It's good to be back. Sort of.
Don't get me wrong-I love Duke. But this is the second time I have made the transition from living in Africa to living on campus. For all of us returning from summers of exploration and service at home and abroad, it's easy to get blindsided by Duke re-entry shock.
As a Resident Assistant on East Campus, my first week at Duke was filled with seemingly endless seminars about the best ways to support our freshmen. There are an amazing number of Student Affairs staff at this school, usually with rather ambiguous job descriptions devoted to some form of programming, coordinating or advising students. No amount of money is spared to ensure that our students are well coddled.
On move-in day I watched families pull up with vans and trucks overflowing with every imaginable possession-some even needed U-Hauls for the load. I heard more than one parent complain about student rooms being too small (and I wasn't even working in Blackwell or Randolph).
Watching the Class of 2011 flood East Campus was surreal for me. I spent my summer conducting research in Sierra Leone-the small West African country known to most Americans only through Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in Blood Diamond.
Sierra Leone is ranked 179 out of 180 on the Human Development Index. The country has almost no infrastructure. Freetown, a city of more than a million people, still has almost no electricity and very little running water. For most of my summer I lived in a mud hut and bathed out of a bucket, often by only the light of my flashlight.
I did some of my research at Forah Bay College, West Africa's oldest university. A popular song in Sierra Leone now talks about how six or eight students would crowd into a single room on campus and sleep on the floor. For the tiny percentage of Sierra Leone's students lucky enough to make it to college, the spectacle of move-in at Duke would be like something out of a fantasy movie.
We live on a campus that is a lot like a country club. At Duke we have a library with almost 6-million volumes. In Sierra Leone, where the whole country's literacy rate is 29.6 percent, the national university's library catalogue stops in 1979.
It would be easy to write some kind of preachy column about how privileged and spoiled we all are as Duke students. But that isn't really my goal. (Although it would be nice if someone shaved down the Student Affairs office a bit-I promise we could find better uses for some of those 300-plus staff members and $40-million annual budget.)
What is curious to me is the disconnect between fascinating summers of service, exploration and innovation and life back in the bubble from September to May.
Over the summer, hundreds of undergrads were involved in service and research across six continents. DukeEngage sent students all over the region and the world-and the program is only beginning. I randomly bumped into the Duke Engineers Without Borders contingent bringing clean drinking water to rural Uganda. Students built houses in Vietnam, taught English in Chile and established a boarding school in Kenya. Even more undergrads worked all over the United States in all imaginable fields.
One cannot help but be amazed by the stories of incredible experiences exchanged the first few weeks of fall each year. In fact, President Richard Brodhead was so impressed that he shared some of the stories in his convocation address to the Class of 2011 last Wednesday. He named "engagement" as one of the "cardinal points of Duke's compass."
For us, however, these summer stories are often colorful interims between comfortable semesters. They are exotic and eye-opening, but their significance is easy to forget once back in the world of classes and kegs.
For students at Forah Bay College, summer only means two months of backbreaking plowing in the rice swamps. For them, summer is not a resume-builder or a vacation; it's often a sad preview of their lives after college.
With the creation of DukeEngage on top of the countless existing service and research opportunities, students will have even more chances to experience cultures and standards of living far different from their own.
It sounds great-but I hope the rhetoric is matched by real commitment, both from our administration and the student body. Real engagement does not come from an amazing summer experience that fades back into the fantasy world of a $40-million Student Affairs budget. "Drink for Durham" and "Shooter's Night for Darfur" don't really count either; real engagement is about connecting our summer experiences and the struggle s we observe with the resources and opportunities at Duke.
So get out there. Keep those summer experiences alive. And stay tuned this semester. I promise to look for the real stories of engagement and share as many as I can.
David Fiocco is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Monday.
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