​Saying 'Me Too' to vulnerability

The latest round of Duke’s very own Me Too Monologues wraps up on campus this week with Thursday’s monologues for contingent faculty. Me Too has become tremendously popular on campus, overcoming self-selection problems that previously concerned us. With hundreds of attendees, its stories now reach and hopefully resonate with a diverse cross-section of our student body. We worry however that, through no fault of its own, Me Too can represent a strong but short-lived inoculation in discourse surrounding identity, struggle and vulnerability. Though anonymity best allows authors to not hold back and to fully challenge viewers to think about how life at Duke can be hard, there surely needs to be push for more ways to bring these issues into daily conversation.

There is also a danger for inoculations of this kind to become a type of commodity, offering social capital in exchange for reception of the program’s message. As a recent guest opinion column put it, “If the campus-wide effects of Me Too Monologues can’t extend past the two brief hours it takes to hear a story, claim to ‘get it’ and then move on, it’s not enough.” Inoculation becomes pacification without careful reflection and motivated action if students feel they have done enough just by attending an event. It risks making the problems and the challenging search for solutions seem easy because we have merely achieved awareness.

Much of Duke’s culture teeters along this line between superficiality and depth. This is the danger of students valuing education and Duke as routes to the workplace over development of an entire person–it risks being deep and results-oriented in one way but shallow in others. Even with post-show discussions offered, Me Too attendees are tempted to evade the hard work of responding to the identity issues they see shared. This means building that vulnerability into their relationships and communities, developing a personhood where one can be open about struggle and consider reflection as a means of overcoming and growing. At Duke, we need more spaces, especially academic ones, to think critically about the human condition.

Why, at Duke, do we so often foreclose life–in all of its depth, its complexities, its staggering amount of both challenge and joy–during its most important formative stage? Why do we insulate, atomize and retreat from the relations around us and the possible communities that we could develop here? Perhaps, we are scared of contradiction: strong and weak, smart and naïve, hopeful and cynical, joyful and depressed. Life has an inevitable variety. It is okay to be a consultant as well as a flawed human being. Duke should find many ways to at once celebrate this variety all the while creating many forums to talk about the vulnerabilities and challenges of coming of age at university.

Joy lies in overcoming life’s challenges, not in suppressing them. So, why do we so often settle for the boring steady-state of effortless perfection with the high cost of avoiding emotional challenges until they become unsustainable? Me Too is a way to alleviate a culture that undermines itself in its promise of such perfection, but it is not enough alone to fix this culture. In fact, it seems more a relief for symptoms than a solution for ailments without students taking up the call to action. We need new ways to break the fourth wall–the boundary between actors and audience–every day on campus.