I have become increasingly disappointed by your journalists’ biased coverage of Duke Student Government. In the Nov. 18 article “Gender forum leads to student action plan,” The Chronicle seems to ignore the reality of the “Gender Summit” and refrains from taking a critical stance (except when it comes time to reprimand some fraternities for not attending).
What the newspaper missed is that DSG gave less than a weeks notice for the summit. Notably, my IFC chapter was absent Tuesday because we had a chapter meeting scheduled at that time where we had our own gender dialogue facilitated by the resources of the Greek Women’s Initiative.
Although DSG will attempt to make the results of the summit look like the “voice of the students,” in reality, it’s the voice of 60 students (mostly campus organization elites) accumulated over three days. While a gender dialogue hosted by Delta Sigma Phi and Pi Beta Phi with help from the Center for Race Relations had 80-plus students on only one night, the laughably named “summit” had an average attendance of 20 people per night, which is hardly worthy of front-page news (especially considering DSG has the resources of personally e-mailing more than 6,400 undergrads, that’s less than 1 percent attendance!).
All I ask is that in the future, The Chronicle be more critical and informed about DSG so as to more accurately compare its work to the success of other campus initiatives.
Isaac Mizrahi
Trinity ’12
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.