Over the last decade, Duke has begun to expand globally, constructing a campus in China and creating or expanding programs that enable more students to study abroad. The University has also ventured, albeit shakily, into the realm of online education. Duke will soon feel the impact of the humanities' national decline, as the University continues to stress interdisciplinarity, faculty research and professional education. All the while, existential threats to brick-and-mortar colleges like Duke have turned higher education into a (pricy) commodity that students often consume as a mere means to an end.
As Duke confronts these challenges, crucial questions emerge: What kind of education does Duke aim to provide, and what kind of education do its students hope to receive? What kind of student does Duke hope to produce, and what kinds of people do its students hope to become?
As students, we often lack the time to answer these questions. Yet, in the absence of deliberate reflection, our academic lives are often shaped by institutional policies and outside forces. The sheer variety of academic and extracurricular options available to students can be disorienting, encouraging empty credentialism and breadth over depth. Moreover, Duke’s intellectual climate exhibits a curious bifurcation between students’ social and intellectual engagements, a cultural phenomenon sustained in part by the persistence of legacy admissions and high admissions rate for early decision applicants.
We have written extensively about how Duke might address this multi-faceted issue: by improving the advising system, introducing more course-sequencing within majors, reducing legacy and early admission quotas and fostering social communities around intellectual pursuits. But students also possess enormous agency in determining what their Duke experience means. To these students, the Board’s departing seniors would like to offer some words of advice.
Don’t fall asleep at the wheel. Although most people enter college undecided about what they want to do, perpetual ambivalence can lead students to follow standard scripts mapped by social and academic pressures beyond their control. It is very easy for students to make decisions based more on a cliched idea of the college experience than on their own principles and ambitions. The desire to maximize opportunity can prevent students from pursuing social and academic commitments that reflect their passions. Four years is a long time, but pushing off inevitable decisions only means that those decisions will be made for you.
Intentionality matters. While we often decry cultural shifts away from academics, students remain the final arbiters of their Duke experience. The experience we mold for ourselves should be grounded in conscious, intentional choices. We should not seek to fulfill checklists, nor should we isolate ourselves in narrow social circles. Take a moment to recap, reread and reflect. As students at a competitive university, we have a responsibility to treat our four years as an opportunity for self-reflection. Our time here is not a free ride, but it certainly is a quick one.
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