Occupy Duke students should leave school immediately

I would like to recommend a more effective course of action for the Occupy Duke protestors: Refuse from this point forward to pay tuition, receive financial aid, attend classes, stay in on-campus housing or partake in any activity that implicitly supports Duke as a private university. Namely, to preserve the sanctity of their message, they should leave campus and never return until Duke ceases to receive aid from corporations or the 1 percent.

Duke’s financial backing largely comes from the very institutions that Occupy Duke criticizes. James B. Duke, the son of our University’s namesake, was the president of one of the country’s flagship multinational corporations: the American Tobacco Company. So large and powerful was this corporation that the United States Supreme Court ordered its dissolution in 1911 on account of its restraint of free trade. Trinity College later was the prime beneficiary of the Duke Endowment, an endowment almost entirely founded with James B.’s money. Duke claims its earliest origins with a corporation accused by the highest authority in the land of unfairly monopolizing a product that causes cancer. Interestingly, a statue of James B. Duke overlooks the Occupy Duke protestors.

Today, the University is similarly dependent on large multinational corporations and rich individuals. Forty-one percent of the entering Class of 2010 received need-based financial aid. The 59 percent who assumably pay full fare (and thereby allow financial aid to exist) contribute tuition dollars that, in part, start out as corporate profits. Duke simply could not exist without corporations. And anyone who attends this school is accepting a sizable subsidy courtesy of Corporate America.

If you truly believe that “corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people,” then stop accepting their charity. I presume that continuing to grace Duke with your impressive talents will only encourage these evil wealth extractors.

Ben Brostoff, Trinity ’12