You may have seen an advertisement about the Blue Rose Society while riding on the bus, flipping through The Chronicle, or using QDuke. You may have wondered what the quotes meant or what the blue rose signified.
According to founder George Grody, a visiting associate professor in Markets and Management Studies, the Blue Rose Society was an organization to “bring back chivalry,” where the term “chivalry” means honor, service to others, courage and respect. It was created to facilitate relationships based on courage and respect, relationships either romantic or non-romantic between members of any gender.
“It’s for everybody in the community, including LGBTQ,” Grody said.
He provided the background for the idea of founding the organization as well.
“Last spring, I think it was in The Chronicle, I read an article that said, you know, there were 20% of college women who were assaulted or inappropriately touched in colleges. And I was talking to some female students of mine that I’m fairly friendly with and I sort of brought it up and said, ‘But it’s probably lower here at Duke, right?’ And they said no. And that bummed me out. Because that means that a lot of the female students that I’m friendly with have had to go through this experience— this negative experience,” Grody said. “It bums me out that a lot of the male students that I’m friendly with could be doing some of this behavior. So I was just trying to think of what can I do to fix that? What role can I play?”
Ideas for potential events would have been renting out restaurants and getting people to meet each other over food or hosting a cooking class for men where they cook food for women.
On October 28, however, Grody decided to shut the venture down.
“It became clear to me that this could be a divisive issue, which was certainly not my intention. So I thought it was best to just halt the effort. If the Blue Rose efforts will end up being divisive and crowd out the voices of others on these issues, it’s not worth doing,” Grody said.
The blue rose is a reoccurring theme in literature symbolizing what is ideal but not naturally achievable, Grody noted. Unfortunately, his seed for the Blue Rose Society was never able to flourish.
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