The twilight zone

"You are traveling through another dimension—a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop: Duke University. "

Duke is a funny place. While I was gone for winter break, I was reminded just how many different ideas and arguments I've come across while at Duke. Here, it's easy to forget how many people don't know what a "non gender-binary pronoun" is and have never heard of the term gender-binary. It's easy to forget how many people don't know whether Saudi Arabia and Iran are Sunni or Shi'ite or who is leading the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It's easy to forget how many people still don't consider having intercourse with a female who's blackout drunk to be sexual assault.

Duke is a pretty special community of highly intelligent people with a variety of interests, often very narrow ones. From student groups tabling on the Bryan Center Plaza to campus events and lectures to articles shared on Facebook and the columns written in The Chronicle (shameless self-promotion), I have learned more about the world and grown as a person. I have been bombarded with arguments, cultural norms, anti-cultural norms and why's and how's that have sharpened the way I think, making me reflect on my own views and experiences growing up.

When people ask me what Duke is like, I give them snapshots of some of the incredibly diverse and talented people I've come across. Just on my freshmen hall alone, I met a girl who came in first in Florida's (my home state's) science bowl. I met someone who sold a painting valued in the five digits. I came across people who started their own charities, people who are related to political leaders in Ghana and China, people who were eight math classes ahead of me, people who created mobile apps to help farmers and people who DJ'd so well they signed with Avicii's label. I met people whose own passions inspired me to pursue my own.

But there is a darker side to Duke's community.

Somehow, in the last three years, students in my class here have been socialized to think that personal attacks are acceptable. That it is okay to tell someone "I don't care about your opinion. Your opinion is unnecessary." It is even scarier when they use that person's skin color, sexual orientation or gender identity as justification for why they don't care about an opinion. This applies to any skin color, any sexual orientation and any gender identity. This applies to lesbian, black females. This applies to straight, white males. By the time Duke students become seniors, they tend to have a very difficult time separating an argument from its speaker.

When I was a freshman, my friends and I would talk about current events and "scandals" on campus liberally, without need to censor or filter. More recently, I have been attacked far too many times by the following paraphrased argument: "You do not see what I see. You do not share my experiences. It is not your place to comment. You need to listen to me before you talk. You are ignorant. We don't need dialogue. You need to educate yourself."

When I took the LSAT, we had to evaluate logical arguments, some faulty and some sound. Not once during the test did I ever know the speaker's ethnicity, and I'm not sure what difference it would have made even if I had known. Would one ethnicity make the argument more sound while another would make it less sound? Nobody would argue that it would, yet why then do we so readily shed this intellectual rigor when the arguments aren't written in black and white but instead fill the air.