A couple months after the release of the Campus Life and Learning report--an in-depth study of undergraduate life at Duke--administrators and campus leaders are still reviewing how the information will be used.
"I'm not going to lie and say that [Duke Student Government] has complete power over student culture and is in the best position of anyone to address these issues, but we do have a role to play," DSG President Elliott Wolf, a junior, wrote in an e-mail.
The study, which tracked the Classes of 2005 and 2006 across their undergraduate careers, examined how and why various groups of students experience their college education differently.
Although the project was originally geared toward the experiences of minority students, the scope was expanded to examine a number of variables, like socioeconomic class, greek life and gender.
"From the beginning, we didn't want this to just be a study on race," Robert Thompson, dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, said in June.
Although the study revealed many positive aspects of campus culture, it also shed light on a number of problematic areas-such as a "striking" decrease in students' self-esteem when they arrive at Duke and the prevalence of self-segregation.
Wolf said he hopes to address the latter of these issues in the upcoming year. "As DSG, we do have some influence there," he said.
In addition to confirming the existence of self-segregation on campus, the CLL report also discovered that students' social networks at Duke closely resemble their social circles from high school.
"People tend to replicate some of their high-school social network-particularly with ethnic and racial background-even when we restrict it to new friends at Duke," said Kenneth Spenner, professor of sociology and one of the principal investigators in the study.
Wolf added that DSG had a few ideas to address the issue after students return in the fall including revising how student groups are chartered and acquire funding to encourage interactions between diverse groups.
The study was designed to be independent of the administration, but the breadth and relevance of the data to University policy have made it a valuable resource-one that, although not yet addressed formally, has been read by many top administrators and faculty members.
"There's a policy side too--what Duke can do to address some of the differences," Spenner said.
Members of the Campus Culture Initiative, a committee commissioned by President Richard Brodhead in the wake of the lacrosse incident, were given copies of the report.
The information will be considered when the committee continues to meet in coming months to discuss issues of alcohol, athletics, race and gender/sexuality.
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