I have this fear. It's two years down the road, and I'm interviewing for a job. I'm an English major, so it'll be at someplace like Chili's. I'll sit down, coiffed and prepared, and my interviewer will see AB, Duke University on my application. He'll have some vague recollection of an old Rolling Stone expose and wonder to himself if I'm a coke-snorting sexual deviant.
Maybe this fear is unfounded. I clean up nice and it's possible that, two years from now, the bad associations and dark cloud that seems to have settled over Duke will be a distant memory. But right now, it's hard to shake the feeling that we're at a university that has lost some of its luster. It's a little less glamorous than it was a year or two ago. The prestige of Duke and the job offers and esteem that should come with it-which I've been banking on for a good two years-are no longer so infallible, so completely certain.
Last fall, our undergraduate program dropped from number five to eight. We've lost Coach G and no one knows what happened to men's basketball. We've wrestled a few scandals and one recent drug bust. It's all starting to pile up and, as the hard-knocks mingle with the failing reputation of the student body, a faculty member, in response to my last column, proclaimed, "There are many post-graduate jobs that require unquestioned honorable behavior. For many of these opportunities one could now never confidently recommend a Duke student."
It stings. And it seems out of our control.
The dwindling prestige and fading sparkle could be the paranoia of a student body obsessed with perfection. We see headlines and hear gossip every day that seem calculated to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our university. But there could be some truth to the fear that Duke is no longer the universal currency that it used to be, the automatic leg-up.
So, much like a spoiled kid who has gotten an eagerly anticipated toy for Christmas only to find that it breaks without much use the next day, students get angry. We point fingers, with relative ease, at whoever we suppose to be responsible. Richard Brodhead, Larry Moneta, Joe Alleva. All fair game. Because maybe, if we make enough noise, these guys will stop doing whatever it is they're doing wrong and restore Duke to its rightful place in the hierarchy of it's-in-the-name colleges. It seems that these figureheads are the gatekeepers to what makes Duke great, what makes it Duke, and they're not letting us in. The prestige that so many of us were banking on when we scraped our way in here, and now feel entitled to, is being chipped away at, and we just want to find someone to blame.
As long as it's not us.
We worry about prestige and defend it to the friend raising her eyebrow or the guy at the party leering at the mention of Duke, but I don't think we've quite realized that if, in fact, the ship is sinking, we do have some responsibility and power to stop it. The reputation of our university is not something that will sustain itself naturally as we frolic around hoarding grades and trafficking staggeringly large quantities of weed. If we want to continue to impress and spend our post-college years riding on the momentum of a coveted degree, we need to uphold the momentum that existed before we came.
It's not what many bargained for. I expect many of us came here with the intent to draw what we could out of the University, to get the tools for whatever career we choose and the benefits of a degree that speaks for itself. But now that we're here, immersed in the experience and living the life, we see the cracks and faults, the stuff that, if it goes unchecked, could really hurt Duke and our individual reputations. So we have to take some of the responsibility on our own shoulders and understand that pointing fingers and scapegoating will get us nowhere. Just like there is no one event, scandal or unsavory article that can define Duke as a school, there is no one man or woman who holds the keys to our success and prestige.
Lest the outside world, abundant with skeptics anxious to see the mighty fall, start to write us off, it's time for a united front not so much entitled as proactive. Yes, we got ourselves into this university and we're paying through the nose for it, but there's work to be done and pieces to put back together, and no one to accomplish that except us.
Lindsay White is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Monday.
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