About a month ago on a late Tuesday night, I was in The Chronicle’s office finishing production with several other editors when we saw a Fix My Campus post saying the first floor of Perkins was flooded. Five of us quickly grabbed a camera and rushed over to see what happened. We didn’t know if the flood would be worth an article, but we were curious.
Three and a half years ago I woke up strapped to a Duke Hospital bed with an IV sprouting from my wrist and a monitoring machine beeping softly by my bedside.
“N***** lover." I came home from the library to find the racial slander scribbled on the front door of my college apartment. Two racially-charged incidents occurred within two days at Duke University. Following the first incident, many students, including myself, used social media platforms to express their anger and to call for administrative accountability. I never imagined that I would be the target of the second incident.
We read with interest the comments made by John Zhu, the Graduate School’s senior public affairs officer, concerning graduate student pay in the Chronicle’s April 25 article, “Grad students ask for $15 per hour.”
Every first year has their thing. Usually, it’s something they did in high school and really excelled at or some incredible accomplishment. For me, it was journalism.
My Dad used to listen to this station called 95.7 The Ride all the time growing up. It wasn’t my favorite music (lots of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, etc.) but now that I’ve come to college I made a Spotify playlist with a bunch of ride classics. I find myself listening to that music when I’m missing home and feeling sentimental and also because I’ve realized it’s actually Good.
Ultimately, the 2017-2018 academic year has ended similarly to many before it: with small victories made, lessons learned and with considerable obstacles remaining on the horizon.
Nothing about The Chronicle is guaranteed.
It’s for the Cardi B concert. Don’t worry. Tons of people are on here, I told myself.
What are the classes I would have dared to take, the people I would have dared to reach out to for help, the conversation I would have dared to have?
You ask me for meaning. And I give you clothes.
While the LDOC committee members scramble to get another act together last second, Editorial Board has taken it upon ourselves to suggest a number of possible substitutions that would surely win over the student body.
Whether a student is religious or secular, the Duke experience should be one in which every student feels comfortable practicing their system of belief proudly.
The U.S. cannot afford to avoid confronting mass human rights crises.
We have all become used to seeing laughable leadership from the White House, but we hoped for a little more from our very own Allen Building.
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As an organization that is devoted to shaping Duke students into informed and socially-aware young people and to ensuring justice and equitable opportunity for all, the Duke NAACP Chapter stands in full support of the brave student activists of the People’s State of the University.
For the first two years, I learned what it felt like to not take oneself too seriously—after all, I’d literally just learned my ABC’s, so I wasn’t too harsh about imposing limits and expectations on myself. If I could conjugate at least one verb correctly, it didn’t matter if the rest of my sentence was off.
Don’t stress the little stuff. Focus on people. Relationships will always matter more.
As alumni of the University, we implore Duke University to meet the group’s list of demands, which includes implementing a $15/hr pay for all employees, hiring faculty of color, and increasing CAPS and Duke Women's Center funding for trauma-trained counselors and psychologists, among many others. We ask that you take the time to sit down with activists and other student leaders and execute actionable steps to address their concerns.
