It is my firm belief that we, as a collective student community, have the capacity and power to create widespread institutional change. Faced with the reemergence of racism at Duke, something that has become a semester-ly occurrence, an inept student government and a general apathy amongst the student body for a multitude of local and campus-wide issues, maintaining this belief may just be in vain. After all, we’ll only ever do something if Yale or Stanford has already done it.
Every time there is another scandal that makes national news, social media explodes with posts of support or rejection taking about a week to die down before slipping into our subconscious as Duke students. Rarely, if ever, does tangible institutional change result from a problem or issue coming to light. We have no one to blame but ourselves for that lack of development as a university.
When President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth emailed the student body on Thursday in response to the growing recognition of an incident on East Campus involving the racist SAE chant and responses on a variety of social media from Yik Yak to Tumblr, all I could think to myself is here we go again. Another email, another statement, and then little change as a result.
The email spoke of “our dream for a colorblind and inclusive nation” and an “institutional climate that affirms the dignity of every community member.” Clearly, they meant well by communicating this message to the Duke community even with the faulty colorblind reference, but there is a deeper truth beneath the words. We’re great at making statements, at handling scandals, but we really do not want to take the risk to make a tangible effort to remedy or change the way we operate as a result. There are students and faculty committed to this change, yet many remain apathetic save maybe a Facebook post.
I want to imagine for a minute what a different response might look like to this most recent revelation—one many on this campus have known since they arrived at Duke—that racism both individual and institutional exists in the Gothic Wonderland. Imagine with me for a moment.
When reports of the incident on East Campus circulated on campus and outlets like Yik Yak became the hub of racist sentiments on campus, social media outlets would begin to propagate these statements to reach a broader student audience. In tandem, student leaders would gather to organize and determine a path forward, something that has actually occurred over the past week. While social media campaigns take hold of student consciousness amid Final Four berths and midterms, each individual from student to top administrator would take at least a moment to seek out truth, to question deeply and honestly whether this is the Duke we want it to be.
This questioning, Socratic Questioning in other words, is the key to creating change in institutions like Duke. It’s the kind of soul searching to take ownership over unjust realities and to respond in turn. It’s the kind of questioning we are meant to perform every day in the classroom to analyze and engage with complex issues seeking a dosage of truth amidst the clutter. Even when it might be easy to do this in a paper for class, we shy away from applying such questioning to our own lives, our own communities, and our institutions simply out of convenience and sometimes out of fear.
Risk is inherent to this process of Socratic Questioning when it comes to our own lives. I have to be willing to come to grips with hard truths about myself and my place in society, especially when I am the beneficiary of privilege and institutional advantages because this society and this community were made for me. The truth is rarely convenient nor does it come without a cost. When you begin to recognize the truth about yourself, questioning mandates a response to injustice. I, in many ways, must then apply my knowledge to improve society. When our university’s goal is "knowledge in the service of society", yet we fail to even seek the knowledge of ourselves that allows us to serve our own community, something must be wrong.
If we want to see change on this campus, the first step is to recognize the truths of daily life here, the paradoxes of wealth and inequality, of privilege and lack thereof among others. Often we get stuck on this step, but even when we take the time to perform this process, tangible responses rarely follow. Questioning mandates a response when truth is obtained. Emails, statements and social media only go so far. Once we question, we have to learn to take the risk of acting to remedy injustice with material realities.
After the Adhan controversy, what if we realized that space for religious life on this campus comes at a premium and that Muslim students are relegated to a small campus center on Central campus. What if we decided to construct a space for them like the Freeman Center or the Chapel, a space where it was clear that Muslim students at Duke were not expected to hide in the basement or be under constant scrutiny?
Today, what if we recognized as BSAI weekend occurred on campus that the lack of investment in financial aid restricts access to a Duke education and continues to feed a campus culture marked by massive inequality masked by wealth. What if the discussion became more about building a table, a campus community, that affirms the humanity and dignity of every student, rather than opening up spots at the old table for marginalized identities? What if we took the risk to eliminate the communities that divide students based on race, income, sexual orientation and gender identity among other marginalized identities?
We’ll only get to that point when students and administrators each take the bold step to seek truth and acknowledge the failures of this community. The road to creating communities that celebrate all identities rather than simply include them in the fold will continue to be set before us as we still stand at a crossroads.
We only need the courage to walk down it.
Jay Sullivan is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Monday.
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