Do better, Duke. Do a lot better.

It is a toxic time on America’s campuses. It is a toxic time, and we are apathetic. Some are too tired of speaking against echo chambers—where nobody is willing to listen. Others are too tired of being asked to listen to something they deem “not their problem.” It is a toxic time, yet we have retreated from trying to make it better. We do not know how to make it better. And now, yet again, we are left sad and hurt and uncertain after a student’s life was threatened on account of his sexuality. As these events transpire at Duke and across the country, we risk becoming normalized to experiencing them unless we act otherwise.

We call on leadership. We yearn for leadership—from our administrators, our students, our Trustees, from anyone willing to fight to make it better. At Yale and at Missouri, they want the same, and we desperately need the same.

Two weeks ago we called on the University to make explicit conduct guidelines establishing a clear mechanism to deal with hate crimes. It seems to have fallen on deaf ears per comments that same week. Now another hate crime has been perpetrated, a manifestation of a climate where it is somehow alright for students to be made uncomfortable in their own being. It has become easier for Duke to ride out hate speech than to create a real response that holds culprits accountable for these incidents.

There are two other primary calls for change. First, a more direct orientation program that puts institutional history and recent campus-wide setbacks alongside broader socio-political problems in contemporary American society. Current additions to orientation merely nibble at the real issues. Secondly, we emphasize the need for a diversity and community relations campus climate survey. The Duke Social Relationships Project and federally-mandated sexual assault survey have conclusions quoted to this day, and the relevance of a new survey is without question. Even if we fear confronting the fallout of the results, it is vital to jumpstart a better, broader and more sustained dialogue that identifies constructive areas for solutions.

As our University considers its overhaul of Curriculum 2000, we also call for this reform to take Duke and the nation’s cultural ills seriously by embedding dialogue into the academic experience to help democratize engagement and promote substantive discussion of problems that feel omnipresent in daily social life. This could take the form of an Area of Knowledge concerning American cultural history or a Trinity requirement that forces ethical engagement specifically with the world today.

Our student government has also failed us. Rather than using student leadership opportunities as a way to enhance one’s resume on pet projects, our student leaders need to get in touch once more with students, gain their respect and engage with marginalized communities to fold in other communities and construct the dialogue we yearn for and yet never see sustained after these events. The Social Justice Fellowship is a start, but on its own, it is a small bandage meant to heal a festering wound.

Tomorrow, we will write about the broader cultural concerns at Duke that make progress so stagnant. Wednesday, we will examine events at Duke in the context of our peers across the nation. Hatred and discrimination are on campuses all over America. Our being passive and “too busy” enables its painful, hurtful, toxic and debilitating repetition. We are sad and angry, and we don’t know what else to say. We devote this week to seeking to understand what is going on. It will be an increasingly toxic time here at Duke if we continue to cover our eyes and ears.