The success of the Center for Race Relations' Common Ground program has led students at other universities to try to adopt the Duke model for improving relationships between people of different backgrounds.
"I really envision this on a nationwide scale, happening on every college campus, so every student can understand how their biases influence their actions and decisions," said Amy Lazarus, Trinity '05 and a cofounder of Common Ground, who has been working to spread the retreat to other schools.
Students at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. held a 24-participant Common Ground retreat over their fall break in October, while students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. have been working to develop a retreat based on Common Ground.
The Bucknell program was spearheaded by Bucknell junior Scott Teagarden, who first heard about the retreat from his sister, Kelly Teagarden, Trinity '08.
Through his sister, Teagarden got in touch with Ben Adams and Albert Osueke, both Trinity '08 and former CRR co-presidents, who provided him with information about the activities and scheduling for Common Ground at Duke. They also flew to Bucknell the weekend before the retreat to help facilitators run through the activities.
"The help and advice and the experience that Ben and Albert were able to provide was so helpful just because we did not have to reinvent the wheel," Teagarden said. "We were able to improve upon what they had done already and start at a more advanced level."
Teagarden adjusted the content for the Bucknell community and added activities from Bucknell's Multicultural Student Services Center to create a three-day retreat, maintaining the Duke program's focus on issues of gender, sexuality and race. The retreat cost $5,000 and was funded by the Dean of Students Office, Teagarden said.
"I was able to take what they had but then also adapt it to fit a smaller university located in central Pennsylvania with the demographics of the university being mainly students from the Northeast and California," he said.
Bucknell has 3,550 undergraduate students and is 3 percent black, 7 percent Asian and 4 percent Hispanic, Director of Media Relations Tom Evelyn wrote in an e-mail. Duke has about twice as many undergraduates and is 10 percent black, 22 percent Asian and 6 percent Hispanic, according to the University's Web site.
Participants hope to hold weekly lunches to spread the ideals of Common Ground and are also planning a diversity event for the Greek community, he added.
Georgetown, though similar in size to Duke, is also less diverse, with a student body that is 7 percent black, 9 percent Asian and 6 percent Hispanic, according to its Web site.
"We have a need for diversity awareness on our campus," said Nicole Hapsburg, a senior in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, who has been working with Lazarus. "Even if Georgetown does not create an exact model or an exact replica of Common Ground, Common Ground would be a really good model to start from."
Hapsburg and Lazarus have been working together for less than two months and are in the beginning stages of developing a retreat, Hapsburg said. Still, they have already met with administrators at Georgetown and would like to hold their first retreat in the spring if they are able to finish developing it in time.
Funding for the retreat would likely come primarily from Georgetown's Center for Multicultural Equity and Access. Duke's Common Ground retreat costs $15,000 and is funded primarily through the Office of Student Affairs, said retreat co-director Theresa Cho.
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