​The importance of diversity in mentorship

Yesterday, we commented on the culture of mentorship and advising opportunities at Duke and made suggestions to improve institutionally-facilitated mentorship on campus. Today, we turn to the nature of informal peer mentorship during the undergraduate experience and hope to illuminate disparities in students’ abilities to think about opportunities for authentic growth and development during their time at Duke.

Undergraduates will inevitably triage decisions about classes, choice of major, research opportunities, extracurriculars, internship experiences and broader life goals by talking with their friends and acquaintances about what they have done in the past. We believe that this second kind of mentorship that runs beneath Duke’s avenues of advising is natural and vital to the student experience. However, some undergraduates have it better than others.

Following the first-year residential experience on East Campus, undergraduates are given the choice to self-select into residential and social niches which may better fit their individual lifestyles for the remainder of their college life. Given our housing model and the reality of independent housing communities, we encourage students to continue to place themselves into the arrangements that will best fit them socially but to also pay attention to with whom they surround themselves and the importance of diversity of input.

Honest and thorough discussions of experiences are best when shared with those to whom you are closest. As a result, authentic undergraduate mentorship is best in tight-knit communities like dance teams, selective living groups and FOCUS programs. Communities like these are best positioned to develop close peer-to-peer relationships and introspection about life after Duke. In comparison, independent and unaffiliated communities are weak and leave students vulnerable to slipping through the cracks between other, stronger networks. We hope that the University is aware of the experiences of isolated students who may not have the synergy of social facilitation pushing them towards opportunities.

The existing framework is especially troubling when we consider how segregated Duke’s social scene is along lines of race, gender and class. Students come from all walks of life before Duke, and some can assist their peers in understanding the life and values of certain professional paths better than others. If undergraduates from privileged backgrounds self-segregate into homogenous social communities, then they may not be exposing themselves to frameworks of success other than ones with which they are already familiar. Similarly, if undergraduates of lower privilege self-segregate into homogenous social communities, then their shared experiences are symmetrically lacking.

We wonder whether the current residential and social framework of the undergraduate experience following a student’s first year may warrant reform in the housing model given the implications the current structure has. Could dissipation of freedom in residential selection in favor of an extension of the east campus residential experience towards a housing model similar to that of Harvard or Yale yield to more equity in informal mentorship? These are just some leads into inspecting how students relate and connect on campus. At the very least, what we have written in the past on the lack of regular and large-scale academic traditions at Duke comes to mind.

College should be an exploratory time for undergraduates to discover passions and values and to test ideas with the help of teachers and peers. Equity and diversity of networks are crucial to student development. We hope they figure into the principles by which the University makes decisions about such fundamental structures as housing and event traditions.