Integrating Duke

I ain't never seen no white person," the child confided. The summer elementary school lunchroom was bustling with more than a hundred kids as the St. Louis summer day rolled by. Seven volunteers, including five Duke students, were taking as much of a rest as they would get during their DukeEngage project. But for a child who had never seen a white person before, the four volunteers with lighter skin seemed odd. According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the school had enrolled one white student since 2004. When I played football in the morning with the kids, my draft nickname alternated between "Duke" and "white boy." Such schools are deemed "racially isolated." According to the Civil Rights Project, 38.5 percent of African-American and 40 percent of Latino children attend such racially isolated schools.

For the past few weeks, the Duke community has been discussing race-based recruitment. One group has called for the end of these recruitment weekends, but others claim that they are important parts of cultural expression, while some consider them necessary evils.

Why doesn't Duke just integrate the race-based recruiting activities with general University recruiting? That way, Duke can put its true multicultural personality forward. Why not have a bunch of student groups run events on a single University recruiting weekend? Engineers can flaunt their technical prowess, a capella groups can spread cheer beneath arches and social service clubs can show off their contributions.

We do so much at Duke, we can make it two weekends! We can even have the Latin majors face off with the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club in a mock gladiatorial arena outside the Bryan Center while WISER serves ethnic specialties to the crowd seated in super chairs designed by those who brought us the Smart House! By sending out the events of the weekends well in advance, recruits can choose the day they want to attend. We can give it a sweet name... maybe the Duke University Knowledge Expo for those who like acronyms, or maybe it can be known simply as "The Bonanza." We already do something like this, but if we made as big of a deal about a female recruit's water polo interest as we did of the fact that her skin is darker, maybe there wouldn't be so many questions about minority recruitment weekends.

Dean of Admissions Christoph Guttentag told me that the major problem in consolidating so many events in such a short timeframe is logistics: Duke can only host a finite number of recruits at any given time. But Guttentag remains very open to input, and his office regularly reviews the recruiting process. For instance, this will be the first year in a long time that Blue Devil Days will occur over a two day period. But Guttentag also stressed that race-based recruiting is effective.

Maybe it has something to do with the way we tend to socialize. Sometimes, it can be pretty stressful and frightening to meet new people. And so, as we grow up, we learn ways to relieve the stress and fear, and somehow we become comfortable with a certain way of picking the people we associate with. As you can see on campus, those choices of association are often, but not exclusively, seemingly made on the basis of skin color, or at least on the experiences involved with having a particular skin color. And those shared experiences can be immensely important.

At Duke, we have the choice to hang out with as diverse a group of people as you can find anywhere in the world. Whether we do or not is up to us. Maybe additional programs targeted at common interests rather than race can encourage us to integrate, but the choice is still ours.

Such a choice is not even an option for many kids just outside of Duke's campus. At C. C. Spaulding, an elementary school four miles from the Chapel, and at Y. E. Smith, an elementary school a little more than six miles away, the student populations are more than 99 percent minority. Of a total enrollment of 644 students at both these elementary schools, five children are white.