OPINION | CAMPUS VOICES
Seniors, our Duke isn't coming back
By Jake Malone | September 28, 2020The Duke that was the backdrop to our dream senior year isn’t COVID-compatible.
The Duke that was the backdrop to our dream senior year isn’t COVID-compatible.
It’s time to confront the issue head on: IFC and Panhel’s time is up.
In Augustinian fashion, tears form a pillow and on them, hope rests, making tears a part of the texture of hope.
Everything we consume is imbued with the lives and labor of people that facilitate their creation.
Daunted by my own ability to “work past eleven or twelve” and “seriously nap,” I began to fear that my goal of achieving morning-person status is truly a Sisyphean task.
Six sick students, Duke says to us. Six sick students and you all can stay.
I popped a Vyvanse to push past the fatigue, and headed out for a midday bar-hopping Tinder date.
We don't, and we couldn't, come to Duke in order to learn every fact and protocol we'll need in life. Instead, we should be here to learn how to approach life.
Maybe, you will encounter someone who is considering leaving this Earth. And maybe, you will help teach this someone that to stay here with us is not a worse fate than death.
The question then becomes if social media’s focus on the “user” refers to the human, or if the “user” is actually just the algorithm that manipulates us behind the scenes.
Christians pretending that there’s a separation of Church and state is par for the course, but Christians choosing to bash other religions in an effort to discredit them while at the same time sensationalizing themselves is particularly wild.
Political disagreements with the Trump administration or ethical questions about vaccine distribution should not stop Duke students from protecting our community by getting vaccinated.
The depiction of abstention as a byproduct of privilege distorts the real reasons why some nonvoters don’t vote.
Our breadsticks are for smart children. Not you.
I was a digital serf, a laborer toiling on the data aggregation farm of the oligarchs in San Francisco. My reward was but a pittance, a small hit of dopamine in exchange for every single marketable fact about my existence.
Students in 2020, many of whom do not remember a world without Facebook, are not the same as they were in 2004. We must hold Facebook's new product to higher privacy standards.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused an immense amount of pain, fear, and disappointment in the institutions that many of us trusted at one point in our lives. Instead of mocking this fear and skepticism, we need to look at where it comes from. And for members of academic institutions, we need to examine our own failures in creating lasting trust.
So when I talk about lungs, I'm working to not automatically think of my own mortality and the crumbling of our organs into ash. Instead, I'm beginning to see the breath and life that I receive and circulate and give—the parts of humanity that are beautiful, immortal, timeless.
Being fearful of one another doesn’t drive the virus out. Rather, Duke students and the Durham community should rely on one another to slow the spread of Covid-19 safely and honestly.
At Duke, I felt caught between prayer and pretending to be rich, so I kept my jobs and rationed my refund checks. I didn’t always have the cash, checks, credit, connections or concerned parents to keep up with my peers. But I did have the cornrows and the courage to put my best wig on and march through the Blue Devil circus, finessing my finances and cultivating my way out of debt.