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In his famous Aug. 15, 2013 interview with President Richard Brodhead, Stephen Colbert noted that by majoring in English, President Brodhead “went for the big cash.” The prospect of having it both ways—reading books and pondering the meaning of life on the one hand, and making oodles of money on the other—should appeal to Duke’s ambitious, smart students as they go about planning their course of study.
Louise is undoubtedly dead by now, but 35 years ago she was a 72-year-old waitress at George’s Greek Restaurant in Athens, Ohio—a tough, assertive woman with an unruly mop of snow white curls. In her white work shoes, she measured 4 feet 10 inches, which meant she was close to the tabletops and the customers’ faces; she could take orders and lay the plates down without bending over and was the fastest server in the place. That translated into more tips. And in an era when we made 80 cents per hour, tips meant the difference between paying the rent and dying in a ditch. Louise was one of the best co-workers I’ve ever had, a wisecracker with a real talent for complaining and commiserating. At the end of the lunch rush, we used to sit at the counter and count the tips—mostly coins in those days—and she used to groan, rubbing her arthritic knees, and say, “What I need is a good lying down job.” I think she had something else in mind, but I took what I needed of her advice and went to graduate school in the humanities.
My time of doing embarrassing things is pretty much over. I’m not worried that someone will find me in a compromising situation, secretly snap my picture and post it on Facebook. I’m so out of it I don’t even SEE compromising situations, and if I do, I have no idea what is going on. The other day I had one of those friendly stairway chats with a neighbor in Wilson. I was going down, he was going up. Warm day today! Classes are going well. Bye! He proceeds up the stairs and I notice he’s carrying a brick in each of his side pockets. Fitness routine? Class project? Weaponry? Kid doesn’t seem dangerous. But what if he is, what if the next time I see him is on the evening news?
The first thing you see when you enter my classroom, fixed to the wall on the left side by the greenboard, is a big black metal cabinet with an open front and a row of, depending on how you count, six control boards with various configurations of buttons, knobs and indicator lights. Underneath is a long, narrow equipment drawer containing a cobra-like gray cord lying in unruly coils, along with three remote-control devices. Instructions are scotch-taped to the control boards, along with various hand-scrawled notes: “Please Remember to Shut Down the Projector. Picture Mute is NOT Shutdown!” “Select Sound Source.” “Internet on Wall Behind You.” “Aux Power.” “Power Supply: Do not turn off.” “To Play a DVD, Turn Off the VCR.”
Right about this time of the semester, grades start to feel important. Midterms have served up an alphabet soup of letters, heavy on the top two—admit it—but with an occasional nasty surprise mixed in. Combined with a multitude of Fall milestones—career interviews, major declarations, application deadlines, MCATs, LSATs, GREs, GMATs,—your grades seem to be that one $%&# thing that threatens to decide the entire course of your life, from Thanksgiving-dinner conversations to how much money you are going to be clutching in your hands on the day of your death.
Those 33 Chilean miners are the happiest people I’ve ever seen. There’s something about being alive, and being made viscerally aware of that fact, that can put a big smile on your face. Most of us don’t think in those terms; we’re more concerned with just getting through the day.
Until 1861 the Russian economy depended on the labor of serfs who farmed the land. These people were considered property and could be bought and sold just like any other good. So it was not implausible that in the summer of 1842 a gentleman by the name of Pavel Chichikov could be traveling around rural Russia, buying up serfs for cold hard cash.
Talk long enough to classroomfuls of people who write down everything you say, and eventually you’ll start to think you know it all. It can be bracing to find yourself in an environment where things don’t always make sense. When I told my family and friends that I was planning to move into a first-year residence hall, they told me I was insane. They are animals! They are messy! You’ll trip over their garbage! They are dangerous and violent! You’ll get hurt! They’ll hate you! You’ll lose your hearing! I’m still trying to figure out who exactly is crazy, myself or everyone else, but one thing is for sure: every day I see things I don’t understand. And a little bit of mystery is the best medicine for a headful of verifiable facts.
On Saturday, August 28, at 9:30 in the morning, 15-year-old high-school student Waheeda Amiri noticed a strange smell in the air of her Kabul classroom. Shortly thereafter she and her classmates fell ill with headaches and sore throats, and many of them lost consciousness and turned blue. Ultimately 45 students and four teachers ended up in the local hospital. Three days before, the hospital had treated 74 students from a nearby school with identical symptoms. Officials initially chalked the episodes up to “mass hysteria”, but chemical analyses of blood samples taken in similar cases indicated the effects of organophosphates. You chemistry majors know what that is: a family of compounds used in insecticides and herbicides, as well as in chemical weapons. The rest of us can just call it poison gas.
The New York Times reported Aug. 20 that although the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is clear, underwater oil plumes lurk in the ocean depths, including a behemoth 20 miles in length, 600 feet thick and a mile wide. Tiny organisms nibble away at its edges, thinking with their deluded, doomed little brains that it is food.
Thanks are due to Nate Freeman, for his great comments about the 2006 summer reading selection in his Aug. 28 column, “Improve summer reading.” Three years have passed since he and his classmates read, and roundly razzed, “My Sister’s Keeper.” We on the 2008-2009 Summer Reading selection committee are pleased to update you and other Chronicle readers about the selection process, and about this year’s very successful choice.
In his thoughtful columns-Oct. 31, "Seeking recommendations," and Nov. 7, "Solving the interaction problem"-Jordan Everson lists a number of existing institutional approaches to student-faculty interaction-required seminars and research classes, the advising system, mentored research, Writing 20, faculty-in-residence, administration-supported social events and house courses-and finds them lacking. Can students and faculty be brought together without recourse to the cumbersome and coercive methods of curricular reform?
