I wish Duke assigned more group projects. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, I feel fine.
Few things strike fear into the hearts of Duke students faster than a group project. As the Professor begins assigning groups, there is a panicked flurry of glances around the room, each student trying separate the weak from the strong. The kid looking out the window in the back? Fingers crossed they’re in another group. The people in the front who always raise their hands? Students silently pray to join that bunch.
Professors seem to rejoice in the pain that is a group assignment, whether it's a lab, a paper, a presentation or the myriad of other tasks they manage to concoct. For instance, my professor this semester decided that a perfect final project would be a sixteen-person group paper. On torture. As I’ve sat locked in a room over the last several days editing this monstrosity, I wonder if he intended us to really connect with this topic by having us actually live it. We have about 90 pages of material that reads more like Steinbeck’s stream of consciousness than anything resembling an analytical research paper.
My group members have been fantastic, though; everyone wrote great individual sections. We’ve been researching for weeks. I’ve never seen a group of people work this hard. But knitting together sixteen different people’s styles of writing to read as one coherent paper is quite a daunting task.
And one of the best tasks I’ve been assigned at Duke.
Out of any assignment type out there, group projects are the most representative of real life. Most jobs consist mainly of group work, whether that’s designing plans for buildings, writing legal briefs, conducting research or designing new technology. We very rarely go it alone. What’s more, we don’t always get to choose the group of people we have to work with. Learning how to work with a large group of people on one project is one of the most critically useful skills out there.
Preparation for our careers, however, isn’t the only reason we should want more group project experience. Social activism succeeds through collaboration. Coalition building works because we convince people to take ownership within a movement.
Group projects present the classic collective action problem: how do you get apathetic group members to care about the project and help move it forward? Letting them free ride is a lose-lose scenario for everyone, and is likely to breed resentment among the active group members. Nearly every group project in the history of group projects has had this kind of problem, and forcing students to confront it in the classroom is the best possible preparation for confronting it in real life.
The reason that social justice movements still exist is because inequality and general apathy still exist as well. I’ve experienced that apathy particularly in movements to combat sexual assault on college campuses. No matter how many times we cite the number–1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college–it never really seems to register. No matter how many organizations work to combat sexual assault–the Women’s Center, Duke Support, Breaking Out, Women’s Collective, We are Here Duke, the Administrative Task Force on Sexual Assault Prevention and countless more–I’m still asked on a regular basis why there isn’t anything happening on campus working to prevent sexual assault.
There is little desire to take ownership of what’s happening on our campus and join the work of the groups that already exist. But yet the success of movements that work to combat sexual assault fundamentally depends on everyone’s care and participation; it requires a culture change that emphasizes consent, peoples’ bodily autonomy, and rejects sexual violence. That’s a collective action problem: it’s a lot easier to free ride off others’ activism than to take part in it yourself.
Public apathy isn’t limited to movements combating sexual assault. Recent hate crimes on campus, including the defacing of a Black Lives Matter poster with a racial slur and a homophobic death threat written on an East Campus dorm, have perfectly showcased apathy among Duke students. Some of us attended the rallies and perhaps had some conversations with our friends, but most of us aren’t taking any further action now. As Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors challenged us a couple weeks ago, “What will you do to save black lives?” What will we as privileged Duke students do to help those downtrodden and forgotten in our society? What, specifically, will each one of us do?
Group projects are a microcosm of the type of collective action and apathy problems we face in everyday life. They’re the best possible practice we can get if we want to change the world around us. Sometimes group projects fail because of apathetic members, just as social justice movements fail when communities don’t care. As Jack Donahue–the first-year who was targeted last week with a homophobic slur–said, “To those idly standing by, what you are doing is as hurtful to me and my people as anything that any bigot can scrawl on my wall or even nail to my back.”
We need to begin seeing our existence in the world as a group project. None of us exist alone, and we achieve no progress unless we all decide to cast off our apathy. The world would be a better place if we lived life as a collective endeavor. We owe some effort to our group members.
Dana Raphael is a Trinity junior. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.
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