Since Duke’s fraternities moved off campus in 2021, residents of the neighborhoods surrounding East Campus have expressed mixed feelings towards students — Greek-affiliated or otherwise — living in their communities.
Duke currently has around 800 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate students living off campus, according to Elinor Landess, assistant dean of students and director of off campus and community life. While the majority of these students have fostered positive relationships with their neighbors, some have created a negative impression that has long clouded locals’ view of student residents on the whole.
University administration did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment on the views expressed by residents throughout this article in time for publication.
“I think that the vast majority of off-campus Duke students are probably exceptionally pleasant to be neighbors with,” said longtime Durhamite Daryn Berlin. “The unfortunate truth is the minority that I have encountered over and over for 30 years are the ones that spoil it for everybody else.”
Berlin has lived in a variety of neighborhoods around Duke’s East Campus since 1994. Over the years, he noticed the same kind of students disrupting his nights — a group he refers to as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
He claimed the Duke students he’d interact with would be “the most generous and lovely” neighbors by day, but “wretched, awful, disgusting” ones by night. Setting off fireworks, throwing beer cans, screeching tires — they’d party regularly from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. with “extraordinary noise.”
While this first “extraordinarily challenging” experience took place at a Trinity Park apartment, Berlin said the situation is the same 30 years later at Brightleaf on Main.
“I’m talking about middle-of-the-night partying, vandalizing random things in the apartment complex … [and] leaving trash wherever,” he said.
Berlin reported calling Durham police on the students multiple times, claiming that the University’s resources for dealing with these kinds of situations were “useless” and that “nothing has ever changed.”
He stressed that the handful of students causing problems for local Durham residents is not representative of the entire student body. Rather, he pointed to a small group who, “generation after generation, year after year, participat[e] in the same activities” and treat Durham as their “playground.”
While not every resident The Chronicle spoke to shared Berlin’s concerns, many pointed to similar problems.
Residents of the Burch Avenue neighborhood, for instance, noted that students routinely sped through the area, ignoring stop signs and even allegedly “[hit] one of the neighbors’ cats [once].” Susan Sewell, a Trinity Park resident, said students going to popular brunch spots such as Foster’s Market and Guglhupf add to traffic levels and often park their cars in residential neighborhoods.
Another issue residents consistently identified as problematic was noise levels during parties. Ryder Sammons, a high school teacher and Durham resident, described hearing students howling like wolves in the early hours of the morning and finding litter on the sidewalks after parties.
“As a dog owner … sometimes the broken glass is unpleasant,” he said.
Sammons characterized his overall impression of students’ off-campus behavior as “mostly good fun” and asserted that Duke is “trying to really do a better job” of keeping larger events — like celebrations on the last day of classes — on campus. Still, many residents attested that late-night traffic was bothersome.
DUPD recently began enforcing a Durham County Misdemeanor Program, which rewards first-time misdemeanor offenders for good behavior by offering to erase records of the first offense — which can include noise complaints — if they make it through a trial period without reoffending. According to longtime Burch Avenue resident Alisa Johnson, that "made a really big difference.”
“That has certainly cut down a number of parties, and … the parties have been quieter since,” she said.
Johnson is the chair of Durham Neighborhoods United, an organization of local residents that formed in 2013 to “address the issues caused by Duke University off-campus fraternities and Student Living and Athletic Groups in the neighborhoods adjacent to the University.”
The group developed protocols for dealing with “loud and invasive parties” that encourage residents to engage with the students themselves first before calling the police at their non-emergency number, only using 911 if there is evidence of “violent or threatening actions.” The group also provides information on how to communicate with University offices and the city about student behavior complaints.
“We have no complaints with undergraduate students who are living off campus … who are not connected with fraternities [or] sororities,” Johnson said. “We've never had any problems with them.”
She draws the source of the problem back to the “commercial-level” socialization fraternities cultivate in residential neighborhoods, emphasizing that parties hosted by non-Greek-affiliated students “aren’t that large.”
The University’s solution to tension between students living off campus and their Durhamite neighbors was the Good Neighbor Program, which is overseen by the recently established Off Campus and Community Life Office within Student Affairs.
The program aims to orient students to life in a residential neighborhood, while also establishing standards to decrease disorderly and disruptive conduct. Through partnerships with a number of University organizations, local police and Durham Neighborhoods United, the program engages in outreach with student and non-student residents alike, sharing educational materials on appropriate interactions between residents and resources for reporting problematic behavior.
However, some residents think some of the program’s guidelines are unrealistic. One policy, which advises students to keep gatherings to less than 30 people, is routinely violated, according to Johnson.
“I don't think it's possible for fraternities to host the kind of parties that are described in Duke's Good Neighbor program,” she said. “Just by their very nature, they're going to be much, much bigger, and it's the size that brings about the problem.”
She added that her concerns over large events in residential neighborhoods are not just on behalf of longtime Durhamites but also for the students themselves.
“If you have a fire in a single residence house with 100 people, what's the plan to get people out?” Johnson asked. “If you have 100 people on a porch, and the porch … is not constructed to hold that many people, what do you do when it collapses?”
Johnson advocated for the fraternities to move back on campus — “not just because they don’t belong in the neighborhoods, but because ultimately it will be safer for everybody concerned.”
However, for students who are living off-campus, Johnson hopes they “take full advantage and become involved with the activities of the neighborhood.”
Sammons thinks graduate students in particular are “doing a decent job of trying to get involved in the neighborhood,” though he sees room for improvement with undergraduates.
“I would love to start seeing them at neighborhood meetings,” he said.
“The more involvement, the better,” Johnson agreed.
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Max Tendler is a Trinity first-year and a staff reporter for the news department.