Duke students are pretty smart. If one goes by SAT scores, high school GPA and the number of times I feel extremely idiotic compared to my peers in the classroom, that statement should be noncontroversial.
With 23 members of Congress, three Nobel Laureates, a former President, a bunch of CEOs and Rhodes scholars galore all having called Duke home, our alums seem to be pretty smart cookies as well. Admittedly the fact that we can also claim as our own the “Beer-flinging fridge inventor,” a Bachelor (of the horrendous reality show variety) and Tucker Max may count against us, but for the most part, we’re doing alright. If all that’s not enough to convince you, I swear I actually heard a kid in Perkins last week use the word “preposterous” in a completely serious manner.
But I think it was the Beatles who once sang “Smarts can’t buy me common sense.” Or maybe, come to think of it, it was “Money can’t buy me love.” Hmm, I think it’s the first one. Either way, it’s true: you can be as intelligent as Einstein, but all those IQ points won’t buy you “street smarts.” Sit in Perkins and watch a procession of 10 people try and use the same broken E-print even though the red-flashing-light-of-document-death is clearly blinking, and you’ll see what I mean.
As a senior, I am old enough to be considered the campus “crotchety old man who shakes his fist at all the neighborhood hooligans,” so allow me to make a revision to the claim I started with: Duke students are pretty smart, but often times we lack common sense and, worse, common decency.
It’s the latter one I want to focus on, because I think it’s the most shocking. You’ll find people who don’t have much common sense wherever you go, but on a campus where it seems we have more causes than students, you’d expect people to treat each other with a bit more respect.
It’s the little things. Take for example study rooms in the library. Last week I wasted 45 minutes walking around looking for a study room with a group of friends, only to find that every single one was full, and most of them only had only one person in them. That’s ridiculous, since there is absolutely no reason to take a study room if you’re by yourself. “But people are talking in the main part of the library!”, you say. Well, we’re talking because people like you take up the study rooms and we don’t really have a choice.
Or what about walking slow on campus? I’m one who definitely sees the merits of a slow meander, but this becomes problematic when there are five of you walking abreast on the quad. Don’t pretend like you don’t hear me subtly giving the “excuse me” cough behind you, because I’m practically hacking up a lung back here.
I’d like to be able to excuse these faults and chalk them up to me being neurotic and most people not even realizing what they’re doing. But the amount of urine all over the seats in every stall in the Bryan Center would say otherwise. Seriously, I don’t like cleaning up after you, you don’t like cleaning up after me, so why not clean up after ourselves? Or better yet, lift up the toilet seat. I know that’s a lot of work, so don’t strain yourself.
Of course, I’m no saint—far from it. For example, I’ve recently started committing one of my worst pet peeves: paying with cash on campus. In all fairness, my parents caught on to my ruse of charging to Flex via my Bursar account, so I don’t have much choice. But my phone has gone off in class tons of times, I’ve spilled a soda in the Marketplace then freaked out and ran away and I’m even selfishly sitting in one of those covered swings on the Plaza all by myself as I type.
Now I anticipate there will be three distinct types of comments on the online version of this column. 1) “Hey, I totally know what you mean! Maybe campus would be a better place if people just recognized that other people exist, their actions affect those other people and maybe we should be a little more conscientiousness of them.” 2) “Jacob, you really are a crotchety old man, but your salt-and-pepper gray hair really suits you in a Richard Gere sort of way.” 3) “What is this, an episode of Seinfeld? What’s the point?”
Bring on the heated online comments. Frankly, I’m willing to bet my life you’ve thought about how annoying it is that people leave their laundry in the dryer overnight more often than you’ve thought about reforming the Young Trustee process. Of course, I’m not saying the Young Trustees aren’t a worthy topic. However, there needs to be more discussion about the small things that affect students daily, like how people don’t hold doors open for each other anymore And no, pushing the automatic handicap button doesn’t count.
Jacob Wolff is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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