On Tuesday night, I’m sitting in the common room of my new dorm. It’s shockingly nice—clusters of plush chairs are arranged in circles across the carpet, there are a few small TVs hanging on the white walls, and the tall, arching ceilings make the room feel more like a hotel lobby than a college dorm. There’s a person playing Chopin on the piano in the corner; she’s an elegant, wonderful pianist, and I’ve never seen her before in my life. That’s not altogether surprising, though. I don’t really know anyone here.
It’s Tuesday night, and I’m sitting in McIver dorm, a little community that’s not on West, Central or East, but on North Campus. Never heard of it? That’s probably because it’s at UNC.
This semester, I’m living in Chapel Hill. Let the calls of heresy reverb, but the lighter blue…isn’t so bad. When I return to Duke, I’m often asked, “What’s different over there?” The short answer is this: much more than I expected. But there’s not much value in listing differences—value comes from the way comparison helps you understand your home. It’s difficult to measure something without a ruler: how can we know we like the taste of chocolate ice cream, if it’s the only flavor we’ve ever tried? Do we really understand Duke if it’s all we’ve ever known? So perhaps it’s not so ironic that I’ve never felt more present at Duke than when I’m…not.
But after a month at UNC, many trips home and countless scribbles in my journal, there’s still one phenomenon that puzzles me.
After the initial “What’s different there?”, the questions from my Duke friends usually go something like this.
“Why are you in Perkins? Do you even have homework?”
“Do you have to go to class there?”
“You must have so much free time now!”
I first found myself playing along with the jokes. “Even I have work, too,” I’d laugh, soon turning back to my reading. I thought they were right: during the beginning of the semester, my assignments were less challenging than they’d been at Duke. But as the comments continued and my work became difficult, I started to feel a strange discomfort. “No, it still takes a lot of time,” I’d respond. “No, the classes are very similar.”
One day, after an exclamation of “Weird to see you doing work!” I decided to stop responding and start asking questions back.
“Why do you say that?” I asked my Duke friend.
“I mean, it has to be way easier, right? I was just wondering.” He walked off, and I sat there, thinking about why—of all the things people could ask about Chapel Hill—class difficulty is the one we just can’t shake.
There’s an idea that snakes its way through all these trivial quips and questions: smart students come to Duke, and the smarter the students, the harder the classwork is. While it’s not wrong that Duke is known to be an intellectually demanding place, there’s something problematic that seems to accompany this notion: smarter students and harder classwork means Duke is better, we are better, and smarter is better. The “better” I’m talking about isn’t better job prospects, and it isn’t better resumes. It’s a vast, shadowy sense of superiority—never spoken, always implied—that becomes clear when you take a step back and look at campus as an outsider.
“Do you even have homework?”
“Do you have to go to class there?”
“You must have so much free time now!”
These are silly, meaningless questions, but I suspect they betray the way many of us think: the smarter you are, the more value you have.
As soon as I was old enough to consider myself “smart,” I began the pernicious practice of tying my self-worth to my intellect. I was “pretty good” at most things. I was a decent athlete, but no prodigy; okay-looking, but not a model. What I did have was my brain. Over and over, it was what I was praised for, what I was noticed for, and what I was valued for. My teachers, employers and even parents treated it as some kind of exceptional birthright; I treated it as the only thing that made me special. And so I began creating a value system that benefitted me: the smarter you are, the more valuable you are.
To various degrees, I think many good students construct this kind of paradigm. There is a sense of inherent worth in picking through a dense paper, in the ability to write that essay faster than a friend, in tests and grades and academic performance. But when that sense of worth and value leads to the elevation of one person over another—manifesting in the condescension of “Is that even real work?” or “Do you actually have to study?”—it becomes less justified and more… stupid.
If you asked North Carolina what it thinks of Duke, it would probably say something like this: snobby, spoiled and presumptuous. In my two years, I haven’t met a single individual who behaves in those ways, but as a collective, it’s no wonder we give off a better-than-thou air. Maybe we actually believe it.
The more we internalize that smartness inheres superiority, the easier it becomes to believe we have everything to teach and nothing to learn. But we have a lot to learn—as individuals, as partners, and as a campus. The mark of true intelligence is opening ourselves up to challenge what we prioritize, how we think and what we consider valuable. It is the humility to know what we don’t know, and the acknowledgment that we have everything to learn from those around us.
Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs on alternate Fridays.
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Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.