Students have grown accustomed to seeing the Robertson bus come to a stop before the Chapel, but members of Duke Student Government's Community Interaction Committee and the Black Student Alliance think another off-campus route should be created to better connect Duke to North Carolina Central University.
"There's a school eight minutes away and we can't get there, but we can get to a school 30 minutes away," said sophomore Awa Nur, BSA academic affairs chair and DSG senator for community interaction. "We need to open up lines of communication with our neighbors."
DSG and BSA are working to secure funding for a bus to NCCU with Kemel Dawkins, vice president for campus services. Dawkins was not available for comment.
Duke students are able to take classes at most neighboring universities, but few currently take advantage of academic opportunities at NCCU. NCCU's biology and history departments are noted, and the School of Law has been named one of America's best law schools by the Princeton Review. The number of Duke students enrolled in classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has increased since the establishment of the Robertson bus, and Nur said a new bus route could build similar academic ties to NCCU.
She said a relationship with NCCU-a historically black university-could also be a valuable way for Duke to strengthen connections to Durham, which is 50 percent black. Nur has mapped a tentative route that passes by a cultural center and sites where volunteers from Duke's Community Service Center work.
"I don't think a lot of students would use the bus socially, so this would be about academic and civic engagement," she said. "And since the bus passes through Durham, Durham is affected in a positive way."
BSA President Simone Randolph, a senior, said when her organization tried to interact with NCCU in the past, parking fees on Duke's campus and a lack of parking at NCCU posed serious problems. Nur said such logistics deter more Blue Devils from forming relationships with their collegiate neighbors.
"There are underlying problems with how Duke and NCCU do business together," she said. "But if you put the framework in place, who knows what would happen?"
Junior Haru Yamamoto said she has taken the Robertson bus to UNC to visit friends, but said she doesn't think she would have any reason to go to NCCU.
"I don't have time to think about taking classes anywhere else," she said. "And as for the social scene, I've never heard of anything going on over there."
Senior Sharon Obialo said the route would be of no use to her since she has a car, but said some might be interested in going to NCCU for publicized events.
"It's important to get people as freshmen to start going, because seniors are set in their ways," Obialo said.
It took the Robertson bus time to become a standard means of student transportation, but the route is funded by a private donation, Nur said. Because transportation to NCCU would require funding from the University, administrators might be less tolerant if the number of students taking the bus was low at first, she added.
"That fear is real, but at some point you have to say we're either completely for engaging our community or we're not," Nur said.
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