An Entrepreneur of the Social Sciences
Marine Lab Director Brings an Anthropologist's View and
a Connection to the Sea to the Facilitation Table
p.4
But his youthful ties to California, if not to water, finally
began to fray after he became a young professor at the University
of California at Santa Cruz. Life there had changed since
he was a 19-year-old happily camping on beaches in a Volkswagen
bus. Now he was 30 with a child, living amidst growing environmental
degradation, declining schools and a rising cost of living.
So he responded to ECU’s redoubled efforts to persuade him
to move east again, and eventually joined Duke full-time in
1993. And he hasn’t looked back. “It’s great to now be here,
at one of the top institutions in the world, with a great
faculty and great students,” he says of the deliberately,
if deceptively, laid-back Marine Laboratory.
According to Orbach, he was originally recruited to Duke
to bring a “formal social science and policy presence” to
a campus previously noted for estuarine ecology. He adds that
his 1998 appointment as director by then-Nicholas School dean
Norman L. Christensen
Jr. and his reappointment by current dean William
H. Schlesinger signaled support for “my basic philosophy
of interdisciplinary research.
“The faculty here has now decided that each new hire is
going to be a person who wants to cross over into what I call
‘so what’ questions in the conservation world while still
performing quality basic science,” he says. “Another thing
that is happening here is that we’re entering a slightly different
arena with ‘charismatic megafauna’—sea turtles, dolphins and
large pelagic (sea-going) fishes and sharks.
“So we’re moving towards conservation, interdisciplinary
research, large pelagic ocean resources, the social sciences
and a more sustainable Pivers Island environment with a master
plan. We don’t want to be bigger, but we want to be better.
There’s a sense of scale we want to preserve here.”
Orbach says the Marine Lab is meeting annual enrollment targets
of 30 professional masters degree students and 20-25 doctoral
students, but is still short of its 50 student-per-semester
goal for undergraduates—at least in the winter.
Actually, the Marine Lab hosts higher numbers of undergrads
in the summer, about 50 percent from out-of-state institutions
lacking their own marine labs. “So we're a little over in
the summer and under in the winter,” he says.
In recent years, the Lab has embarked on a campaign to reconnect
its facilities in Beaufort to the main campus in Durham.
Under a new arrangement, for example, the Duke Facilities
Management Department manages the Marine Lab for building
and maintenance projects. The lab now has two new emergency
generators with autoswitching capabilities, and other significant
upgrades because of this arrangement.
But when Facilities Management began designing the lab’s
first new building in 30 years—a cinderblock maintenance structure—Orbach
insisted that it look in character with the rest of the campus.
“So they redesigned it a half story lower, and put on a hip
roof and cedar shakes,” he says. “It’s a big building, but
it looks nice and compatible.”
That was followed up with other additions, ranging from solar
panels on the roofs of dormitories to the Marine Lab’s first
Student Center.
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