Why Duke bothers to form committees on how to improve itself-instead of just asking me-I'll never know. If this college is serious about changing for the better, here's three places to start:
- Stop giving contract employees a rough break.
Duke deserves praise for many of its employment practices. The University offers most employees considerable access to its massive resources, whether through job training, continuing education or the many initiatives targeted at children of employees. Also commendable is the $10/hr base pay rate that the administration instituted two years ago.
Still, something's rotten in the state of Duke employment: contract employees, those workers at separate businesses such as Alpine, McDonald's and Chick-Fil-A, are largely shut out from these benefits. Despite being critical to Duke's continuing operations, contract employees are often paid far less ($7/hr for many) and sometimes receive no insurance plans or health benefits of any kind. In the past, the administration has been largely indifferent to calls to extend the pay rate and health benefits guaranteed to Duke employees into the contract sphere, washing its hands of responsibility by saying they don't control the terms of employment for these workers. That's an irrelevant objection: They control the contract and could easily demand better terms if they cared to. And although maybe one guy ever in the history of humanity has actually been convinced by the "it's the right thing to do" argument, I'll try it: Treating contract employees as full Duke employees is the right thing to do. It would boost Duke's image in Durham, raise employee morale and give the people who brew your coffee and serve your meals a fair break. Moreover, it would honor Duke's aspiration to respect principles beyond its own bottom line. Building a school that purports to "higher learning" on the backs of low-paid, unsupported workers is just plain stupid.
- Eliminate the minor annoyances that plague student life.
Here I'm thinking of two specific things: parking and the search bar on the Duke home page. Look, I understand that parking is a treasure to be jealously guarded around here, but parking enforcement is and has always been arcane, unfair and often insane. I don't know whether the drive to secure every possible parking spot like it's the Crown Jewels stems from the administration or from Parking and Transportation Services itself, but whoever is responsible needs to understand the enormous amount of ill will they're generating among the student body. Liberalizing parking-whether that be through lower fines, more lenient ticketing, even 20-minute loading and unloading zones behind dorms-would go far in improving student attitudes toward their own administrators.
Finally, the Duke search bar: Jesus Christ on a bicycle, is there any more ignorant and nonfunctional electronic tool in the entire world than this non-searching search bar? This is probably a seriously minor issue for most people, but for some reason I find myself attempting to use this search bar ALL THE TIME, and as far as I can tell, it does not "search" in any traditional sense of that word. It's mind-blowing how ineffective this search bar is. If you need facts and information, use Google. Anything to avoid the blighted, purgatorial stupidity of the Duke search bar.
- Treat people like people, damn it.
It's shocking how little we've learned from being put through the year-long grinder of the lacrosse case. Before the evidential tide turned, the defendants were vilified as icons of white male privilege, the sinister products of a morally bankrupt ruling class. Now that they're free men again, the pendulum's swung the other way, and there's been a rush to hold them up as angelic, wholly clean-cut gentlemen. Frankly, both tendencies disgust me. They stem from the same horrifying willingness to devour individuals for the sake of politics and ideology. I've never met any of the guys in the lacrosse case; I do know they've handled themselves with grace and restraint throughout this whole ugly affair, and they and their families have come off looking a hell of a lot more dignified than their accusers and critics ever will, and that's all I'm qualified to say about it.
To anyone that ever used or is still using the lives of three men to justify your own tiny agenda, be that liberal, conservative, communist, whatever: shame on you.
To anyone who wondered why students were so ambivalent during the legal proceedings, here's why: We've become so difference-obsessed at this college that we can't see plain injustice anymore, objective injustice. It has to be "white injustice" or "black injustice"-parsed into categories of race, gender or social class in order to be digested. I don't want to belittle that mode of thinking; there's a limited value to it. But when we spend more time on the [your category here] experience than the human experience, we've gone way too far. If all of us-students, faculty, staff and alumni-can't take the minimal time and energy it takes to judge individuals on their own merits, rather than as members of some damn group or category or cogs in our ideological worldview, then we are well and truly lost.
Despite my practiced cynicism, I'm a wild optimist at heart. I can't help but think we'll get better. To crib from Alex Jones, it's my sincere hope that all of us, at Duke and elsewhere, will "get fired up about the real things, the things that matter! Creativity, and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit!"
That's it, that's all I have to say. It's been a pleasure.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday. This is his final column.
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