The tents have come to Duke early this year.
Nine members from the Occupy Duke movement set up camp between the West Campus bus stop and the Duke Chapel Saturday. Each member of the movement has expressed varying concerns, but collectively, the group is aiming to promote campus discussion on issues of economic disparity and social justice. The protesters are camped out indefinitely.
The campsite is designed to provide an open, democratic platform, said sophomore Anastasia Karklina, who organized the social media campaign to launch Occupy Duke.
“By having this camp, it will centralize the debate to a starting point where you come and exchange ideas, inspire and get inspired by other people, then take this issue to your classes, to your dorms, to your dinners with your friends,” Karklina said. “I see it expanding to a campus-wide movement.”
Duke administrators supported the first night of encampment and plan to re-evaluate it on a day-to-day basis, said Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek.
“Duke has been committed to making certain that members of the Duke community have an opportunity to express their thoughts and their ideas,” Wasiolek said. “The goals and focuses and ideas of Occupy Duke were certainly consistent with the notion of freedom of speech, so it was a pretty easy conclusion for us to reach that Occupy Duke had a place on campus, a very important place.”
The general assembly meetings of Occupy Duke operate on policy of consensus decision-making adopted from the Wall Street movement, Karklina said. With an indefinite time-frame and goals, the Duke movement—independent from Occupy Durham—hopes to include academic discussions such as teach-ins and debates, and creative expressions such as dance, music and banner-making.
“We do not have an agenda, and what I have been getting through the general assembly that we had earlier today... was that people don’t necessarily feel that there needs to be certain agendas or demands,” Karklina said.
The first night of encampment, favored by the clear weather, consisted of games and discussions intended to create a community atmosphere between campers and passers-by.
“I love sleeping in tents. If you think that people will stay in K-ville during January and February for a three-hour basketball game, this is a pretty worthy cause to camp out for,” sophomore Sarah Ludwig said.
Ludwig said the encampment creates a space where people feel comfortable expressing differing opinions. She noted that one male student passing by stopped to argue, saying the top one percent—people with an annual salary above $506,000, according to the Real Time Economics blog of The Wall Street Journal—are intelligent and deserve their earnings.
The discussions Saturday night were periodically interrupted by drunk students returning from a night out, Ludwig noted.
Across the Triangle, another offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement has begun camping out in Chapel Hill. Students at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have yet to organize an encampment but have held protests.
The Occupy Chapel Hill/Carrboro movement set up their tents Oct. 15 with an average of 14 tents per night and over 50 attendees at their daily general meetings. Their location at the Peace and Justice Plaza in front of the Post Office-Courthouse on Franklin Street is a public place, historically known for protests, said Cassandra O’Fray, a former co-op worker from Pittsboro, N.C..
“I will be here until the world changes,” O’Fray said.
The activists in Chapel Hill included a local plumber, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student and a high school student, each supporting issues from education to the environment and income disparity.
Jeremiah Sellers, a recent high school graduate, said he came to demonstration because the Occupy Wall Street movement created the opportunity for him to express his views on the irresponsibility of the government.
“I want the rich to be taxed more than the poor, which I think is universal among everybody here,” Sellers said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.