Search terms: Duke University Anil Potti
Note: In preparation of this report on the Potti Mess and a coming special report on the campus-wide leadership of President Brodhead, FC asked VP for PR Michael Schoenfeld for input, for information and suggestions. He has ignored our request.
✔✔ In January, the Potti Mess spun out of control, pushing Duke deeper and deeper into a quagmire. FC shall detail what happened in a moment.
First, we want to address the leadership that President Brodhead has provided during this crisis, now eight months old.
We find only two statements by Brodhead, both made during routine start-of-the-academic-year conversations with the editorial boards of the Herald-Sun and News and Observer.
Neither comment was significant enough to be reported in the Chronicle.
Immediately after The Cancer Letter revealed Potti's fake claim of a Rhodes Scholarship and the Rhodes Trust confirmed there was no award, with other credential issues looming, Brodhead cautioned editors and reporters not to reach rapid conclusions of truth or lie, for there could also be "intermediate explanation."
And in another editorial board meeting, Brodhead was asked how in hell Potti ever got a job on our faculty:
Brodhead: "The university will in general continue to accept credentials on their face as presented by the people who present them... We're not going to start running background checks and police checks on everybody... You can't reasonably do that, nor is there a need to."
Dare we point out that the President was immediately contradicted by Schoenfeld:
“In terms of faculty, [hiring] is a very thorough and rigorous process and involves extensive checking of references, conversations with people who worked with faculty members and reviewing work they do.”
✔ This is not leadership; the request to wait for an "intermediate explanation" is mush from an English professor, not the mighty declaration of principle we needed from the guy in charge, that anyone falsifying credentials would be thrown out on their ass. And the waffling on how Duke vets its employees is bewildering.
✔✔ Loyal Readers know of our repeated concern for Potti's patients. We believe there were far more than generally reported: the total of 107, 108 or 110 represents only those enrolled when Duke finally pulled the plug on his "clinical trials," which is to say experiments on human beings. We believe -- but have been unable to confirm -- that over time more than 300 people participated in these experiments, with perhaps as many as 1500 undergoing invasive tests to see if they qualified.
Has Brodhead ever said a word to any of these people? People who came to Duke in desperation, who got a quack instead of help and care.
Wouldn't it be appropriate for our Preident to address these people, to express our remorse, to reassure them, to bring them together for group therapy to help them cope with their mental anguish, to pledge that Duke will help them now obtain the best cancer care possible?
These people got ignored. They got silence from our President.
And needless to say, in a rosy Happy New Year sent belatedly to all alumni on January 21, Uncle Dick did not mention the Potti crisis at all.
Pathetic. Dick, just pathetic.
✔✔ And now the horrible month of January, with the Potti Mess spinning out of control:
✔ 1) As the Chronicle reports today, a third research paper that Potti published with his mentor Dr. Joseph Nevins has been retracted, which is a nice way to say withdrawn in disgrace. More to come.
✔ 2) In January, Nevins, Barbara Levine University Professor of Breast Cancer Genomics, saw the research center he headed disappear from the face of this campus. That is, the Center for Applied Genomics and Technology where Potti worked.
We have been cautioned against reading too much into this -- for two other centers that neither Potti nor Nevins were involved in were also terminated as part of a review of the entire genome enterprise prior to its 10th year. The Cancer Letter, which has broken most of the Potti stories, does not agree with that interpretation.
✔ 3) As the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), which is supposed to conduct a well financed "unfettered" investigation of the Potti Mess arrived on campus to begin its work, The Cancer Letter gave us a peek at some of the documents the IOM has amassed.
BOMBSHELL: The National Cancer Institute, which was using federal money to pay for some of Potti's research, became so concerned that on June 29, it summoned top Duke officials to its offices in Maryland for a showdown. For purposes of our analysis, the key person there was Sally Kornbluth, PhD, professor of pharmacology and cancer biology, and vice dean of the medical school.
This would not have been the first time that a highly authoratative challenge to Potti's work landed in her lap: Loyal Readers will recall how the previous November, as Duke's first internal investigation into Potti was beginning, she and Dr. Michael Cuffe, another vice dean, received an extraordinary letter from the eminent MD Anderson Comprehensive Cancer Center in Houston, with Dr. Keith Baggerly outlining in new detail precisely what was phony about Potti's research.
This letter was concealed from the investigation. Concealed. Repeat, not sent to the investigators, concealed.
We are told by a reliable source that Kornbluth and Cuffe were only some of the people in this decision; one account says "leadership": of Duke signed off -- in writing -- on this course. FC is at work trying to pin this down. (Later, Cuffe told Nature that if a similar situation were to ever occur again, he would forward “every shred” of evidence to the review panel. Whew.)
And even after the internal Duke investigators gave rousing approval to Potti's work, the letter was not send along as part of a reconsideration.
Rather, Kornbluth and Cuffe signed off on the investigation -- allowing clinical trials to continue.
Thus, Kornbluth was in a unique position to know the full dimensions of the implosion. But she -- and others -- did nothing. Only in the past horrible month, these details fell together.
✔4) It appeared more and more that the Institute of Medicine isn't delving into the nooks and crannies of Potti at all, but rather is more interested in a broad survey of standards in the emerging field of genome studies. This is undoubtedly important -- but not at the expense of a thorough investigation into Potti.
✔ 5) BOMBSHELL We learned that the Food and Drug Administration is on Duke's tail too. Part of Potti's clinical trials fell under their jurisdiction, because the tests that he used to determine who might benefit from what cancer drug are considered a "device."
No one can plead ignorance. On other similar trials, Duke doctors, including Nevins, secured FDA approval. Yet in documents just revealed, Duke’s Institutional Review Board put N/A for non-applicable next to checkboxes intended to indicate whether this form of FDA clearance had been obtained.
Investigators are on campus.
✔6) BOMBSHELL During the month of January, we learned that some of the people in Potti's clinical trials for lung cancer, received a chemotherapy cocktail that he concocted -- that is -- a combination of very powerful drugs used in a way not approved by drug regulators.
This should be a criminal offense.
✔ 7) Also in January, Duke surrendered the last of the Potti research funds, multi-year grants from the federal government involving cancer research, one with one year and $200,000 left, and the other with six months and $100,000. Potti's lab -- once vibrant with hope of a major scientific breakthru -- had shrunk to four employees, and they learned they are being laid off.
✔ 8) As FC reported, Potti started to emerge from the seclusion of his Chapel Hill home... building his Facebook site, sending out tweets (http://friendfeed.com/anilpottimd) and worse, apparently trying to capitalize on his years at Duke, presenting himself as a cancer doc extraordinaire, misleading with a regurgitation of a seven year old press release announcing a humanitarian award. So far as we can find out, Duke has filed no report on Potti with the North Carolina Medical Board.
✔ 9) A Raleigh law firm that has taken on Duke University in the past says it is doing "research" on the Potti Mess. The firm Henson Fuerst has now sent out several press releases seeking information from Potti patients, which seems to FC like a thinly disguised effort to sign them up for lawsuits.
✔✔ What will February hold? Brace yourself, fellow Dukies. At Bingham Young University, Baggerly (the whistleblower from MD Anderson Comprehensive Care Center) reviewed the Duke mess for the fourth joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis).
They deal with highly technical stuff, but everyone will be able to understand this prediction:
"Hold on folks, the ride’s just beginning."
Thank you for reading Fact Checker.
Duke.Fact.Checker@Gmail.com
1/27/2011
With money tight, universities scramble to profit from intellectual property
Search terms Duke University Anil Potti.
The following was written in response to a Chronicle editorial telling how the University of Missouri snagged 25 percent of a new app developed by a student.
✔ Fact Checker here. Good day.
FC has been following the growth of Duke's Office of Licensing and Ventures for some time -- the office set up to make sure that the University grabs its share of any intellectual property.
To be sure, most of this involves the faculty. But there are lessons to be learned for students.
We are troubled for two reasons:
First, much of our research is paid for by public money from the federal government. Or by entities like the American Cancer Society which enjoy tax breaks on their contributions and activities.
In these instances, we believe that all discoveries should be in the public realm, not subject to licensing fees or profit. If private industry paid for the research, then a financial gain would be understandable.
Second, our society has built walls around intellectual property so high, that unlike other societies in history that benefited from discoveries, our advances are held so that few citizens gain advantage immediately.
✔ Loyal Readers, there is big big bucks in this for Duke.
Two weeks ago one of the most distinguished senior faculty members, Dr. Allen Roses, director of Duke's Deane Drug Discovery Institute, licensed a test for Alzheimer's disease (very complicated genome test), to be made and sold by a Japanese firm. Up front price: $9 million.
The test determines if someone 60 years of age is likely to develop Alzheimer's within five or seven years. And the Japenese firm, making a drug for people at risk of Alzheimers, hopes to sell more of it because of the tests. If all this pans out, there will be additional payments of $78 million.
Roses acted thru a company he founded called Zinfandel (presumably named for his favorite wine?). While the corporate entanglements are not clear, these situations often involve a slice for Duke. And often Duke sells off nibbles of its slice to venture capitalists in order to cash out immediately.
Update: The good professor advises his favorite wine is Cabernet Sauvignon. And while FC said it is not unusual to have Duke owning a slice, in this instance Prof Roses says there is no relationship to Duke.
(The Duke ventures website is filled with information for potential investors. http://olv.duke.edu/index )
In the case of Dr Anil Potti, Loyal Readers may recall that after the heat really built up, Duke was charged with having a conflict of interest in seeing that Potti's work panned out -- standing to make BIG bucks.
Chancellor Dzau ordered Duke to sell off all its interests. This was buried in obscure language in an e-mail he sent to the medical community.
We tried to get additional information on the value of this part of the Potti Mess from the director of our licensing offices, Dr. Rose Ritts, and the ubiquitous VP for PR Michael Schoenfeld, both of whom shamefully did not acknowledge nor answer the Deputy Fact Checker's correspondence.
A good source in a position to know told FC that when fully developed, Potti's screening tests for cancer -- and their ability to tell which drugs would work best in each human -- could have been used by 700,000 people a year. And the source told us -- based upon the cost of similar tests -- the price tag for each test would easily be $1,000.
In the case of Dr. Homme Hellinga, FC has been told that Duke had a similar financial interest in seeing his work pan out. But this conflict of interest apparently was ignored when Duke reached judgment on him -- whatever the secret proceeding decided.
✔ Thank you for reading FC.
The following was written in response to a Chronicle editorial telling how the University of Missouri snagged 25 percent of a new app developed by a student.
✔ Fact Checker here. Good day.
FC has been following the growth of Duke's Office of Licensing and Ventures for some time -- the office set up to make sure that the University grabs its share of any intellectual property.
To be sure, most of this involves the faculty. But there are lessons to be learned for students.
We are troubled for two reasons:
First, much of our research is paid for by public money from the federal government. Or by entities like the American Cancer Society which enjoy tax breaks on their contributions and activities.
In these instances, we believe that all discoveries should be in the public realm, not subject to licensing fees or profit. If private industry paid for the research, then a financial gain would be understandable.
Second, our society has built walls around intellectual property so high, that unlike other societies in history that benefited from discoveries, our advances are held so that few citizens gain advantage immediately.
✔ Loyal Readers, there is big big bucks in this for Duke.
Two weeks ago one of the most distinguished senior faculty members, Dr. Allen Roses, director of Duke's Deane Drug Discovery Institute, licensed a test for Alzheimer's disease (very complicated genome test), to be made and sold by a Japanese firm. Up front price: $9 million.
The test determines if someone 60 years of age is likely to develop Alzheimer's within five or seven years. And the Japenese firm, making a drug for people at risk of Alzheimers, hopes to sell more of it because of the tests. If all this pans out, there will be additional payments of $78 million.
Roses acted thru a company he founded called Zinfandel (presumably named for his favorite wine?). While the corporate entanglements are not clear, these situations often involve a slice for Duke. And often Duke sells off nibbles of its slice to venture capitalists in order to cash out immediately.
Update: The good professor advises his favorite wine is Cabernet Sauvignon. And while FC said it is not unusual to have Duke owning a slice, in this instance Prof Roses says there is no relationship to Duke.
(The Duke ventures website is filled with information for potential investors. http://olv.duke.edu/index )
In the case of Dr Anil Potti, Loyal Readers may recall that after the heat really built up, Duke was charged with having a conflict of interest in seeing that Potti's work panned out -- standing to make BIG bucks.
Chancellor Dzau ordered Duke to sell off all its interests. This was buried in obscure language in an e-mail he sent to the medical community.
We tried to get additional information on the value of this part of the Potti Mess from the director of our licensing offices, Dr. Rose Ritts, and the ubiquitous VP for PR Michael Schoenfeld, both of whom shamefully did not acknowledge nor answer the Deputy Fact Checker's correspondence.
A good source in a position to know told FC that when fully developed, Potti's screening tests for cancer -- and their ability to tell which drugs would work best in each human -- could have been used by 700,000 people a year. And the source told us -- based upon the cost of similar tests -- the price tag for each test would easily be $1,000.
In the case of Dr. Homme Hellinga, FC has been told that Duke had a similar financial interest in seeing his work pan out. But this conflict of interest apparently was ignored when Duke reached judgment on him -- whatever the secret proceeding decided.
✔ Thank you for reading FC.
1/22/2011
Brodhead tells alumni "university's financial health is again strong." He omits any comment on Potti / Duke Medicine, and Kunshan, China
Search words Duke University Richard Brodhead Anil Potti
✔✔ FC here.
Just 16 months after the chair of the Trustees warned Duke was in "dire financial strait," President Brodhead has sent an extraordinary e-mail to all "alumni, parents and friends" declaring "the university’s financial health is again strong."
Brodhead congratulated himself for "internal discipline" that held down spending, and said "recovering financial markets" have boosted the endowment.
He offered no numbers whatsoever. He did not even refer readers to the special website set up to keep them informed about the financial crisis, which is sadly out of date.
Nor did Brodhead reconcile his claim that finances are "strong" with the planning for substantial cuts in the number of faculty in the Arts and Sciences, starting with the next budget on July 1. The hope is that enough faculty will resign or retire, but lay-offs cannot be ruled out.
Brodhead did not also say if in addition to being "strong," we'd have another budget gap in the new fiscal year starting July 1. This year's budget has $72 million in red ink, covered by a special withdrawal from the endowment.
The special $72 million is only part of the story, too, because trustees doctored the formula for regular withdrawals from the endowment and are now taking far more than the formula previously allowed. Obviously without this secret tinkering, the $72 million would have soared.
All this is at the peril of future generations, which will inherit far less of their fair share of current endowment.
✔ ✔ The e-mail, dressed up as a New Year's greeting for a "particularly positive start," even though it arrived on the 21st of January, listed several achievements, but is curious in ignoring Duke Medicine / Duke Health. And needless to say the Anil Potti scandal.
Brodhead urged alumni to return to Duke, listing reasons to come to Durham including some surprising restaurants and a resurgent downtown. He did not include Duke Medicine / Duke Health, which have given the city its nickname "City of Medicine."
The only appearance of Duke Medicine / Health comes when Brodhead reports on undergraduates who won Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, mentioning Nick Altemose's research in the genome center.
Similarly there is no mention of Kunshan, China, his signature initiative which FC has previously reported is in serious trouble. Another pet project, DukeEngage, was also omitted.
✔ If there has been an uptick in the endowment, it's not been because of new contributions.
The only major gifts that have been the subject of news releases are $17.2 million for pediatrics left by a doctor who happened to make an early investment in Food Lion supermarkets , and a $5 million pledge from a law school dropout.
Traditionally Duke has refused to issue interim reports during the fiscal year on the value of its endowment. Most of the university's funds are invested in fancy deals like private equity or hedge funds. There is no ready market for these investments and their value is only a highly malleable estimate.
The Brodhead administration, however, has repeatedly released selective statistics to bolster itself.
Brodhead signed the e-mail "Dick Brodhead," reserving "Uncle Dick" for communications with students.
Thank you for reading Fact Checker!
✔✔ FC here.
Just 16 months after the chair of the Trustees warned Duke was in "dire financial strait," President Brodhead has sent an extraordinary e-mail to all "alumni, parents and friends" declaring "the university’s financial health is again strong."
Brodhead congratulated himself for "internal discipline" that held down spending, and said "recovering financial markets" have boosted the endowment.
He offered no numbers whatsoever. He did not even refer readers to the special website set up to keep them informed about the financial crisis, which is sadly out of date.
Nor did Brodhead reconcile his claim that finances are "strong" with the planning for substantial cuts in the number of faculty in the Arts and Sciences, starting with the next budget on July 1. The hope is that enough faculty will resign or retire, but lay-offs cannot be ruled out.
Brodhead did not also say if in addition to being "strong," we'd have another budget gap in the new fiscal year starting July 1. This year's budget has $72 million in red ink, covered by a special withdrawal from the endowment.
The special $72 million is only part of the story, too, because trustees doctored the formula for regular withdrawals from the endowment and are now taking far more than the formula previously allowed. Obviously without this secret tinkering, the $72 million would have soared.
All this is at the peril of future generations, which will inherit far less of their fair share of current endowment.
✔ ✔ The e-mail, dressed up as a New Year's greeting for a "particularly positive start," even though it arrived on the 21st of January, listed several achievements, but is curious in ignoring Duke Medicine / Duke Health. And needless to say the Anil Potti scandal.
Brodhead urged alumni to return to Duke, listing reasons to come to Durham including some surprising restaurants and a resurgent downtown. He did not include Duke Medicine / Duke Health, which have given the city its nickname "City of Medicine."
The only appearance of Duke Medicine / Health comes when Brodhead reports on undergraduates who won Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, mentioning Nick Altemose's research in the genome center.
Similarly there is no mention of Kunshan, China, his signature initiative which FC has previously reported is in serious trouble. Another pet project, DukeEngage, was also omitted.
✔ If there has been an uptick in the endowment, it's not been because of new contributions.
The only major gifts that have been the subject of news releases are $17.2 million for pediatrics left by a doctor who happened to make an early investment in Food Lion supermarkets , and a $5 million pledge from a law school dropout.
Traditionally Duke has refused to issue interim reports during the fiscal year on the value of its endowment. Most of the university's funds are invested in fancy deals like private equity or hedge funds. There is no ready market for these investments and their value is only a highly malleable estimate.
The Brodhead administration, however, has repeatedly released selective statistics to bolster itself.
Brodhead signed the e-mail "Dick Brodhead," reserving "Uncle Dick" for communications with students.
Thank you for reading Fact Checker!
1/21/2011
Reynolds Price 1933 - 2011
✔ Remembering Reynolds Price ‘55
The Fact Checker organization includes five people, soon six. One is an alumnus who studied under Reynolds Price more than half a century ago.
---
✔ In the fall of 1959, as Reynolds Price began his second year as an assistant professor of English at Duke, warned there would be no renewal of his three year contract, he was already a campus phenomenon. A freshman who by luck was assigned to Reynolds' class gained immediate recognition if not awe from his dorm mates.
The mandatory first year English program consisted, each week, of one mass lecture rotated among members of the department, one classroom hour with 12 other students, and a private half-hour appointment with the professor to discuss your weekly essay.
The mass lecture normally involved someone reading his script aloud, (yes it was HIS script, no female professors back then) hardly stirring the windowless auditorium. But Professor William Blackburn made us perk up. And Reynolds Price, when he lectured on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” without reference to any notes, drew a standing ovation, an appreciation not repeated again in most people’s undergraduate years.
The classroom hour was eclectic. While other profs labored through discussions of “The Great Gatsby” and the like, pitting Ph.D. dissertations against each other, Reynolds enlivened his class with probative and provocative discussions of faith and focus, family and meaning, history and current events. Sitting atop his desk, his legs folded under him, he led complex, magnetic discourse unlike any other English class you are likely to run into.
When listening, and he was just a good a listener as story teller and speaker in class, Reynolds had a way of moving his tongue to the corner of his mouth; and when he understood your point and was about to pounce, to move his tongue up to his upper lip.
When no one was up to speed on the coming British elections, he flared with his strong deep voice and castigated the vitality of the class in no uncertain terms.
"For many Duke students," he would say later, "the word 'intellectual' has an almost pejorative tone to it. I think of an intellectual as being one of the millions of human beings who pays very close attention to the world and tries to draw intelligent conclusions for his or her own life and the lives of others. It's not a choice someone makes in the 6th grade to be some book wormy, nerdy person who derives no joy from life."
The weekly essays were also eclectic. While others pondered Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other first year authors, Reynolds assigned his students to write on their life experiences. While other freshmen went to their one-on-one critiques and saw their professors reading one line ahead of the discussion, Reynolds had labored in his crowded East Duke Building office over the student's effort, scribbling abundantly in the margin, circling words and phrases in swooping red ink, and taking far more time than the allotted 30 minutes each week to critique.
Oh yes, no one got an A.
During his three year contract, Reynolds wrote his first novel -- and was asked to stay on. He quickly moved beyond mandatory freshman English and later taught courses on creative writing and the 17th-century English poet John Milton, as well as a course on the gospels in which students wrote their own version of a gospel story.
And then there was Halloween, Reynolds Price's annual reading of ghost stories and poems, which became a tradition.
For Dukie's who only know Reynolds from the decades he used a wheelchair, it’s difficult to imagine him as a student in the 50's or an aspiring professor in the 60's. Robust and athletic, a soccer player, someone who gracefully bounded up stairs two if not three at a time, who walked briskly and erect, loafers no socks. He particularly enjoyed the autumn and spring rains, and more than once was found just standing on the Main Quad under his large black umbrella watching the passing crowd.
Notice I said “used a wheelchair,” for Reynolds disdained the words “confined to a wheelchair.” For him, this device enabled his continued participation in the life of a university he so loved, and was not a restriction.
✔ FOUNDERS DAY 1992
It's hard to imagine too how dreary Founders Day was over the decades. I mean, what's to be said for inviting the president of the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of the industry, to give the main address.
And then December, 1992, an invitation went to Reynolds with the blessing of President H. Keith H. Brodie, who knew that people who loved Duke eternally and were loyal to the core could make significant contribution with constructive criticism, a view lost on today's administrators.
Starting by noting Duke's increasing recognition -- "the university faculty has grown in responsible intellectual daring and professional stature to a point at which we may begin at least to think of ourselves as a first-rate academy, presumably the youngest in the world" -- Reynolds soon got to his theme:
When he was a student in the 50's, said Reynolds, undergraduates "gloried in a proportionally greater number of absolutely first-rate student minds, and fruitful personal exchanges between teachers and students were far more common in those days."
And in his early days, he encountered "extraordinary students to keep me teaching."
But as Reynolds said on Founders Day, times changed:
"I likewise encounter -- and all my classes are elective -- the stunned or blank faces of students who exhibit a minimum of preparation, or willingness for what I think of as the high delight and life-long pleasure of serious conversation in the classroom and elsewhere."
(In an interview, he later said, "It just is a tradition at Duke that students don't come to see their teachers. I sit in my office hours two days a week, and I also list 'and by appointment' and, generally speaking, nobody comes by. Here I am, and I mark the time reading a book or getting through my own homework and just nobody comes.")
Pointing fingers, he said alcohol was having devastating effect on students because it decreases their hunger for knowledge. When he was a student, Duke was certainly "no garden of Eden of intellectual serenity... but there really (has been) a gigantic change. It was a sober place."
With the stage thus set, Reynolds attacked with even more specificity.
Finding Greek life to be "play and violence and the occasional charitable project," fostering a "prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life," he exhorted, "Join me in an earth-moving act which this university has delayed many decades and for lack of which it has punished all its members."
"... take firm steps to move briskly every fraternity and sorority among us; they would not return."
"I was once a member of a fraternity that survives on this campus. (Phi Delta Theta) This was before alcohol became our grim solvent."
With Greeks gone, "freed of that burden, we'd move with deliberate speed to organize life throughout the university on a residential college model...
"We'd redesign or rearrange individual quads and buildings, each with the shortest corridors possible, with private bedrooms for every student and with a dining room in each quad where students could meet like sane adult members or a group dedicated to legitimate principles of thoughtful social life, punctuated by normal bouts of revel."
In subsequent interviews, Reynolds wondered aloud why fraternities have exclusive rights over prime pieces of campus real estate.
The ideas spawned much soul searching. At one public follow up forum, Dukies heard from a young professor in the sciences named Steve Nowicki.
Though FC does not remember, an obituary in The New Yorker by his student Ian Crouch, notes he took "a special pride, it seemed, in horrifying his students by sharing his distaste for Duke’s men’s basketball."
✔ EARLY LIFE
Macon, North Carolina. A town north of Durham along the Virginia border which in the 2000 census harbored 115 people.
It apparently has lost people over the generations, for Edward Reynolds Price once described it as “227 cotton and tobacco farmers nailed to the flat red land at the pit of the Great Depression."
Reynolds' father was a traveling salesman, and while Reynolds was born in Macon, his family moved from town to town as it eked out a living in north-eastern North Carolina.
The New York Times obituary this morning notes Reynold's affinity to and affection for rural North Carolina, ordinary Tar Heels, finding, struggling in the world. The people he would write about as he became one of the most important voices in Southern fiction. His first novel featured the young woman Rosacoke Mustian, desperate to pin down her relationship with a feral boyfriend, Wesley Beavers. "A Long and Happy Life" thus began:
“Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers.”
The literary world spun to pay attention. And Harper's Magazine, then the most highly regarded magazine, published the novel in its entirety as a supplement.
And the Times quoted the critic Theodore Solotaroff in Saturday Review: “Some beginning — of a book, of a career.... Its sheer virtuosity is like that of a quarterback who on the first play of his first professional game throws a 60-yard pass on the run, hitting the receiver exactly at the instant he breaks into the clear; a tremendous assertion of agility, power, timing and accuracy.”
On the next possession, to keep the metaphor alive, a year later, Reynolds scored another TD with his story collection "The Names and Faces of Heroes."
Early on in his life, Reynolds had begun to grasp the South that he would write about, much of his knowledge coming as relatives spun stories that fascinated him.
Fascinated him so much that his mother frequently urged her son to get out of the house and go play with children his age. But soon he would be back inside. He wrote "Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides" in 1989 about these years, explaining “I’m the world’s authority on this place. It’s the place about which I have perfect pitch.”
"Without having any consciousness of it at all and without having anybody in the family making a decision to train up somebody to be a writer or teacher, I was probably born with some genetic bent for using the English language in an interesting narrative fashion."
UNDERGRADUATE YEARS
Reynolds first saw Duke on a spring day in 1943, a day trip from his home which was now in Raleigh, and the lush of the place -- in sharp contrast to the grim of the nation during World War II -- lingered in his mind.
Neither of his parents were college people. But his mother had a nephew and his wife who had been at the old Trinity College, entranced by their experience.
He enrolled in 1951, an Angier B. Duke Scholar.
His roommate of two years, Fred Chappell, recalls his wall posters were not like others, who favored pin-up girls. Reynolds had a Matisse.
Pledging a fraternity was quite different then: "When I was an undergraduate from '51 to '55, if you were caught with a bottle of alcohol in your room, you were just out of here. There was no mercy about it; they put you on the next bus out of town. It's amazing what a difference sobriety makes because we did come along in a generation where students who came to college at age 18 had not been accustomed to alcohol's having been a very large part of their high school and middle school life. In that sense, it was a different world, and it has been extraordinary the difference that alcohol has made on campus."
Not long after pledging, Reynolds quit Phi Delta Theta.
Tapped into an honorary society called the Red Friars, he refused to accept admission, explaining later the absurdity of an organization that contended it was secret holding a ceremony on the Chapel steps, its members appearing several times a year wearing red carnations in their lapels and denying the flowers were there. Seriously. It was the beginning of the quick end for the society.
He also felt that the group -- designed to bring together seven select seniors as good friends in service of Duke -- just was not functional, friendships having been forged long before the tapping and other organizations part of the members' lives for their first three years at Duke taking up much of their free time.
He got his first break as a writer at the end of his senior year at Duke, when the writer Eudora Welty visited campus and he showed her a short story he had written. She asked if she could show it to her agent, who took on a new client, and "Michael Egerton" appeared in a national magazine.
And then there was the Rhodes Scholarship, the boy from Macon, North Carolina, became the young intellectual who sailed for England to write a thesis on Milton, to have personal encounters with Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil. He said his greatest regret was that his father died before his graduation summa cum laude from Duke and the Rhodes award.
As the NY Times notes, Spender was an important contact. He published the story “A Chain of Love” in the journal Encounter, a coup that led to an offer to teach at Duke when Reynolds returned from Oxford. (Later he wrote "Ardent Spirits" about this time)
Reynolds enjoyed a greater rank, assistant professor, than the proliferation of instructors in the freshman writing program. And let's be honest. Reynolds' easy southern drawl gave way slowly, with increasing hints of his four terms in England appearing year by year.
✔ CANCER
1984. Walking on West Campus, a friend noticed a slight hesitation, a slight limp. And then another discovered that when Reynolds took a step, one of his feet plopped to the ground.
Doctors found an eight to ten inch cancer called an astrocytoma wrapped around his spinal cord, suffocating it.
He underwent aggressive radiation to kill the tumor which he called, as the Times obit recalls, "the gray eel," and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Three years later, he underwent delicate neurosurgery with Duke's great Dr. Allan Friedman, but still had no use of his legs.
"Once the immediate shock has passed, I wish someone had said to me, 'You are no longer Reynolds Price. Who do you want to be?' Your only real choice is to invent a whole new life."
And that was the title of his autobiographic account of his ordeal. "A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing."
Interestingly, inexplicably, Price played no significant role as Duke was slow to meet requirements of the new federal disability act. He did lament on occasion the slate sidewalks and how the wheelchair bumped every four feet through them. His office, moved now to Allen Building, was reachable by only one back elevator. At home he had the services of a full-time aide, frequently a student studying under him.
✔ BEING GAY. OR QUEER AS HE PREFERRED.
It was interesting too how he played no role in the difficult journey of gays to have full acceptance on campus.
In fact he was lucky to survive as a student, for the atmosphere in those years is best summed up by one contemporary dean who said, "There are two things we cannot have around here. Thieves and homosexuals."
Students disappeared overnight, and so did a prominent member of the faculty in the Divinity School.
Returning from Oxford, where his sexuality exploded and he had a relationship with an older mentor he would never name, his draft status no longer protected by deferment, he unabashedly stated for the first time that he was "homosexual" and thus excluded from the military.
For decades, while most people knew anyway and could care less, Reynolds did not come out on campus, an issue raised when Charlie Rose '64 interviewed him upon publication of the book in which he did.
Reynolds said he felt it was not anyone's business. And then in a warmer response, he said he did not think a homosexual story would sell.
And he described himself as "queer," not gay. "Potent genes may well have been at work,” with five “queer” relatives in two generations in his family."
His view was that the word “gay” made homosexuals seem “giddy irresponsible, negligible creatures.”
Looking back to his return to Duke from Oxford in 1958 and the years that followed immediately, “Without quite knowing it, I was slowly being inducted into the writer’s life with its unavoidable isolation and its demand for internal resources that can so easily be replaced by drink, other drugs, and the supreme narcotic of other human bodies.”
He took the supreme narcotic, later calling himself a “sexual wolverine,” noting wryly “an enduring partnership was not among my immediate projects.”
Published a year ago, Reynolds looked back in "Ardent Spirits," where he outed himself: “What I didn’t quite know, in the last year of high school, was how fiercely most Americans were then opposed to the whole reality of male homosexuality, if they knew of it at all. It was a life then called queer. .. Nonetheless, I kept my strong suspicion undercover—and rather enjoyably so. I was after all at the I-love- a-mystery stage.”
✔ ON FAITH
Reynolds was as iconoclastic in his faith as in the rest of life. He identified himself as an “outlaw” Christian, a reference which FC believes incorporates his belief in Christ, perhaps not His divinity, and certainly not any established religion. A reference that may include his homosexuality, condemned in limited sections of the Bible, but as Reynolds would note, not by Jesus.
Corrections of this view, nuances, would be appreciated.
Most notably in 1978, he published the first of two Biblical translations, "A Palpable God." In 1996, he followed up with "The Three Gospels.” And religion played a deep role in his 2007 tribute to his godson “Letter to a Godchild."
“My teaching, however, slowly became my primary means of attempting to practice the life of a good man, a responsible child of God.”
"The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments ... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life."
Reynolds reveled in teaching freshmen Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, and asking mysteries of faith and doubt, “who or what made us, for what purpose. . . raising Leibniz’s troubling question — ‘Why is there something and not nothing?’”
Later works, “Roxanna Slade” (1998) and “The Good Priest’s Son” (2005), saw fallible characters fighting moral choices, a deepening moral tinge as one reviewer put it.
✔ HONORS
In 1962, "A Long and Happy Life" received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel. His novel "Kate Vaiden" received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
In his early days as a published writer, Price took offense at reviewers labeling him as the heir to Faulkner.
"The search for influences in a novelist's work is doomed to trivial results," he wrote in the New York Times. "A serious novelist's work is his effort to make from the chaos of all life, his life, strong though all-but-futile weapons, as beautiful, entire, true but finally helpless as the shield of Achilles itself."
This morning, The New York Times noted his passing with a headline and small paragraph on page one -- a highly unusual tribute -- and an extensive obituary on an inner page.
He received the highest honors: as an alum and as a faculty member for his service to Duke, and will have a professorship living on in his honor.
He left us, by count on the FC bookshelf, 38 full length volumes, and untold memories.
Thank you for reading FC.
The Fact Checker organization includes five people, soon six. One is an alumnus who studied under Reynolds Price more than half a century ago.
---
✔ In the fall of 1959, as Reynolds Price began his second year as an assistant professor of English at Duke, warned there would be no renewal of his three year contract, he was already a campus phenomenon. A freshman who by luck was assigned to Reynolds' class gained immediate recognition if not awe from his dorm mates.
The mandatory first year English program consisted, each week, of one mass lecture rotated among members of the department, one classroom hour with 12 other students, and a private half-hour appointment with the professor to discuss your weekly essay.
The mass lecture normally involved someone reading his script aloud, (yes it was HIS script, no female professors back then) hardly stirring the windowless auditorium. But Professor William Blackburn made us perk up. And Reynolds Price, when he lectured on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” without reference to any notes, drew a standing ovation, an appreciation not repeated again in most people’s undergraduate years.
The classroom hour was eclectic. While other profs labored through discussions of “The Great Gatsby” and the like, pitting Ph.D. dissertations against each other, Reynolds enlivened his class with probative and provocative discussions of faith and focus, family and meaning, history and current events. Sitting atop his desk, his legs folded under him, he led complex, magnetic discourse unlike any other English class you are likely to run into.
When listening, and he was just a good a listener as story teller and speaker in class, Reynolds had a way of moving his tongue to the corner of his mouth; and when he understood your point and was about to pounce, to move his tongue up to his upper lip.
When no one was up to speed on the coming British elections, he flared with his strong deep voice and castigated the vitality of the class in no uncertain terms.
"For many Duke students," he would say later, "the word 'intellectual' has an almost pejorative tone to it. I think of an intellectual as being one of the millions of human beings who pays very close attention to the world and tries to draw intelligent conclusions for his or her own life and the lives of others. It's not a choice someone makes in the 6th grade to be some book wormy, nerdy person who derives no joy from life."
The weekly essays were also eclectic. While others pondered Fitzgerald, Hemingway and other first year authors, Reynolds assigned his students to write on their life experiences. While other freshmen went to their one-on-one critiques and saw their professors reading one line ahead of the discussion, Reynolds had labored in his crowded East Duke Building office over the student's effort, scribbling abundantly in the margin, circling words and phrases in swooping red ink, and taking far more time than the allotted 30 minutes each week to critique.
Oh yes, no one got an A.
During his three year contract, Reynolds wrote his first novel -- and was asked to stay on. He quickly moved beyond mandatory freshman English and later taught courses on creative writing and the 17th-century English poet John Milton, as well as a course on the gospels in which students wrote their own version of a gospel story.
And then there was Halloween, Reynolds Price's annual reading of ghost stories and poems, which became a tradition.
For Dukie's who only know Reynolds from the decades he used a wheelchair, it’s difficult to imagine him as a student in the 50's or an aspiring professor in the 60's. Robust and athletic, a soccer player, someone who gracefully bounded up stairs two if not three at a time, who walked briskly and erect, loafers no socks. He particularly enjoyed the autumn and spring rains, and more than once was found just standing on the Main Quad under his large black umbrella watching the passing crowd.
Notice I said “used a wheelchair,” for Reynolds disdained the words “confined to a wheelchair.” For him, this device enabled his continued participation in the life of a university he so loved, and was not a restriction.
✔ FOUNDERS DAY 1992
It's hard to imagine too how dreary Founders Day was over the decades. I mean, what's to be said for inviting the president of the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of the industry, to give the main address.
And then December, 1992, an invitation went to Reynolds with the blessing of President H. Keith H. Brodie, who knew that people who loved Duke eternally and were loyal to the core could make significant contribution with constructive criticism, a view lost on today's administrators.
Starting by noting Duke's increasing recognition -- "the university faculty has grown in responsible intellectual daring and professional stature to a point at which we may begin at least to think of ourselves as a first-rate academy, presumably the youngest in the world" -- Reynolds soon got to his theme:
When he was a student in the 50's, said Reynolds, undergraduates "gloried in a proportionally greater number of absolutely first-rate student minds, and fruitful personal exchanges between teachers and students were far more common in those days."
And in his early days, he encountered "extraordinary students to keep me teaching."
But as Reynolds said on Founders Day, times changed:
"I likewise encounter -- and all my classes are elective -- the stunned or blank faces of students who exhibit a minimum of preparation, or willingness for what I think of as the high delight and life-long pleasure of serious conversation in the classroom and elsewhere."
(In an interview, he later said, "It just is a tradition at Duke that students don't come to see their teachers. I sit in my office hours two days a week, and I also list 'and by appointment' and, generally speaking, nobody comes by. Here I am, and I mark the time reading a book or getting through my own homework and just nobody comes.")
Pointing fingers, he said alcohol was having devastating effect on students because it decreases their hunger for knowledge. When he was a student, Duke was certainly "no garden of Eden of intellectual serenity... but there really (has been) a gigantic change. It was a sober place."
With the stage thus set, Reynolds attacked with even more specificity.
Finding Greek life to be "play and violence and the occasional charitable project," fostering a "prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life," he exhorted, "Join me in an earth-moving act which this university has delayed many decades and for lack of which it has punished all its members."
"... take firm steps to move briskly every fraternity and sorority among us; they would not return."
"I was once a member of a fraternity that survives on this campus. (Phi Delta Theta) This was before alcohol became our grim solvent."
With Greeks gone, "freed of that burden, we'd move with deliberate speed to organize life throughout the university on a residential college model...
"We'd redesign or rearrange individual quads and buildings, each with the shortest corridors possible, with private bedrooms for every student and with a dining room in each quad where students could meet like sane adult members or a group dedicated to legitimate principles of thoughtful social life, punctuated by normal bouts of revel."
In subsequent interviews, Reynolds wondered aloud why fraternities have exclusive rights over prime pieces of campus real estate.
The ideas spawned much soul searching. At one public follow up forum, Dukies heard from a young professor in the sciences named Steve Nowicki.
Though FC does not remember, an obituary in The New Yorker by his student Ian Crouch, notes he took "a special pride, it seemed, in horrifying his students by sharing his distaste for Duke’s men’s basketball."
✔ EARLY LIFE
Macon, North Carolina. A town north of Durham along the Virginia border which in the 2000 census harbored 115 people.
It apparently has lost people over the generations, for Edward Reynolds Price once described it as “227 cotton and tobacco farmers nailed to the flat red land at the pit of the Great Depression."
Reynolds' father was a traveling salesman, and while Reynolds was born in Macon, his family moved from town to town as it eked out a living in north-eastern North Carolina.
The New York Times obituary this morning notes Reynold's affinity to and affection for rural North Carolina, ordinary Tar Heels, finding, struggling in the world. The people he would write about as he became one of the most important voices in Southern fiction. His first novel featured the young woman Rosacoke Mustian, desperate to pin down her relationship with a feral boyfriend, Wesley Beavers. "A Long and Happy Life" thus began:
“Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers.”
The literary world spun to pay attention. And Harper's Magazine, then the most highly regarded magazine, published the novel in its entirety as a supplement.
And the Times quoted the critic Theodore Solotaroff in Saturday Review: “Some beginning — of a book, of a career.... Its sheer virtuosity is like that of a quarterback who on the first play of his first professional game throws a 60-yard pass on the run, hitting the receiver exactly at the instant he breaks into the clear; a tremendous assertion of agility, power, timing and accuracy.”
On the next possession, to keep the metaphor alive, a year later, Reynolds scored another TD with his story collection "The Names and Faces of Heroes."
Early on in his life, Reynolds had begun to grasp the South that he would write about, much of his knowledge coming as relatives spun stories that fascinated him.
Fascinated him so much that his mother frequently urged her son to get out of the house and go play with children his age. But soon he would be back inside. He wrote "Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides" in 1989 about these years, explaining “I’m the world’s authority on this place. It’s the place about which I have perfect pitch.”
"Without having any consciousness of it at all and without having anybody in the family making a decision to train up somebody to be a writer or teacher, I was probably born with some genetic bent for using the English language in an interesting narrative fashion."
UNDERGRADUATE YEARS
Reynolds first saw Duke on a spring day in 1943, a day trip from his home which was now in Raleigh, and the lush of the place -- in sharp contrast to the grim of the nation during World War II -- lingered in his mind.
Neither of his parents were college people. But his mother had a nephew and his wife who had been at the old Trinity College, entranced by their experience.
He enrolled in 1951, an Angier B. Duke Scholar.
His roommate of two years, Fred Chappell, recalls his wall posters were not like others, who favored pin-up girls. Reynolds had a Matisse.
Pledging a fraternity was quite different then: "When I was an undergraduate from '51 to '55, if you were caught with a bottle of alcohol in your room, you were just out of here. There was no mercy about it; they put you on the next bus out of town. It's amazing what a difference sobriety makes because we did come along in a generation where students who came to college at age 18 had not been accustomed to alcohol's having been a very large part of their high school and middle school life. In that sense, it was a different world, and it has been extraordinary the difference that alcohol has made on campus."
Not long after pledging, Reynolds quit Phi Delta Theta.
Tapped into an honorary society called the Red Friars, he refused to accept admission, explaining later the absurdity of an organization that contended it was secret holding a ceremony on the Chapel steps, its members appearing several times a year wearing red carnations in their lapels and denying the flowers were there. Seriously. It was the beginning of the quick end for the society.
He also felt that the group -- designed to bring together seven select seniors as good friends in service of Duke -- just was not functional, friendships having been forged long before the tapping and other organizations part of the members' lives for their first three years at Duke taking up much of their free time.
He got his first break as a writer at the end of his senior year at Duke, when the writer Eudora Welty visited campus and he showed her a short story he had written. She asked if she could show it to her agent, who took on a new client, and "Michael Egerton" appeared in a national magazine.
And then there was the Rhodes Scholarship, the boy from Macon, North Carolina, became the young intellectual who sailed for England to write a thesis on Milton, to have personal encounters with Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil. He said his greatest regret was that his father died before his graduation summa cum laude from Duke and the Rhodes award.
As the NY Times notes, Spender was an important contact. He published the story “A Chain of Love” in the journal Encounter, a coup that led to an offer to teach at Duke when Reynolds returned from Oxford. (Later he wrote "Ardent Spirits" about this time)
Reynolds enjoyed a greater rank, assistant professor, than the proliferation of instructors in the freshman writing program. And let's be honest. Reynolds' easy southern drawl gave way slowly, with increasing hints of his four terms in England appearing year by year.
✔ CANCER
1984. Walking on West Campus, a friend noticed a slight hesitation, a slight limp. And then another discovered that when Reynolds took a step, one of his feet plopped to the ground.
Doctors found an eight to ten inch cancer called an astrocytoma wrapped around his spinal cord, suffocating it.
He underwent aggressive radiation to kill the tumor which he called, as the Times obit recalls, "the gray eel," and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Three years later, he underwent delicate neurosurgery with Duke's great Dr. Allan Friedman, but still had no use of his legs.
"Once the immediate shock has passed, I wish someone had said to me, 'You are no longer Reynolds Price. Who do you want to be?' Your only real choice is to invent a whole new life."
And that was the title of his autobiographic account of his ordeal. "A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing."
Interestingly, inexplicably, Price played no significant role as Duke was slow to meet requirements of the new federal disability act. He did lament on occasion the slate sidewalks and how the wheelchair bumped every four feet through them. His office, moved now to Allen Building, was reachable by only one back elevator. At home he had the services of a full-time aide, frequently a student studying under him.
✔ BEING GAY. OR QUEER AS HE PREFERRED.
It was interesting too how he played no role in the difficult journey of gays to have full acceptance on campus.
In fact he was lucky to survive as a student, for the atmosphere in those years is best summed up by one contemporary dean who said, "There are two things we cannot have around here. Thieves and homosexuals."
Students disappeared overnight, and so did a prominent member of the faculty in the Divinity School.
Returning from Oxford, where his sexuality exploded and he had a relationship with an older mentor he would never name, his draft status no longer protected by deferment, he unabashedly stated for the first time that he was "homosexual" and thus excluded from the military.
For decades, while most people knew anyway and could care less, Reynolds did not come out on campus, an issue raised when Charlie Rose '64 interviewed him upon publication of the book in which he did.
Reynolds said he felt it was not anyone's business. And then in a warmer response, he said he did not think a homosexual story would sell.
And he described himself as "queer," not gay. "Potent genes may well have been at work,” with five “queer” relatives in two generations in his family."
His view was that the word “gay” made homosexuals seem “giddy irresponsible, negligible creatures.”
Looking back to his return to Duke from Oxford in 1958 and the years that followed immediately, “Without quite knowing it, I was slowly being inducted into the writer’s life with its unavoidable isolation and its demand for internal resources that can so easily be replaced by drink, other drugs, and the supreme narcotic of other human bodies.”
He took the supreme narcotic, later calling himself a “sexual wolverine,” noting wryly “an enduring partnership was not among my immediate projects.”
Published a year ago, Reynolds looked back in "Ardent Spirits," where he outed himself: “What I didn’t quite know, in the last year of high school, was how fiercely most Americans were then opposed to the whole reality of male homosexuality, if they knew of it at all. It was a life then called queer. .. Nonetheless, I kept my strong suspicion undercover—and rather enjoyably so. I was after all at the I-love- a-mystery stage.”
✔ ON FAITH
Reynolds was as iconoclastic in his faith as in the rest of life. He identified himself as an “outlaw” Christian, a reference which FC believes incorporates his belief in Christ, perhaps not His divinity, and certainly not any established religion. A reference that may include his homosexuality, condemned in limited sections of the Bible, but as Reynolds would note, not by Jesus.
Corrections of this view, nuances, would be appreciated.
Most notably in 1978, he published the first of two Biblical translations, "A Palpable God." In 1996, he followed up with "The Three Gospels.” And religion played a deep role in his 2007 tribute to his godson “Letter to a Godchild."
“My teaching, however, slowly became my primary means of attempting to practice the life of a good man, a responsible child of God.”
"The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments ... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life."
Reynolds reveled in teaching freshmen Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Milton, and asking mysteries of faith and doubt, “who or what made us, for what purpose. . . raising Leibniz’s troubling question — ‘Why is there something and not nothing?’”
Later works, “Roxanna Slade” (1998) and “The Good Priest’s Son” (2005), saw fallible characters fighting moral choices, a deepening moral tinge as one reviewer put it.
✔ HONORS
In 1962, "A Long and Happy Life" received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel. His novel "Kate Vaiden" received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
In his early days as a published writer, Price took offense at reviewers labeling him as the heir to Faulkner.
"The search for influences in a novelist's work is doomed to trivial results," he wrote in the New York Times. "A serious novelist's work is his effort to make from the chaos of all life, his life, strong though all-but-futile weapons, as beautiful, entire, true but finally helpless as the shield of Achilles itself."
This morning, The New York Times noted his passing with a headline and small paragraph on page one -- a highly unusual tribute -- and an extensive obituary on an inner page.
He received the highest honors: as an alum and as a faculty member for his service to Duke, and will have a professorship living on in his honor.
He left us, by count on the FC bookshelf, 38 full length volumes, and untold memories.
Thank you for reading FC.
1/20/2011
The death of Reynolds Price
The following is the Duke University press release. FC will have an essay posted by Friday morning.
Reynolds Price, author and long-time Duke English professor, dies
DURHAM, N.C. -- Reynolds Price, the celebrated writer of fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays and plays who turned a three-year teaching appointment into more than 50 years on the faculty at Duke University, died Thursday afternoon. He was 77.
Price, the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke, his alma matter, had a major heart attack early Sunday.
"With a poet's deep appreciation for language, Reynolds Price taught generations of students to understand and love literature," said Duke President Richard H. Brodhead. "Reynolds was a part of the soul of Duke; he loved this university and always wanted to make it better. We can scarcely imagine Duke without Reynolds Price."
A native of Macon, N.C., Price graduated summa cum laude from Duke in 1955, where he studied creative writing under influential professor William Blackburn, whose other Duke students included noted authors William Styron '47 and Anne Tyler '61.
Price was a Rhodes Scholar and studied in Oxford, England, with W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil. He returned to the United States and took a teaching job at Duke in 1958. The letter offering Price that job warned that the position was a three-year appointment -- with no chance of being extended.
"That seemed a little discouraging, but I thought, 'Well, three years is three years,'" Price recalled in a 2008 interview. During those three years he wrote his first novel and was asked to stay on. He remained a Duke faculty member for the next 53 years.
In 1962, his novel "A Long and Happy Life" received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel. Price published numerous books after that, including the novel "Kate Vaiden," which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
In his early days as a published writer, Price took offense at reviewers labeling him as the heir to Faulkner. "The search for influences in a novelist's work is doomed to trivial results," Price wrote in a 1966 piece for The New York Times. "A serious novelist's work is his effort to make from the chaos of all life, his life, strong though all-but-futile weapons, as beautiful, entire, true but finally helpless as the shield of Achilles itself."
Price became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council. In 1987, Price received the University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Service at Duke, the university's highest honor, and the Distinguished Alumni Award. A professorship in creative writing honoring Price was established at Duke in 2008.
He had a commanding presence in the classroom, using his deep, rich voice to convey the beauty of the English language. For many years, Price taught courses on creative writing and the work of 17th-century English poet John Milton, as well as a course on the gospels in which students wrote their own version of a gospel story. Price's Halloween reading of ghost stories and poems became a tradition on campus that lasted more than a decade. Price said he experienced two main rewards as a professor: reading and teaching great writing by other people, and getting to know his students, who included Tyler, writer Josephine Humphreys and actress Annabeth Gish.
In a fiery Founders' Day speech in 1992, Price took aim at what he deemed a lack of intellectualism at Duke, describing students as enthusiastic about partying but marred by a "prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life," reported Duke Magazine. Some university officials cited that speech as an impetus for a greater emphasis on recruiting more intellectual students to Duke, according to the magazine article.
Price, who considered himself an "outlaw" Christian, wove his faith into his writings. His 2007 book "Letter to a Godchild," for example, was a christening gift to his godson, intended as a brief guide for the child's spiritual future. He also published two biblical translations: "A Palpable God" (1978) and "The Three Gospels" (1996).
Price became confined to a wheelchair in 1984 when a cancerous tumor affecting his spinal cord left him paralyzed from the waist down. A 2006 article in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., noted that Price had pondered and accepted the truths articulated in the Book of Job: that God's ways are often beyond understanding or finding out.
"The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments ... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life," he said. Price's account of cancer survival is captured in his 2003 book, "A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing."
Price's third volume of memoir, "Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back," was published in the spring of 2009. The book explores six crucial years in Price's life, from leaving home in 1955 to attend Oxford University to his return to North Carolina and the start of his career as a university teacher.
According to Price's wishes, there will be no public funeral. Duke University has not yet announced plans to honor Price.
Reynolds Price, author and long-time Duke English professor, dies
DURHAM, N.C. -- Reynolds Price, the celebrated writer of fiction, poetry, memoirs, essays and plays who turned a three-year teaching appointment into more than 50 years on the faculty at Duke University, died Thursday afternoon. He was 77.
Price, the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke, his alma matter, had a major heart attack early Sunday.
"With a poet's deep appreciation for language, Reynolds Price taught generations of students to understand and love literature," said Duke President Richard H. Brodhead. "Reynolds was a part of the soul of Duke; he loved this university and always wanted to make it better. We can scarcely imagine Duke without Reynolds Price."
A native of Macon, N.C., Price graduated summa cum laude from Duke in 1955, where he studied creative writing under influential professor William Blackburn, whose other Duke students included noted authors William Styron '47 and Anne Tyler '61.
Price was a Rhodes Scholar and studied in Oxford, England, with W.H. Auden and Lord David Cecil. He returned to the United States and took a teaching job at Duke in 1958. The letter offering Price that job warned that the position was a three-year appointment -- with no chance of being extended.
"That seemed a little discouraging, but I thought, 'Well, three years is three years,'" Price recalled in a 2008 interview. During those three years he wrote his first novel and was asked to stay on. He remained a Duke faculty member for the next 53 years.
In 1962, his novel "A Long and Happy Life" received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel. Price published numerous books after that, including the novel "Kate Vaiden," which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.
In his early days as a published writer, Price took offense at reviewers labeling him as the heir to Faulkner. "The search for influences in a novelist's work is doomed to trivial results," Price wrote in a 1966 piece for The New York Times. "A serious novelist's work is his effort to make from the chaos of all life, his life, strong though all-but-futile weapons, as beautiful, entire, true but finally helpless as the shield of Achilles itself."
Price became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council. In 1987, Price received the University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Service at Duke, the university's highest honor, and the Distinguished Alumni Award. A professorship in creative writing honoring Price was established at Duke in 2008.
He had a commanding presence in the classroom, using his deep, rich voice to convey the beauty of the English language. For many years, Price taught courses on creative writing and the work of 17th-century English poet John Milton, as well as a course on the gospels in which students wrote their own version of a gospel story. Price's Halloween reading of ghost stories and poems became a tradition on campus that lasted more than a decade. Price said he experienced two main rewards as a professor: reading and teaching great writing by other people, and getting to know his students, who included Tyler, writer Josephine Humphreys and actress Annabeth Gish.
In a fiery Founders' Day speech in 1992, Price took aim at what he deemed a lack of intellectualism at Duke, describing students as enthusiastic about partying but marred by a "prevailing cloud of indifference, of frequent hostility, to a thoughtful life," reported Duke Magazine. Some university officials cited that speech as an impetus for a greater emphasis on recruiting more intellectual students to Duke, according to the magazine article.
Price, who considered himself an "outlaw" Christian, wove his faith into his writings. His 2007 book "Letter to a Godchild," for example, was a christening gift to his godson, intended as a brief guide for the child's spiritual future. He also published two biblical translations: "A Palpable God" (1978) and "The Three Gospels" (1996).
Price became confined to a wheelchair in 1984 when a cancerous tumor affecting his spinal cord left him paralyzed from the waist down. A 2006 article in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., noted that Price had pondered and accepted the truths articulated in the Book of Job: that God's ways are often beyond understanding or finding out.
"The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by 25 X-ray treatments ... was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life," he said. Price's account of cancer survival is captured in his 2003 book, "A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing."
Price's third volume of memoir, "Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back," was published in the spring of 2009. The book explores six crucial years in Price's life, from leaving home in 1955 to attend Oxford University to his return to North Carolina and the start of his career as a university teacher.
According to Price's wishes, there will be no public funeral. Duke University has not yet announced plans to honor Price.
1/16/2011
Duke Police won't count muggings of two graduate students as on-campus crimes in Clery Report
Chronicle story: An autopsy released during winter break revealed that a woman who died at Duke University Medical Center was poisoned by a pain reliever and common antihistamine. But Duke Police are stalling in classifying this as homicide.
✔ FC here.
By "continuing the investigation," Duke Police are avoiding adding this death to the Clery Report on campus crime in 2010.
This is an all too familiar tactic that distorts the picture of campus crime that Clery is designed to convey.
Certainly by the reporting deadline of December 31st, in addition to the autopsy, the police would have reviewed hospital hall surveillance tapes from October 5 that will reveal precisely who entered the victim's room. And also they certainly should have completed fingerprint and DNA testing on the syringes.
These steps alone should be enough to establish how this death occurred and classify it either as a homicide, or as assisting with suicide. Classifying is quite different from bringing criminal charges and requires a different standard of proof.
Fact Checker has been concerned for some time about statistical totals from Duke Police.
✔✔✔✔✔ We have confirmed, for example, via the ubiquitous PR VP Schoenfeld, that the two most serious crimes against students in the fall semester will not be in the next Clery Report.
These are the armed robberies of graduate students on consecutive nights near the intersection of Erwin Road and LaSalle Street.
The south side of Erwin Road at this intersection is all Duke. The corner includes major facilities like the Synderman Building, part of Duke Health.
The Clery Report requires Duke to "disclose crime statistics for the campus, public areas immediately adjacent to or running through the campus, and certain non-campus facilities and remote classrooms.."
We believe the north side of Erwin Road, location of a garden apartment complex filled with Dukies, just yards from Snyderman, qualifies. The robberies occurred by the driveway from LaSalle into the parking lot.
Schoenfeld refused to be drawn into a discussion that would explain Duke's contrary position.
This is not the same time Duke has used this trick. We were alerted to it first by a discrepancy in statistics for 2009.
Duke Police listed nine robberies and 11 victims during the course of a 12 month period in logs that it is required to keep and in press releases, but its Clery count totals only seven robberies.
We have received only obfuscation trying to determine what's going on here.
✔✔✔✔✔ And on another issue, Schoenfeld got downright testy when we pushed to know the number of Duke officers fully trained and available for patrol. We were mindful of years of turmoil and personnel changes in Duke Police, the abrupt and unexplained departure last semester of the associate VP Graves assigned to Police, and the recognition party that President Brodhead threw at the Nasher a year earlier when officers with a combined 372 years of experience took early retirement.
We also noted that at one point, Duke Police had three officers ranked as majors. Today it has none this high.
We wanted to contrast the actual number with the number available for patrol and investigations with the total presented in the Clery Report as "authorized."
Schoenfeld said the number was "adequate." We responded this was a conclusion, and we repeated we wanted the actual numbers. At which point we were told to write that Duke would not tell us.
✔✔ In reaction to the armed robberies of the graduate students and other crimes, Duke Police promised extra patrols in Ninth Street, Trinity Park/Heights and Erwin Road. They have also committed to provide extra patrols on Central Campus.
We have been unable to find out if these patrols continue, and if so, where the officers came from, what area is being cut back. A preliminary check by Deputy Fact Checkers who visited each of these four sites and counted passing police cars over a period of time fails to establish that there is a significant police presence.
✔ Thank you for reading FC.
✔ FC here.
By "continuing the investigation," Duke Police are avoiding adding this death to the Clery Report on campus crime in 2010.
This is an all too familiar tactic that distorts the picture of campus crime that Clery is designed to convey.
Certainly by the reporting deadline of December 31st, in addition to the autopsy, the police would have reviewed hospital hall surveillance tapes from October 5 that will reveal precisely who entered the victim's room. And also they certainly should have completed fingerprint and DNA testing on the syringes.
These steps alone should be enough to establish how this death occurred and classify it either as a homicide, or as assisting with suicide. Classifying is quite different from bringing criminal charges and requires a different standard of proof.
Fact Checker has been concerned for some time about statistical totals from Duke Police.
✔✔✔✔✔ We have confirmed, for example, via the ubiquitous PR VP Schoenfeld, that the two most serious crimes against students in the fall semester will not be in the next Clery Report.
These are the armed robberies of graduate students on consecutive nights near the intersection of Erwin Road and LaSalle Street.
The south side of Erwin Road at this intersection is all Duke. The corner includes major facilities like the Synderman Building, part of Duke Health.
The Clery Report requires Duke to "disclose crime statistics for the campus, public areas immediately adjacent to or running through the campus, and certain non-campus facilities and remote classrooms.."
We believe the north side of Erwin Road, location of a garden apartment complex filled with Dukies, just yards from Snyderman, qualifies. The robberies occurred by the driveway from LaSalle into the parking lot.
Schoenfeld refused to be drawn into a discussion that would explain Duke's contrary position.
This is not the same time Duke has used this trick. We were alerted to it first by a discrepancy in statistics for 2009.
Duke Police listed nine robberies and 11 victims during the course of a 12 month period in logs that it is required to keep and in press releases, but its Clery count totals only seven robberies.
We have received only obfuscation trying to determine what's going on here.
✔✔✔✔✔ And on another issue, Schoenfeld got downright testy when we pushed to know the number of Duke officers fully trained and available for patrol. We were mindful of years of turmoil and personnel changes in Duke Police, the abrupt and unexplained departure last semester of the associate VP Graves assigned to Police, and the recognition party that President Brodhead threw at the Nasher a year earlier when officers with a combined 372 years of experience took early retirement.
We also noted that at one point, Duke Police had three officers ranked as majors. Today it has none this high.
We wanted to contrast the actual number with the number available for patrol and investigations with the total presented in the Clery Report as "authorized."
Schoenfeld said the number was "adequate." We responded this was a conclusion, and we repeated we wanted the actual numbers. At which point we were told to write that Duke would not tell us.
✔✔ In reaction to the armed robberies of the graduate students and other crimes, Duke Police promised extra patrols in Ninth Street, Trinity Park/Heights and Erwin Road. They have also committed to provide extra patrols on Central Campus.
We have been unable to find out if these patrols continue, and if so, where the officers came from, what area is being cut back. A preliminary check by Deputy Fact Checkers who visited each of these four sites and counted passing police cars over a period of time fails to establish that there is a significant police presence.
✔ Thank you for reading FC.
1/14/2011
Duke picks Commencement speaker
Search words Duke University
✔The Chronicle is reporting that President Brodhead told some seniors that the Commencement speaker will be John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. He attended Duke for two years before transferring, but under our rules, he's an alumnus.
✔ Fact Checker has already checked him out
Forget a commencement address. Next May at Duke, John Chambers will seem like an evangelist, promptly leaving the podium, stepping down from the stage, moving through the seated graduates as he speaks, coursing over to the faculty and parents to face them head-on.
His right hand is never still: a finger pauses on his lip in contemplation, he reaches as if to heaven, then clasps both hands in front of him as if in prayer, and a moment later his right hand arcs through the air to emphasize his point.
Then he leans over, right down to the level of a graduate seated nearby, quietly advising her with a juggling motion of his arms and hands to balance life between work and family.
Slicing through the seriousness of the occasion, he advises “Learn to laugh. Most things in life are not near as serious as you think they are.“
Chambers been on the commencement circuit for more than a decade (Wake Forest, 2000 was one of the earliest, about time we caught up) and is an accomplished speaker. No notes, and obviously no teleprompter and no podium.
And most of all, for those of us who remember speakers of recent vintage at Duke, merciful brief. FC timed one address at only 13 minutes!!! Take that Barbara Kingsolver.
On yes, John Chambers loves basketball. It’s unclear at this writing whether he played, but when he was a graduate student at Indiana University he developed a friendship with one of Bobby Knight’s graduate assistants, a 26 year old named Michael Krzyzewski. He speaks of a dinner with our team seven years ago and what he learned. No, I won't steal the thunder.
Chambers says he landed at Cisco when he was looking for a job “purely because of the way i treated somebody seven years earlier. He said, 'John, this is the company for you because of your skills in dealing with other people.'“
If only someone had told you to invest $10 in Cisco stock.. with the right timing on buying and the right timing on selling, you'd be a millionaire today. (The stock has since lost value.)
Though the company name is not likely to be on much that you own, its hardware and software is at the heart of technology, its reputation one of the best in Silicon Valley.
He has been richly rewarded by his company -- and speaks of sharing.
Last December, Pratt’s Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics announced a new award, the John T. Chambers Scholars. Two graduate students will be selected each year, to receive $40,000 apiece each year for two years. The winners are graduate students Stephanie Chiu of biomedical engineering and Ma Luo of electrical and computer engineering.
FC has to believe, all this is only a start for new involvement with Duke. Or to put it another way, those people salivating over on the sidelines are from the development office.
Some points from a recent speech: Take risks, he said. take risks. “You will not achieve what you are capable of in life unless you reach out and give it a try. ... you will periodically fall. That will make you stronger.”
And with his right hand raised as if answering a teacher, “How many of you like change. Isn't change great! Raise your hand. ... during your life you will probably work in five or ten different roles and you've got to learn to adjust to change. Darwin had it right. It isn't the strong in species that survive. It is they who learn how to adapt.”
“All of our top competitors from 15 years ago at Cisco are gone. Not because of what we did. because of what they did. they did not adapt, and did not change with time.”
✔The Chronicle is reporting that President Brodhead told some seniors that the Commencement speaker will be John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems. He attended Duke for two years before transferring, but under our rules, he's an alumnus.
✔ Fact Checker has already checked him out
Forget a commencement address. Next May at Duke, John Chambers will seem like an evangelist, promptly leaving the podium, stepping down from the stage, moving through the seated graduates as he speaks, coursing over to the faculty and parents to face them head-on.
His right hand is never still: a finger pauses on his lip in contemplation, he reaches as if to heaven, then clasps both hands in front of him as if in prayer, and a moment later his right hand arcs through the air to emphasize his point.
Then he leans over, right down to the level of a graduate seated nearby, quietly advising her with a juggling motion of his arms and hands to balance life between work and family.
Slicing through the seriousness of the occasion, he advises “Learn to laugh. Most things in life are not near as serious as you think they are.“
Chambers been on the commencement circuit for more than a decade (Wake Forest, 2000 was one of the earliest, about time we caught up) and is an accomplished speaker. No notes, and obviously no teleprompter and no podium.
And most of all, for those of us who remember speakers of recent vintage at Duke, merciful brief. FC timed one address at only 13 minutes!!! Take that Barbara Kingsolver.
On yes, John Chambers loves basketball. It’s unclear at this writing whether he played, but when he was a graduate student at Indiana University he developed a friendship with one of Bobby Knight’s graduate assistants, a 26 year old named Michael Krzyzewski. He speaks of a dinner with our team seven years ago and what he learned. No, I won't steal the thunder.
Chambers says he landed at Cisco when he was looking for a job “purely because of the way i treated somebody seven years earlier. He said, 'John, this is the company for you because of your skills in dealing with other people.'“
If only someone had told you to invest $10 in Cisco stock.. with the right timing on buying and the right timing on selling, you'd be a millionaire today. (The stock has since lost value.)
Though the company name is not likely to be on much that you own, its hardware and software is at the heart of technology, its reputation one of the best in Silicon Valley.
He has been richly rewarded by his company -- and speaks of sharing.
Last December, Pratt’s Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics announced a new award, the John T. Chambers Scholars. Two graduate students will be selected each year, to receive $40,000 apiece each year for two years. The winners are graduate students Stephanie Chiu of biomedical engineering and Ma Luo of electrical and computer engineering.
FC has to believe, all this is only a start for new involvement with Duke. Or to put it another way, those people salivating over on the sidelines are from the development office.
Some points from a recent speech: Take risks, he said. take risks. “You will not achieve what you are capable of in life unless you reach out and give it a try. ... you will periodically fall. That will make you stronger.”
And with his right hand raised as if answering a teacher, “How many of you like change. Isn't change great! Raise your hand. ... during your life you will probably work in five or ten different roles and you've got to learn to adjust to change. Darwin had it right. It isn't the strong in species that survive. It is they who learn how to adapt.”
“All of our top competitors from 15 years ago at Cisco are gone. Not because of what we did. because of what they did. they did not adapt, and did not change with time.”
Drew Everson autopsy released
The following was posted on the WTVD website.
DURHAM (WTVD) -- The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released autopsy results Friday that show a Duke University senior was intoxicated before a fall on campus that led to his death.
Drew Everson was discovered unconscious and severely injured near a stairwell at the East Union, also known as Marketplace, on Duke's campus October 22.
Related Content
Documents from the medical examiner say Everson suffered multiple skull fractures and was declared brain dead two days later. His family agreed to donate his organs for transplants.
The documents say Everson's blood-alcohol content was .133. In North Carolina, .08 is considered to be legally intoxicated.
Police said in October their investigation indicated Everson's injuries were the result of an accidental fall, but exactly how it happened was still under investigation.
Friday, Duke's vice president for public affairs and government relations Michael Schoenfeld issued a statment:
"The medical examiner's report released today provides finality to the extensive investigation by the Duke Police, which has concluded that Drew Everson's death occurred as a result of an accidental fall into an open stairwell. The Duke community is deeply saddened by this tragedy and continues to mourn Drew's death. His legacy at Duke will be long-lasting, and we offer our thoughts and prayers to Drew's many family and friends."
A member of the Duke Debate Team, Everson also coached student members of the East Chapel Hill High School debate team. He was involved in many other student organizations, including the Inside Joke comedy troupe, Campus Council and other campus committees.
DURHAM (WTVD) -- The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner released autopsy results Friday that show a Duke University senior was intoxicated before a fall on campus that led to his death.
Drew Everson was discovered unconscious and severely injured near a stairwell at the East Union, also known as Marketplace, on Duke's campus October 22.
Related Content
Documents from the medical examiner say Everson suffered multiple skull fractures and was declared brain dead two days later. His family agreed to donate his organs for transplants.
The documents say Everson's blood-alcohol content was .133. In North Carolina, .08 is considered to be legally intoxicated.
Police said in October their investigation indicated Everson's injuries were the result of an accidental fall, but exactly how it happened was still under investigation.
Friday, Duke's vice president for public affairs and government relations Michael Schoenfeld issued a statment:
"The medical examiner's report released today provides finality to the extensive investigation by the Duke Police, which has concluded that Drew Everson's death occurred as a result of an accidental fall into an open stairwell. The Duke community is deeply saddened by this tragedy and continues to mourn Drew's death. His legacy at Duke will be long-lasting, and we offer our thoughts and prayers to Drew's many family and friends."
A member of the Duke Debate Team, Everson also coached student members of the East Chapel Hill High School debate team. He was involved in many other student organizations, including the Inside Joke comedy troupe, Campus Council and other campus committees.
As Potti begins to tweet, lawyers circle Duke, sensing big bucks for malpractice
Search terms Anil Potti Duke University
There are two Fact Checker posts on Potti today; make sure you scroll down for the earlier.
✔ FC here.
As Dr Anil Potti starts to emerge from the seclusion of his Chapel Hill home... building his Facebook site, sending out tweets (http://friendfeed.com/anilpottimd).....
and apparently being behind the misleading regurgitation of a seven year old press release announcing a humanitarian award...
a Raleigh law firm that has taken on Duke University in the past says it is doing "research" on the Potti Mess.
The firm Henson Fuerst put out a PR release seeking information from Potti patients, which seems to FC like a thinly disguised effort to sign them up for lawsuits. Other Raleigh injury lawyers -- the Temple firm, and Brent and Adams -- have frequently used this tactic too, so expect them on the bandwagon.
Henson Fuerst represented plaintiffs in the Duke hydraulic fluid case in 2004, where two community hospitals run by Duke supposedly fully up to its standards (but not the principal hospital on West Campus) washed surgical instruments in dirty, used hydraulic fluid from an elevator instead of antiseptic detergent.
For months, surgeons complained of greasy and slippery instruments. In other words, Duke did not move to investigate and correct immediately -- and plaintiffs' lawyers loved it.
In many cases, instruments used in surgery are disposed after one use. But not so with clamps (to cut off the flow of blood), holders for the blades of scalpels, and other things.
Interestingly, in that case, Duke's point guard was Dr. Michael Cuffe, who then had the title vice president for medical affairs of Duke Health.org (he has since added Vice Dean of the Medical School). Very highly regarded in Duke's hierarchy, photogenic and well spoken, Cuffe came to Duke to earn his MD '91, stayed for all his additional medical training and burnished his credentials with an MBA '09. He has taken on a similar role in the Potti Mess, repeatedly making statements and giving interviews.
In the hydraulic case, Duke created an extensive website with information for patients; not so in the Potti Mess where patients and reporters alike have to dig for every scrap.
3500 people had surgery with the elevator fluid. 3500! It's never been clear how many patients were infected because their surgeries occurred with instruments not properly sterilized. And infected with what? Bacteria? Or even blood born diseases.
Nor do we know how residual chemicals that may have gotten directly into surgical wounds affected people.
We don't know either the total cost of malpractice claims that Duke paid -- this university doing everything under cover of darkness. People who settled with Duke were required to shut up, to sign a confidentially agreement. That's the course that Duke finally took with the Henson Fuerst clients.
The total was very substantial. Very.
Fellow Dukies, you haven't seen anything yet. The Potti Mess is a plaintiff's lawyers dream:
-- A defendant with lots of money and institutional arrogance.
-- Plaintiffs who will have great emotional impact on a jury.
-- Plaintiffs who signed contracts for clinical trials -- informed consent forms -- that were violated, so the basis for the lawsuits is not the slippery slope of malpractice alone.
-- Plaintiffs who suffered from malpractice. This is always tough to prove, and requires far more than just an unexpected or bad outcome from treatment. But if anyone is up to the challenge, Potti is!!
-- And most importantly to add on the bucks in any settlement, deliberate acts by Duke administrators -- like concealing the Baggerly e-mail that would have blown Potti out of the water far earlier.
FC has yet to pin down the number of potential plaintiffs. We know 107, 109 or 110 people were in the clinical trials -- experiments on human beings -- when they were abruptly ended. We believe in all 300 people participated, and many times that number went through invasive tests to see if they qualified.
These people got a rough ride when they came to Duke as patients. Wait until you see what happens to them when they return as plaintiffs, for Duke has a reputation of dragging out litigation and being very scrappy.
Fellow Dukies, this is bad.
There are two Fact Checker posts on Potti today; make sure you scroll down for the earlier.
✔ FC here.
As Dr Anil Potti starts to emerge from the seclusion of his Chapel Hill home... building his Facebook site, sending out tweets (http://friendfeed.com/anilpottimd).....
and apparently being behind the misleading regurgitation of a seven year old press release announcing a humanitarian award...
a Raleigh law firm that has taken on Duke University in the past says it is doing "research" on the Potti Mess.
The firm Henson Fuerst put out a PR release seeking information from Potti patients, which seems to FC like a thinly disguised effort to sign them up for lawsuits. Other Raleigh injury lawyers -- the Temple firm, and Brent and Adams -- have frequently used this tactic too, so expect them on the bandwagon.
Henson Fuerst represented plaintiffs in the Duke hydraulic fluid case in 2004, where two community hospitals run by Duke supposedly fully up to its standards (but not the principal hospital on West Campus) washed surgical instruments in dirty, used hydraulic fluid from an elevator instead of antiseptic detergent.
For months, surgeons complained of greasy and slippery instruments. In other words, Duke did not move to investigate and correct immediately -- and plaintiffs' lawyers loved it.
In many cases, instruments used in surgery are disposed after one use. But not so with clamps (to cut off the flow of blood), holders for the blades of scalpels, and other things.
Interestingly, in that case, Duke's point guard was Dr. Michael Cuffe, who then had the title vice president for medical affairs of Duke Health.org (he has since added Vice Dean of the Medical School). Very highly regarded in Duke's hierarchy, photogenic and well spoken, Cuffe came to Duke to earn his MD '91, stayed for all his additional medical training and burnished his credentials with an MBA '09. He has taken on a similar role in the Potti Mess, repeatedly making statements and giving interviews.
In the hydraulic case, Duke created an extensive website with information for patients; not so in the Potti Mess where patients and reporters alike have to dig for every scrap.
3500 people had surgery with the elevator fluid. 3500! It's never been clear how many patients were infected because their surgeries occurred with instruments not properly sterilized. And infected with what? Bacteria? Or even blood born diseases.
Nor do we know how residual chemicals that may have gotten directly into surgical wounds affected people.
We don't know either the total cost of malpractice claims that Duke paid -- this university doing everything under cover of darkness. People who settled with Duke were required to shut up, to sign a confidentially agreement. That's the course that Duke finally took with the Henson Fuerst clients.
The total was very substantial. Very.
Fellow Dukies, you haven't seen anything yet. The Potti Mess is a plaintiff's lawyers dream:
-- A defendant with lots of money and institutional arrogance.
-- Plaintiffs who will have great emotional impact on a jury.
-- Plaintiffs who signed contracts for clinical trials -- informed consent forms -- that were violated, so the basis for the lawsuits is not the slippery slope of malpractice alone.
-- Plaintiffs who suffered from malpractice. This is always tough to prove, and requires far more than just an unexpected or bad outcome from treatment. But if anyone is up to the challenge, Potti is!!
-- And most importantly to add on the bucks in any settlement, deliberate acts by Duke administrators -- like concealing the Baggerly e-mail that would have blown Potti out of the water far earlier.
FC has yet to pin down the number of potential plaintiffs. We know 107, 109 or 110 people were in the clinical trials -- experiments on human beings -- when they were abruptly ended. We believe in all 300 people participated, and many times that number went through invasive tests to see if they qualified.
These people got a rough ride when they came to Duke as patients. Wait until you see what happens to them when they return as plaintiffs, for Duke has a reputation of dragging out litigation and being very scrappy.
Fellow Dukies, this is bad.
1/13/2011
Potti Mess: Duke relinquishes last of his grants.
Search words Anil Potti Duke University
There are two Potti posts today. Please read the one before this.
✔✔ With two strokes of the pen, Duke University has just rid itself of the last of Dr. Anil Potti's research grants.
Both were multi-year grants from the federal government involving cancer research. One had one year and $200,000 left, and the other six months and $100,000.
FC has learned that one grant paid for clinical trials -- experiments on human beings -- that have been ended. And the other paid for cancer research that no longer has any validity.
Unlike Potti grants from the American Cancer Society, which demanded and got all its money back, the substantial funds that have been spent already from the last two grants apparently will not have to be refunded.
As the new semester began, Potti's lab -- once vibrant with the hope of major scientific breakthru -- had shrunk to four employees, and they heard the lay-off word earlier this week. One told FC that Dr. Huntington Willard, head of genome research at Duke, is trying to help them find new positions.
Duke made no announcement; one of the people affected is a Loyal Reader who tipped us.
There are two Potti posts today. Please read the one before this.
✔✔ With two strokes of the pen, Duke University has just rid itself of the last of Dr. Anil Potti's research grants.
Both were multi-year grants from the federal government involving cancer research. One had one year and $200,000 left, and the other six months and $100,000.
FC has learned that one grant paid for clinical trials -- experiments on human beings -- that have been ended. And the other paid for cancer research that no longer has any validity.
Unlike Potti grants from the American Cancer Society, which demanded and got all its money back, the substantial funds that have been spent already from the last two grants apparently will not have to be refunded.
As the new semester began, Potti's lab -- once vibrant with the hope of major scientific breakthru -- had shrunk to four employees, and they heard the lay-off word earlier this week. One told FC that Dr. Huntington Willard, head of genome research at Duke, is trying to help them find new positions.
Duke made no announcement; one of the people affected is a Loyal Reader who tipped us.
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