Category: Archive Page 6 of 9

This week, the nation will observe Veterans Day, a day on which we thank, honor, and remember all those who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces. In celebration of this holiday, we thought it fitting to dedicate a post to our student veterans by highlighting the program that helps them attend Duke, the value they add to the classroom, and their post-Duke accomplishments.  Duke is proud of its vets and we thank them for their service.

***

Called the “patriots who have kept us whole” by President Barack Obama, veterans are the men and women who answered the call of duty, and — due to the draw-down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — are a growing part of the nation’s population.

At Duke, veteran students and their dependents are also a rapidly growing group — in fact, they are the fastest growing group on campus. Over the past five years, the number of these students has grown more than 400 percent across the University’s undergraduate and nine professional and graduate schools.

Behind this increase lies what Duke’s associate vice-president for federal relations, Chris Simmons, calls a “classic example” of a partnership between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities to do “what is right and what is needed:” the post-9/11 G.I. Bill.

[Read the full op-ed that appeared in the Herald-Sun here]

The post-9/11 G.I. Bill, signed into law in 2008, offers a wide range of benefits for veterans with a variety of education goals. It has provided $40 billion in funding for the education of more than 1 million beneficiaries. In addition, the bill established the Yellow Ribbon program, designed to make private colleges more accessible to veteran applicants. At Duke, we provide these special scholarships to veterans to say thank you for their service to our nation, and also because we believe having veterans in our classrooms and laboratories improves the education and teaching environment for our entire campus.

“A lot of veterans were thrust into situations where leadership really matters,” said Tommy Sowers (T ’98), a former Veterans’ Administration official and assistant director of the Hart Leadership Program at the Sanford School of Public Policy. “They have a rich, real world experience, in that many were working in developing countries and had to face the complexities of policy on the ground.”

Those experiences add an “unbelievable value” to the university community, says Clay Adams, associate dean of students with the Office of Student Affairs (OSAF). And through outreach, programming, and support, Adams says OSAF works to make Duke a campus that “embraces the value of military service and contributes to the diverse world-view of the student body.”

But why choose Duke? Many veterans tell Adams they are attracted by Duke’s emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. They see as an opportunity to build upon the practical skills they have from their service with academic training.

This was true for Paul Escajadillo, who served seven and a half years in the U.S. Special Operations and is now a second year MBA candidate at the Fuqua School of Business. In his classes, Escajadillo brings first-hand experience of how cultures can be different but still operate together. In return, he’s discovered a program that allows him to leverage his leadership skills in an atmosphere that mirrors the team-based approach he saw in the Army.

“Everyone, everyday lives out the ‘Team Fuqua’ concept,” Escajadillo said. “I’m blessed to be around the best and the brightest of my generation, and to strive to keep up with them.”

Escajadillo also brings this team-based approach to the Graduate and Professional Student Council, where he serves as Attorney General. In his first year, Escajadillo partnered with the Duke University Stores and the Office of Student Affairs to establish a program that gives one veteran per school a $100 gift certificate to use to purchase textbooks, a cost not covered by the G.I. funds.

And once they graduate, Duke veterans continue to impact our nation and support their teams — like Eric Greitens (T ’96), who started the non-profit, The Mission Continues, an organization that awards community service fellowships to post-9/11 veterans. [Click here to read about the seven Duke alumni military veterans who participated in the Freedom 500, a 500-mile run from the Duke Chapel to the World Trade Center with a stop in Washington, D.C. to raise money and awareness for The Mission Continues.] Another alumnus, Gen. Martin Dempsey, is currently serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  And let’s not forget the hundreds of faculty and staff who have served and are now a part of the Duke community.

During this Veteran’s Day week, take a moment to say thank you to our veterans – for their service and for their contributions to our country and our campus.

In a recent profile of North Carolina politics, The New York Times labeled North Carolina as “neither red nor blue, but a shade of deep Dixie purple.” The piece went on to paint a picture of a state divided and in flux.

It’s a fascinating portrait of Duke’s home state that panelists at the latest installment of the Duke University Election Discussion series, focusing on North Carolina, largely echoed.

“The interesting thing that’s been happening in North Carolina is the rise of the independents,” said Frank Hill (MBA ’83), chief of staff to former Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC). “These are the people that have decided not to be Republicans, not to be Democrats.”

However, as fellow panelist and long-time Democratic consultant, Pope “Mac” McCorckle (L ’84), pointed out, this does not mean that individual North Carolina voters are moving any closer to the center.

“Independent [as a political label] has grown so large it’s no longer a proxy for ‘moderate,'” McCorckle said. There are independent liberals,  independent conservatives,  independent radicals — people that don’t want to be besmirched with party label.”

And these are the voters upon which the outcome of the 2014 midterm races will depend — especially the contest pitting incumbent Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) against Speaker of the North Carolina General Assembly Thom Tillis for the United States Senate.

“It’s going to come down to get out the vote efforts, in which voters are interested in voting,” Hill said. To that end, Jim McCleskey (T ’85), a former director of federal relations for the North Carolina governor’s office, said North Carolina is an “inversion” of the nation-wide enthusiasm gap that polls are showing the Democrats to have.

“North Carolina feels a little bit different,” McCleskey said. McCorckle attributes these “counter-veiling” winds in the state to voter displeasure with the North Carolina legislature and Governor Pat McCrory.

“The key to this Senate race is that Tillis is not a generic republican candidate,” McCorckle said. “If he were a generic ‘R,’ with no association with the General Assembly, you’d see him up by 5 to 7 points.”

For her part, Senator Kay Hagan has proved a “resilient” candidate, McCorckle said. Her campaign has steered the conversation toward public education, which in Hill’s mind has made the race feel “for a long time like a State Senate race instead of a national race.”

Looking down the ballot at state-wide races, the panelists agreed that Republicans were unlikely to lose control of either the General Assembly or the State Senate, but Democrats did have a chance to pick up a few Senate seats in Wake County and around the Asheville area. McCorckle also said he would be watching the judicial races, especially the Supreme Court races, as they could be close.

All three agreed that North Carolina is in transition. No longer is it a smear on your resume to not be a native North Carolinian — McCleskey noting that many of the names at the top of state leadership from Hagan and Tillis to McCrory and leader of the State Senate Phil Berger were not from “around here.”

What that means for the future of North Carolina politics is anyone’s guess. When he looks at the next generation of voters, he sees a group of people that “aren’t interested in fighting. They want to make a decision and get things done.”

On Monday, October 27, Pedro Lasch, a Duke artist and faculty member, will present a special project at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

***[Click here for registration information]***

A great profile in Duke Today of Lasch’s work highlights his incorporation of dozens of faculty, staff, and students around the university into his latest piece of art, and our colleagues at Duke in Washington were lucky enough to be among those involved.
Back in May, Duke in Washington hosted a preview reception featuring a live conversation between Lasch and Vesela Sretenovic, curator of modern and contemporary art at The Phillips Collection, to introduce select Washingtonians to Pedro’s work.

So what exactly is this project, and why is the nation’s capital the proper stage for such a work?

A Complex Idea

The description of Lasch’s Abstract Nationalism & National Abstraction: Anthems for Four Voices reads:

“Abstract Nationalism & National Abstraction: Anthems for Four Voices takes shape as a series of short public recitals, temporary exhibits, and social practice artworks in select foreign embassies, culminating with the largest manifestation of the project at the Phillips Collection during the International Forum (October 25-27, 2014).  These multimedia performance events will incorporate audio and visual elements to explore questions of (multi)nationalism, cultural pluralism, independence, statehood, diplomatic and other themes so deeply related to the history and identity of nations and cultures.”

Still not sure what this is all about?

As you can tell from the description, Anthems is a complex project with many moving pieces, so let’s describe some of its basic concepts with a bulleted list:

• First, Lasch alphabetized every nation, as found in the 2001 World Almanac and Book of Facts.
• Then, Lasch selected groupings of four nations, as determined by their positions in the alphabet.  For example, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Uzbekistan make up one grouping.
• The musical component of the project combines the national anthems of the four countries found in each group, arranged for four voices (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass), into an overlapping and simultaneous performance.
• Furthermore, each anthem will be sung, not in its native tongue, but in the language of the country that follows it in the Almanac.
• At the same time, Lasch has created a visual element to the project by distilling the flags of each of these countries into their most basic design elements (stars, stripes, emblems, mottos, etc) and then creating paintings, videos, and even physical flags depicting the combination of these elements, thus creating a new flag representing each grouping.

Pretty simple right?

As Lasch and Sretenovic repeatedly emphasized at the Duke in Washington preview last spring, the project is constantly evolving and will continue to do so even after the performances and viewings themselves.  There will be times where the project will feel like a traditional concert, with professional singers performing the arrangement of the anthems in The Phillips Collection’s concert hall.  But other pieces of the project will be more unexpected.

“Imagine you are visiting the Phillips, totally unaware of this project,” said Lasch during the program.

“And you are sitting quietly in the Rothko room, enjoying the artwork, when in marches this singer, dressed in formal wear, carrying one of the flags, and singing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish.  You are going to say, ‘What is going on?,’ especially as you begin to notice that other singers are also singing other anthems in different galleries.'”

International Flavor

In addition to planning for the project at The Phillips Collection, Lasch and Sretenovic reached out to embassies in Washington, DC to make them aware of opportunities to share Anthems with foreign nationals and others who may closely identify with specific anthems included in a grouping.

Representatives from some of these embassies attended the preview reception at DIW, adding a diplomatic flavor to the evening.

“As we focused on producing a project specific to The Phillips Collection and Washington DC, we quickly realized that reaching out the embassies would be an important component. If you have walked even just a few blocks on Embassy Row, you know that the atmosphere and architecture created by this incredibly high concentration of foreign embassies is totally unique and unmatched by any city in the U.S., perhaps the world,” said Lasch.

Lasch added, “The work is as much about that as it is about modern art.”

The University As a One-Stop Art Shop

The live conversation portion of the evening also addressed the role of the university as cultural producer.  Lasch highlighted the access to disciplines outside the arts as just one benefit of being an artist associated with a university.

“Universities have had a very important history in relation to the production of contemporary art, but this is often overlooked and underestimated by universities and artists themselves…[H]owever, universities have a great advantage over traditional museums, stand alone cultural institutions, or…commercial galleries,” explained Lasch.
“Where else, other than a university, will you find dozens of translators, a great choir and conductor, a composer, designers, performers, political scientists, humanists, historians and musicology researchers, all necessary collaborators for this very project?”

For Lasch and Sretenovic, the event was an opportunity to offer a small glimpse of Anthems to people and organizations whose interest and involvement can enhance the project’s reach.  For Duke in Washington, it was a chance to highlight the cultural contributions of a major research university to those who may be more familiar with Duke’s contributions to undergraduate education or the hard sciences.

For more photos, please visit our Facebook gallery.

Learn more about Lasch’s performances at The Phillips Collection here.

If you are at a loss trying to think of the last time a Congressional candidate mentioned their economic policies, Dr. Valerie Rawlston Wilson has reassuring words for you, “There’s nothing wrong with your hearing. There has not really been any discussion of economic inequality of any sort in this election cycle.”

Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, who was speaking at the latest installment of Duke’s Election Series, says in a way this isn’t surprising, but “it’s important to understand how critical this issue is to the average American.”

Just consider these statistics, provided by Professor William (“Sandy”) A. Darity, Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics, Duke University; and director of the Duke Consortium on Social Equity:

• The CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies have an average salary 354 times that of the median American worker.
• The top 20% of wealthiest Americans hold 90% of the nation’s wealth.
• When considering a household’s net worth, black and Latino households have 5% of the net worth of the median white household in America.

So while Darity agreed that politicians have paid “negligible attention” to issues of inequality in this campaign, he also said that those policies they have been touting aren’t exactly “imaginative.”

“Whatever policies politicians have pursued are largely stale ones that are indirect,” Darity said, pointing to proposals such as raising the minimum wage as an example. “It’s surprising that despite the ‘Great Recession’  — the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression — that we haven’t had more innovative or dramatic proposals from our candidates.”

But it’s the talk of the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession that Wilson argues has lulled Americans to sleep on the issue. “There’s been a lot celebration over the fact that we’ve gotten beyond a jobless recovery, but what remains is that we continue to have a wageless recovery,” Wilson said.

So what will it take for politicians to start addressing economic inequality? Darity says politicians need to stop saying real economic reform isn’t feasible. Wilson says politicians need to change the narrative and realize a need to invest in America’s future through programs such as rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

Next week’s session, the last before the November 4 elections, will focus on North Carolina and its key races. Leading the discussion on Duke’s campus will be Mac McCorkle, (L ’84), associate professor of public policy at Duke University and a Democratic political consultant, and Frank Hill (MBA ’83), director of the Institute for Public Trust and former chief of staff to Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC). Joining from Duke in Washington will be Jim McCleskey (T ’83), former director of the North Carolina Governor’s Office for Federal Relations.

When Jenni Owen took a survey of recent headlines in education, she found some articles trumpeting support for Common Core and others claiming that support for the program was dwindling. She found headlines on education funding, on higher education issues, and still others addressing issues of teacher quality.

Taken together, the headlines paint a picture of a complex system that Owen, the director of policy initiatives at the Center for Child & Family Policy, described as fragmented and one that most people don’t really understand. But at the same time, she said education is a shared experience for all Americans because “we’ve all been somewhere in education system, so we all think we know something about it.”

Former Department of Education official Mike Lamb (T ’05) agreed that education is a complex issue, partly because of the shared power between local, state, and federal levels of government. So when it comes to education and elections, they both agreed there’s a lot to consider.

Speaking at the latest installment of the Duke Election Series Owen and Lamb, who were also joined by Barbara Jentleson, assistant professor of the practice for education, gave audience members some tips for evaluating candidates’ stances on education issues.

First, Owen encouraged audience members to look at the state government. “Is yours a state with strong or weak local control?” she asked, noting that at least one audience member indicated they were unsure.

Next, Lamb said to consider whether a candidate uses phrases like “expense” versus “investment” to describe funding for education. It could be a signal for how they see policy recommendations playing out post-election.

And then, look at the issue as a whole. “Is the candidate using education as a wedge issue, to drive parties apart?” Lamb asked. “Or, are they using it to generate substantive debate? Are they asking whether their policies will be substantively best for the kids?”

And that, Jentleson said, should be the question at the heart of any debate around education.

The election series continues next Thursday, as Peter Feaver, professor of political science and public policy, and Paul Teller (T ’93), chief of staff for Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), take on the issue of international relations. Feaver, a veteran of two administrations, will be speaking from the Forum for Scholars and Publics, while Teller, a fourteen-year veteran of Capitol Hill, joins in from Duke in Washington.

Click here for the full schedule and to register for next week’s installment.

In October of 2013, Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act — commonly known as Obamacare — was one of the main drivers behind the two-and-a-half week government shut-down. One year later, in the midst of campaign season, the fight over Obamacare has divided along lines of cable television viewership: in red states, the anti-Obamacare message still resonates. In blue states, where the public is not as “ginned up,” the issue has largely moved to the “back burner.”

This is according to Don Taylor, associate professor of public policy and associate professor of community and family medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine. Taylor, along with James Capretta (G ’87), a former associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, led the latest installment of Duke University’s Election Discussion series Thursday, which focused on the impact healthcare is having on the 2014 midterms.

Capretta pointed to states such as Alaska and Arkansas as examples of where anti-healthcare ads still dominate the airwaves. He contrasted this with states like North Carolina, where the healthcare ads of early 2014 have faded into ads focusing on education and spending. Taylor attributes this shift to the fact that 350,000 North Carolinians have entered into healthcare exchanges, one of the highest rates in the country.

But while healthcare has become a regional debate in the months leading up to the mid-terms, Capretta expects it to once again be a national issue come 2016.

“It’s hard to imagine the Republican nominee not being a critic of the healthcare law,” he said. “While the Democratic nominee will have to defend it, or adopt a ‘keep and improve’ position.”

By then, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 24 million Americans will be covered under healthcare exchanges, which to Taylor means the ship on repealing the law has sailed. For his part, Capretta agreed, saying viable alternatives to Obamacare will now have to include steps on how to get from the current system to that new vision.

The election series continues next Thursday, with Barbara Jentleson, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Education; Jenni Owen, Lecturer in Public Policy and Director of Policy Initiatives for the Center for Child & Family Policy; and Mike Lamb (T ’05), a former Senior Policy Advisor in the Department of Education, leading the discussion on education.

Click here for the full schedule.

With less than seven weeks until November’s midterm elections, campaign strategist Brent McGoldrick (T ’97) says political forecasting websites like Nate Silver’s 538 blog and The Washington Post’s “The Fix” have one thing in common: “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Mid-term elections are about voter turn-out,” McGoldrick said. “And voter turn-out, when it’s an off-year, is hard to predict.”

David Rohde, Duke University professor of political science who studies trends in Congressional elections, agreed. The two were speaking via videoconference at the first installment of Duke University’s Election Discussion series, “The Issues. Their Impact. Our Input,” where McGoldrick said the national implications of this year’s elections would hinge on races in unlikely places. Like the Senate race in Kansas.

Rohde, who has co-authored a book on the trends in Congressional elections every cycle since 1980, said this is because without one party controlling both Congress and the Presidency, the parties are left without someone to blame — a key strategy to nationalizing elections and increasing voter mobilization.

So what does this mean for the common voter? Well, for states that have a hotly contested Senate election, like North Carolina, “things are about to get more heated,” according to McGoldrick.

That’s because, as Tommy Sowers can attest, this is the point in a campaign when the public is finally starting to pay attention. Sowers, who was the 2010 Democratic nominee for Missouri’s 8th Congressional District, says that at this point in his campaign, he was at a cross-roads. He could no longer walk into a coffee shop unrecognized, which he says “led to some colder shoulders.” And while it had been a year since he declared his candidacy, the last two months were critical. Before he had spent 12 hours a day fundraising; now, it was about being on the ground, shaking hands, and meeting as many people as possible.

Over the next seven weeks, as candidates are on the ground, the Duke University Office of Public Affairs and Government Relations, along with the Forum for Scholars and Publics and Duke in Washington, will come together each Thursday to delve into an issue central to the mid-term elections. The panels will connect Duke University faculty with experts in Washington, D.C. via teleconference to generate conversation’s between campus and the nation’s capital.

The next event will focus on Healthcare and be led on campus by Don Taylor, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Sanford School; and Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine and Nursing, Duke Medical Center; and at Duke in Washington by Jim Capretta (G ’87), a Visiting Fellow at American Enterprise Institute.

Click here for the full line up.