It's been four years and I still don't know quite what to make of Duke. I've wondered what kind of a theme could explain this place. Something made us all come to this school, situated in a "challenging" town so far from many of our homes.
Contrary to one possible description, I don't think Duke can be satisfactorily described as a safety school for top-tier Ivy applicants. While some colleges (I'm thinking of a visit to Tufts I made in my senior year of high school) virtually reek of resentment for more prestigious institutions, I don't think Duke has any such inferiority complex. One of the most redeeming qualities of discussions I've witnessed about how to change Duke is that we tend to compare ourselves not to other schools, but to a version of Duke as it can and ought to be.
No; if anything, we seem to have an overabundance of confidence, a pride that comes with a top-10 rank but the simultaneous conviction that our social atmosphere trumps anything to our north (in terms of ranking or geography).
Having only gone here, it would be hard for me to comparatively judge either our academic or social strength, even if at times I've had doubts about both. What I do know is that the tension between the two-the tension that super-achievers at Duke are miraculously supposed to have resolved-is not the non-issue that incoming freshmen often believe.
Rolling Stone's breathless portrayal of a vapid, hedonistic den of iniquity filled with status-minded "core fours" and "Duke 500 members" went a little overboard. Still, it exemplified two of the revelations about "campus culture" that came in the fallout of the lacrosse case: many of us spend a lot more time worried about drinking and going out than about taking an active approach to academics, and many people here are a lot more superficial than you'd expect a bunch of child geniuses to be.
On the one hand, a sense seems to prevail among many that $40,000+ per year (a figure Dukies love to cite until after a while they realize that it is more crass than endearing to do so) buys a lot of things-most importantly, a prestigious degree and its trappings, attained while having fun. This sense of entitlement can be stifling to the academic ambition of people who are smart enough to do just well enough, without having to work at it too hard.
By this account, if there is one thing that provides an unfortunate theme song for Duke, it may be the comfiness of undergraduates who stand to inherit their upper-middle-class legacy-with no more effort than what it takes to passively move through here.
But on the other hand, the initial, lacrosse-borne cries against "white male privilege" have lost some of their sparkle, considering that it was the players' money that first made them attractive targets for a politically symbolic railroading, then enabled them to pay a year of fees to the brilliant lawyers who-along with the truth-have set them free.
Before and during the lacrosse case, members of the team were cited as the epitome of the "privileged" mentality. I don't know whether that was ever really accurate, but I do know that such a charge can never be leveled against the three formerly indicted players again. Take Collin Finnerty's promise to "do everything I can to help others who face a situation similar to the one I had over the last year," which rings of a sincerity that makes Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's early statements in the case-a means to his political end-now seem utterly grotesque. It signals a departure from the passivity that can often reign at Duke; it shows a purpose, perhaps even a cause.
But what's to become of the rest of us, the ones who haven't been forced to reevaluate things in light of such a trauma? Students of a university that through "outrageous ambition" has catapulted itself into the ranks of schools two and three times as old, but in that glorious and garish nouveau-riche sort of way: partly by admitting the children of wealthy donors, regardless of whether they meet any sort of academic standards.
Endowed with brand new tobacco money, cut from the North Carolina wilderness and built from Gothic-looking stone purchased at a discount rate, Duke exhibits the American Dream in its gaudiness and loveliness and shows what ambition can lead to. But meanwhile, it is host to an atmosphere that many accuse of lacking true academic ambition. One of my professors noted that unlike many other top-tier schools, Duke does not endow its undergrads with the sense that they will be the country's future leaders. Professionals, perhaps; but for the time being, not presidents.
My career as a columnist here will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. A quiet question, perhaps rhetorical: At a school created by outrageous ambition, what are we to make of the fact that so many don't seem to share it?
Dave Kleban is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Tuesday. This is his final column.
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