Are student leaders leading students?

Remember the good old days of Duke?

Not the days when beer flowed like water, fraternities lived on East Campus and Krzyzewskiville was Camelot.

Think back to the days when protests on the quad drew more ralliers than reporters. When students did not have to switch on CNN to bring passionate discussion into their dorm rooms. When campus selective houses spawned discussions about Duke's racial climate. When the campus' student leaders rallied students behind their politically charged messages and led them to significant acts of protest.

Like the keg-doused days of Duke's history, some elements of a politically active campus remain. An NAACP boycott of South Carolina led some students to head for Virginia instead of partying at the traditional Myrtle Beach-based beach week. And a Duke Conservative Union-sponsored speech gave students a chance to question the multicultural values embraced by academia.

But a majority of the student body swam in South Carolina anyway, and only 35 people showed up for the April lecture.

Student leaders have long blamed an apathetic student body for fostering a climate that encourages students to be more concerned with homework than with larger issues of the campus'-or the nation's-future. The student body, however, rarely questions how effectively its "leaders" nurture a more passionate atmosphere.

In the mid-'90s, the campus was ablaze with student debate and teeming with students shaping that discourse. In 1993 and 1994, Duke students held forums and formed new organizations to oppose the plan to create an all-freshman East Campus, a move that would shake up the Gothic Wonderland's entire social system. On a larger scale, the beating of Rodney King, Jr. spawned reflection and debate in dorm rooms and in classrooms, whether from a broad, national perspective or by examining the racial dynamics of this southern university.

Both local and national issues caused students to scream-loudly. Only the loudest voices, the ones most likely to provoke change on campus or in the world, attracted the support of huge groups of students. It seemed like everyone had something to say about the relationship of fraternity culture to race or the relationship of academics to a changing social scene; the students who said it best were dubbed student leaders.

"Duke leaders tend to fall into two categories: administrative leaders and popular opinion leaders...," says Lazarus, who classifies himself in the former group. "For many campus leaders, that tends to be because Duke students tend to be bright and intelligent. They understand that if all student leaders just pound away with student opinion without finding out how the administration is going to react to it, that there's less of a chance of whatever action or idea they have becoming real."

The tilt toward administrator-focused leadership seems to be a distinct shift from the modus operandus used by several former student leaders. Sarah Dodds, Trinity '95 and co-founder of Prism House, then Spectrum House, attributes part of her successful student movement to confront race relations to the fact that direction came from students, not from University officials.

"At some point there's a disconnect," she explains. "At some point, being very involved with the administration... takes you away from what students are thinking, what students need, what's important to students."

Of course, involvement with administrators is necessary to achieve any significant policy change. While "it's up to students to sort of set priorities, lay out the things they need to address," Dodds says, administrators are often responsible for carrying them out.

Like Dodds' movement to spur discussions about race relations, the student anti-sweatshop movement of 1998-99 started with student passion and eventually drove officials to meet demands, this time by breaking off contracts with companies that used sweatshop labor to make Duke apparel. Because anti-sweatshop organizations were fairly new to college campuses, Students Against Sweatshops founder Tico Almeida, Trinity '99, worked to forge a relationship with administrators-a task that was difficult, considering that SAS was directly challenging administrative practice. Granted, the task climaxed in a 30-hour Allen Building sit-in, which resulted in the University's commitment to obtain, within a year, a full list of factory locations.

"While a DSG president already has some level of standing in the view of administrators by the fact that she or he won an election, other student leaders have an added burden," Almeida wrote in an e-mail. "They must create their standing in the eyes of administrators and the campus by using particularly strong arguments and demonstrating clearly that they have student support.... In the case of the public disclosure issue, our burden was even greater because administrators had to choose between the arguments of non-elected student leaders and companies like Nike, which were threatening to cut ties with the University if it implemented a disclosure requirement."

While student leaders are becoming the cronies of administrators, the focus of student debate is shifting from broad political issues to more localized campus talks, which can be productive in their own way: Who knows what the new dorm would look like if administrators had not singled out specific students and asked their opinions?

"I don't think administrators come to students for approval," says Freedman, who deals primarily with administrators on campus dining issues. "They come to students with fundamental ideas."

Freedman attributes the increasingly administrator-driven talks to an administration that is increasingly accessible.

"I think the administrators have created an atmosphere where anyone can get someone to listen to them," he says. "Most administrators have an open-door policy. It helps create the right relationship. There are individual students who don't know how the campus works, but student leaders feel their voices are heard."

But administrators paying attention to student leaders' voices does not necessarly mean that they are hearing student voices, as they might with a more student-driven leader-selecting process. "When you're very involved with administrators off the bat, it's maybe one or two students working with administrators, not broad-based student support," Dodds says.

Based on her experience, Dodds says the cycle of student leadership has up-periods and down-periods. When she arrived at Duke, she says, few issues sparked student passion. But during the course of her time at the University, hot national topics came up-most notably the beating of Rodney King, Jr.

Toward the end of the last academic year, glimmers of concern about broad-scale issues were apparent: the Duke NAACP's push for a Myrtle Beach boycott and DSG resolutions supporting same-sex marriages in campus religious facilities. Still, hot topics are largely localized, with campus drinking culture and residential planning at the top of the list. Although students and student leaders participate significantly in discussions about these issues, the debates themselves are largely framed by administrators' questions and surveys.

"[Political activity] forces you to learn how to have intellectual dialogue and debate on an issue that may be very personal, but you can't take it personally," says Dodds. "When the campus is apathetic or maybe in a quiet period, there's not as much opportunity to be in the forefront of something."

With the upcoming presidential election, the campus could erupt into robust debates about presidential politics. But first, students must refocus their attention: While some campus concerns are pressing, there is a world outside of the Gothic Wonderland.