This past week, I made a trip to Dublin, Ireland, where I will be studying abroad for the next three and a half months.
The historical legacies of efforts to chip away at the prominent injustices that mar Duke haven’t been in vain and we owe it to the agitators and activists that paved way for us to reside here, to continue it. Even if Duke may never stray from the discriminative intentions it was created with, the ubiquitous struggle to make it at least survivable is honorable, to say the least.
Editor’s note: As advice for the Class of 2022 has piled up in recent weeks, The Chronicle staff took it upon ourselves to answer all the most important questions first-years could have.
“I have no idea how I got in here.”
Swing districts. Purple regions. The mythical undecided voter, who has yet to choose between Clinton and Trump one week before the election.
Last Spring, Duke announced that incoming first-year students, aside from those in varsity sports, would no longer have the option to choose a roommate.
It’s October, 2010. The cool breeze, a harbinger of the fast approaching autumn days, brushes against your pre-pubescent body.
Think you know us? You have no idea.
With the semester only days underway, we’ve already seen some of the worst of our nature in and around our campus—racial epithets, skirmishes around Silent Sam and likely dozens of other incidents that never rose to the attention of public scrutiny—often without any clear offender to blame.
Instead, in the age of MeToo, we should seek to reorganize the ancient power structure of the ivory tower toward a more a healthy, equitable mentor-ship structure where faculty mentors are held accountable for their actions, and where prestige and power do not absolve predators of their abuses.
“Lowered expectations mean that everybody’s happy.” This was the quote one of my best friends from high school chose as their senior quote.
When I was a kid, I never dreamed of being a princess. I never wanted to be a firefighter, a policewoman or even a superhero.
However, it would be a disservice to the multifaceted nature of Larry Moneta’s story to cast him solely as a collection of mistakes and triumphs. He remains a complicated and enigmatic figure in part because his position at Duke doomed him to that role.
The last time I went to Shooters was mid-March. Until then, I felt relatively safe when I “rolled Shoots.”
Today, my dad asked me if I remember how I felt exactly two years ago, during my first week of my freshman year.
“I’m having trouble with your class. I swear I’m trying.” a student pleads to me in my office.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” This is Socrates’ whole method reduced to a refrigerator magnet, but its insight is profound. We cannot live well if we do not shake ourselves out of our complacency. We must question what we are doing and why. If we haven’t interrogated our beliefs, how can we know them to be true?
Now more than ever, Duke must seize this opportunity to go forward in the removal of these odes to racist violence in a critical and intentional way.
There is a difference in noticing that you are not like everyone around you and feeling like those differences ostracize you. Noticing my own Blackness comes when I recognize how little Black people there are in the social circles I find myself in. Whether it be my social group, my major, my extracurricular clubs and activities, or my work-study job I am constantly noting the disproportionately low number of familiar faces in a concentrated environment. These moments, however, are not what concerns me about Duke’s commitment to Black students.
