Reaction needed

I helped deliver babies in Uganda two summers ago. That’s not a normal college experience for your average history major.

Along with the other members of my DukeEngage group, I conducted a Duke Institutional Review Board-approved survey about the general health of the Ugandan mothers whom we met in our work in several clinics in the rural southwest of the country.

We learned, among other things, that 63 percent of women gave birth in their homes instead of a hospital and that 71 percent of them reached our clinic for prenatal care by walking. We found that almost 50 percent of the mothers assessed their own health as poor, and that more than half cited a lack of money, transportation and adequate drugs as a “big problem” in their prenatal care. And those statistics don’t reflect the family planning challenges and child mortality rates in the region.

When I returned to campus, I had a new idea of what “knowledge in service of society” should mean. I discovered a narrative that lent coherence to my experiences as Duke as a Project BUILD crew leader, intern for Senator Kay Hagan’s 2008 campaign, assistant to a Ugandan obstetrician, fraternity philanthropy chair and member of Duke Student Government.

The crucial vocabulary for this narrative: “civic engagement.”

And I wasn’t the only one at Duke exploring the narrative of civic engagement that year. In January 2010, a committee co-chaired by Emily Klein, senior associate dean and director of undergraduate studies at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Sam Wells, dean of Duke Chapel, published a report, “Engaging Excellence,” which called for a more strategic, institutional approach to civic engagement at the University. We’ve known for at least a couple of years now that the concept of “civic engagement” ranks right up there with interdisciplinarity and internationalization in terms of how Duke’s innovative approach to undergraduate education is setting national and international standards.

The Klein-Wells report got a flurry of attention when it came out, as these type of reports generally do: a written response from Provost Peter Lange and Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost for undergraduate education, a set of two editorials from The Chronicle’s independent editorial board and an assortment of other articles and opinion pieces.

Notably lacking, however, was a response, in an institutional sense, from students. As the report notes, more than 700 undergrads are engaged in the Durham community each semester, more than 1,000 have now participated in DukeEngage, and fully 62 percent of alumni report participation in community service while they were at Duke. The Klein-Wells report recommendations definitely impact our student experience. But there was no student statement analogous to that of the Provost and Dean Nowicki.

When my class arrived at Duke four years ago, President Brodhead delivered a convocation address in which he challenged us to engage Duke. We were not yet a week into our Duke careers, huddled as strangers next to each other in a crowded Duke Chapel. President Brodhead told us that Duke was a place with four cardinal values: excellence, community, education, and—you guessed it—engagement. “Duke’s project” was “excellence pursued as a community toward the end of ongoing education,” but engagement was the fulcrum “since without it there’s no reaching the other three.”

President Brodhead spoke truth when he told us that day in the Chapel that “Duke’s offerings will remain inert until something is added to start the reaction. The missing ingredient is your personal engagement: your taking the initiative to seek and seize opportunities and to charge them with your energies of mind.”

It’s high time student leadership take the initiative and join the conversation about the place of civic engagement and continued innovation in undergraduate education at Duke.

Who knows what reaction we might start?

Gregory Morrison is a Trinity Senior. He is the former EVP of DSG. His column runs every Monday.