pay to make the decision sooner rather than later. Administra-tors have carved out special common spaces for Ubuntu, PiKapp and Panhel, but they won’t have the resources to do that indefinitely, he said.

“If you think of a section on West with dingy hallways and poor lighting, Ubuntu is the best common space on campus by light years,” he said. “There’s a cachet to living on West, but if you’re interested in good real estate Central is the place to get it.”

Nowicki said he is in talks with the Inter-Greek Council, the National Pan-Hellenic Council and another chapter in the Interfraterni-ty Council about space on Central. Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was offered space on Central but declined for lack of member interest.

IFC President Erskine Love, a senior, said he thinks PiKapp’s section on Central will help the group set itself apart during rush. But he has not heard much discussion about chapters that have already staked out space on West re-

locating to Central. “West is a great place for fraternities to be,”

Love said. “I think certainly as the housing model from the top down changes, fraternities are going to make sure that we don’t get kicked aside.”

ith visions of New Campus still burning bright, Moneta conceded that administrators are making only

“nominal” upgrades to Central facilities. Yet they are also the first tangible signs of progress he has seen on Central since he arrived at Duke in 2001.

Moneta said he is “guardedly thrilled” about the changes taking place on Central—happy to have something to show for five years of formal

conversation, but disappointed that New Cam-pus remains a daydream.

“I wish we were really working on New Cam-pus,” he said. “[Revamping Central] was our sec-ond choice, not our first choice.”

Administrators are remaking Central with a few coats of paint, new carpeting and perhaps some greenery too. If all had gone according to plan, they would have traded the paintbrushes and hoes for a bulldozer.

Yet regardless of when the “quad model” formally gives way to the “house model” and New Campus relieves Central of its stopgap role, Campus Council President Stephen Tem-ple, a senior, said the interim goal is to make the makeshift campus into something else entirely: a community.

“I don’t want [changes to the housing model] to be a huge drastic light switch that we flip,” he said. “We’re going to pull people out of their apartments and build friendships.”

Construction projects aside, many students said the most profound change on Central this Fall is that with the advent of selective living groups, some residents will be living on Cen-tral by choice—not by virtue of their housing lottery number.

“In the past, I feel that students were swept onto Central because there wasn’t enough space on West,” said junior Libby Hase, who will be living in the Panhel block. “I feel like if you have happy groups of people then it will improve the mood on Central.”

Klein noted that the addition of selective living groups will revitalize the social scene on Central—and may even challenge traditional nightlife migration patterns.

“This is going to bring people who don’t even live on Central out there,” Klein said.

To alleviate concerns about the iso-lation of Central campus, the C-2 bus will run in place of the C-1 and C-4 af-

ter 8 p.m. starting this Fall, said Brown, who is Duke Student Government’s vice president for athletics and campus services. Some freshmen boarding the bus in search of a section party may be enticed to pull the cord while still on Central, saving the frat party mecca for another night. It may be a bit easier to breath in the halls of West.

Junior Michelle Barbera, who will be living in the Panhel block, is sad to be giving up her quad-view room in Kilgo—the perfect vantage point from which to take in a bonfire last spring. But she thinks her timing is perfect—all signs tell her that change is finally coming to Central.

“Whenever I tell someone I’m living on Central they’re like, ‘Oh, that sucks.’ And it does compared to West,” she said. “But it’s a good year to move to Central. I hope a lot of people look at us and are like, ‘They’re having a lot of fun. I want to go there.’”

“Central is the new place to live.” - Junior Betsy Klein

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5 Dean

The Deanship V

By Zach Tracer

lvin Crumbliss was going to take some time off.

After 40 years as a professor of chemistry, and the last three as dean of natural sciences, Crumbliss had earned a sabbatical. He planned to spend it in Genoa, a seaside city in northern Italy known for its history and cuisine.

But instead of stepping back, Crumbliss is stepping up. He agreed to serve for a year as dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and dean of Trinity College after the previous dean, George McLendon (incidentally, also a chemist), left Duke to become the provost at Rice University.

“I viewed it as an honor to have been asked to take this position,” Crumbliss said. “In the end, I didn’t want to pass it up.”

The dean’s job—simply put, running Trinity College—has never been easy. You’ve got to keep the ship on a forward course, and it’s a compli-cated ship.

“The deans are absolutely critical to map-ping and developing the future for the school, and for the interaction between the schools and for making sure we advance on our academic pri-orities,” Duke Provost Peter Lange explained.

That means regular meetings with deans, department chairs and other representatives of Trinity’s 635 professors. It means working with students who want to do research and with stu-dent leaders who want to change policies.

And, as Lange noted, the dean is also re-sponsible for managing Trinity’s roughly $300 million budget, a task complicated by the Uni-versity’s continuing need to cut spending.

But fortunately for Crumbliss, he’s following in the footsteps of McLendon, who hired many distinguished professors to Trinity’s faculty and fostered interdisciplinary research and teaching as dean of Trinity College and dean of the fac-ulty of Arts & Sciences.

“I don’t see any drastic direction changes,” Crumbliss said.

That doesn’t mean Crumbliss will be sit-ting around in McLendon’s oversized shoes, minding the helm for a year until someone else takes over.

Crumbliss will continue hiring professors and work to figure out how undergraduates fit in on Duke’s new overseas professional school campuses in China and Singapore.

“He’s got considerable vision,” Lange said.

“He really understands the underlying culture of us wanting to press forward with innovation.”

That culture extends to students, too. Crumbliss wants to push more undergrads

to do research with professors during their time at Duke.

He has seen the value of this research him-self as director of the Crumbliss Lab, where he works with a handful of students each year, studying the role of iron in biological systems. But Crumbliss didn’t just take the top job in Trinity because he’s looking forward to more responsibilities.

Midway through our interview, Crumbliss stopped me in the middle of another question about the challenges of the position.

“You didn’t ask me about the fun part of the job,” he said. “What I enjoy is… talking about the intellectual interests of my faculty colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the natural sciences.”

The fun, as much as the honor, is why Crumbliss opted to postpone his Genoan sab-batical, he said. After all, he’ll still get his chance to go to Italy next year. But the opportunity to lead at Duke, that comes just once.

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Smith WarehouseVI

The W

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By Kevin Lincoln

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The drawing and painting studio in Smith Warehouse

Art finds a place to call home.

hat do you know about the arts at Duke?

This isn’t rhetorical. Think about it. But whatever comes to mind, if it doesn’t in-volve the Smith Warehouse, is incomplete. In a five-year-old evolution that is still blossoming, ways of employing the space in Smith are chang-ing not only the University’s arts culture but the rest of the academic landscape as well.

The warehouse has come to house some of the most progressive departments at Duke: the certificate in Information Science and Informa-tion Studies and the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image. Many Visual Studies faculty members have workspaces in the warehouse as well. In addition, next year marks the beginning of the Master of Fine Arts program in Experi-mental and Documentary Arts, which will be housed in the carpentry shop near Smith and is Duke’s first MFA program. Though Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 will only see the first appli-cants applying to the program, its beginning is emblematic of the multidisciplinary, arts-meet-technology fervor that has come to define a sig-nificant portion of the artistic community here, a transformation that would be impossible without this old tobacco warehouse on Buchanan Road, perched just above Campus Drive.

The outside is red brick, top to bottom. The inside, separated into bays—the cutting-edge Arts, Culture and Technology Studios, multime-dia headquarters and lynchpin of the new move-ment, dominate Bays 11 and 12—also sport plentiful brick. But the expansive high-ceilinged space of the warehouse’s interior is more notable for the wooden columns that give the building

a grainy, organic feel. And better yet, the walls serve as galleries for student work, the lion’s share of which is created within the walls it adorns.

Speaking to professors and students partici-pating in the arts at Duke, there is a palpable excitement regarding the potential of the ware-house—something that seems surprising in hind-sight. In January and November 2009 editorials, The Chronicle’s independent editorial board lev-eled criticism against Smith Warehouse. It was described as “Duke’s answer to Siberia” and the relocation of the Career Center and the Global Education Office was judged unwise.

Now accompanied by the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, Duke Performances and the Office of Undergraduate Scholars and Fellows (and a new branch of the Saladelia Cafe), the building has overcome its difficult location with a necessity established by its facilitative virtues and the efforts of innovative faculty and students.

“We imagine that the CDS space, the Bay 11 and 12 space and the carpenter space as being all part of a larger arts campus,” said ISIS Program Director Victoria Szabo. “This is really a way to grow from within what we’ve really got, and to really refurbish and enhance the spaces that we’ve got so that there’s more opportunities for people to do work.”

Professor Hans Van Miegroet, department chair for Arts, Art History and Visual Studies as well as an author of the Visual Studies Initiative, credits the breakneck expansion seen in his and other departments to Smith’s space and possibili-ties. Before Smith, Van Miegroet said there was “nothing”: Visual Studies had yet to come into being, and in the academic environment that

existed prior to the collaborative opportunities created by Smith—opportunities essential to the co-disciplinary dictates of the Visual Studies Initiative—the field was hardly conceivable.

“This is completely new, because Visual Stud-ies is not practicing arts. Visual Studies operates at the interface of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences,” Van Miegroet said.

The opportunities allowed by the space within the Arts, Culture and Technology Studios include film editing, virtual worlds, a painting studio, podcasting, a game studio, faculty of-fices, a green screen, experimental arts display space, computers connected to common server infrastructure and a host of other facilities. These are almost all methods of creation that, one way or another, weren’t around until just recently: ei-ther they weren’t technologically feasible, or they weren’t technologically feasible at Duke.

Potential is impressive, but through the lens of art, it only means so much. There needs to be a product. And so far, the students and fac-ulty utilizing Smith have achieved surprising and impressive feats with the tools at their disposal. Unequivocally, this is a great thing for the Uni-versity: the complexion of artistic endeavoring at Duke has been altered, and for the better.

The work of Visual Studies major Sarah Goetz, a senior, seems to be a fitting distillation of this approach. Last semester, Goetz edited two films for two different classes, wrote a pro-gram for interactive graphics based on webcam movement, made her own website and created a wall-sized installation out of paper based on the hormone oxytocin and the chemicals compos-ing Adderall and Ritalin. If you’re looking for

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conversant artists, her works, with their multi-faceted nature, speak in a variety of academic and artistic languages. And this was all done in the space of Smith, the importance of which she stresses as a spot not only helpful but essential to Duke’s community of artists.

“At the end of last semester, during the crunch-time before finals, I could walk out of a room at 2 a.m., run into someone who was painting, run into another person who was doing Web design and then run into another person who was editing their final movie—and all of this is part of the same space,” Goetz said.

Without the Arts, Culture and Technol-ogy Studios, this would not be possible. Nor would projects like those undertaken in the ISIS capstone, including an upcoming col-laboration with the Franklin Institute in the creation of a virtual world revolving around Haiti, Szabo said. It would not be possible to create an intuitive learning environment that allows convenient access to Haitian docu-ments and history alongside tools for develop-ing your Creole alongside sociological data and archival information alongside other students, doing the exact same thing.

“The idea is by looking at old and new me-dia together and seeing how a space is being rep-resented, to understand what all the opportuni-ties are—it’s not so much creating a virtual Haiti just for the sake of creating a virtual Haiti, but it’s using all the available tools that are out there to

think about new modes of representation and to take advantage of them,” Szabo said.

But Goetz pointed out that Smith Ware-house, despite its virtues, still falls far short of perfect. She cited the its distance as a serious ca-veat, and little things that, for a location where she spends so much of her time, create certain difficulties: the vending machines don’t accept DukeCards, the doors close at 11 p.m., the walls really aren’t great for displaying artwork—“which is kind of silly,” she said—and compared to a

disciplinary headquarters like the French Science Center, it just doesn’t hold up.

Goetz is a leading voice in the new Duke Arts Majors Network, a group that she hopes will bring arts students together and force the ca-maraderie that the multi-departmental discipline and its chief location currently lack, though she said it’s greatly improved over three years ago, “not even close to what it is now.”

“Community in the arts is the most impor-

tant thing next to facilities and teachers. For most students, it’s the most important thing,” Goetz said. “We’re trying to get [Smith] to be a place where it can actually be a second home for stu-dents, because as an art student, that’s what you actually need in your facility is a second home. It’s got to be somewhere you can spend the night if you have to. I’ve done that, and most people think I’m crazy for it. It’s going to change.”

Because of the value and necessity of the warehouse, such culture merits change. The

possibilities of creation literally supersede the boundaries of the space and equipment, the students and faculty constantly coming up with new ways of doing so. Hence, “new” media. In this collaborative way, Van Miegroet said Duke has set a fresh bar. He stressed the importance of artists who can work at the joints of what would initially seem to be far-flung fields, “who can readily cross boundaries.”

“They don’t have to be neuroscientists, or they don’t have to be engineers or compu-

tation people, but they have to be conversant with it,” Van Miegroet said. “We practice what we preach. Duke is a co-disciplinary institution but you also have to do it, it’s in the doing, it’s not solely in the saying, and artists are an inte-gral part of this. So it’s not solely how science departments can do artsy things, it’s really also how artists can fundamentally affect scientific thinking. And that’s new.”

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The Haiti LabVII

Hait

i Lab

By Ryan Brown

or the heads of a laboratory, Laurent Dubois and Deborah Jenson have an unusual set of credentials. Yes, you can

call them “doctor,” but look closely: those PhD’s are in history and French. They spend far more time combing Caribbean archives than mixing chemicals and they know more about Haitian Creole than the periodic table.

But if Jenson and Dubois aren’t your average lab directors, that’s because theirs isn’t your aver-age lab. When the two professors open the doors to their Haiti Lab in Smith Warehouse this Fall, there won’t be a white coat or test tube in sight.

Instead, they’ll be rolling out the Univer-sity’s first ever “humanities laboratory.” It’s a term with the puzzling ring of an oxymoron, but as English professor Ian Baucom, director of the Franklin Humanities Institute, describes it, the concept is simple. You take the idea of a scientific lab—a hub for teaching and research, a collaborative space for study, an intensive and singularly focused community of scholars—and apply that to a topic in the humanities.

“With a lab we can address questions that are beyond any one scholar’s area of expertise,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to create an in-tensive, ongoing dialogue on a [hu-manities] subject.”

So where does Haiti play into all this? While a small Caribbean island nation may initially seem like a strange subject with which to kick-start the humanities lab program, the ties be-tween the Gothic Wonderland and Haiti run deep. Duke is one of only a handful of American universities to offer a language program in Hai-tian Creole, and the University counts among its faculty experts in Haitian history, language, literature and dance. Renowned public health expert Paul Farmer, Trinity ’82, whose pioneer-ing work on medical services for the poor began in Haiti, sits on the University’s Board of Trust-ees, and this Spring in London, Julia Gaffield, a graduate student in history at Duke, discovered the only known original copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

The true catalyst for the lab, however, was the catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12. With the country splayed across inter-national news headlines, its pain and poverty on display for the entire world, Duke’s scholars of Haiti searched for a way to marshal the ground-

swell of concern for the country rising across campus, while also stemming media-fueled per-ceptions of Haiti as destitute and unfixable.

Jenson, a professor of romance studies who was then Duke’s only professor of Creole lan-guage—the mother tongue of most Haitians—scrambled to launch a new language class to give students and community members with an in-terest in the Haitian recovery the linguistic and cultural background necessary to make them effective ambassadors. Meanwhile, Dubois and Gaffield were also planning a conference focused on preserving Haitian archival materials and teams of Duke students and medical personnel were preparing for aid trips to the country.

“We started to have a very organic surfacing of Haitian ties and interest from the commu-nity,” Jenson says.

With the ball already rolling, the question for Jenson and Dubois, a professor of French and history who has worked extensively in the

French Caribbean, was how to keep it going. Enter Baucom and the Franklin Humanities

Institute. The institute, he says, was looking to push cross-disciplinary collaboration in the hu-manities in an innovative way—and to motivate scholars to work more closely with students on their research.

The solution, it seemed, was to create a long-term space for research, channeling money, resources and brilliant minds into a single press-ing subject for maximum results. Thus the idea of the humanities lab was born, and the FHI made plans to launch three over a three-year period. When Dubois proposed the idea of making Haiti the first subject, it seemed like a natural fit.

“We hope it will create really a think-tank-like atmosphere for those of us working on Hai-ti,” says Christina Mobley, a doctoral student of Dubois’ who works on 19th century Haiti. “This has the chance to really make a large com-munity around Haiti scholarship at Duke.”

Ideally, the lab’s creators say, that commu-nity will include students and scholars of a wide

variety of disciplines, from history to public health to law, all of them bringing their indi-vidual expertise to some of Haiti’s most press-ing earthquake needs, all the while promoting a broader understanding of the country.

“The real hope is that we can show you can bring together in-depth humanities and cultural knowledge with projects that can have an im-mediate impact,” Dubois says.

The disaster, he says, highlighted the need to preserve and promote Haitian history, both within the country, where educational tools are a pressing need, and to a world that often sees Haiti—which holds the distinction of existing as a result of the modern world’s only success-ful slave rebellion—as corrupt and backward. A central tool in this battle to remember will be the digitization and free Internet distribution of Haitian archival documents, many of which were buried beneath crumbled concrete Jan. 12.

The lab also hopes to be heavily involved with linguistic work, translating press-ing recovery documents into Creole and publishing Creole literature in English, making it—and by proxy Haitian cul-ture—accessible to a wider audience. To that end, the University has hired a sec-ond Creole language instructor, linguist Jacques Pierre, who will begin to teach

and work with the lab in the fall. “Many people from Duke will go to Haiti

for aid work [over the next few years], and we want them to be able to communicate in culture and language with the country,” he says.

As for other projects, Dubois and Jenson say they will depend largely on the students and fac-ulty who join the lab in the coming years. They intend to hire student interns and researchers, develop new Haiti-related classes and encourage students to pursue multidisciplinary honors the-ses through the lab.

In this way, Baucom says, the directors of the lab hope to make Haiti more than just a flash in the pan for Duke philanthropy and research.

“The Haiti lab is a fabulous way for us to think about how to be scholars, students and citizens of the world all at once, both to contrib-ute to historical understanding of this place and also to think about what we all can contribute to it in the future.”

Students interested in working with the Haiti Lab should contact Ian Baucom at ibaucom@duke.edu.

“This has the chance to really make a large community around Haiti scholar-ship at Duke.” - Doctoral student Christina Mobley

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24 TOWERVIEW

8 E-s

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Entrepreneurship VIII

By Lisa Du

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The Blue Devil makes an appearance at the 2010 Duke Start-Up Challenge.

The entrepreneurial spirit is stronger than ever.

an Certner, Trevor Ragan and Shaan Puri, members of the recently-gradu-ated Class of 2010, appeared like typi-

cal college graduates. Their career paths were standard for Duke grads: Dan was ready for Wall Street, Trevor wanted to be a high school teacher and Shaan was heading to medical school.

Then, all three put their plans on hold. Their new idea is to become entrepreneurs—

more specifically restaurateurs.The spotlight has been shining on the trio’s

decision since April 16, the day they became the first undergraduate team to win the Duke Start-Up Challenge with their idea for Wasabi–newly minted Sabi Sushi–a fast and customizable sushi restaurant. Think the Subway of sushi.

Dan, Trevor and Shaan aren’t the only ones who have caught the entrepreneurial fever. The Start-Up Challenge, an annual student-led competition in which teams of un-dergraduate and graduate students compete for $25,000 to fund a business idea, just finished its 10th year with a record number of competitors. This year, the challenge had 109 teams—70 more than last year’s total. In addition, there were also a record number of 41 undergraduate teams and 21 women-led teams.

Jon Fjeld, the director of Duke’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, gives two reasons for the increased popularity of the chal-lenge and entrepreneurship in general. The first one is no surprise—the state of the economy and the weak job market. Student interest in the five year-old center is much greater than when it opened before the credit crises.

“Entrepreneurship creates a positive energy in the economy,” Fjeld said. “It’s people trying to do something new and get something go-

ing… that’s where the action is going in the economy.

Fjeld also said people are starting to notice the interdisciplinary nature of starting new ven-tures and realizing the value of the experience. Part of this enlightenment could be a result of the Center’s push to get more undergraduates to take advantage of its services.

Howie Rhee, the managing director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, said that students have always been enthusiastic about entrepreneurship. It was just a matter of reaching out to students—especially undergrad-uates—and offering enough resources and help

so they are not afraid to take the first step be-hind a possible business idea.

“Before, if students wanted to be entre-preneurial, they had to find their own path. It wasn’t just about how good your idea was, but if you could do it as a student,” Rhee says.

“What we’re doing now is… providing those clearer steps of how to get started and making it easier to get on the path of being an entrepreneur.”

The resources at Duke are numerous. DU-hatch, the appropriately named “incubator” of entrepreneurship, offers office space for entre-preneurial teams working on start-ups and guid-ance from local business consultants. The Duke Global Entrepreneurial Network connects cur-rent students to alumni who are willing to help with new ventures, whether it’s offering legal

advice or investment money.And finally, there’s the Program for Entre-

preneurs. The two year-old program matches students interested in entrepreneurship to form teams that will work together on a start-up idea. Those enrolled in the program will be guided and mentored by business professors and re-ceive course credit. One of the teams advised by the program, EntoGenetics, won the Start-Up Challenge in 2009.

In addition to all these resources, young Dukies have even more to be excited about as business leaders turn their eyes toward the Uni-versity’s promising entrepreneurs.

Duke alumnus Aaron Patzer, ’02, founder of the personal finance website Mint.com—which recently sold for $170 million—was a keynote speaker at this year’s Start-Up Challenge. In an hom-age to the entrepreneurial spirit, Patzer made an impromptu announcement that he would be investing $250,000

over the next five years in Duke start-ups be-cause he was so impressed with the ideas he saw in the competition.

Both Patzer and Bill Maris, co-founder of GoogleVentures and a judge at last December’s Elevator Pitch Competition, have described the start-ups and ventures at Duke to be as exciting, if not more, as those in Silicon Valley.

But before students start seeing dollar signs, they should also be prepared to live the life of a budding entrepreneur – which isn’t all fine wine and extravagance.

Dan, Trevor and Shaan are in the process of moving Sabi Sushi operations to Boulder, Colo. The three will relocate there this month to live in Trevor’s aunt’s basement.

“You can’t be an entrepreneur without living in a basement,” Dan says matter-of-factly.

“You can’t be an entrepreneur without living in a basement.” - Sabi Sushi Co-Founder Dan Certner

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9 Serv

ice

Student ServiceIX

By Toni Wei

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Mike Posner, Trinity ‘10, performs at the Purple concert.The Service Lifestyle

uke was one of three institutions award-ed the Presidential Award for Service to Youth from Disadvantaged Circum-

stances from the Corporation for National and Community Service in early February 2009—a mark of the rising prominence of the University’s civic engagement programs.

Kristin Wright, service learning program coordinator, said the administration has pri-oritized service learning much more in the past few years.

“Everyone is working together and excited about ways the University is helping us to work together even more,” she said. Wright added that faculty director of the Service-Learning Program David Malone, who has been involved in many committees focused on civic engagement, “has expressed that this is one of the first times he feels like [Provost Peter Lange] is really behind this.”

Duke has an abundance of opportunities to get involved, said senior Becky Agostino, presi-dent of the Duke Partnership for Service, adding that this also poses a major challenge to the orga-nization of those opportunities.

“I think one of the major issues with social action on campus is there are so many people working on it, students are confused as to who is running what,” she said. “I think there is a perception that [civic engagement at Duke is] a bit fragmented and that people don’t really know where to go for what.”

DPS, a student-run umbrella organization for student service learning groups, was created in March 2009 to improve visibility of and coor-

dination among student service groups.Senior Nick Bruns, former vice president of

Purple, said the proliferation of service groups on campus helps to alleviate the idea that students have to commit all or nothing to a cause.

“At least there is something for everyone,” he said. “There are different layers people could be engaged with the causes, at the very least just [be-ing] mindful of the cause.”

A highly publicized Social Activism Week, capped by a concert by pop musician Mike Pos-ner, Trinity ’10, put Purple—which uses music and fashion to inspire students—on the map.

Bruns said that although some students think of Purple, one of 80 organizations that fall under the purview of DPS, as just an event plan-ner, that isn’t the case.

“The point is not to have a concert and the tickets are a fundraiser,” he said. “I think it’s more the music itself tries to create its own experience; the concert tries to direct people to the cause.”

Agostino, a Robertson Scholar, said one thing she noticed about her semester at the Uni-versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the strong culture of service there.

“At Duke… it’s common that people think social action is something that can be confined to a class or a summer,” Agostino said. “But I really think that a lot more students are finding ways to integrate it into their lives, and have more holis-tic experiences [at Duke].”

The landscape of service learning at Duke has markedly shifted in the past few years, with the advent of powerhouse bragging point Duke-

Engage, as well as the emergence of new groups with widespread student support.

When the Community Service Center was disbanded in early 2009, its responsibilities were distributed among the Office of Student Activi-ties and Facilities and the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, an office designed in 2007 to con-nect University service learning programs with the newly minted DukeEngage program.

The Klein-Wells Commitee’s “Engaging Excellence” report, which was released Jan. 15, encouraged finding ways to bring more coordination and focus to Duke’s civic en-gagement programs.

As a result, administrators named Leela Pras-ad as faculty director for DCCE. Prasad, associ-ate professor of ethics and Indian religions, will work to establish a formal director for the center along with Eric Mlyn, director of DukeEngage and DCCE.

Wright said efforts are now being made to connect DukeEngage to academic work, with several ideas under consideration.

The Service-Learning Program, which fo-cuses on connecting civic engagement to the academic curriculum, has received a lot more in-terest from students and faculty recently, Wright said. She added that 16 new courses were given the service learning label for Spring and Fall 2010, up from 11 new courses in 2009.

“Duke is definitely recognized as a great place to be right now in terms of service learning and we’re very proud of that,” Wright said.

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26 TOWERVIEW

Rolling Hills X

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By Eugene Wang

he Durham community of Rolling Hills–or what’s left of it–is well past its heyday. The center of two failed rede-

velopment efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, Roll-ing Hills is something of a Bermuda Triangle for real estate development dollars.

The Rolling Hills neighborhood, literally on the other side of the train tracks adjacent to where many Duke students enjoy Main Street’s diverse stores and restaurants, is replete with foreclosed properties, cracked windows and overgrown lawns. Rolling Hills is nearly entirely vacant, and the city owns almost all of the property.

But a mix of city officials, civically-minded residents and real estate developers hope that third time’s a charm for the 20 acres of prime real estate on a hill overlooking the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

With outsized hopes that Rolling Hills can someday become a vibrant neighborhood with retail shops, family rental units and public parks, the city has drafted plans for a wide-ranging, $50 million, multi-year revitalization plan for Rolling Hills and the adjacent neighborhood of Southside to start this August pending the ap-proval of financing measures.

To redevelop Rolling Hills, the city has en-listed the help of national developer McCormack Baron Salazar, a reputable firm that specializes in urban turnaround projects. Although Rolling Hills is arguably the community more in need of development, the adjacent neighborhood of

Southside was included in the redevelopment project after MBS requested a larger develop-ment area, said veteran reporter Jim Wise, who covers Durham for The (Raleigh) News and Ob-server. Including Southside–which is larger than Rolling Hills–in the project will help the area at-tain the economies of scale necessary for organic growth beyond the initial development effort.

The current plans for redevelopment call for St. Louis-based MBS to build rental apartments and mixed live-work units in Rolling Hills along Lakewood Avenue between Roxboro and Fay-etteville Avenues. Additionally, the Center for Community Self-Help is expected to build or renovate close to 50 owner-occupied houses in Southside. Financial projections complied by blogger Kevin Davis indicate that the total cost of the first two phases of the project is expected to exceed $50 million, of which about 45 per-cent will be paid for by the city, another approxi-mately 50 percent by a mix of tax credits and government grants and the remaining 5 percent by a mortgage.

Notably missing from this cost projection, however, is any cost borne by MBS. Initially ex-pected to contribute $350,000, MBS failed to raise any funds for the project. The developer blamed the recession for its inability to fund-raise, and in its stead, the city has pledged ad-ditional funds to cover development costs in addition to an $800,000 development fee for MBS. The revised financing agreement—which simultaneously increases the cost and risk for

Durham while lowering them for MBS—has some stakeholders voicing opposition.

“One of the key factors is risk: is this project too risky for Durham to be engaged in, and what kind of impact is it going to have on our non-profits in the future?” said City Council mem-ber Eugene Brown. “It’s not a good deal for the city—the developer is getting everything and is putting in no equity.”

And the financing proposal isn’t all that de-tractors are criticizing. The plan suggests that the endeavor is a high-risk, high-reward gamble, especially as previous efforts to revitalize the area have failed. In the 1980s, a consortium of local business leaders tried to develop the area before the city passed the buck to businessman Larry Hester—who currently owns the nearby Phoenix Crossing shopping center–in the 1990s. Neither attempt succeeded in bringing investment back into the neighborhood as not enough houses were sold. The city foreclosed on the properties owned by Hester in 2003.

One thing that separates this effort from previous attempts, however, is the presence of MBS—a developer that boasts urban success sto-ries as far-flung as Los Angeles and Jersey City. A successful redevelopment of Rolling Hills and Southside would mean an influx of residents, more tax dollars and more jobs for neighbor-hoods that have seen some of its wealthier in-habitants move south over the past few decades.

But a failed effort would mean millions in lost tax dollars and smaller budgets for local

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The location of the planned development project, just south of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park

Here comes the neighborhood.

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27TOWERVIEW

Artist’s rederings of the renovated neighborhood

Currently, many homes in Rolling Hills are vacant.

nonprofits that have had some of their city sub-sidies redirected toward redevelopment.

“Many times, people in the community are distrustful of government. Oftentimes a non-profit can relate better,” said Mike Barros, head of Durham’s Department of Community Devel-opment, noting that previous failed attempts to redevelop the Rolling Hills and Southside neigh-borhoods have left residents skeptical of the city’s new plan.

The opposition to the project on a cost ba-sis has increased since the start of 2010. Earlier this year, city proposals for federal grants were rejected. The failure to acquire federal funds, coupled with a lack of equity invested by MBS, has pushed the city to increase its financial stake in the project. City Council members Diane Catotti and Brown have voiced opposition to the financing plans and general strategy for re-development. As Durham attempts to scrounge its way out of a $15-million budget deficit, some have also questioned the wisdom of such a large-scale project with the city in uncertain financial straits.

Behind the technical debate about tax cred-its, zoning restrictions and property blueprints is the looming specter of eminent domain. Thus far, the city has purchased the properties in Roll-ing Hills from willing sellers. The reluctance of a few homeowners to leave their property, how-

ever, has residents asking the city if it will use eminent domain, the legal right the city has to force a resident off his or her property, to create a development zone entirely owned—rather than mostly owned—by the city.

Thus far, Mayor Bill Bell has been adamant in stating that the city will not use eminent do-main. “We [won’t] make anyone move—if you’re happy where you are, you stay there,” Bell was quoted as saying by The Chronicle at a public hearing in April.

But some residents—including Hester—are skeptical of the city’s claim. They point to the city’s use of eminent domain in one of its more recent redevelopment projects: the renovation of the crime-addled neighborhood around Barnes Avenue in East Durham into Eastway Village. If worse comes to worst, then the city may have to build around the reluctant hom-eowners in the community.

Opposition to the project also comes from those who think the money is being misdirected. Rather than spend money on renovations, some residents think human capital development—education, job training, etc.—should be the pri-mary focus.

“The south side [of Durham] has a remark-ably robust underground economy,” Wise said.

In August, the final verdict on MBS’s ap-plication for tax credits is due. Without the

credits, development will likely be delayed for another year or more. Otherwise, construction can begin—the culmination of several years of planning for the largest-ever effort at redevelop-ing Rolling Hills and Southside. For city officials and Durham residents, the next year may indi-cate whether Rolling Hills can be transformed into a vibrant community adjacent to downtown or if this current project will be just another dis-appointment in a series of development failures.

28 TOWERVIEW

29TOWERVIEW

Teammates look on as senior Michael Hutchings takes his turn cutting down the net following the Blue Devils’ victory in the NCAA lacrosse Championship.Photo by Christina Peña

Anne YoderDirector, Duke University Lemur Center

WISDOM

What is your idea of perfect happiness?Being in a beach house somewhere, with my dearest loved ones, and the biggest decision of the day is “what are we doing for dinner?”

What is your greatest fear?That unspeakable fear that all parents have

What is the trait you most deplore in others?Greed, self-righteousness, and entitlement (Sorry; I couldn’t stop at one.)

Which living person do you most admire?Alison Richard. She is a lemur biologist, was the Provost of Yale University when I was there on faculty, and is now the Vice-Chancellor of University of Cambridge. She is the first woman in that position in the University’s more than 800-year history. She is brilliant, gracious, funny, feminine and very kind.

What is your current state of mind?Hectic and happy

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?Prudence

On what occasion do you lie?When my fiancé asks “Now, how much did those boots cost?”

What do you most dislike about your appearance?My hair. Every day is a bad hair day.

What is the quality you most like in a man?Warmth and intelligence

What or who is the greatest love of your life?My son, Dylan

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?I would like to slow myself down a bit. I have taken on too many commitments and really crave and miss “thinking time”.

Where would you most like to live?In a farmhouse, somewhere in the south of France

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?The stomach flu

What is your most marked characteristic?Determination

What do you most value in your friends?Consistency, honesty, warmth and humor

Who is your hero of fiction?Elizabeth Bennet

Which historical figure do you most identify with?I am stumped by this question. There aren’t many women who are recognized as historically significant, especially in the sci-ences. I certainly admire Charles Darwin beyond expression, but do not identify with him in any way.

Who are your heroes in real life?My parents. They are two of the most interesting people that I know. Both are very accomplished, and so much fun to hang out with. I am very fortunate to have parents whose company I enjoy and whose lives I admire.

How would you like to die?As a very healthy old woman—lets say in my mid-90s—who has just returned from an adventurous trip to the tropics where I contract a lethal (but painless) tropical disease. I would have just enough forewarning to say goodbye to my loved ones, and then expire peacefully while gardening. Do you think that this can be arranged?

30 TOWERVIEW

Read more of Yoder’s responses at TowerviewMag.com