Sigma Pi granted official colony status

28 Mar 2011, Posted by Chris Taylor in News, 0 Comments

As of yesterday, the new Sigma Pi fraternity was officially recognized by the Interfraternity Council. Sunday’s official pinning ceremony was the culmination of years of planning between Duke University and Sigma Pi representatives Adrian Rodgers and Joe Ruggieri.

The group was granted official colony status by Sigma Pi, which gives all students the same membership status as fully recognized members of Sigma Pi. Over the next few years, the colony will work toward charter status by meeting certain membership goals and completing specific projects. The process generally takes between one and two years.

Sigma Pi representatives arrived in Durham in early February, just as Spring rush drew to a close. Within a few days, there were flyers all around campus and people were abuzz about the prospect of a new fraternity.

“Starting up after Rush kind of helped us here,” said Ruggieri. “It helped show that there was still an opportunity to join a fraternity. Also, we attracted a different market—people who wanted to start something new.”

Sigma Pi has experienced relative success in the initial recruitment stage, with approximately 45 men applying for membership. The applicants represent a diverse  student population—with less than 50 percent of applicants currently freshmen.

“This has been a tremendously successful expansion for us,” Rodgers said. “We have spoken with literally hundreds of undergraduates who have been very eager to be involved with something new that they can mold into what they feel a fraternity should be.”

Other members of Duke Greek Life have noticed the recent activity of the incoming fraternity and have been impressed by the rapid expansion of Sigma Pi, as well as by the number of students who have taken interest.

“They have approached a large number of underclassmen and upperclassmen alike, and the response from them has been encouraging,” said Adam DeWolf, former Executive Vice President of the IFC. “I am sure that by the end of this process, they will have a solid group of new members and will quickly become an integral part of the Interfraternity Council.”

As the process draws to a close, Rodgers and Ruggieri are both excited and optimistic about the future for this new colony. Both felt welcomed by the strong sense of community at Duke, and are hopeful for the continued expansion of the fraternity into a major component of life at Duke.

“What really impresses me is that every guy has asked if they could be a leader,” Rodgers said. “That’s a great sign that they all really want to make this the best it can be.”

Looks can be deceiving: Duke’s faux-aged finish

26 Mar 2011, Posted by Stephanie Tsimis in News, 1 Comments

Don’t be fooled by the antiquated look of our Gothic Wonderland. Though the buildings on West Campus appear to have been built hundreds of years ago, in reality most are a mere 81-years-old.

West campus was built in the Collegiate Gothic style of architecture. William Blackburn, in his “The Architecture of Duke University,” defines the style as “domestic Gothic architecture found in the colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.”  At the time of the construction of West Campus in 1930, Collegiate Gothic was considered the most acceptable and popular architecture style of American universities and colleges.  Princeton and UChicago feature Collegiate Gothic.

James B. Duke, who established the Duke Endowment in 1924 to expand what was then known as Trinity College, originally wanted to construct Duke’s campus with stones purchased from Princeton’s quarry to achieve the same antiquated façade.  However, other Duke University leaders soon found a nearby Hillsborough quarry, which provided comparable stones for a sixth of the cost.  Stones from the Hillsborough quarry have been used in recent projects including the construction of Bostock Library and the Goodson Chapel.

However, Duke’s founders were not entirely successful in creating an antique Gothic campus. Blackburn notes that West Campus has a couple instances of architectural inconsistency. For example, the School of Medicine and the science buildings on the north end of the Main Quad had to be built with uniform ceiling heights and ample window space for functional reasons making it difficult to adapt the Gothic style, which is defined by its irregularity.

“The wide steps which lead to the Chapel court [and] the prim plots of grass and boxhedge on each side of the Chapel make it look as if a Gothic village had been put down in a Renaissance garden,” Blackburn writes.

In addition to using Gothic architecture to create an older look, it has also been suggested that Duke’s founders intentionally placed dips in the center of buildings’ steps to make it appear as though they had been walked upon for centuries. Caroline Bruzelius, Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, wrote in an e-mail that this phenomenon is called “rustication”.

“In the context of Duke, [rustication] is clearly meant to suggest older institutions like Oxford, for example. But the stone used at Duke could also not have been able to have been cut in a smooth way—so the aesthetic choice and the type of masonry are associated.”

Timothy Pyatt, Duke University Archivist, noted that although it is clear the steps could not have naturally become as worn as they are in the short time since their construction in 1930, there is nothing in the University documentation that confirms the steps were intentionally built to look weather-beaten.

Duke’s swift rise to a major research institution may be credited to its choice of architecture, Pyatt said.

“The fact that Duke looked like an old and established university from the start really helped give it its launch.  It didn’t seem like a newly minted university…. A lot of people think using a more historic design helped propel Duke to greatness even quicker.”

The buildings on Science Drive, constructed during the University’s period of rapid rise in the post World War II era, were not created in the same Gothic style as the rest of West Campus. As Duke gained its reputation as an international research institution, it had to quickly put up a lot of buildings on a tight budget, Pyatt said.

Following the construction of the engineering buildings on Science Drive, The Board of Trustees passed a resolution that required future projects to include more elements of Gothic style, including the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

Pop culture grid: Gustafson & Rasiel

24 Mar 2011, Posted by Ziwen Deng in News, Pop Culture Grid, 0 Comments

What does Emma Rasiel, associate professor of economics, think about Justin Bieber?  What does Michael Gustafson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, think should be a fad again? Find out now. Chronicle blogger Ziwen Deng caught up with these professors you may recognize.

Graphic created by Christina Peña

1/4 of college students substantially harming their hearing

21 Mar 2011, Posted by Michael Shammas in News, 0 Comments

Researchers from the University of Florida concluded that up to one-fourth of college students suffer from substantial hearing loss. This begs the question: just what is causing healthy twenty-one-year-olds to lose their hearing so rapidly? After days of wrangling over research and manipulating variables, the experimenters came to the same conclusion that you and I and virtually every college student in the universe would have come to in a matter of seconds: MP3 players.

In fact, the study found that students exhibiting the highest levels of hearing loss were males who said they used MP3 devices regularly (presumably while working out). This may seem like common sense, but don’t discount the findings just yet; average loss exceeded an alarming 15 decibels—an amount that, while it doesn’t quite require a hearing aid, could impair the ability to learn and even to distinguish between important variations in speech. In other words, this much hearing loss could have a substantial, negative impact on your social and academic life.

So all this sounds pretty dire, but will it change the way students listen to music? Maybe. As for me… well, I’ve been sufficiently frightened to the point that I plan on toning down Eminem a bit next time I go to the gym.

MULTIMEDIA: Japan Earthquake Vigil

20 Mar 2011, Posted by Michael Naclerio in Featured, News, student life, 0 Comments

On March 18, Duke University Students gathered on the Chapel steps to commemorate the lives lost in the Japan earthquake and tsunami with a candle light vigil.