"F**k n*****s. F**k gays. Gas the k***s." These are the words found spray-painted under the East Campus bridge last weekend. These are words that shock the conscience.
After The Chronicle published an account of the Bridge Incident last Tuesday, the response on social media was swift. Duke students, especially those who identify with the black, LGBTQ and Jewish communities targeted by the hateful words, were quick to express their outrage and anguish—sentiments I hope anyone with an ounce of empathy would share. But a few went further in their reactions. Lingering in their Facebook posts was a curious assumption: the idea that Duke had failed to keep them “safe.”
Duke has failed these students, but not in the way they think. The boxwood bushes of Duke Gardens and the stalks of grass on Abele Quad aren't the only things Duke manicures with exquisite care. Duke promises an amazing college experience, "the best four years of your life,” with star professors and shiny new facilities and centers designed to support just about every identity and affinity. For protective parents, Duke promises to take care of their precious children in loco parentis. Duke’s Jewish Life even provides a chicken soup hotline for sick students.
The trouble is that no institution of higher learning, however wealthy or powerful, can ever fully shelter its students from the storms of life, much less the maelstroms buffeting the wider world. Duke's failure isn't in "allowing" the bridge incident to happen, but in raising expectations for what college is and what a university can do. The new rhetoric of “safety”—meaning protection against anything that can trigger an unpleasant psychological response—means that otherwise reasonable students think that Duke is to blame every time we feel “unsafe.”
When students ask for “safety”, what we really want is protection. But there is only one sure-fire way to secure complete protection from hate on campus. I call it the "totalitarian approach," in which the university seeks to safeguard students’ psychological safety as it would secure physical safety.
Duke could have stopped what happened on the East Campus bridge last weekend. If preventing hateful speech was really a priority for the university, Duke could install security cameras on-site and station guards there at all hours.
At that point, Duke would have effectively prevented individuals from writing hateful words on the bridge. But wouldn't any enterprising ne'er-do-well quickly discover that Duke's 8,470 acres have more than one venue for hateful speech? There are too many potential canvases: classroom walls, study carrels, bathroom stalls. After all, anyone with a sharpie can deface a poster, as we saw last year.
While the watchful eye of Big Brother's camera might deter a troll or hate-monger from spray-painting slurs on the bridge, it might also change how everyone else uses the space. For example, might the climate activist, unhappy with Duke's plan to build a natural gas-fired power plant on campus, temper the heat of her dissent? By policing the bridge, we would lose much of the rollicking, contrarian spirit that makes it so special. The same holds true for campus as a whole. To be successful at warding off hate, the totalitarian approach would require policing campus at great financial and spiritual cost.
There is another way. It starts with distinguishing the two methods for achieving “safety”: protection versus strength. Unlike physical safety, which can be guaranteed by external forces like policing, psychological safety can only come from within (with some external helpers: friends, family, mentors, and therapists among them). To seek protection means isolating oneself from hate, while building strength requires repeated exposure to the world and its ills.
The paradox of safety, safety-through-strength, is that it requires openness. It rejects the totalitarian approach of safety through protection and closure. In the "openness approach," the university acknowledges that its strength comes from its openness—and also concedes that a commitment to openness comes with certain costs. If we concede that there are -isms and -phobias afoot in the world, it would be unreasonable to expect them not to manifest themselves from time to time on campus.
So long as expectations of safety-through-protection endure, every campus incident will spur the same cycle of reactions: outraged Facebook posts, appeals for protection from “unsafe” students and flurried emails from college administrators promising succor and safety.
Following the Bridge Incident, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta wrote to students, "If you see me around over the next few days, share a smile or a thumbs up to let me know you're part of our movement to fight back against hate." But students shouldn't wait for Don Quixote de Moneta to lead us on what will surely be a short-lived quest against hate. We shouldn’t rely on administrators for protection we know they can’t provide; instead, we should use incidents like this to build up own our strength and grow more resilient as a school community.
Siddhārtha Gautama grew up behind palace walls and knew little of the world beyond. One day, at the age of 29, he defied his father’s wishes and left the palace in order to meet the subjects he presumed to rule. Soon he encountered an old man, a diseased man, a dead man and an ascetic. The experience with suffering shook Gautama to his core—surely he felt “unsafe” in that moment—and he took off after a new life, never to be safe behind palace walls again. The Buddha’s life of openness meant exposure to suffering and hardship, but it also fostered a core of strength and wisdom that even the storms of life could not shake.
We are growing up and taking our places in the world, a world as full of bitterness as it is of hope. Well-intentioned parents and college administrators want to keep us safe from harm. They would like to wall us off from hatred. But they cannot be our shields forever. We have to strengthen ourselves.
Matthew T. King is a Trinity junior. His column, “at the water's edge,” runs on alternate Mondays.
Edit 2:45 PM: added word for clarification
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