We’re incredibly fortunate to go to a university that the public seems to pay attention to and care about. Yet as a second-semester senior, I’ve noticed that our campus gets national media attention most consistently for two categories of events—sensationalized controversies and sports. And since spring is high season for scandal at Duke, like clockwork we’re already catching our share of coverage after a remarkably quiet fall semester.
Our lowest moments seem to happen in the spring. A search for Duke on some of our favorite news and media sites doesn’t paint a pretty picture—in the last two springs alone we’ve gotten written up for drama surrounding the adhan, potential rape, the Asia Prime party and our very own porn star. Go further back and you’ll find plenty more unflattering coverage from other campus events.
So what causes this spring awakening of controversial behavior and drama every year? Maybe it’s the sudden inescapable ubiquity of groups—sororities, fraternities, SLGs, whatever—that makes us feel like, individually, we must behave at our most extreme in order to keep up with some supposed collective identity.
Maybe it’s the prevalence of suits and padfolios on campus for recruiting. With so many peers gunning for finance positions, we wonder whether we should also want to be on Wall Street ourselves. Maybe we even try on some jaded pretentiousness to prove we could totally fit an imagined persona.
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy sparked by hard-wired tradition, maybe it’s just a coincidence. Whatever it is, each spring semester our campus becomes caricaturized to fill shoes so ambitiously large that something inevitably goes wrong.
The media’s “this again” attitude glorifies a Duke we should not be proud of. It perpetuates a false impression of us as collectively racist, classist, sexist and oversexed. We’ve become a campus outwardly known for its callousness, its superficiality, its pretension and its division.
But there’s another Duke here in the spring, one that comes out of the woodwork once a year and quietly grounds us in something I’m much more proud to be a part of.
Walk through K-Ville late at night and you’ll see something that’s still Duke to its core but unrecognizable against our “Dukebag” reputation.
Huddled for warmth, immobile and avoiding phone usage to preserve battery, we’re forced to actually talk to one another, to catch up and have real conversations. Makeup-less, dressed down and borderline smelly, the feigned “effortless perfection” of our typical Wednesday-night-to-Thursday-morning grind is replaced with real people. And come game time, the calculated apathy that we’re trained to convey year-round with our outward appearances is replaced by legitimate maniacal enthusiasm so vibrant and so genuine that our rivals totally pretend to hate us for it.
It’s not that K-Ville exists in opposition to the Duke the media loves to hate—it thrives in parallel. The same student body that supposedly churns out scandals fills our campus swamp with stories. Only at Duke can 11:30 on a Wednesday night be considered weekend hours and a tent a legitimate pregame, postgame, study and sleep spot all at the same time.
We managed to turn camping into a competition and built an entire vocabulary around the concept of lining up early—dirty black, tent shift, walk-up line and the implicit expletives in eye contact shared with a line monitor during a 4:00 AM check.
Wall-less and sleepless, K-Ville has no secrets for Rolling Stone to expose or Buzzfeed to exploit.
There’s meaning in the ridiculousness—it’s a tradition that takes so much effort and energy that it restores some of our credibility as real humans with passions and quirks. As an institution, K-Ville keeps us grounded.
I’m probably not in K-Ville’s target demographic. I originally thought I wanted to go to a liberal arts school and sports were not on my radar. My first sporting event viewed in its entirety was at Duke—a football game freshman year I attended out of a sense of obligation. I had never gone camping or slept outside in my life.
I’m barely even in it for the basketball itself, either. In my third year tenting, I’m not in it to cross off a bucket list item or because I was raised hating Carolina Blue. I’m in it because I like the Duke brought out by tenting.
When Coach K won his 1000th game this week, we got so into his accomplishment. I relished in the opportunity to sit in my apartment surrounded by a dozen or so friends, passing around a jar of cookie butter and shouting poorly informed things at our little TV. When the game ended I caught myself feeling like my involvement had contributed somehow to his success, beaming like a proud grandma.
That’s a part of life at Duke I’m proud to support, one I hope to see discussed on TV and made fun of on Buzzfeed.
I’m not trying to suggest that every member of the Duke community should live in a tent for a couple of weeks each January as a magic antidote for bad press. K-Ville does more good symbolically—we gather with unstoppable spirit for our school, hours or days before a regular game or weeks before we play UNC.
We need K-Ville. It’s inconsistent with the blasé and put-together demeanor we’re supposed to project everywhere else. It undermines our outside reputation as elitist, intolerant kids who breed controversy. In a semester where we’re more aware than ever of our divisions, K-Ville’s contagious energy supports a tradition that binds us together.
Elissa Levine is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday.
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