Creating a community we want

To my friends in the Duke community,

If any of us have so far turned a blind eye to the silent discrimination of female Duke students, let the events of the past week shake us from our ignorance. The two e-mails made public over the weekend—one from a recognized fraternity and one from an off-campus group—are merely symptoms of a cultural ailment that is often diagnosed but never treated. When female applicants are advised by students that it’s tough to be a girl at Duke, we cannot afford to stay silent. When women graduate Duke with lower self-esteem than when they enroll, we are compelled to do something to protect our community members.

Let me be clear: the issue of gender inequity cannot possibly be resolved by another focus group or committee report. The solution needs to come from us—the independents, the greeks, the boyfriends and the girlfriends, the engineers and the econ majors—all of us who are the student body and care deeply about each other and the health of this University.

The Interfraternity Council is taking concrete action to monitor social communications and make sure those e-mails are never replicated. After this experience, it’s unlikely we will see offensive messages like that anytime soon. But does anyone really believe the problem has been addressed? More likely, it has merely been silenced.

I have watched students begin to dig in for battle, variously painting all fraternity men as misogynists or chastising a few women for not getting the “joke.” The situation is complicated. On the one hand, nobody should ever use the language expressed in those e-mails; on the other hand, I’m sure the events were well-attended—how many students who read the e-mails actually boycotted the parties? Every time Duke men and women shrug off an offensive e-mail, a message scrawled on a bathroom wall or a tasteless flyer—every time we continue with our lives because we think we aren’t affected—we abandon our own peers. This isn’t about greek life. It’s about campus life.

Today I call on all members of the student body to reject the acceptance of these destructive cultural norms. We know Duke to be a fun, accepting place made up of kind people who want the best for each other. So we are understandably reluctant to see sexist messages as representing anything beyond the poor judgment of a few students. But there is a problem, and fortunately the blame lies not in any immutable legacy of sexism at Duke, but on us. Campus culture is written every year, and we’re the authors. Let’s make sure that as individuals and Duke students, we create a culture worthy of our membership.

Faithfully,

Mike Lefevre