An open letter to the Duke University administration

I am an 18-year-old freshman girl currently living on the second floor of Giles. In case you hadn’t heard, there was an incident in Giles on Saturday night in which a fire extinguisher was placed in an active oven and left to burn. Now, I know that this is our first year of college and for many students it is a first taste of living independently and our system of accountability is being drastically altered as we enter a new stage of our lives. However, I don’t believe that a violent act such as this is one can be taken lightly in the sense that it’s just “kids being kids” or “drunken idiots playing a prank.”

Flipping our bench was a prank. Pulling our fire alarm was a prank. Purposefully starting an oven fire in a residence hall in the dead of night that could have led to an explosion is not a prank.

I did not choose to live in this particular dorm, but as fate would have it, here I am. Everyday in Giles, I interact with compassionate and intelligent individuals who I am lucky to call my neighbors. However, whenever I mention where I live to someone outside these halls, I hear “F--- Giles” or “I heard about (insert ridiculous prank here) that must have been so funny.” My dorm has been singled out based on a series of actions of a few individuals living here and now every Giles resident is paying the price. Somehow, we have become the major victim of hateful actions on East Campus.

Despite this, Giles is currently the place I call home. In this way, I would like you to ask yourself the following questions: How would you feel if a stranger snuck into your home in the dead of night and placed a potential bomb in your kitchen? How would you expect the police to handle the situation if your own life and property were put into danger? How would you expect your neighbors to react upon hearing the news? Would you expect your neighbors to be informed at all? What would you say if someone told you that you were taking the whole thing “way too seriously?”

What if the police came up with the solution that all you had to do was lock your door to outsiders? For Giles, this is the solution that has been proposed by our Residence Coordinator. We are told that Giles will be put on house-only card access as a preventative measure to these incidents; however, we have already been on house-only access and it has done nothing to stop the incidents. It is not enough.

What if your neighbors completely ignored the incident as to not tarnish the reputation of the neighborhood as a whole? There has been no public discussion of these events outside of East Campus. I informed my professor of the series of “pranks” in a class discussion about campus safety, and she was in complete shock that these actions had continued to become worse and worse without consequence and that she had no knowledge of them at all. I am not one to play victim. I do not want to start conflict or make this campus “look bad” in the eyes of the media. However, a lack of acknowledgement of the severity of this attack makes me feel like the university and the administration are blatantly ignoring my safety.

The individuals who find it funny to terrorize others not only need to be held accountable for their actions but efforts need to be put in place so that these incidents do not continue to escalate. Perhaps a camera installed in our common area and doorway or visible presence of an RA on weekends would make the difference between a fun Saturday night and a dangerous one. It is my not my intent to get my peers in trouble but rather for incidents such as these to simply cease. They began with bench flipping, vandalism and thrown eggs around our entryway, complete destruction of our bench and now an act of arson. I do not feel safe in my home, and that is not funny. Weekend after weekend, I am awoken by the sounds of shouting and deliberate destruction of property, wondering if I would be harmed if I were to step outside or if someone may decide it “funny” to throw a piece of broken bench through my window. I don’t want to wait around to see what the next “prank” may be.

We have all earned my right to attend Duke University, and we all deserve the right to feel safe.