Two weeks ago Frank Warren-founder of the Post Secret project and part of the inspiration for the Duke Unmasked campaign-spoke in Page Auditorium about the power of secrets. After he finished, a parade of my fellow students went to the microphone to confess their deepest, darkest secrets to an audience of mostly strangers. As I listened to these students take off their proverbial "masks," I wanted to feel compassion and sympathy for their revelations. Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but all I could think to myself was: "This is pathetic. There is something very, very pathetic about this."
I don't mean to belittle the people who shared their stories-some of their secrets truly showed them to be brave people dealing with serious problems. What strikes me as pathetic are not the secrets these people are confessing, but the ways we have come up with to combat their problems: letters to nobody, secrets told in the dark, an Unmasquerade complete with invitations to design your own mask and coordinated glow sticks. Very, very pathetic.
It would be easy to say that the impotence of the response is due to the ambiguity of the problem-Duke Unmasked even invites this critique on itself, calling itself a "campus-wide awareness initiative designed to address the social compartmentalization widely accepted as a campus norm" on its Web site. Vague terms like "awareness initiative" and "social compartmentalization" sound an awful lot like "campus culture," "social disaster" and other meaningless buzzwords.
But it would be foolish and flippant to pretend that these buzzwords aren't at least trying to call attention to a real problem-if you listen to the actual secrets being told and you hear the relief some people evidently feel when they confess, then it's very hard to say that the mission statement is pure double-speak.
The problem with Duke Unmasked, then, isn't simply the lack of precision with which it defines its objectives, but the lack of any real solution that is offered. Duke Unmasked and the Post Secret project on which it is based obviously strike a chord with some people-Warren has received more than 300,000 secrets and released four books-but I am curious as to what service either actually offers.
Some fans of Warren claim that he provides an outlet for many confessions and stories that would otherwise go untold. He likes to describe his work in fortune-cookie clichés such as "sometimes when we keep a secret, that secret is really keeping us." But what is the value of a confession that is devoid of any context?
What is troubling about secrets is that we keep them from people we know and care about. Confessing to these people is hard because they may potentially be hurt by the secret, or treat us differently based on the revelation. Anonymously sending in our confessions to a complete stranger, as opposed to actually revealing them to the people who would care, is worthless for the same reason it is easy: The stakes are essentially eliminated. People sending letters to Warren or dropping them in Duke Unmasked's boxes may as well light their letters on fire-they will never be held accountable for them, so they will change exactly nothing.
And this is what makes Duke Unmasked pathetic. It offers no substantive changes, just an outlet for anonymous complaints. It is the institutional equivalent of screaming into a pillow.
The culmination of Duke Unmasked, the Unmasquerade, suffered from the same plague of anonymity that the rest of the campaign did. Attendants who had filled out an RSVP survey were divided into groups (signified by different colored glow sticks) based on their responses. This was supposed to provide shorthand for getting to know people, for seeing past their "masks." And perhaps it would have, if there had been real information as to what exactly people with the same color had in common. Because the connections were kept secret, however, conversations generally started with something like "so, you have a green glow stick too," if they started at all.
In the end, the entire Duke Unmasked campaign seemed like a very cheap gimmick. Yes, it may have provided a brief solace to some students who were motivated to finally unburden themselves, but if there were any systematic problems that it was designed to alter, they remain unclear, and certainly unchanged. The end result of Duke Unmasked is the same as the change you can expect from a secret told anonymously: nothing.
John Schneider is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Monday.
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