Editors' Note

It is being called a PR nightmare. Karen Owen’s PowerPoint, a teenager almost dead in a port-a-porty, a slew of misogynistic e-mails published on the internet and around the campus—these incidents only exist as the most glaring examples of Duke’s inability to present itself well to the internet public and Gawker Media. But what might be a PR nightmare is, as we know, not about image but cultural failures.

To continue commenting on these situations and trends would only add to a growing number of voices in a dialogue, which much as we hope it is not, might very well be in vain. This letter, these persons, these pages, this abstract body of so-called student journalists make no pretense of offering some theoretical solution or a charge to make things better. This is not President Brodhead’s e-mail, nor is it a Letter to the Editor from some “student leader.” As much as writing is a practice, this written musings are not enough to transform the culture at stake. Indeed what is needed is practice oriented solutions: not what is to be done, but how is it to be done.

And of course, you will not find the answer to any of those interrogatives here. Rather, we want to alter the discourse, step outside the dialogue and consider the terms. A proposition: might we first consider what has happened in Duke’s culture to be a failure. It’s clear that in the past decade, Duke’s undergraduate culture has failed in the media, and perhaps also failed itself.

What is to be done with this failure in its high moment of present tense failing? And how can we make this failing generative? Moreover, if we are to continue what has happened as a failure, how it can be turned into something else. How can a failed culture be generative?

To follow, if this failure does generate something, what will it be? Might it be worthy to consider that what we make of failure is not to remake from its decayed remains but to leave that behind and make something new? The forces of failure must move us toward something. Perhaps the solution is to shut Duke down to undergrads for a few years and let it start again, become a new university (of course the economic reality does not permit such fantasy, but maybe we need to do something about economic failures too – no doubt the East Campus Marxists have something deeply worthwhile to say about this). All this musing aside, the very point here is that we must move toward something. Remedies, quick fixes, rhetoric—these are not the solution. Something must be done. Something must emerge. Otherwise, Duke is destined to be a hash-tagged joke on Gawker and the Courtney Love of the “elite” universities.

We’re not all at fault—not even all of the undergraduates—but under the banner of this neoliberal university, we’re all implicated somehow into this community of abject failure.