Students and admins should shape future

We have spent much of the semester castigating the Allen Building for administrative high-handedness as it goes about transforming Duke’s campus culture. There is no doubt that administrative policies can throttle students’ ability to shape their collective future. But students can also defeat their own interest in representation by failing to take seriously good faith efforts to engage the student voice. There is ample room for the administration to do better, but there is room for us to do better, too.

When Housing, Dining and Residence Life rolled out the house model blog—a belated but earnest attempt to engage students—earlier this week, it gave students a chance to participate in the cultural transformation that many have felt marginalized in so far. Students who want a voice in the future should take this opportunity, small as it may be, seriously.

The House Model Committee’s blog lays out the house model’s trajectory for the coming year. It effectively aggregates previously hard-to-find information—like how house selection will work and how houses will break down by class. Promisingly, a feedback section promises to connect the voice of the everyday Duke student with the House Model Committee. Even if the site stops at adumbration, it sketches well the general processes and goals of the house model.

No doubt, these attempts to inform the student body at large about the transition have come late. While the administration’s letters in The Chronicle and open forums have been informative, they have usually arrived after the fact, after most major decisions have been made. In fact, last Monday was the first time that the administration sent an email to the Duke student body formally announcing the transition to the house model, though administrators did submit letters published in The Chronicle several times last year. And, when details have trickled down, they have chiefly reached selective living groups, leaving the independent students out in the cold. Had the blog been posted earlier, independents could have had a convenient venue for voicing their concerns to the House Model Committee.

We don’t pretend that a blog will revolutionize the student-administration relationship. But we cannot let this and other administrative efforts to reach out fall on deaf ears. If we want to be engaged on a large scale, we must treat small-scale efforts with respect. The onus is on us to attend the forums and to own the upcoming transition process­—how else could the administration appreciate our demands and grievances? Last Tuesday’s Duke Student Government forum on the house model saw only 40 students attend, as have many of the forums in recent University history. If students want to own this process, next Tuesday’s House Model Committee forum will have to see much greater turnout.

We don’t absolve the administration from the demands of transparency­. In fact, if the administration sincerely hopes to hear about student concerns before they are splashed across the front page of The Chronicle, it will have to reach out to students early on in every decision-making process. Slipping policies under the door and opportunistically taking advantage of the student body’s four-year lifespan will always be condemnable. But our failure to speak out cannot help matters—it, too, would be condemnable.