Last Saturday in Cameron, I had one of the scariest experiences of my life. From the very beginning when the "Poltergeist" girl said, "They're baaack!" to the very end when Tony Lang took a charge with 10.8 seconds left to seal our semifinal victory, I felt charged with energy. The atmosphere, the mood, the cheering all contributed to an adrenaline rush beyond description. When we finally won, the upsurge of relief nearly overwhelmed me; I turned and hugged a stranger standing next to me.
Despite the energy and emotion, despite the positives, one visual image frightened me. During the cheer, "Let's go Duke!" thousands of students packed into Cameron raised their right arms with fists clenched in a manner reminiscent of old films of Hitler Youth rallies. Now before anyone takes offense, I'm not equating the Cameron Crazies with Hitler Youth (if I did that, I'd be including myself). What I'm saying is that at the points of highest emotional intensity, we were all captured in a group-event mob mentality focusing our energy on an event over which we had no control yet in which we had a huge emotional investment. All mobs fixate on something--we focus on the success of Duke basketball.
What scared me so much about the game came from a personal realization. Though I consider myself a rational Duke student proud of Duke's academic reputation, I had some measure of self-worth tied up in that game. Perhaps few others felt as I did, but on hearing "They're baaack!" I immediately thought, "We're baaack!" Reflecting later, I decided that I place so much importance on Duke basketball because it truly sets Duke apart from its peer institutions. When we say, "Let Duke be Duke," we're really saying, "Let Duke win basketball games."
Much time and energy in the Chronicle and other Duke publications has been spent documenting Duke students' academic inferiority complex with respect to schools like Harvard or Princeton. Duke's basketball success allows us to say, "Not only are we good students, but we also have great basketball team." When our team proves the second half of the equation, the campus explodes. By contrast, we take little group pride in Duke's academic successes. By dethroning Harvard, the national math champions for the last eight years, to win this year's math competition, our math team accomplished a feat analogous to N.C. State's double-overtime win against UCLA in the 1975 final four; our computer science team placed first among all American universities in an important international programming contest beating out schools with proven CPS reputations such as MIT. When I learned of our victories, however, I had no sense of the shared accomplishment I feel when our basketball team has even the most minor regular-season success.
Without a doubt, I contribute as little to the basketball team with my cheering as would I contribute to the math team by wishing them good luck. By what right can I claim more satisfaction from a basketball victory than from the math team's success? To a large extent, I believe we are defined as much by outside perceptions of Duke as we are by our own expectations. Flying back to school after spring break last year, a stranger, having seen my Duke T-shirt when he boarded the plane, left his seat mid-flight, approached me and said, "Just wanted to let you know that your boys lost--have a nice flight." He then returned to his seat.
Because Duke has achieved national name-recognition outside of the academy through basketball, Duke's validation, like that of so many other less academically prestigious schools, comes from its athletic successes. People who know little about scholarly pursuits associate the names Harvard and Yale with intelligence and scholarship; those same people hear Duke and think basketball.
I've become a basketball freak. To my regret, I'll probably never get that same electric thrill upon hearing that out computer science team is the best in the nation, as I will by a Grant Hill dunk, but at least I'm thinking, thinking that Duke defines itself by how we, the undergraduates, see ourselves. Though not many non-academicians outside Duke either know or care, this year Duke has proven that it can "talk the talk and walk the walk" in academics as well as any other university. Perhaps it's just me still playing the stupid "name game" I played when applying to colleges and still regretting that certain northeastern schools' reputations still eclipse Duke's, but I truly believe that saying "let Duke be Duke" will never mean Duke is as good as but different than peer universities academically until we stop associating Duke's prestige with its basketball team's.
Alex Rogers is a Trinity sophomore.
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