God & Man at Duke

The Dude was just looking for a groovy class, man. Engineering was his bag and these big lecture halls weren't his scene, but whatever, man, the Dude, this Matt Bettis dude, needed to fill his time slot and get shaking on his history minor. And, like, American Dreams/American Realities sounded pretty far out. Hell, by the time Dean Gerald Wilson got to rapping on how everybody'd be getting a B no matter what went down, the Duke commune seemed straight down outta sight.

But when Dean Wilson said he dug everyone but Republicans, man, and, like, everyone else started laughing, Bettis was in the middle of one serious bummer. "This needs to get out," he thought and then got to writing down the "blatant indoctrination" Dean Wilson and the cats buying into the Duke system were whizgigging about on that first day of school last fall. The Dude just split--totally freaked out!--to the library, dumped the class and wrote up his bad trip for all the new counterculture to check out.

By February, it was all happening, but, like, there was no, no... peace this time, man. What used to be the lefties were the establishment, and the GOPers were the G-O-Hippies--so totally freaked out and uptight in the classroom, but, like, turning all these spaced-out Dukies on to a free exchange of ideas and views where the fuddy-duddies and the flower children could maybe all just groove someday. "I thought it was going to be like, alright, one thing happened and then that's it," the Dude says. "I didn't plan on people questioning and everything. You know, I wasn't trying to start some revolution here, but that's how it happened, you know?"

It was weird when, in 1951, a professor and recent graduate of Yale by the name of William F. Buckley went off on the establishment at his alma mater in God and Man at Yale, accusing that bastion of higher education of indoctrinating students like him to be atheistic socialists. "The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'" was the subtitle of this book calling for "the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities of the schools," and it reeked of conservatism from the campus to New Haven and beyond. It was like some jerk had exploded a bomb from stage right-wing for no reason--or at least no reason that anyone understood quite yet.

In Bettis, the conservative clan had a poster boy: an almost absolutely harmless senior from Chapel Hill, gym bag strapped over shoulder, dirty blonde mane hanging over eyebrows and the façade of an innocent, indoctrinated Duke dude who had emerged from his electrical engineering major and come out doing his "duty" in reporting academic assault.

Although Wilson, who is known as a liberal but also a joker (who also happens to get a whole lot of kids into law school), quickly sent Bettis a polite response, the poster dude was busy scouring the website of the Duke Conservative Union. But before he could click his way to the names of the Hippies he was looking to e-mail, up shot a majestic photo of the Chapel and in came a blaring orchestral performance of "Simple Gifts" as the following doctrine was revealed on screen--one line at a time:

"The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God and the guts to say: Yes, there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for and yes, if necessary, to die for. That is not 'ideological purity.' It is simply what built this country and kept it great." --Ronald Reagan

The DCU, its motto mixing Buckley's guts and the Gipper's brawn, sent Bettis the way of David Horowitz--former Socialist-turned-"neo-conservative" provocateur numero uno--who quickly snatched the first-day-of-class write-up for his online magazine and media echo chamber. But it took the DCU, a five-year-old club priding itself on being the thorn in the side of Duke's vast liberal establishment, five months to capitalize on the convenient accident that followed. Bettis' experience became the focus of a story in The Chronicle of Higher Education the same week that the DCU pulled off its biggest coup yet--more rabble-rousing than bringing Horowitz himself to speak, more convincing than denouncing a teacher's speech invitation to feminist/terrorist Laura Whitehorn and more campus-oriented than denouncing a homosexual union in the Chapel.

The Pearl Harbor full-page advertisement the DCU took out in Duke's Chronicle Feb. 9--an open letter to President Nan Keohane crying foul that nearly 85 percent of the professors in the major humanities and social sciences departments (with the notable absence of Public Policy Studies) are registered Democrats--caused what many saw as an unnecessary ruckus. Panel discussions marginalized the academic freedom rallying cry as juvenile jabber that ignored the inherent liberal basis in academe, while philosophy department chair Robert Brandon hanged from his own words and set much of the discourse off course.

In making so much noise for political awareness all over campus, though, the rising right may have become its own nuisance. The conservatives meant to balance things out in the classroom, but the Dude remains in the shadows in there, hidden under that protective umbrella, scared of the rain that didn't follow him inside.

Even Michael Munger, chair of the political science department, the DCU's faculty advisor and one of eight registered Republicans alluded to in the contentious ad, sees the right-wingers looking for vindication from him for countering the culture. "I'm willing to give them credit if they'll argue for it," Munger says. "I think that, in some ways, we're doing a pretty good job by the conservative students because we're presenting an alternative view or making them argue. The liberal students, in many cases, we're just patting on the head and saying, 'Good liberal, here's a biscuit.' So we're making a mistake by patronizing the liberal students. And the professors who take a liberal perspective in class and want to argue with the conservative students are doing the conservative students a favor. I think the conservative students, many of them that I have met, don't argue enough in class. They actually seem afraid."

Jeff Raileanu seems a little on edge himself. Sure, the DCU president is humble and not a rabble-rouser on the surface by any means, but his slight voice echoes what some of his peers have mentioned in passing--that being afraid in class stems from being afraid about their grades. For all the freedom many say they exploit and power they exert on campus as the new- wave Woodstockers, the armies of the right feel oppressed and withstand much less when they're just so, like, freaked out.

"We're certainly not an oppressed group on campus or anything like that," Raileanu boasts, and then, on the inside, "but we are a minority, and sometimes it can be difficult to get your message across."

But Madison Kitchens, the Karl Rove to Raileanu's Bush, remains cool-headed and quick-mouthed enough to keep finding ways to trumpet--or megaphone--the DCU's agenda. Slight and speaking with a liveliness that echoes from the back of his throat, confident and articulating unadulterated ideals, the senior economics major could star in The Godfather: The College Years. As executive director of the DCU, Kitchens seems eager to avoid any Rumsfeldian politicking, steadfastly fighting the establishment while upholding the organization's tongue-in-cheek status as "the vast right-wing conspiracy at Duke," a school that, like many others of its kind, sits largely closed off from the national scene.

Yet, the de facto leader of the on-campus counterculture is relatively counter-conservative himself. A staunch libertarian, Kitchens stands 50-50 on the political seesaw on national issues but finds himself siding with conservatives 90 to 95 percent of the time when it comes to campus issues, which plops him in the chunky center of the strange brew that is the DCU. "In my opinion," he says, sanguinely sipping his orange juice, "there's a little more diversity of thought within the DCU, ironically, than there is in many of these departments."

And, believe it or not, mini-Ken Kesey here isn't the only one digging that concept. Plenty of students bought the idea that even the neo-conservatives of the next generation could set up their own Woodstock-esque public campaign, and, if they rocked hard enough, maybe it would be worth giving a listen. "We've gotten a lot of support from people," Kitchens ruffles a hundreds-of-pages-thick book. "People have e-mailed me and have said, 'Look, I'm a Democrat, I'd love to have a beer with you, and I agree with you on this issue.' We've been encouraged by that a lot. I really haven't gotten too much negative feedback from it, so I think this is something that definitely people are concerned about."

But peeing on his publication? Well, maybe things aren't that groovy yet after all. Kitchens realizes that New Sense, the title of the DCU magazine he co-edits, sounds an awful lot like "nuisance," but he takes the abuse to heart, using the urinated copy of the magazine in a Perkins Library bathroom and the hijacked issues in the Bryan Center bins as fuel for a campus-wide fire that out-burned even the postgame basketball bonfires this winter.

So with a collective voice spanning from his libertarian ideology to his fellow conspiracists' far-right fervor, and echoing from New Sense funder the Collegiate Network (one of many influential interest groups and a subsidiary of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that Buckley began half a century ago) to Horowitz, Kitchens and Co. are content to keep truckin' with their new brand of free speech. "We sort of accept that gadfly role. But, for the most part, the reason that we do that is because we are such an intellectual minority on campus, particularly with the faculty and the administration. And you normally think of protesting being done from the left, and I think that's certainly the case. But as far as protesting on campus about campus policies, I think progressive protesters protesting at Duke is tantamount to Communist protesters in Castro's Cuba. To me, that's what it seems like: What are you protesting? They agree with you."

Despite the omnipresent opposition inherent in the "They" ultimately having the final (liberal) say, the G-O-Hippies don't have too many fans rooting for them as the underdog. But even if the left-leaning administration and faculty remain staunch in merely providing what Kitchens says is a lot pomp and circumstance to the issue of academic diversity, the conservative corps still has a battle to fight in the trenches of the quad, where volume lets the minority make a difference too.

Then, when it's not about God and Man but just about the kids, it seems clear that, of late, the mobilized, active renegades of the right are pushing work-hard-play-hard Duke to just simply think hard and listen up.

The lights came up at Cameron Indoor Stadium this month 26 years ago, and Jerry Garcia, not freaked out in the least, smiled the crowd with a song about getting things done and not moving much too slow: "Leaving Texas/Fourth Day of July/Sun so hot, clouds so low/The eagles filled the sky."

The tip went up at Cameron this past Jan. 29, and Sarah Hawkins, with her Cherry Garcia bob of hair, content with a job well done, flashed a smile she perfected interning in the White House.

Hawkins and a couple dozen others chilled out after a chilly night outside and a long afternoon of doling out buttons and bumper stickers. The gang, mostly comprised of beaming sorority sisters, ditched their parkas for Dubyas--thick, white "W"'s on their almost-Duke-blue T-shirts. As the Blue Devils went on to down Florida State, it was all happening for the Dubyas. They were on national television, holding up their "Bush-Cheney" signs (with a little "Go Duke!" etched on for good measure), part of the craziest commune at the school--an oh wow middle ground where a little healthy rebelliousness and a lot of healthy political awareness could expand the margins and flow with discourse like a big, blue lava lamp.

Ah...hemmmm!

There's the liberal student voice, clearing its throat after long disuse, calling out Hawkins, the founder and president of Duke Students for Bush who wouldn't hurt a fly yet barely dares to be a gadfly, for politicizing Holy Cameron.

And suddenly--Watch it!--there goes the venue, the forum, the battlefield, the lava lamp. God and Man forbid she start a happening, where the talking is a start and the finished product can come later, man.

"People like to get angry about stuff, and we gave them a reason to get angry, so I fully expect them to have a reaction," Hawkins says with her curious, almost-Duke-blue eyes. "But I think there was definitely more of a backlash because it was a conservative group."

Eleven days after the Dubyas, the long, strange trip hit the fan for the G-O-Hippies, and the Dude would be screwed by Friday the 13th. We were freaking from the right, and we were freaking from the left, but somewhere in the middle, man, maybe both sides found some peace.

Can you dig it?