Prioritizing the needs of women

After over two decades spent in its central location adjacent to the West bus stop, the Women’s Center is slated to be relocated to the Crowell Building on East Campus next year. Founded 27 years ago, the Women’s Center is tasked with providing a safe, comfortable and educational space for students of all genders on campus. Throughout its history, the center has sought to empower women and promote gender equality through various programs and initiatives. Given the importance of the center’s mission to “promote a campus culture that ensures the full participation and agency of women students” and its status as a high-priority, oft-used resource, we question the administration’s decision to relegate it to a remote and less accessible venue.

The Women’s Center’s current location in the Few residence hall is scheduled to be taken over by the Center for Leadership Development and Social Action (CLDA), which was recently bumped from its standing location to accommodate the expansion of the Center for Multicultural Affairs. While we understand that maintaining the CLDA’s location on West Campus would allow it to conveniently interface with other nearby offices, we believe that the value of that convenience is outweighed by the negatives brought by the relocation of the Women’s Center, especially considering that the CLDA could be moved to Smith Warehouse where several related offices are located. We also find that arguments for the moving the Women’s Center to East Campus focusing around the claim that first-years experience the highest rates of sexual assault and thus need closer proximity to the Women’s Center to be unconvincing. Such arguments are based in the false idea that upperclassmen and graduate students experience less gender violence and trauma.

While the Women’s Center’s new location offer small trade-offs like expanded office and allow enhanced collaboration with programs and departments on East Campus like the Baldwin Scholars and Duke Reach, we believe that the conciliatory benefits of the move fail to measure up to its glaring costs. Chief among those negative costs brought by the Women’s Center’s move would be the erosion of the Center’s role as a social hub. Its relocation from a highly trafficked location near the West Campus bus stop to a building on the corner of East campus would effectively preclude most students, especially upperclassmen, from visiting it frequently and using it as a casual hang-out spot. The new location of the Women’s Center would especially inconvenience graduate students who would be forced to travel to East Campus and wander through a foreign maze of buildings to access it. Perhaps the most grievous offense of the move, however, would be the new proximity of the Center to the Undergraduate Conduct Board, which holds sexual misconduct hearings. Placing both in the same building would force sexual assault victims to relive day-long traumatic hearings in order to reach the sanctity of the Center.

If the administration stands still and the Women’s Center moves, it is imperative that the move be advertised widely and that the center’s move be paired with enthusiastic programming efforts to help students learn of and familiarize themselves with the Center’s new location. We would also call for improved parking access to help inconvenienced graduate students access the Center.

The Women’s Center relocation would isolate a resource that a large number students need and love. We firmly hold that the ousting of the Women’s Center seems to prioritize whatever career advancement the CLDA office brings over student safety and gender equality, and ought not go forward.