With more than a dozen eateries, a bookstore, grocery store, laundry facilities and work-study opportunities on campus, students feel they have little need to ever leave Duke's grounds. Forays into Durham beyond Ninth Street are, for most undergraduates, few and far between, and many students feel little connection to the University's hometown.
More than 100 freshmen took steps to remedy that situation Saturday when they went "Into the City" as part of the Community Service Center's annual first-year service day, now in its fifth year. This was the first year the program included a bus tour of Durham, which Tori Hogan, CSC student co-director, said was a successful addition.
"This was a completely different year for Into the City because we added the component of the tour of Durham," she said. "It wasn't about getting [the students] to do a few hours of service, it was about getting them into the community.... It made it a very different experience for the students."
Freshman Joanna Shih, who volunteered Saturday at a local nursing home, said she appreciated the tour because it gave her a different perspective of the Durham community.
"[The tour] was really fun because I got to see a lot of the places around Durham that I normally wouldn't get to go because I don't have a car," she said. "I got to see a lot of places that were around close to campus that I could walk to."
Before boarding the buses for the half-hour tour, students heard remarks from President Nan Keohane and Mayor Bill Bell.
"For a long period of time Durham has cared about Duke, and increasingly Duke is caring about Durham," Keohane said. "We're not a 'Gothic Wonderland'--these are our neighbors."
Although Bell was unexpectedly delayed, he managed to greet the freshmen before they left for their sites, reiterating Keohane's assertion of the importance of forming a relationship with the town.
"He was basically encouraging [students] to explore Durham," Hogan, a senior, said. "He also offered to them... that he was interested in forming better connections between Duke and Durham, offering himself as a resource for the new students as a means for getting to know their neighborhood."
Shih said Keohane's and Bell's speeches helped her feel connected to the larger community.
"It was really nice that the mayor and President Keohane could take time out of their day to come talk to us," she said. "When the mayor came it really made me feel like a member of the Durham community, instead of just the Duke community."
At the end of the bus tour, participants started work with non-profit programs ranging from reading tutorials to homeless shelters to organizations that teach local citizens how to cultivate gardens.
Sophomore Katherine Healy, a member of the CSC programming staff and the site leader for a sustainable gardening initiative, echoed Keohane's sentiment that students could only benefit from developing a stronger relationship with the city of Durham.
"We're hoping to help the freshman class learn that there's a lot of ways to get involved in the Durham community and help out because there's a lot of people [who have] a negative view of Durham," she said. "They really shouldn't, and if they do, they should try to help out--it's where they're going to live for four years."
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