After taking a semester off to address student feedback, Common Ground will hold a Fall retreat this year.
The student-run retreat—which centers on discussions of race, socioeconomic status, gender and sexuality—was cancelled in the Spring amid criticisms of its intense programming and selective application process. A student advisory council was selected from previous participants to identify aspects that could be improved and make changes to the retreat, which normally holds both a Spring and Fall retreat. As a result of the council's discussions, Common Ground has been extended from four to five days, will allow more contact with staff advisors and will employ a random lottery system to select participants. Senior Emily Chen and junior Alice Reed, co-directors of Common Ground, explained they seek to promote self-reflection and understanding of others’ experiences through the new curriculum.
“Common Ground has evolved each semester since its inception, and will continue to evolve, to accommodate a continuously changing campus climate,” Chen wrote in an email. “We do hope that our curriculum will help participants develop the skills to, and interest in, starting conversations in their communities at Duke about issues of identity on campus.”
Common Ground, which was conceived as a student project in 2003, allows students to share their views and experiences. Participants are led through these discussions by student facilitators.
Senior Robert Vann, director of the 2015 Fall Common Ground retreat, wrote in an email that training for facilitators has also been revamped and that facilitators for this retreat will include students who have never attended Common Ground.
“We hope that bringing in new faces will help us to engage a broader section of the student body,” he wrote.
Common Ground has previously been criticized for its selectivity. However, the retreat will continue to host only 56 students due to logistical and funding reasons, Reed wrote in an email.
Although the selection process will continue to be anonymous, applications have been shortened and will only include one short answer question on why applicants want to attend the retreat. This year, participants will be selected from a pool of completed applications that demonstrate "genuine interest" using a computer algorithm that generates a stratified random sample that will produce a group similar to Duke’s demographics in terms of race and gender, Vann explained.
“We feel that these changes to the participant selection process will allow participants to complete the application in a way that is authentic and genuine to their own conception of how their identity has affected their lived experiences at Duke and beyond without concerns about answering in a way that is ‘right’ or palatable to the Common Ground directing team,” Reed wrote in an email.
Vann declined to comment on the previous system that was used to select participants.
Some past participants have deemed Common Ground too emotionally intense for the short time frame in which it is held. To remedy this, the new Common Ground will span five days and include more breaks to rest. Vann also noted that there will be more opportunities for participants to interact with staff members from various identity centers on campus, including the Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the Women’s Center and the Center for Multicultural Affairs.
Chen and Vann both denied that the restructuring of Common Ground was related to any recent racially charged or homophobic incidents on campus, saying that the project had been in the works for some time.
Vann noted that the student advisory council did discuss these incidents and how the retreat could be structured to offer support to students that have been impacted.
“Common Ground has been the single most impactful experience of my time at Duke,” Vann wrote. “In light of everything that has happened [at] Duke recently and with a brand new retreat experience ready, I hope that Common Ground creates space for honesty, healing and growth for years to come.”
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