​'There are no bystanders'

Yesterday, we scrutinized the procedural failures of administration’s investigations of EVP Tallman Trask’s 2014 hit-and-run incident, as well as what allowed Parking and Transportation Services' hostile and discriminatory work environment to persist. Today, our title hearkens back to what Provost Sally Kornbluth stressed in the wake of April’s noose incident: if we remain as bystanders to racial macro- and micro-aggressions, “we’re all complicit.”

Since The Chronicle’s investigative pieces were released this week, administration has offered only radio silence. While the articles contain careful, lawyered responses from President Richard Brodhead and other administrators, students deserve much more in the way of confirmation or disputation of these investigations, clarification of the oversight involved in handling these issues and light shed on the follow-up with PTS Director Carl DePinto. If the experiences and facts of these articles are to be dispelled, so be it, but if they remain uncontested, the silence is unforgivable.

President Brodhead’s declaration that “This is no Duke we want. This is no Duke we accept” ought to be just as forceful today as it was on April 1. As leaders of the university, administrators have to expect the highest standards for their behavior. In the absence of communication, an alarming and unacceptable double standard is implied. Administrators along with faculty and students set the tone of our university’s culture, and the opacity and silence thus far only serve to breed distrust we would rather avoid.

But this duty is not the administration’s to bear in full. We all accept the Community Standard the moment we step foot on campus: to conduct ourselves honorably in all our endeavors and to act if the Standard is compromised. Are these and our University’s mission statement going to be empty words or commitments to live by?

Perhaps the lack of national media coverage and large-scale student backlash differentiates this from the lacrosse scandal, adhan prayer retraction and noose incident. For students, perhaps that these issues cannot be neatly packaged into tweets or shared viral pictures invites complacency to wait out the news cycles. Perhaps students are fatigued by last semester and national dialogues, or is it that it is hard to feel connected to these staff experiences? It may be that many students have the privilege of so far avoiding toxic work environments and power differentials with high-up officials. No matter the reason, while DukeEnrage has called for Trask’s removal, the majority of students are nowhere to be found.

We point to last semester when students pushed to bridge the gap between administration and student voices. Yet all of us now contribute to that distance in our apathy. An opportunity to fight for oversight and against discrimination has been carefully and painstakingly handed down by The Chronicle’s investigations. Whether your concern is administrative oversight, the procedures of DUPD or the racial discrimination in PTS, you should not wait for events that hit closer to home. In November, students articulated what appeared to be an interest in Duke’s workers but now, with experiences demonstrating bias against our workers, student outrage has yet to materialize.

We must reevaluate the relationship between DUPD and the administration, the role of Trask as a leader at Duke and the behaviors documented by PTS’s director among other issues. It is a crying shame that Tuesday’s most talked about piece of news was a UNC student dressed up in Duke gear to film a spoof video on campus. We believe in temperance and staying cool-headed in moments of scandal and revelation, but we are shocked at our campus’s silence compared to what has erupted over events with many fewer details.