lex Roland is hearing something odd. "So you're here to talk about Colombia?" says a disembodied voice in his ear. "It's our own secret war, isn't it?"

"Well, actually I'm here to talk about Columbia the space shuttle, not Colombia the country," Roland responds, his voice carried through a clip-on microphone, his bemused expression multiplied across a bank of television monitors.

Media Mentions

Roland is in a TV studio in the basement of the Bryan Center. It's the second day of classes for the fall semester, and the day that a commission led by Admiral Hal Gehman has released its findings on last winter's space-shuttle disaster. Roland Ph.D. '74, a former NASA historian and now professor of history at Duke, gained notoriety when he wrote an eleven-page article for Discover magazine titled "Triumph or Turkey?" that called the shuttle program wasteful, misdirected, and unmanageable. The article appeared two months before the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. Today, Roland has been bombarded by reporters' queries; he's hardly had time to absorb the six-inch Gehman report, which he's sampling in quick glances as airtime approaches.

The main decorative element in the studio is a blue screen with repeated representations of the university shield. But there are more functional touches--air-conditioning that actually quiets down, rather than whooshing, as it comes on, and facing walls angled so that sound waves won't bounce around. In its self-contained subterranean spot, the studio is a big step up from its predecessor in the Mary Duke Biddle Building, created in the early 1980s to serve the audio-editing needs of the music department.

Roland jokingly tells a technician to "make me beautiful," and that pretty much is the aim of a rapid-fire exchange between the Duke studio and PBS' NewsHour in Washington: Straighten the necktie. Tighten the shot in the camera frame. Swivel the chair so that he won't seem to lean or slouch. Adjust the color balance--the monitors have him looking a little gray. "Let's dust him up," says Scott Wells, manager of studio operations. A technician pats Roland's bald spot with talcum powder.

A taped interview with Admiral Gehman leads off the NewsHour, followed by a three-way conversation with host Ray Suarez, Roland, and Donna Shirley, former manager of NASA's Mars exploration program. Roland makes the point that the advice of the Challenger commission was largely ignored. He adds that the shuttle is a complex machine that, unrealistically and now tragically, has been expected to meet conflicting demands. Wrapping up the interview, he questions whether NASA can fix itself without external oversight and says the time is ripe for a broader national conversation: "Since the end of the Apollo program, we've continued to have a manned space-flight program but no avowed, explicit national policy of why we're sending people into space."

As he's untethered from the mike, Roland notes his surprise at the relatively small amount of disagreement between him and Shirley, who did not toe the NASA party line. "I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get a fight out of that."

If he hasn't quite achieved media-star status, Roland is representative of a rapidly growing presence in the media of Duke faculty experts. You see them on CNN, commenting on civil rights in terrorism-wary America. You read them in The New York Times, discussing mental health on Indian reservations. You hear them on NPR, talking about restoring the wetlands of Iraq.

This burgeoning media presence presumably adds to Duke's name recognition. But the frequent mention of Duke by the media "is important on its own terms," says David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications. "Duke has insight to help inform the public debate on issues ranging from Iraq to Enron," he says. "Of course, as we engage this debate, audiences learn what we actually do here at Duke. Whether it's a student or faculty member thinking of coming here, a donor, a journalist, or someone else, they'll see for themselves the scholarship and activity that makes Duke so exciting."

The dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment, William H. Schlesinger, is pretty excited about media contact. Last spring he wrote in the school's magazine that "academics should make every effort to translate their findings, and their best interpretation of the state of the science, so that the public can understand it.... Indeed, when taxpayer money has supported our research investigations, one can argue that we have the responsibility to go public with our findings." As one component of his school's annual review of faculty members, Schlesinger now asks them to document their efforts in "public outreach, education, and media." For his part, Schlesinger--who has contributed op-ed columns on the thinning ozone layer, higher mercury concentrations in fish, the case for higher gasoline prices, and the ties between global warming and exotic diseases--says that one of the reasons he sought out the deanship was the opportunity it presented to bring science before the public.

Scott Silliman, a veteran of everything from the call-in shows on National Public Radio to the op-ed pages of national newspapers, says he considers media work an extension of his teaching. "In my area--national security and national-security law--I am painfully aware that there is a lot of ignorance out there. A lot of folks don't really understand the issues. That's particularly true with the 'war on terrorism' and what we're doing at Guant·namo Bay. So I take every opportunity that I can to be interviewed, as long as I feel that the interview is going to help further public knowledge."

Through his own media appearances, a law-school colleague, Michael Byers, is working to further public knowledge across borders. On a warm fall morning, Byers, who is also director of Canadian studies at Duke, is fighting off sleepiness as he enters a less imposing space than the Bryan Center, a small radio studio alongside the News and Communications office. He's there for an appearance on The Current, a current-events program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Byers, dressed in shorts, is just back from some avid lap swimming--meant to help clear his mind and collect his thoughts, he says. He puts on earphones, sits down in front of a microphone, and jots down some talking points.

At 8:20, Cabell Smith, radio and TV manager for News and Communications, is still working out the correct signal-synchronizing configuration. "I like to live dangerously," he says. At 8:30 on the dot, the host, Anna Maria Tremonti, introduces the program with a teaser about "Cut Piece," a Yoko Ono show in which the artist cuts her clothing into pieces and asks spectators to send the clips to loved ones. Then she brings on Byers to discuss the political evolution of Paul Martin, the current finance minister for Canada, who is about to take the helm of the federal Liberal Party and, presumably, the office of prime minister. How important is the personal chemistry between the leaders of the two nations? Byers argues that economics trumps chemistry: The financial ties between the U.S. and Canada are "unmatched anywhere else in the world."