In the wake of another weekend, the commons room is a mess. Mustard and ketchup, swirled across the carpet and linoleum, has lionized a crass four-letter slur about a female body part. The culprits? Footloose scofflaws, likely inebriated, who committed the task under the auspices of cowardice and anonymity. We may safely assume that they were Dukies.
Visitors often ask about the ethical climate at Duke. Measuring the degree of honor proves to be an ongoing struggle, so many refer to ethics-related campus organs. The Kenan Institute, an ethics certificate, Encompass Magazine, a Mode of Inquiry requirement and more than a dozen Spring 2010 course offerings that believe “ethics” is important enough to include in the title—reveal a comforting candy shop of academic ethical chitchat.
But our common spaces show that although we may be interested in ethics, we aren’t living the creed. Indeed, if we use the condition of our common rooms as a measurement of our campus-held integrity—well, we look like a crowd of shirkers and hooligans.
Stolen furniture is by now a near ubiquitous whodunit across West Campus. Food items and clothing are taken from public refrigerators and laundry rooms. Enter an unlocked public toilet over the weekends, and by the luck of the dice, one too likely encounters objectionable odors, litter and evidence of disgraces that should be reserved to the presence of their owners.
If you believe anonymity in common spaces makes you impervious to sanction, makes you invincible, unaccountable and thereby license to nincompoop-ery—well, you’re probably right. You’re the reason I’m disappointed. What’s worse, I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed to call myself a Duke student when the state of our commons only affirms what others have accused. Let’s toast to GQ: We really are douchebags. And it’s not just Schmitty!
The critic may be thinking, dear girl, let college be a lesson to you about the real world. Human nature is self-advantage, not the hugging-hand-holding-sharing hocus pocus that only fools can stomach.
He may call upon Plato’s “Republic,” and Gyges, the poor shepherd who takes advantage of a ring that makes him invisible to seduce the queen, murder the king and rule Lydia himself.
So writes Plato, through Glaucon, “If you could imagine any one obtaining this power... and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot.”
So, too, might he raise Garrett Hardin’s critical 1968 Science contribution on the tragedy of the commons for a theoretical group of cow-herders. Multiple individuals who act independently with self-interests, will deplete a shared resource despite existing knowledge of its communal long-term benefits.
Although our commons are suffering from over-abuse or under-use like Hardin suggests will occur, I’m still of the habit to look down upon the advice of those who tell us to carry with us the smelling salts of cynicism. They say that when our eyes are temporarily blinded by too rosy a hue, cynicism helps us to see the real world.
But that’s just it: Undergraduates aren’t in the real world, and we aren’t fully formed rationalists yet. If academia has given us anything, it is the opportunity to temporarily suspend the real-world needs of people like Plato’s shepherd and Hardin’s cow-herders. College life is communal, and should delay rather than accelerate ethical deterioration.
The real tragedy is that the few who read this column are likely to already respect commons spaces. The defectors to which this rant is addressed are likely not reading at all.
In the event that this does reach a defector, what I ask is this: Remember that we, and future Duke students, pay for our commons rooms. Wipe a used counter and leave alone that which is not yours. Know the names of the people who live around you, and ignore the rationalization that left behind messes give cleaning staff jobs. Going around campus and breaking windows also employs people, so that’s not a valid excuse.
When the few who do try grow tired of being suckers, one wonders if common spaces should be eliminated and replaced with lockers or rooms.
While we are here, we should want to and try to uphold the integrity behind our castle walls. If we don’t, as we don’t now, we will remain hypocrites and sloths. The incongruity between our intent and our actions smacks of a distressing display of moral turpitude.
Our downfall comes by a tragedy of the commons and an even sadder tragic irony.
Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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