​Tackling the issues, not each other

Last semester, racial tensions shook campuses across the nation, including our own, leading to forums and task forces convened to tackle the inequities stratifying our shared experiences. The Fall semester put a spotlight on underlying issues in campus conversation and how students relate to each other. Last year, Rolling Stone’s coverage of the University of Virginia brought sexual assault and case management again to the attention of students and administrators. As each event notches itself in the belt of our college experiences, we have to look forward to this semester and require not only a firm understanding of the facts but also a more robust set of attitudes and questions to explore each debate.

With the high profile trial of Lewis McLeod—found responsible in 2014 for sexual misconduct—slated to begin next month, we will return to questions about how Duke deals with sexual misconduct. Congress is considering several laws that could radically reshape how colleges and police departments evaluate and prosecute allegations of sexual assault. The federal legislation aims for fairness for complainant and respondents and to make consistent a process that so many find confusing. Some reforms include increased transparency and making proceedings contingent on police involvement, exposing the tenuous quasi-judicial path universities tread. A cursory glance at social media and student thought reveals the complexity of the topic.

Other federal-level concerns will rock campus in the coming months. In December the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Fisher v. the University of Texas II, which deals with the use of racial preferences in undergraduate admissions decisions. In November, Duke joined 12 peer universities in an amicus brief in support of the university. The affirmative action debate has invited controversy for decades and draws attention to the underpinnings of campus cultures as well as the tools used to achieve student body diversity. Given that such diversity is a compelling state interest, what constraints are there on how admissions offices can achieve it? Students have to be prepared to explore the question of race-conscious admission with the legal paradigm of the arena that poses it.

From conversations of race and privilege to sexual assault and affirmative action, students are living in a time when the conversations about them feature them very prominently. On one hand, productive and charitable attitudes will be requisite to progress and intellectual growth. On the other, how to foster a campus that operates with such an open set of rules of discussion requires structural changes. Among other things, inspecting the independent housing model for become imperative. The status quo on West and Central is wildly different from East Campus’s close-knit communities. Granted, not all parts of the first-year experience are reproducible, but the current model fails to capitalize on the potential for the housing experience to go far in shaping the broader Duke experience. Exploring Living Learning Communities and alternative blocking systems and section arrangements for Selective Living Groups will all play a part in improving independent communities.

The importance of sharing ideas between students and members of the Duke community cannot be understated. Such exchanges are fundamental to a university’s purpose, and it is to urge students to do their homework on these issues that we draw attention to them. No educated person, students least of all, can afford to be poorly or ill-informed on topics like these which are both persistent and head-scratchingly complex.