This time of year, we Dukies turn self-congratulatory.
As bright-eyed freshmen from Nebraska and do-gooder DukeEngagers from Kenya arrive on campus, we puff out our chests. "Isn't Duke a great place?" we think. "Look at how diverse we are, and how much we're learning, and how much we're giving back to the world."
Then, President Brodhead identifies "engagement" as one of the "cardinal points of Duke's compass" and we fall all over ourselves talking about how engaged we are. We're saving Katrina victims in New Orleans; we're building houses in Vietnam; we're doing research in Sierra Leone.
But come October, we don't follow through. Our underclassmen find that tailgating is much more fun than engaging at a Durham homeless shelter, and our upperclassmen find that a couple years at Goldman Sachs can be just as "rewarding" as a lifetime spent trying to save Darfur.
Of course, many of my classmates are spending at least a couple of years working to right global or local wrongs. Some of them might truly engage, dedicating their lives to a cause and working long hours for low wages.
Still, the vast majority of us will only engage with a small, elite sliver of the world. We will become successful financially; and all that do-goody stuff we did in college will be nothing more than the do-goody stuff we did in college.
But this is not a bad thing.
Duke does extremely well at ensuring its graduates are capable of being rich. I'm not talking about making money; I'm talking about living amongst the super-wealthy - of things peripheral to merely having money, of golf games and cocktail parties where powerful people make decisions that change the world.
This is the world with which we are being trained to engage. Just about everything at Duke is geared toward producing graduates who will be comfortable being rich.
First of all, the Washington Duke Inn's Fairview Dining Room - an on-campus, four-diamond restaurant - accepts students' food points. At the Fairview, Duke undergrads dress up in their I-banker suits to be treated like the kings they'll one day be by waiters who offer them navy blue napkins to match their pants. They learn what it's like to drop $80 on a meal and drinks and not even care.
But it's not enough to just know how to eat at a restaurant like the Fairview; you've also got to have something to talk about when you go there.
Because of Curriculum 2000's requirement to take Arts, Literature and Performance classes, even the most technically-inclined economics majors can talk intelligently about Shakespeare or Faulkner. The Ethical Inquiry area ensures that physics majors won't graduate college without knowing about Kant or Descartes.
From just about any practical standpoint, having read Faulkner or Kant is worthless to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Socially, it's something clever to talk about - a smart-sounding framework through which to interpret current events. A liberal arts curriculum provides Duke graduates with tools for lifelong learning, but more importantly, it provides them with great dinner party conversation.
Likewise, engaging is a great thing to talk about over drinks. Caring about global issues is totally in; just ask Brangelina or any of the acts from this summer's Live Earth. Of course, just because DukeEngagers are doing something that's cool right now doesn't mean the program isn't genuine.
But true commitment to saving the world isn't just a summer game. And for many, many Dukies - even the ones that spent the entire summer in Uganda or Vietnam - a Friday night might still involve a trip to the Fairview and then a section party on West Campus where they'll throw their Solo cups on the ground for someone else to pick up Saturday morning.
That's not a commitment to saving the world; that's a commitment to owning it one day.
You can play this game with just about anything that happens on campus - housekeepers to clean up vomit-covered toilets, the team of guys that clean up party debris, lax enforcement of drinking-age laws, free beer at e-kegs, free beer at the Old Duke party, free t-shirts on the Plaza, free e-printing, free exercise classes, free basketball tickets, free condoms.
This school breeds a culture of entitlement by giving so much to its students. But again: This is not a bad thing. A large part of what makes Duke special is the way it makes its students feel that they are entitled to everything they want. And that sense of entitlement also prepares us to be powerful people that change the world - whether the post-lax culture committees like it or not.
Ridding Duke of this culture of entitlement in favor of a true culture of engagement would produce a very different and much worse place.
If the new commitment to "engagement" helps a few of Duke's future wealthy and powerful individuals to understand the depth of some of the world's problems, or if it convinces a few immensely talented Duke undergrads to dedicate their lives to engaging, then it's worth every penny spent on it. That's not the issue.
Instead, the issue is that we've rushed to congratulate ourselves for our engagement. In a lot of ways, Duke is an elitist place, a finishing school for the soon-to-be rich and powerful. It's a place where future captains of industry, medicine and law can learn interesting facts for dinner conversation and maybe, thanks to temporary engagement, learn something about the problems faced by the people that they'll never be and might never know.
And that's okay. But before we congratulate ourselves for our engagement, we should decide if that's who we truly are - and more importantly, if that's who we want to be.
Alex Fanaroff is a first-year medical student and former TV co-editor.
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