This week’s Monday, Monday column satirized last week’s Honor Council YBTT campaign. Although humor is humor and lies largely in the realm of personal taste, we would like to defend YBTT on its principles, which were purposefully misconstrued in order to produce an, at times, entertaining column.
The article defined the “better” in YBTT as “superior” as a springboard for delivering a biting critique of the prevalence of entitlement and superiority complexes on the part of Duke students—and perhaps the Honor Council in particular. The goal of the campaign was not to adopt an air of condescension or pretension by prescribing any singular values to the Duke community—doing so would be impossible in a community as diverse as ours. Instead, the initiative hoped to spur reflection and discussion on how our actions affect other people in our community. We sought not to make judgments about the behavior of Duke students but to encourage members of the Duke community to consciously make judgments about their own actions. The Honor Council seeks to create a culture in which moral reflection and consideration of others is more prevalent.
It is perhaps ironic that, even with the purposeful misinterpretation of YBTT, the message of The Devil’s column was largely the same as ours: that it is important to step outside of ourselves in order to think more of other people. The Devil’s examples—ignoring cab driver pleas or failing to tip a deliveryman—could just as easily have appeared on one of our flyers as instances where we would do well to reflect on how our actions affect others.
Nick Valilis, Trinity ’12
Honor Council Chair
Ellie Schaack, Trinity ’15
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