The Chronicle THE INDEPENDENT DAILY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTH YEAR, ISSUE 120 WWW.DUKECHRONICLE.COM Plumlee’s Plumlee’s draft decision draft decision not yet not yet made, made, Page 7 Page 7 Football players Football players take part in take part in Pro Day, Pro Day, Page 6 Page 6 ONTHERECORD “Arabic language and literature... should be a topic of high importance for the curriculum of humanistic studies.” —Professor Carl Ernst on Arabic language and literature. See story page 3 Brodhead assesses Duke’s race relations Safi promotes broad look at social justice TYLER SEUC/THE CHRONICLE Courtney Liu and Cedric Stapleton of Sabrosura perform for “Shufflin,” presented by On Tap. Everyday I’m shufflin’ by Kristie Kim THE CHRONICLE President Richard Brodhead reflected on the University’s history and increasing ef- forts for greater equity Thursday. In his address at the Annual Meeting of the University Faculty, Brodhead discussed issues of race and inclusion in Duke’s his- tory, noting the topic’s relevance in light of the recent controversy over an unpublished study exploring the correlation between GPA and race. Brodhead explained that although the University thrives on free ex- pression, views that students believe dimin- ish their standing at the University warrant an institutional response. “This University has had a commitment to making Duke a place of access, opportu- nity and mutual respect for all,” Brodhead said. “This commitment was confirmed in Duke’s most recent strategic plan, and I re- confirm the commitment today.” In January, several students and members of Black Student Alliance presented admin- istrators with the Black Culture Initiative— a list of recommendations regarding the problems facing the black community at Duke. Although the initiative prompted dis- cussion between students and the adminis- tration, Brodhead did not reference the ini- tiative directly in the address but did allude to some of the suggestions it presented. BSA by Gloria Lloyd THE CHRONICLE Muslims should engage in all avenues of social justice rather than solely focus on their own persecution, said Omid Safi, the keynote speaker at Duke’s Islamic Aware- ness Week. Safi, Religion ’00 and professor of Is- lamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said his preferred method of promoting Islam and its ide- als does not focus on protesting injustices inflicted on Muslims but instead working against injustices done to all communities. This philosophy is inspired by the teach- ings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Safi, who is considered a leader of the progressive Mus- lim debate, spent 11 years studying at Duke and co-founded Duke’s Muslim Student As- sociation in 1988. “The question we have to ask today is not ‘If we rise up for justice for others, what will happen to us?’” Safi said. “The ques- tion we have to ask is ‘If we do not rise up, what will happen to them?’” The professor, whose research inter- ests include Islamic mysticism, delivered a speech about peace and justice to about 35 students from Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University at the Divin- ity School Thursday. Safi’s speech was the culmination of the annual MSA-sponsored SEE BRODHEAD ON PAGE 5 Bejan finds order in chaotic world TORI POWERS/THE CHRONICLE Engineering professor Adrian Bejan invented the constructal law of design. by Julian Spector THE CHRONICLE Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones professor at the Pratt School of Engineering, re- clined behind his desk, clean-shaven, sporting trim silvery hair and recoup- ing from a four-day and three-city book tour. To his left, file cabinets and stacks of paper rise to meet the ceiling. To his right, the wall disappears behind his 16 honorary degrees from some 11 differ- ent countries. “When last I checked, [Henry] Kissinger had 18,” he noted, with the unassuming self-confidence of someone who has invented a law of physics. Bejan, who is one of the 100 most cit- ed authors cited in all fields of engineer- ing, first published on the constructal law in 1996 and has since expanded its application to almost any field. The prin- ciple defines the world as a teeming envi- ronment of flow systems—cars traveling on the highway or antelopes moving on a plain—that branch out into increas- ingly smaller pieces as the most efficient way to travel across a landscape. In January, he published a book aimed at bringing his law to wider audi- ences. Its title indicates the broad nature of the concept—“Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, And So- cial Organization.” With a background in mechanical en- gineering, Bejan specializes in thermo- dynamic design—studying, for instance, how to design computer chips that dis- sipate heat as efficiently as possible. He began to recognize characteristics of his SEE BEJAN ON PAGE 12 SEE SAFI ON PAGE 4 DUKE vs ST. JOHN’S SATURDAY • 9:00 p.m. • ESPN Blue Devils face Red Storm by Brady Buck THE CHRONICLE Nothing has come easily for Duke this sea- son. Battling through inexperience, costly inju- ries and a brutal schedule, the Blue Devils (26- 5) have needed every ounce of their resilience to reach the Sweet 16. Saturday, the challenges continue as a depleted Duke roster travels three time zones from Durham to take on a veteran St. John’s squad. They will enter the regional semifinals with confidence left over from a convincing over Vanderbilt on the Commodores’ home floor Tuesday. SEE SWEET 16 ON PAGE 8
Transcript
The ChronicleTHE INDEPENDENT DAILY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTH YEAR, ISSUE 120WWW.DUKECHRONICLE.COM
Plumlee’sPlumlee’sdraft decision draft decision
not yet not yet made, made, Page 7Page 7
Football playersFootball playerstake part in take part in
Pro Day, Pro Day, Page 6Page 6
ONTHERECORD“Arabic language and literature... should be a topic of
high importance for the curriculum of humanistic studies.” —Professor Carl Ernst on Arabic language and literature. See story page 3
Brodhead assesses Duke’s race relations
Safi promotes broad look atsocial justice
TYLER SEUC/THE CHRONICLE
Courtney Liu and Cedric Stapleton of Sabrosura perform for “Shufflin,” presented by On Tap.
Everyday I’m shuffl in’
by Kristie KimTHE CHRONICLE
President Richard Brodhead reflected on the University’s history and increasing ef-forts for greater equity Thursday.
In his address at the Annual Meeting of the University Faculty, Brodhead discussed issues of race and inclusion in Duke’s his-tory, noting the topic’s relevance in light of the recent controversy over an unpublished study exploring the correlation between GPA and race. Brodhead explained that although the University thrives on free ex-pression, views that students believe dimin-ish their standing at the University warrant an institutional response.
“This University has had a commitment to making Duke a place of access, opportu-nity and mutual respect for all,” Brodhead said. “This commitment was confirmed in Duke’s most recent strategic plan, and I re-confirm the commitment today.”
In January, several students and members of Black Student Alliance presented admin-istrators with the Black Culture Initiative—a list of recommendations regarding the problems facing the black community at Duke. Although the initiative prompted dis-cussion between students and the adminis-tration, Brodhead did not reference the ini-tiative directly in the address but did allude to some of the suggestions it presented. BSA
by Gloria LloydTHE CHRONICLE
Muslims should engage in all avenues of social justice rather than solely focus on their own persecution, said Omid Safi, the keynote speaker at Duke’s Islamic Aware-ness Week.
Safi, Religion ’00 and professor of Is-lamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said his preferred method of promoting Islam and its ide-als does not focus on protesting injustices inflicted on Muslims but instead working against injustices done to all communities. This philosophy is inspired by the teach-ings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Safi, who is considered a leader of the progressive Mus-lim debate, spent 11 years studying at Duke and co-founded Duke’s Muslim Student As-sociation in 1988.
“The question we have to ask today is not ‘If we rise up for justice for others, what will happen to us?’” Safi said. “The ques-tion we have to ask is ‘If we do not rise up, what will happen to them?’”
The professor, whose research inter-ests include Islamic mysticism, delivered a speech about peace and justice to about 35 students from Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University at the Divin-ity School Thursday. Safi’s speech was the culmination of the annual MSA-sponsored
SEE BRODHEAD ON PAGE 5
Bejan finds order in chaotic world
TORI POWERS/THE CHRONICLE
Engineering professor Adrian Bejan invented the constructal law of design.
by Julian SpectorTHE CHRONICLE
Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones professor at the Pratt School of Engineering, re-clined behind his desk, clean-shaven, sporting trim silvery hair and recoup-ing from a four-day and three-city book tour. To his left, file cabinets and stacks of paper rise to meet the ceiling. To his right, the wall disappears behind his 16 honorary degrees from some 11 differ-ent countries.
“When last I checked, [Henry] Kissinger had 18,” he noted, with the unassuming self-confidence of someone who has invented a law of physics.
Bejan, who is one of the 100 most cit-ed authors cited in all fields of engineer-ing, first published on the constructal law in 1996 and has since expanded its application to almost any field. The prin-
ciple defines the world as a teeming envi-ronment of flow systems—cars traveling on the highway or antelopes moving on a plain—that branch out into increas-ingly smaller pieces as the most efficient way to travel across a landscape.
In January, he published a book aimed at bringing his law to wider audi-ences. Its title indicates the broad nature of the concept—“Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, And So-cial Organization.”
With a background in mechanical en-gineering, Bejan specializes in thermo-dynamic design—studying, for instance, how to design computer chips that dis-sipate heat as efficiently as possible. He began to recognize characteristics of his
SEE BEJAN ON PAGE 12
SEE SAFI ON PAGE 4
DUKE vs ST. JOHN’SSATURDAY • 9:00 p.m. • ESPN
Blue Devils face Red Storm
by Brady BuckTHE CHRONICLE
Nothing has come easily for Duke this sea-son. Battling through inexperience, costly inju-ries and a brutal schedule, the Blue Devils (26-5) have needed every ounce of their resilience to reach the Sweet 16. Saturday, the challenges continue as a depleted Duke roster travels three time zones from Durham to take on a veteran St. John’s squad.
They will enter the regional semifinals with confidence left over from a convincing over Vanderbilt on the Commodores’ home floor Tuesday.
SEE SWEET 16 ON PAGE 8
2 | FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 THE CHRONICLE
Performers
Duke Moves has received support from the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts and Duke Student Government.
Dance groups from Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than one of every four Americans last year received a free mammogram, colonoscopy or flu shot, thanks to a federal law that many of them despise.
Roughly 3.6 million Medicare recipi-ents saved an average of $604.
JUAN FORERO/THE WASHINGTON POST
Passerby can spot Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” on top of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Wash-ington, D.C. Aitken’s artwork is a 360-degree projection that combines film of drivers on a nighttime freeway with the song, “I Only Have Eyes for You.” He hopes his art can “fuse with the city.”
VIENNA — The second global con-ference ever on nuclear material that has escaped state control is drawing President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Nuclear violators Iran and North Korea will not be there.
Law threatened in court transforming health care
Global nuclear meeting draws Obama, Medvedev
U.S. student loan debt reached the $1 trillion mark as young borrowers strug-gle to keep up with soaring tuition costs, according to the initial findings of a gov-ernment study.
The figure, which is higher than the country’s credit card debt, prob-ably reached “several months ago,” Rohit Chopra of the Consumer Financial Protec-tion Bureau, said Wednesday in a posting excerpted from a speech he made at the Consumer Bankers Association meeting in Austin.
“Young consumers are shouldering much of the punishment in the form of substantial student loan bills for doing exactly what they were told would be the key to a better life,” Chopra, the bureau’s student loan ombudsman, said.
More students are taking out loans to pay for college as tuition increases. Under-graduates are limited by the amount they can borrow in federally backed loans.
US student loan debt reaches $1 trillion mark
61
“‘From my own experience, people I know with more pictures online gen-erally did tend to be very outgoing in person,’ said freshman Ryan Bartoszek. ‘Screening Facebook profiles can be especially helpful for companies look-ing for people with good social skills’”
— From The Chronicle ‘s News Blogbigblog.dukechronicle.com
onthe web
Foraging and fire-makingDuke Campus Farm, 3-7 p.m.
With the power grid down, global trade halt-ed and zombies roaming the countryside, you’ll need the hard skills to thrive off the grid. RSVP at http://dcffire.eventbrite.com/.
The Mary Play from the N-Town Cycle
East Duke 209, 8-10 p.m. A reading translated from Middle English
and directed by Mandy Lowell.
Berlioz RequiemDuke Chapel, Saturday 8-10 p.m.
This requiem combines Duke Chapel Choir, Duke Chorale and the Choral Society of Dur-
ham. General admission $20, students free.
scheduleat Duke...
To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing
you around is another. — Katherine Paterson
TODAY IN HISTORY1839: The term “OK” enters the
national vernacular.
oono the calendarPakistan Day
Pakistan
World Meteorological DayInternational
National Day of UnpluggingU.S.A.
National Puppy DayU.S.A.
Grand Tea GatheringSarah P. Duke Gardens,
Sunday 11:30 a.m. -2 p.m.The gathering features Japanese taiko drum-
ming and traditional Japanese arts.
—from calendar.duke.edu
THE CHRONICLE FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 | 3
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ACADEMIC COUNCIL
Faculty to review future DKU graduate programs
Diplomat lauds history of Arabic language, literature
by Kristie KimTHE CHRONICLE
After a years-long freeze, faculty are ready to discuss new academic opportu-nities for Duke Kunshan University.
Academic Council approved a resolu-tion to consider additional graduate aca-demic programs for DKU at its meeting Thursday. The proposal passed with 52 council members voting in favor of the proposal, five dissenting and one absten-tion. This overturns a December 2009 council decision to refrain from consid-ering other graduate programs beyond the Fuqua School of Business’ Master of Management Studies program until
faculty believed they had adequate in-formation about the risks of the project.
This resolution symbolizes renewed faculty support for DKU, said Academic Council Chair Susan Lozier, professor of physical oceanography.
“[This resolution] not only serves as a gateway for numerous opportunities abroad but is also an example of the cooperation and collective advocacy of Duke faculty,” Lozier said. “It confirms a strong faculty role in the development and review of DKU academic programs and finances.”
by Maggie SpiniTHE CHRONICLE
The Middle East is becoming increas-ingly present in the global community, Kuwait Ambassador Salem Al-Sabah said Thursday.
At the inaugural Arabic Majors Dis-tinguished Lecture series, speakers Al-Sabah and Carl Ernst, William R. Ke-nan Jr. distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discussed how the Middle East’s rich literary and cultural history has in-fluenced modern politics. Arabic, one of the fastest growing languages in the world, has become increasingly preva-lent in the global sphere.
“[Arabic] has an enduring cultur-al property in the global heritage in civilization,” said Ernst, co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civiliza-tions. “Arabic language and literature... should be a topic of high importance for the curriculum of humanistic stud-ies.”
Arabic is one of six languages offi-cially used in United Nations meetings. Given the Middle East’s vital role in world politics, knowledge of Arabic lan-guage and culture should be a top pri-ority in the United States, Ernst said.
“If you open a map, you can make a very, very good argument that the Arab countries are in the center of the world,” Al-Sabah said. “We are a land [connecting] three continents—Asia, Africa and Europe.”
Western media often skews Ameri-cans’ perceptions of Arab nations, Al-Sabah said, noting that it is difficult to open a newspaper or watch television news programs without seeing some-thing about the Middle East.
“Everything that comes up about the Middle East... is about one of two things,” he said. “It’s about oil or tur-moil.... You have no idea how many mis-conceptions are out there that need to be clarified.”
Al-Sabah added that Arabic-American speakers, who have access to current events
REEM ALFAHAD/THE CHRONICLE
Salem Al-Sabah, ambassador from Kuwait, speaks about the importance of Arabic in the modern world.
SEE ARABIC ON PAGE 12
BRIANNA SIRACUSE/THE CHRONICLE
Members of Academic Council passed a resolution Thursday to review future DKU academic programs.
SEE COUNCIL ON PAGE 5
4 | FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 THE CHRONICLE
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Study to address disparate obesity ratesby Andrew Luo
THE CHRONICLE
Helping the underprivileged lose weight may be as simple as providing reliable group support.
A study published earlier this month in Archives of Internal Medicine reveals that regular medical feedback and personalized monitoring helps maximize weight loss in obese patients. Researchers documented the weight fluctuations of 365 obese patients from low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds. After 24 months, the patients who received monthly intervention training and counseling treatment lost on average 2.3 pounds more than those who received traditional weight loss care. The study was funded by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Can-cer Institute.
“Though the average weight loss appears moderate, the most significant finding from this study is that the patients kept their weight down throughout the two-year period,” said lead author Gary Bennett, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “We tried to customize behavioral goals depending on each
patient’s personal goals.”The results of the study may indicate a more effective
way in maintaining weight loss, particularly in people experiencing socioeconomic challenges. The weight loss program in the study followed an intervention obe-sity treatment approach.
Patients received three goals meant to modify their behavior and then either self-monitored their progress through the study’s website or recorded their progress through an interactive voice response system.
Bennett noted that the researchers used several com-puter algorithms in the study, which allowed them to lower the cost of the research and reach more patients.
“For example, Person A may get a goal that says they should walk 8,000 steps in a day, and Person B will get another task asking them to eat five servings of fruits,” he said.
Participants in the intervention group also participat-ed in monthly meetings with a health coach, said Erica Warner, research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the study. The patients met with their coach once a month in the first year of the study
and bimonthly in the second year. Patients traditionally started to gain weight again after six months, Warner noted, but the addition of health meetings allowed sub-jects to maintain weight loss throughout the program.
Warner said that helping low-income populations lose weight, particularly during a recession, is challeng-ing. Despite the economic challenges preventing people from eating healthy, the patients were engaged through-out the entire program. The high follow-up rate from the participants is encouraging for future research, she added.
“More studies should be done in order to help these low-income populations, who have the highest risk for diseases like obesity and hypertension,” Warner said. “These sorts of intervention programs can be applied to health centers.”
Additional research is already underway to study methods of preventing weight gain, Bennett said. Apart from running a study in China that looks at refining the approach to obesity treatment, Bennett is also interest-ed in examining the effects of weight fluctuations on overall health in the future.
week, which is held at campuses nationwide to promote awareness about issues pertaining to Islam.
In his speech, Safi noted how national Muslim or-ganizations primarily exist to broadcast injustices and prejudice affecting Muslims equally emphasizing the positive accomplishments and daily concerns of Mus-lims. Instead, these groups should focus on broader social issues and also communicate the strengths of the Muslim community.
“Islamic tradition does stand for something,” Safi said. “It stands ultimately... for a twin mandate of justice—social justice that refuses to stop at gates of our own community—and a divine sense of love and mercy.”
Freshman Shajuti Hossain said she shares Safi’s ide-als and appreciates his message of promoting social justice above self interest.
“He encourages us to actively show through example what Islam is rather than what it’s not and how we’re also American and have American values,” she noted.
Above anything, current leaders of Muslim orga-nizations in America want to be invited to the White House or Department of State to increase their politi-cal visibility, though for some leaders the invitation can be uncomfortable, Safi said. He was once asked to the Department of State for a Ramadan-related event
and declined.“I said, ‘I will come when you stop killing my peo-
ple,’” he added. “They said, ‘We don’t appreciate your attitude.’ And I said, ‘I don’t appreciate you killing my people.’”
Safi said most of the Republican presidential candi-dates have a shaky understanding of American foreign policy, with the exception of Ron Paul, R-Texas and Medicine ’61. He noted Paul’s willingness to diminish our military involvement.
Attendance at Islamic Awareness cultural events had been strong throughout the week, said MSA education chair Noreen Khan, a sophomore.
“We feel as citizens we should take responsibility to inform people of our culture, beliefs and intellec-tual thoughts,” Khan said. “Islamic Awareness Week is a great way to inform people and use this time while people are on a college campus to teach them about us.”
Religious leaders need to speak up more on war and poverty issues, Safi added.
“When we appear before Allah, yes, we will be asked, ‘Did you pray, did you fast?’” he said. “But we will also be asked, ‘Where did your society puts its food, its resources, its money? Did you support that military-industrial complex that Eisenhower and Martin [Luther King] warned us about? Or did you take that and put it in the wrinkled stomachs of God’s children?’”
SAFI from page 1
JISOO YOON/THE CHRONICLE
Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, speaks as a part of Islamic Awareness Week.
THE CHRONICLE FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 | 5
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recommended that the administration increase funding for cultural events and outline the role, if any, of special considerations in the admissions policy, among others.
Brodhead said the University takes multiple factors into account during admissions, such as standardized test scores as well as students’ characters, and will con-tinue to recruit highly qualified students from every background. The Supreme Court decided Feb. 21 to hear Fisher v. The University of Texas, which challenges the constitutionality of affirmative action. Duke will be joining with other universities in filing an amicus brief to support a holistic approach to the admissions pro-cess.
Brodhead added that the University has made much progress in affording opportunities for black students and faculty. The report follows the recent allocation of $13,000 from the Office of the Provost to fund various groups who are participating in Black Student Alliance Invitational, the recruitment weekend for prospective black students.
BSAI has attracted some controversy in recent years, as some members of the Duke community stress that the event misrepresents the goals of the University in focus-ing on one target group.
During his time at Yale University, Brodhead played a significant role in removing minority-targeted recruit-ment events. He has previously said that he preferred a racially unified invitation for all admitted students.
After the speech, however, Brodhead said in an inter-view that the current system of BSAI is successful, and he is in full support of the program.
“There is no debate about the aims we are pursuing in attracting top applicants from various backgrounds,” Brodhead said. “It’s only the question of means—what is the best way to convey to the best applicants that Duke is a good fit?”
Going forward, Brodhead has requested that each academic and administrative unit produce an annual report on the status and goals of diversity within each group. These reports will be reviewed and aggregated in a final report for the Duke community every other year. Brodhead also affirmed a commitment to freedom of expression among scholars and students alike.
The University has come a long way in broadening the faculty and student body in recent years, Brodhead said. He noted that the number of blacks appointed to regular rank faculty in all schools at Duke has risen from 44 in 1993 to 140 in 2011. Additionally, between 9 and 11 percent of Duke’s entering freshman class have been black, a statistic rivaled only by Stanford University and Columbia University among Duke’s peer institutions.
He stressed that although Duke has many praisewor-thy accomplishments, much work is needed. He com-pared the successes and inadequacies of the institution’s diversification efforts to his administration. Since his arrival as president, Brodhead has incorporated lead-ers of various backgrounds—including two blacks, one Asian American and one woman. Brodhead noted that he would like to instate more female senior administra-tors, adding that there has not yet been a black dean of any school.
“We’re never totally there—living up to these ideals will always be a work in progress—and the nature of the challenges continues to evolve with larger changes in our society,” Brodhead said.
Several faculty members responded positively to Brodhead’s address and focus on the University’s jour-ney and progress with diversity.
Lee Baker, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences dean of academic affairs and associate vice provost for under-graduate education, said the report served as a “great reminder of the arc of Duke’s effort to diversity.” He added that he was especially pleased with the Univer-sity’s decision to support the pending amicus brief.
Brodhead’s speech also encouraged some faculty to reflect on how they will personally incorporate his goals.
“I am glad that he raised the questions of race and di-versity, reiterating our goals to make diversity something we work on and own collectively in a non-episodic way,” Dean of Arts and Sciences Laurie Patton said. “I am per-sonally going to work very hard on this with a number of different units in the community.”
BRODHEAD from page 1
The council’s decision to consider future academic programs at DKU is a response to the substantial de-mand for program development, Provost Peter Lange said. Programs for DKU currently under review by Ac-ademic Council include a Master of Science in Global Health through the Duke Global Health Institute. The council will not review undergraduate DKU programs at this time, though some administrators have dis-cussed various semester abroad programs.
The approval follows an Arts and Sciences Council decision March 15 to update the process for approving new programs in Duke’s global undergraduate cur-riculum. According to Thursday’s proposal, programs that lead to Duke degrees or credit must be reviewed within two or three years by the appropriate subcom-mittee regarding course changes, program changes or global initiatives.
Some council members said more measures are still needed to monitor the state of academic integrity on the China campus.
Karla Holloway, James B. Duke professor of English and professor of law, said DKU needs to implement a different mechanism for monitoring academic free-dom than the one used in Durham.
“We have a [monitoring] system that faculty and students trust in the United States, but we have no way of making sure that it will be successful [at DKU],” Holloway said.
DKU will incorporate a community monitoring ef-fort similar to the system enforced in Durham, Lange
said. Even though maintaining academic integrity and freedom is not an explicit responsibility, faculty and administration have an instrumental role in mak-ing sure that preventative measures are in place. The small number of faculty in the initial phases of DKU will make it easier for academic integrity and freedom to be monitored and maintained.
“From the beginning, we knew we were engaging with a country whose culture and political system does not match those in the U.S., but we know that we’ll be able to adhere to our core values in that environ-ment,” Lange said.
In other business:William Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin professor of his-
tory, received the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award for his contribution to University academ-ics. President Richard Brodhead presented the award and praised Chafe for his mentorship and revolution-ary efforts during his 41-year tenure at Duke. Chafe previously served as dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences and was instrumental in implementing Cur-riculum 2000.
“Any student or faculty member who has experi-enced Duke has been touched by the work and leader-ship of Chafe,” Brodhead said.
COUNCIL from page 3
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FRIDAYMarch 23, 2012
>> INSIDE Junior Mason Plumlee is thinking about leaving Duke to turn pro. PAGE 7Scott Rich takes a look back at the 2011-12 men’s bas-ketball season. PAGE 7
>
FOOTBALL
Blue Devils show off skills for pro scouts
TYLER SEUC/CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO
Senior safety Matt Daniels worked out for NFL scouts Thursday in hopes of being the first Duke player drafted into the league since 2000.
by Chris CusackTHE CHRONICLE
All eyes were on Matt Daniels as he took the field with nine other Blue Devils Thursday afternoon to work out for NFL scouts and coaches at the Duke pro timing day.
Daniels, a 6-foot-1 senior safety, is expected to be Duke’s first football player taken in the NFL Draft since defensive tackle Chris Combs was taken in the sixth round in 2000. He worked out in front of about 25 scouts and coaches, including representatives from both the NFL and the Canadian Football League.
“Scouts love me,” Daniels said. “I’ll definitely be getting drafted.”
Daniels earned first team All-ACC honors in 2011 after recording 126 tackles, 14 pass break-ups and two in-terceptions in first-year defensive co-ordinator Jim Knowles’ 4-2-5 scheme, which allowed the senior more free-dom within the defense. Beginning in January, the Fayetteville, Ga. native spent five days a week in Duluth, Ga. this spring training with Competitive Edge Sports and the other two days in Durham attending class.
He is projected to be a late-round pick, though his stock is improving after gaining 10 pounds already this spring while adding more speed, dropping his 40-yard dash time from 4.47 seconds—a time head coach David Cutcliffe called “faster than 80 percent of what was at the [NFL Combine]”—to 4.40. He met with representatives from the New England Patriots and New York Jets Thursday, and has meetings with other NFL franchises scheduled.
“He will blow you up,” head coach David Cutcliffe said. “He is a great tackler. Defense is still not all that complicat-ed.... The more physical you are, the more impact you have.”
Daniels added that his “conditioning was a little off,” but he expects it to improve as he alters his training over the coming weeks.
Cooper Helfet, who played at Duke for only two years af-ter starting his collegiate athletic career at Johns Hopkins as a lacrosse player, is a considered a long shot to hear his name called on draft day. But while he has limited experience, the 6-foot-4, 245-pound tight end was presented with a unique opportunity during his spring workouts—catching passes from NFL quarterback Peyton Manning. After Helfet gradu-ated in December, Cutcliffe paired him up with Manning as the quarterback began his rehab from neck surgery.
“He definitely had positive things to say,” Helfet said. “He said he would be there as a reference for me, which is one of the best references you can have.”
Helfet ranked third on the team in 2011 with 395 receiving yards on 43 catches, earn-ing honorable mention All-ACC honors.
Running back Jay Hollingsworth, tight end Danny Parker and wide receivers Donovan Varner and 2011 graduate Aus-tin Kelly also worked out on the offensive side of the ball. Kelly was one of three
Blue Devils who are still looking to catch on in the NFL after going undrafted last season. The league’s lockout limited the chances the trio had of signing with NFL franchises be-cause team officials could not make contact with potential free agents for much of the spring and summer.
Cornerback Johnny Williams joined Daniels among the four Blue Devils to work out on the defensive side of the ball. The senior converted to cornerback before the 2010 season after tallying over 700 combined receiving yards in his first two years.
At the end of the workout, 2010 Lou Groza Award semifinalist Will Snyderwine took the field. His workout was highlighted by several booming kickoffs that reached the Brooks Football Building—standing approximately 10 yards beyond the end zone—on the fly.
The Blue Devils have one month left to train before the NFL Draft, which will be held Apr. 26-28 in New York City.
“Scouts love me. I’ll defi nitely be getting
drafted.” — Matt Daniels
Ward looks to defend national title along-side five teammates
The Blue Devils, led by two-time NCAA champion Becca Ward, have sent three women and three men to compete for na-tional titles of their own at this weekend’s NCAA championships.
After the first four rounds of the wom-
fromstaffreportsen’s competition, which took place Thurs-day at Ohio State’s French Field House, Duke sits in eleventh place as a team.
On Mar. 10, Ward won the Mid-Atlan-tic/South Regional saber championship for the fourth time in her four-year ca-reer. Today Ward will defend her nation-al title as well, as she competes in the semifinal and final rounds.
Ward currently holds second place in the saber tournament, behind Penn State senior Monica Aksamit. Although Ward and Askamit have each tallied 12 victories, Askamit holds the advantage in indicators 40 to 38 heading into the second day.
Additionally, Duke sent two competi-tors in the women’s epée —freshman Sar-ah Collins and junior Emily D’Agostino—to the national championships for just the second time in program history. With six victories, Collins is tied for 15th place, and D’Agostino holds 19th place with four victories in her third consecutive postseason appearance.
The men’s competition begins Satur-day in Columbus, with sophomore Dylan Nollner and senior Tristan Jones repre-senting Duke in epée competition, while junior Anthony Lin will participate in the saber event.
Nollner and Jones will be fencing at the championships for the second time in their careers, and Lin will make his third consecutive appearance at the event.
Blue Devils to welcome Virginia in matchup of top-10 teams
Duke will look to build on the momentum of two straight conference road wins as it re-
turns home to face Virginia Friday afternoon. The No. 3 Cavaliers (13-1, 3-0 in the
ACC) have beaten the Blue Devils in the teams’ past eight meetings, and No. 6 Duke (13-2, 2-0) will have to overcome a very talented Cavalier squad to end that streak. Virginia boasts four players ranked in the ITA top 100 nationally, in-cluding No. 1 Mitchell Frank and No. 7 Jarmere Jenkins.
By contrast, Duke features only two ranked individual players. To beat the Cav-aliers, the Blue Devils will need big perfor-mances from No. 3 Henrique Cunha and No. 18 Chris Mengel, each of whom has won his past three matches. Cunha was re-cently named the ACC player of the week for the seventh time this season.
Both Duke and Virginia have fared well this season against teams in the top 25, and neither has lost to a team current-ly ranked outside the top ten. The Blue Devils’ two losses came to No. 1 Southern California and then-No. 15 Pepperdine, who has since risen to No. 8 in the coun-try. Virginia’s only defeat came at the hands of then-No. 3 Ohio State.
Following its match against the Cava-liers, Duke will face off against Virginia Tech Sunday. The Hokies (6-6, 2-1) have lost their past two matches.
SYLVIE SPEWAK/CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO
Senior Becca Ward needs two victories today to seal the third national championship of her Duke career.
THE CHRONICLE FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 | 7
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Duke finished the regular season 26-5, ranked in the top 10 in the nation and competing for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Through all the success, though, something about this Blue Devil team seemed different from those of the past two years, when Duke earned a national title and two No. 1 seeds.
The 2011-12 Blue Devils were sometimes good but rarely great, and in the end their strong resume could not save them from defeat in the ACC tournament and a historic upset in the first round of the NCAA tournament at the hands of 15th-seeded Lehigh.
In retrospect, then, Duke’s nearly catastrophic sea-son opener does not seem quite as shocking as it did in November. Many expected the Blue Devils’ first game to be a rout, but Duke instead faced a furious fight from Belmont, escaping thanks to a clutch 3-point bas-ket from Andre Dawkins in the waning seconds. The opener would not be the last time that the Blue Devils struggled to put away inferior teams.
The near-disaster against the Bruins was forgotten just four days later, though, as head coach Mike Krzyzewski be-came the winningest coach in NCAA Division I men’s col-lege basketball after a five-point victory over Michigan State in Madison Square Garden. While the victory was historic, it also served as a marquee victory for the Blue Devils, over the Spartan team that ended up winning the Big Ten.
“At halftime I wasn’t sure we were going to have this moment,” Krzyzewski said after the game. “We beat a re-ally good team, and I’m glad now we can just move on.”
Duke’s success continued through the early part of what Krzyzewski repeatedly called a “hellacious” non-conference schedule. Less than a week after his mile-stone victory, the Blue Devils traveled to Maui and de-feated Tennessee, Michigan and Kansas in consecutive days to win the Maui Invitational.
The victory over Kansas, an eventual No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament, was additionally notable for the emergence of sophomore Tyler Thornton, who made two clutch 3-pointers to put Duke ahead late in the game. The defensive specialist would eventually stake a claim to the starting point guard role.
“People will say it’s a lucky shot, but I’ll say I’m lucky to have him on my team,” Krzyzewski said of Thornton after his miraculous final 3-pointer.
The fatigue of an early-season schedule that includ-ed six eventual NCAA tournament teams finally caught up with the Blue Devils in Columbus, Ohio, where Duke was blown out by a fresher Ohio State squad Nov. 29. The Blue Devils lost their next road game as well, falling to Temple in Philadelphia Jan. 4.
The cracks were beginning to show.Doubters might have thought the two road losses por-
tended more trouble away from Cameron, but surpris-ingly, this year’s Blue Devils became just the third team in
after the loss. “We need to fight, like we did at times, for a whole game.”
The bad news kept coming for Duke, as third-leading scorer Ryan Kelly injured his foot in practice and was ruled unavailable for the ACC tournament. Without him, the Blue Devils struggled in their first game against Virginia Tech before falling in the semifinals to Florida State.
Where just a week earlier Duke was playing its best basketball of the season, the team was now reeling. The late-season losses cost the Blue Devils a chance at a No. 1 seed, setting the stage for the matchup with Lehigh in the NCAA tournament.
In the season’s biggest and final shock, Duke faltered against the Mountain Hawks and star guard C.J. McCol-lum. Despite leading at the half, the Blue Devils fell by five in one of the biggest upsets in NCAA tournament history.
Krzyzewski was frank all season that his team had flaws and would take time to coalesce after losing a trio of stars in Kyrie Irving, Nolan Smith and Kyle Singler. During the season, those issues were sometimes masked by road prow-ess and a surprising 7-0 start, but the season’s final weeks exposed the roster’s flaws as a Duke squad reliant on its long-range shooting struggled from beyond the arc.
“We’re not a juggernaut or anything like that,” Krzyze-wski said. “We have known that throughout the whole sea-son. You have to do it pretty precise, and we just didn’t play well offensively the last few weeks of the season.”
PLUMLEE CONSIDERING PRO OPTIONS
Mason Plumlee
MELISSA YEO/CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO
Austin Rivers’ game-winning 3-pointer against North Carolina remains one of the defining images of Duke’s 2011-12 season.
After three years as a Blue Devil, junior Mason Plum-lee has decided to “test the waters” of the NBA draft and possibly skip his final year of college to pursue a career in the NBA. Both Draft Ex-press and Chad Ford of ESPN rate Plumlee as the 29th-best prospect and project him to be drafted to-wards the end of the first round, should he choose to leave Duke.
Unfortunately for Plumlee, he will not be able to get all that much more information by testing the waters. Last summer the NCAA in-stituted an early-entry withdrawal deadline of April 10, meaning that a player must make his final decision by that date. Plum-lee will have a chance to receive an evaluation report from the 20 executives who form the NBA’s Undergrad-
‘Not a juggernaut’: a look back at 2011-12
uate Advisory Committee, but NBA rules prohibit teams from having any contact with players until April 29, the league’s deadline for early entry registration.
Plumlee has tantalized NBA scouts with his length and explosive athletic ability since his freshman year, but he has lacked consistency and questions remain about his NBA readiness. While he had several dominant games this year, he struggled in several games against more physical opponents like Florida State. His stock has dropped some-what since his freshman year as NBA scouts have become less forgiving of inconsistency as he has gotten older.
The Blue Devils also face the possibility of losing ACC Rookie of the Year Austin Rivers to the NBA Draft. While Rivers has not yet stated that he will test the wa-ters, he is projected to be a potential lottery pick if he leaves Duke early. He will have until April 3 to decide whether or not he wants to receive a report from the Undergraduate Advisory Committee.
school history to go unbeaten on the road in ACC play.Instead, Duke seemed to have trouble maintaining its
intensity level on its own home floor. First, the Blue Devils fell at home to Florida State and Michael Snaer’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer, and then suffered another home defeat in overtime to Miami Feb. 5, just three days before a show-down with North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
“The biggest emphasis for us was to protect our home court,” freshman Quinn Cook said following the loss to the Hurricanes. “We’ve got to get better.”
At the time, it looked like Duke’s season was on the brink of total collapse, especially as the Tar Heels built a late lead at the Dean E. Smith Center. But thanks to an epic comeback capped by Austin Rivers’ deep 3-point swish at the buzzer, the Blue Devils downed North Carolina in one of the most memorable games in the history of the rivalry.
Rivers’ shot in the face of Tar Heel center Tyler Zeller became an enduring image of Duke’s season, and the Blue Devils seemed to break out of their mid-season rough patch. They rattled off six straight victories following the win in Chapel Hill, including revenge over the Seminoles in Tal-lahassee. But with the ACC regular-season title on the line at Cameron Indoor Stadium Mar. 3, Duke came up short, falling behind early to North Carolina and eventually losing by 18, costing them the regular season ACC title.
“You give a team like that a 20-point lead, it’s nearly impossible to win,” Duke’s lone senior, Miles Plumlee, said
8 | FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 THE CHRONICLE
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Application deadline is April 18. Three cash awards of $500 will be given for outstanding investiga-tive research, curriculum develop-ment work, and innovative proj-ects in Education-related fields. For more information: http://educationprogram.duke.edu/un-dergraduate/awards or email [email protected]; [email protected]; or [email protected].
DIRECTOR OF RESIDENTIAL LIFE
Duke Youth Programs is seeking a Director of Residential Life.
Applicants must have a Bach-elors degree (or higher)in edu-cation, counseling or a related field, experience developing and implementing programs for youth, supervisory and other management skills.
Information about the position is available at http://learnmore.duke.edu/youth/employment.asp
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WE’RE CURRENTLY LOOK-ING for an outgoing leader as a Dell Campus Representative!
In this part-time paid position, you will be required to utilize your networks to create a dia-logue with consumers, generate buzz and in turn support the sustainable development of our client(s) brand. You will help promote Dell by attending cam-pus events such as orientations, club events, career fairs, and a variety of social functions.
How to apply: please call Rich Johnson at 877-870-4800 ext 4842
RESEARCH STUDIES
PARTICIPANTS ARE NEED-ED for studies of visual and hearing function using mag-netic resonance imaging (MRI). These studies are conducted at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC) at Duke University Medical Center. Participants should be 18 years or older and should have no history of brain injury or disease. Most studies last between 1-2 hours, and par-ticipants are paid approximately $20/hr. Please contact the BIAC volunteer coordinator at 681-9344 or [email protected] for additional information. You can also visit our website at www.biac.duke.edu.
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CHILDCARE PROVIDER/TUTOR
A mother and two lovely older children, Girl (12 ) and Boy (10), are looking for a responsible, fun and mature caregiver to pick up the kids from school at 3:15 and be with them until 5:30 p.m. every Monday, Tuesday and every other Thursday and Friday starting immediately through June 8th. Duties include mak-ing snack, overseeing and help-ing with homework, driving to activities on Tuesdays and hav-ing fun. Mom would like to find someone who can help with homework, has a perfect driv-ing record and is very reliable and mature. Kids would like to find someone who loves the outdoors (we’re in the country), playing sports, cooking, mak-ing art and playing all kinds of games. Must like dogs, cat and sea monkeys. $10-$12/hr de-pending upon experience (plus gas allowance). Please reply to: [email protected]
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“We just recognized that you have to be able to play any place, anywhere, any time and in any conditions,” Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie said after de-feating the Commodores.
Now, Duke is just two wins away from reaching the Final Four for the first time since 2006. To play for those two victories, the Blue Devils will make the trek to Fresno, Calif. for the NCAA West regional.
The first obstacle will be St. John’s (24-9) in the regional semifinal, the No. 3 seed in the region. Finishing third in a rugged Big East confer-ence, the Red Storm are a battle-tested and experienced bunch that have proven they have the talent to defeat any team in the tournament.
In February, head coach Kim Barnes Aricos’ squad sent shock-waves through women’s college basketball when they knocked off perennial power Connecticut on
the road. The St. John’s victory at Gampel Pavilion Feb. 18th was just the fourth time the Huskies have lost at home since 2007.
The Red Storm won their next four games, extending their win-ning streak to nine, before Con-necticut exacted revenge with a 74-43 shellacking in the Big East tournament semifinals. St. John’s barely escaped 14th-seeded Creighton 69-67 in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but then posted a road win over No. 6 Okla-homa to earn a date with Duke.
The Blue Devils have even more reason than the Red Storm to be excited about their high level of play in the first two rounds of the tournament, particularly on of-fense. In the last two games, against Samford and Vanderbilt, Duke av-eraged a blistering 89 points per game without relying excessively on any one scorer. Gray, Haley Peters, Elizabeth Williams, Shay Selby and Tricia Liston all finished in double figures against the Commodores,
while the team dished out 28 assists en route to its 96 points.
The potent offensive show-ing over the past two contests is even more impressive given the fact that Williams, Duke’s lead-ing scorer, is playing with a stress fracture in her lower right leg. The injury has limited her to 50 total minutes of play in the first two rounds of the tournament and will continue to affect her for the remainder of the postsea-son. Even with reduced minutes, the ACC rookie of the year still managed to score a combined 24 points in the two contests.
“[Williams] is not 100%,” Mc-Callie said. “I’m really proud of her for fighting through this.”
In the round of 16, Duke can-not afford the defensive lapses that plagued it in the second round, especially against a balanced Red Storm offense. The Blue Devils gave up 17 offensive rebounds against Vanderbilt, enabling the Commodores to score 80 points,
SWEET 16 from page 1the most Duke has surrendered all season. Upperclassmen Sheneika Smith, Nadirah McKenith, Euqe-nia McPherson and Da’Shena Ste-vens each average 11 points or bet-ter for a St. John’s squad that has won 11 of its past 12 games.
“[St. John’s is] an incredibly athletic, good strong team,” Mc-Callie said. “Everybody can pen-etrate from all spots. They love transition and they love to press.”
For the Blue Devils, it will be another weekend of travel, but one player may not mind the long flight to the Golden State. This weekend’s contests in Fresno will be a homecoming for sophomore guard Chelsea Gray, who grew up in nearby Stockton, Calif.
“I’m excited, to be playing in front of a lot of family members and close friends,” Gray said.
“We’re excited and I think in a good place, but it’s always a battle,” McCallie said. “[St. John’s and Stan-ford] are very, very good and you have got to be ready to play.”
CHELSEA PIERONI/CHRONICLE FILE PHOTO
Chelsea Gray will return to her home state of California for the regional semifinals.
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Let’s say you’re a Duke student—undergrad-uate or graduate—and you’re deciding whether you want to vote in North Caro-
lina in upcoming elections, or if you’d rather vote in the state your parents live. Maybe it’s not realis-tic of me to assume this quandary is keeping you up at night, but humor me anyway. I’ve made this argument to many of you in per-son, interrupting you while you were eating lunch on the Plaza, maybe catching you in the middle of a mid-afternoon study session in your dorm. For those of you I’ve never tracked down, here goes:
1. North Carolina politics infl uence your life more. Last Fall, voters in Durham (which in-cludes many Duke students) voted to raise the sales tax by three-quarters of 1 percent, to fund improvements to transit and to increase fund-ing for Durham Public Schools and for Durham Technical Community College. News fl ash: You pay sales tax. If you work on campus, you also pay North Carolina income tax, and you pay property taxes if you live off campus. I’m not wishing this on anyone, but if you ever get ar-rested, you’ll be tried in North Carolina courts by our elected judges, and you’ll be tried by our elected district attorney. If the name “Mike Nifong” rings a bell, it should be obvious why Duke students have a stake in electing a fair and responsible DA. You breathe North Carolina air, drink North Carolina water and have an incen-tive to keep it’s environment green. You drive on Durham roads and highways or make use of its transit—and you might be just as likely to look for work in North Carolina after you graduate as you are to fi nd a job in your home state. The success of Duke as an institution is incredibly related to North Carolina laws; as an example, it will be harder for North Carolina to recruit LGBT faculty if North Carolina Amendment One passes. You’re in Durham for eight months of the year—and at your parent’s house for only a month or two.
2. It is easier to vote in North Carolina. In ad-dition to state and local races, there are also im-portant national elections—for the U.S. House of Representatives, for the U.S. Senate and for president. If you live in another state and you forget to request or turn in your absentee bal-lot, you’ve given up your opportunity to weigh in on national politics. There hasn’t been an on-campus voting site since 2008—but both for the Amendment One vote (between April 19 and May 5) and for the November general election
there will be a one-stop voting location on West Campus, where you’ll be able to register and vote at the same time. Chances are good that during
November presidential elections, there will always be a one-stop voting location on campus, but voter turnout this April and May will be an important determinant of whether there is an on-campus voting location for future mid-term elections and future primary elections. It’s also easy to learn about North Carolina politics—in my time at Duke, The Chronicle’s coverage of North Carolina poli-tics has gotten increasingly more
extensive. Our elected offi cials and candidates frequently make stops on Duke’s campus to talk to voters—many of the candidates for local of-fi ce will be at Voter Pride Day on the Plaza this Friday.
3. North Carolina is a swing state and not just a swing state but perhaps the swingiest of all swing states. There is literally not a single state in the country that Obama won by fewer votes than he did in North Carolina; he won the state by fewer votes than there are Duke students. A lot of Duke students mistakenly be-lieve that North Carolina is mostly conservative and is only recently trending blue due to demo-graphic changes. In reality, North Carolina has a long tradition of bold progressivism—until 2010, the last time Republicans controlled both houses of the General Assembly was Reconstruc-tion. In the past year and a half, Republicans in North Carolina have implemented an incredibly extreme set of policies—dropping our state’s per-pupil K-12 education funding to 49th in the nation, obstructing women’s reproductive free-dom and making slashes to Medicaid funding that threaten public health. No matter what the “big-ticket” issues concern you most—women’s rights, fi ghting poverty, protecting the environ-ment—the issues are on the line in a big way in our state.
You might not always think of North Carolina as your home, but if you think of Duke as your home, then North Carolina is your home, too. Whether you’re about to fi nish your graduate program and voting against Amendment One will be your only election in this state, or you’re a freshman with three years ahead, the time has never been better to register to vote here.
Elena Botella is a Trinity junior. Her column usu-ally runs every other Monday. Follow Elena on Twitter @dukedemocrats.
commentaries10 | FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 THE CHRONICLE
The C
hron
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t D
uke
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Why North Carolina?
An appetite for ethics
”“ onlinecomment
sad to see Coach Anderson go. Thanks for the time you invested in this young men, Coach.
—“Benjamin Wolf” commenting on the story “Anderson resigns after 15 years.” See more at www.dukechronicle.com.
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For students concerned with animal welfare, some of Duke’s most loved foods may taste a little bit sweeter in coming years. Bon Ap-petit Management Company, which manages vendors like the M a r k e t p l a c e and the Great Hall, has re-cently committed to purchas-ing 25 percent of its meat and eggs from producers that treat their animals humanely and, beginning 2015, will no longer purchase eggs laid by chickens confi ned to battery cages or pork raised in gesta-tion crates. The pledge by Bon Appetit promises to yield an exciting improvement in both the quality and ethicality of food on campus and refl ects the company’s laudable and long-held commitment to
sustainability and ethical food production.
With the threat of green-washing and other insincere at-tempts to appear ethical always looming, it remains important
to determine whether com-panies that
claim to support humanely raised food actually do so in practice. Bon Appetit appears to be committed to ensuring that its pledge translates into action. Independent animal welfare groups and the Hu-mane Society of the United States will aid Bon Appetit in selecting humane suppliers.
Crucially, Bon Appetit has not ignored sustainability con-cerns that are independent of animal welfare. Sustainability forms a core part of Bon Ap-petit’s mission, and the com-
pany has a long history of pro-moting local and sustainable agriculture. Both the Market-place and the Great Hall serve food from local farms, includ-ing the Duke Campus Farm.
Bon Appetit also boasts a history of advocating on be-half of farmworkers. In 2009, Bon Appetit signed an agree-ment with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers—an ad-vocacy group for immigrant laborers in Florida—that out-lined a strict code of conduct for tomato growers who sell to the company. The agree-ment, which emphasizes fair wages and worker’s empower-ment, emerged amid a slew of reports detailing abuses suf-fered by tomato harvesters in southern Florida. In some of the worst cases, workers en-dured physical violence and
prolonged enslavement at the hands of their employers. Bon Appetit’s dedication to supporting human and labor rights sets it apart from other food providers that champion animal welfare. Chipotle has banned the use of gestation crates in the production of its pork, but it refuses to sign an agreement with the CIW and continues to buy from tomato growers that maintain some of the worst labor standards in the country.
Because suppliers often price humanely raised meat at a premium, Bon Appetit may have to pay more for ethical food. Despite the possibility of raised prices in campus eater-ies, Bon Appetit should pay more for humane products so that these producers can com-pete with factory farms. In the
event that prices increase, we hope that the University will absorb the price hikes so that students do not have to, as higher prices threaten to push students to eateries that do not offer ethically produced items.
Given Bon Appetit’s sub-stantive commitment to not only animal welfare but also environmental sustainabil-ity and workers’ rights, we encourage students to priori-tize the Marketplace and the Great Hall over other eateries when choosing where to eat. As Duke students, we enjoy the unique privilege of having access to relatively inexpen-sive, humanely raised and sus-tainable food, and we should consider voting with our food points to ensure that ethical food production receives con-tinued support.
commentariesTHE CHRONICLE FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 | 11
editI was devastated when the details of Trayvon Martin’s tragic death started to gain national attention this week. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman, shot and
killed unarmed Trayvon, who is black. Zimmerman reported that he saw a “suspicious” per-son, yet no logical reasons for suspicion have been found.
Coverage of Trayvon’s story is increasing, in connection with needed race dialogues. These dialogues are reminding people of the disastrous reality of racial profi ling. Based on the trends in the current criminal justice system, the “suspicions” that some individuals hold due to race might actually be getting worse.
Michelle Alexander has compiled data about race and U.S. incarceration rates in her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” She makes a severe claim: the Criminal Justice System is the new Jim Crow. When an individual is pegged as a felon, it becomes le-gal to discriminate in employment, housing and education. The denial of voting rights, jury service and public benefi ts like food stamps becomes legal. Alexander argues that the criminal justice system is able to achieve the same results of the Jim Crow system through the mass incarceration of blacks and Latinos: People of color are disproportionately disenfranchised and denied the opportunity of social mo-bility. The process has obviously been restructured, but the legalized oppression is the same.
Alexander’s layers of evidence make her claim compelling. Our total incarceration rate has skyrocketed, with drug convic-tions composing the majority of the increase. The total U.S. pe-nal population has grown from 300,000 to more than 2 million in less than 30 years. We easily have the highest incarceration rate in the world, beating aggressive regimes like Iran, China and Rus-sia. High incarceration rates should not be a source of pride. For a country as developed as the United States, these rates actually refl ect an inability to prevent crime, though one might frame it as evidence of effective policing and justice systems
The racial disproportions evident in mass incarceration are staggering. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., it is estimated that three out of four young black men can expect to serve time in prison. This disparity cannot be due to differential crime rates.
Alexander’s analysis of drug use and incarceration is the epiphany that leads to the New Jim Crow hypothesis. U.S. De-partment of Health and Human Services studies report that 6.4 percent of whites, 6.4 percent of blacks and 5.3 percent of Hispanics were current users of illegal drugs in 2000. In some states, black men have been confi ned in prison on drug charg-es at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men.
Is that really justice?The criminal justice system targets people of color. In major
cities pillaged by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young black men now have criminal records. As explained before, this legalizes discrimination against them. It pushes individuals fur-ther out of the mainstream and promotes stagnation and re-cidivism. To try to justify that as criminals being punished does not explain the racial dimension.
The combination of minority mass incarceration and le-galized discrimination against criminals leads to the cradle-to-prison pipeline. The lack of social mobility affects future generations, and the racial implications are terrifying. Na-tionally, one in three black and one in six Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. These children will be subjected to legal discrimination. If the pattern con-tinues, it does seem like Jim Crow subjugation is currently masquerading as criminal justice.
In response to Trayvon’s death, many young black men have been writing and speaking about their interactions with stereotypes. Some report that they choose to purposely coun-teract the negative assumptions of “suspicious” black men by wearing certain clothes or smiling a lot. Others say they refuse to change in response to false generalizations. Regardless, it is obvious that certain people have an association between black men and crime, and the unbalanced incarceration of black men is exacerbating these harmful perceptions. Seeking real justice requires us to be persistent on many levels. Criminal institutions have to be rebuilt and perceptions need to widen: those are two initial steps toward pursuing something greater than Jim Crow justice.
Rajlakshmi De is a Trinity junior and is studying abroad at the London School of Economics. Her column runs every other Friday. Fol-low Rajlakshmi on Twitter @RajDe4
Jim Crow Justice
lettertotheeditorI was happy to read in Tuesday’s article, “Sexual
assault policy changes raise questions,” that the Offi ce of Student Conduct is fi nally taking steps to create a uniform harassment policy. Instead of extending the statute of limitations for sexual mis-conduct and harassment from one year to two, the Offi ce has decided to reduce the statute of limi-tations for sexual assault and rape from two years to one. As Dean Bryan himself writes, “I have re-viewed all sexual misconduct cases reported to my offi ce for disciplinary action over the past 10 aca-demic years, and 96 percent were reported in less than a year after the incident.” This reduction to the statute of limitations would have only affected 4 percent of all reports! For students who are con-cerned about the change in policy, do they really want the statute of limitations to be set at one year seven months 23 days fours hours and 51 minutes (which to my understanding is the longest time a survivor has taken to fi le a report)? We should be happy, in fact grateful, for achieving 96 percent ef-fi ciency; not many production lines achieve that these days.
At the same time, critics of this policy change do not realize the external benefi ts that can come out of the current scenario. For one, by reducing the statute of limitations, we can address the prob-lem of underreporting in cases of sexual violence. It is clear that underreporting is the result of sur-vivors taking their own sweet time in coming forth and reporting, and if we force survivors to be more effi cient, more cases can be reported and sexual assault will be recognized as a legitimate problem on campus (if it even is in the fi rst place). In ad-
dition, not all sexual assaults are deliberate acts of violence; some perpetrators just made honest mistakes in coercing others to have non-consen-sual sex with them. A reduction in the statute of limitations would allow these misunderstood indi-viduals to continue their education without inter-ruption—while I believe no student has ever been expelled by the University for committing sexual assault, some students have faced suspension and have been forced to spend a few semesters away.
I modestly propose that since the Offi ce of Stu-dent Conduct is already implementing this policy change, it might as well go just a few steps further and mandate that all victims of sexual assault pres-ent their cases before the Student Conduct Board before the end of the next working day following their alleged assaults. More time for “healing” and “recovery” is simply a luxury as the University seeks to solve the problem of sexual assault as soon as it possibly can. Besides, we already have suffi cient sup-port services through the Women’s Center, Coun-seling and Psychological Services and Duke Well-ness that allow survivors of sexual violence to fi le reports for disciplinary action in a timely and effi -cient manner, should they decide to. Of course, a student would have more time to prepare his or her case if the alleged assault happened on a weekend; he or she would appear before the Board by 5 p.m. Monday. People need to realize that the University certainly has its students’ best interests at heart.
Ming Jiu LiPratt ’12
This weekend, I will finally become a man. This Saturday, I will intimately light a few candles and take the plunge. I know, I’m a little late
(some people these days do it when they’re as young as 13), but I wanted to make sure I was ready to commit my-self to this sort of relationship. That’s right: I’m getting bar mitzvah’d. Were you thinking of something else?
Cheap jokes aside, the Freeman Cen-ter is actually hosting my bar mitzvah on Saturday. Since apparently learning to read the Torah without necessarily, uh, “knowing” Hebrew requires a bit of time, I’ve been thinking about the role of religion in my childhood. Oh, don’t worry, this won’t be a diatribe about what it means to be Jewish: I’m saving the good pretentious stuff for the service itself.
The thing is, by and by, I wasn’t raised religious. At all. My father was Jewish, but he was also jewish: which is to say, he didn’t really believe in Judaism. My mom spent 13 years in Catholic school, and that should tell you enough about how Catholic she was once she grew up. God was mostly absent from my life.
That isn’t fair, actually: There was a God in my life. We went to worship him, regularly, in hymn, and he had a mass of followers all along the too-Long Island where I grew up. He taught us of hope, of despair, of everything. That his name happened to be Bruce Springsteen instead of Yahweh or Jesus was of little import.
As much as that sounds like a joke, it really isn’t. In terms of religious texts, “Born to Run” is the Al-pha and the Omega, the fulfillment of the promise his E Street apostles told him of in “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” Bruce spoke (and spoke is really the right term: singing was never his strong suit) to a generation of people caught in the pitfalls of American life, and He exalted the low. And if you think the Christian language is too strong here, you’ve got two problems. One, it only gets worse and much more cringe-worthy; I’m not even going to act ironic about it. Two, if you think this is bad, you clearly haven’t listened to enough Springsteen.
There are a large number of critics who find Bruce painfully sincere, a ra-ra jingoist whose work
has little actual value. They are sad people who are also full of crap. The transcendent value of the Boss (notice, the name is capitalized) is that He is able
to look so deeply into the abyss and come out not with irony, detachment or sadness, but with hope.
Bruce’s albums are littered with drug addicts, the unemployed, the disabled and the otherwise more sub-tly disenfranchised. One of the great-est lies ever told is that “Born in the U.S.A.” is about the simple glory of America. Rather, it’s a tale of how the Vietnam War tore this nation apart. Simply put, Springsteen is what is, a
world seen not through rose-colored glasses, but through an unflinching and utterly American ver-sion of what is.
Hope. That’s what Springsteen was to me and to my family. I’m not saying my life was absurd-ly difficult, but we certainly had our challenges. Some challenges, like the death of my father, were obviously difficult. Others were more average, like the problems I had adjusting to a 1950s-style “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” high school. “Growin’ Up,” as Bruce entitled one of his best early songs, ain’t easy. Ev-eryone I know searches for meaning in some way: My search just happened to lead me to pop cul-ture, as it so often does.
Popular music may seem meaningless, but what we listen to as children matters, because it’s part of what shapes our worldview. And in that regard, I was a lucky child.
Because when I found myself in times of trouble, neither Mother Mary nor Paul McCartney came to me. Instead, I would pray in full stereo and mono and ask from the Almighty Boss above to make sense of all this misery. And Bruce responded, and he did so as such …
“Let the broken hearts standAs the price you’ve gotta pay.Keep pushing till it’s understoodAnd these badlands start treating us good.”Amen.
Harry Liberman is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Friday.
Springsteen’s not a Jewish name
rajlakshmi deminority report
harry libermanjews in the news
12 | FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012 THE CHRONICLE
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designs in natural phenomena. Bejan said his “eureka” moment occurred at a 1995 thermodynamics conference in Nancy, France where he heard Nobel Prize winner and chaos theorist Ilya Prigogine refer to the apparent randomness of recurring nat-ural tree-shaped patterns, like river basins.
“When he spoke of tree-shaped struc-tures being the result of throwing the dice, I thought, ‘He has no idea what I know, which is that this is not the case,’” Bejan said. “If the drawing I make is the same drawing he sees everywhere in nature, then the principle that I am invoking intuitively is in fact the principle that accounts for these structures everywhere.”
On the flight back to America, Bejan condensed his new thoughts on the matter into what he would call the constructal law. According to Bejan’s research, “For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.”
This principle of the constructal law can be demonstrated in the design of a river delta—gravity forces the water from higher inland elevations to the sea, but the water does not all flow in one jet. It fans out across the delta in a tree-shaped fan, in which the water covers the distance to the sea more quickly with the passage of time.
“It’s not about what flows, it’s about how the flow system acquires its configuration and why,” he said. “It’s about designing bet-ter channels through which to move.”
Bejan applies this concept of flow to sys-tems as diverse as people moving through neighborhoods to ideas spreading through society. The law’s large reach is notable in itself—he noted that it governs the design of everything, including inanimate, animate
and engineered bodies.The breadth of the constructural law pos-
es a certain challenge, said Tom Katsouleas, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering.
“This is pretty deep and profound and broad reaching, and I think because of that it’s a hard one for people to get their arms around,” Katsouleas said. “But like the second law [of thermodynamics], it has led to predictions in what the opti-mal branching should be and plants and animals and rivers have evolved to have those sorts of characteristics that have been predicted.”
Key to this expansiveness is the defini-tion of life in constructal law. Bejan defines life through thermodynamic term, classify-ing anything that moves as living—a key difference from the traditional biological definition.
“A system in which nothing moves is known as a system in the dead state. It fol-lows that anything that moves and morphs its configuration while flowing is not dead,” he said. “What do you call that which is not dead, that persists in its flow and evolution? You call that life.”
This thermodynamic definition of life can predict, for example, humanity’s con-tinued fuel consumption in the future, Bejan said. Systems thrive on burning fuel for transport. If humans cut down on fuel consumption, it will therefore result in less movement, such as international travel and transportation. This will lead to a global slowdown.
“To argue for reducing the consumption of fuel, based on my definition of life, is to argue for death,” he said. “The history of humanity and civilization is completely ori-ented the other way.”
Global warming will increasingly pres-sure the design of global society so much that it will force a gradual change to pat-terns of consumption, he added, comparing
it to severe smog in cities like Pittsburgh that became intolerable and prompted clean-up efforts.
Gilbert Merkx, vice provost for interna-tional affairs and director of international and area studies, met Bejan at a meeting of Duke’s international affairs committee. When Bejan showed him some diagrams of tree and river flow systems, Merkx, a profes-sor of the practice in sociology specializing in social networks, noticed a parallel to an example in his field: patterns of immigra-tion from Mexico to the U.S.
“Migration stream gathers people from different points, they flow together and then they spread out again,” Merkx noted. “Commuters work the same way. They live in the suburbs, they get on a trunk line to go to work, and they get off for their respective workplaces.”
The constructal law has been in publica-tion for 16 years, and it has been the basis for publications across a broad range of subjects. The law will continue to undergo scrutiny to vie for a spot as a law of physics, Katsouleas said.
“This is exciting because he’s proposed something so fundamental, and when you have a new fundamental law, it really re-quires the test of time to assess its validity,” he said. “We’re in that period, and it will be exciting to see what those tests show,”
The constructal law shows that success-ful ideas enhance humans’ ability to flow more efficiently through systems, Bejan said. He believes the constructal law is one such idea.
“In 15 years, the constructal law has not been refuted by anybody. It is a train on which more and more scientists are climb-ing and publishing and actually competing with me,” he said. “Good ideas persist and keep on traveling. This is in a nutshell the origin of science, the evolution of science and the future of science.”
BEJAN from page 1
in the Middle East through Arabic media sources, are in a unique position to help correct some of these misconceptions.
The background of Arabic language and literature, such as pre-Islamic po-etry and the Quran, provides historical context to contemporary Middle Eastern issues. Ernst noted that by the 10th cen-tury, Arabic writers covered a wide range of subjects, including religion, grammar and philology. He added that many non-Muslim groups, including Arabic-speak-ing Jews, contributed extensively to Ara-bic literature through their own writing.
A massive translation movement, which began around 800 C.E., marked an important landmark in Arabic liter-ary history. The movement featured the translation of scientific and philosophi-cal literature from Greek into Arabic, Ernst said. Arabic literature also became notable for its geographic component.
“Arabic became the medium for de-scribing the world, much more compre-hensively than was possible in other lan-guages before the European expansion of the 16th century,” he added. “Arab geographers combined personal travel narrative with administrative reports to gain much more extensive knowledge of the world than their predecessors.”
Still, Ernst noted that, given its breadth, merely skimming the surface of the Arab world’s “grand history” does not do it justice.
“[Arabic] is an academic pursuit and a skill at the same time,” said se-nior Andi Frkovich, who introduced the speakers. “It was beneficial to hear [how knowing Arabic] might benefit you in the future and to hear the rich history of the language.”
