Whose academic freedom?
(01/17/14 10:38am)
Dear President Brodhead,
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Dear President Brodhead,
I’ve taken an introductory course on economics. Sadly, the course didn’t instill an undying faith in the invisible hand of the free market, but nonetheless I learned some valuable lessons. The most significant of these was the idea of “thinking at the margins.”
“Inshallah.” Muslims all over the world use the Arabic phrase, usually translated as “God willing,” referring to any future occurrence, recognizing that tomorrow isn’t promised and that most of the conditions in our lives are out of our hands. The phrase even found its way into the Spanish language in the form of “ojalá,” with a similar sense of hope for something coming to pass. In English, the Latin phrase “deo volente” expresses the same thought, although it has largely fallen out of usage since the early 20th century.
Next week, Duke Students for Justice in Palestine (of which I am president) will be hosting Israeli Apartheid Week, to which the entire Duke community is invited. The week is an internationally coordinated series of events geared toward educating people about Israel as an apartheid system and to organize boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) campaigns as part of a global movement.
“You sound too angry in your columns.”
It’s finally my last semester at Duke (God willing). As I walk through the mess that we jokingly call a student center, I can’t help but think of how appropriately the structure reflects my Duke experience. I don’t mean this in some sentimental sense, where I’m looking for the cheapest metaphors to summarize the years that I’ve spent here (although I can’t deny that I’m victim to that impulse). I mean it quite literally: the spaces and structures we occupy shape the way we interact with one another, the way we think, the way we imagine our world and its possibilities. As I’m preparing to leave this place, I think about the changes I’ve seen in the scenery around me as much as my own personal development. There are plenty of people who have been around this campus longer than I have. There are people who have wiser insights on space and subjectivity, on the role of a university, on the inner workings of Duke’s bureaucracy. For my first column as a second semester senior, I don’t have much else to offer but some humble reflections on my personal experiences as an undergraduate at Duke University.
Even after a cease-fire, it’s easy to feel hopeless about the situation in Israel/Palestine. The rockets have stopped (for now), but the violence continues. Gaza is still under siege. The West Bank is still under a brutal military occupation. Refugees are barred from returning home. The wall still stands. What can one do on a campus in North Carolina aside from light some candles, “raise awareness” or screen movies? Why should anyone care?
This campus is not a safe space for Arabs or Muslims, and it shouldn’t take an act of violence to realize that.
I grew up in an anti-Semitic household. I have relatives who treat “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as fact and not as the vile, racist propaganda that it is.
During this season of presidential debates, I can’t help but notice how many questions are left unasked, or how many questions that are asked already assume the range of acceptable responses. Our foreign policy toward Iran is one of the most glaring in this aspect and exposes our utter lack of concern for the humanity of the Iranian people.
Last week when protests in Libya broke out in response to a film that insulted the Prophet Muhammad, I was asked by a local news media source if I, as a Muslim student, would like to comment on the events. I refused, struggling to find anything of special significance I could say.
In 2003, a recent college graduate went abroad to stand up to an injustice she saw in the world. Like many of us, she found a cause worth fighting for and used her privilege to dedicate her time and energy toward it. That cause was Palestinian solidarity.
This past summer session I traveled between Doha, Qatar and Cairo, Egypt on a pilot study abroad program of Duke in the Arab World.
As a classics major, I sometimes walk through life in strange ways. Take for instance the simple act of strolling into Perkins late at night. The ancient Greeks had a concept of “miasma,” or pollution that could affect an individual, a family or an entire city due to disorderly actions ranging from murder to incest to various kinds of sacrilege. Among the empty cups of coffee, laptops opened to Facebook and side conversations, I sense a particular Duke pollution that makes me wonder if there’s some administrator who has made a stew of his brother’s children and fed it to him. As finals approach, students are physically and psychologically tired—they are anxious, depressed, sleep-deprived and malnourished—and you can feel it in the air. The pollution isn’t confined to the library, but seeps into every corner of campus. Our dorm rooms. Our parties. Our very way thinking.
Well, the jig is up. As reported by the Associated Press, NYPD and others have finally figured out the real threat that Muslims in America pose to our society. Some of their activities have included monitoring Muslim student associations at various schools in the Northeast, including Yale and Rutgers, as well as compiling a “demographics report” of Muslim-owned businesses—from bookstores to cafes to laundromats—in Newark, N.J. And since the NYPD’s jurisdiction now apparently covers my home state of New Jersey, it is inevitable that I have a file somewhere with the NYPD, if not also with some other agencies. If that’s the case, I may as well fess up to my nefarious plots and save whoever is monitoring me any further trouble.
I never thought I’d be doing art criticism in one of my columns. Recent controversy surrounding advertisements for Israeli Apartheid Week, organized by Duke Students for Justice in Palestine (DSJP) (of which, I’m a member), however, has made me one lucky humanities student.
Last semester, the Duke Student Government Senate discussed an amendment to the Student Organization Finance Committee (SOFC) bylaw that proposed exempting religious organizations from holding democratic elections to decide their executive leadership. The amendment was tabled at that time, but has recently been brought back to the attention of the Senate. The proposed amendment should be opposed not only because the given justifications don’t make sense, but also because it reinforces dangerous ideas about the role of religion in civil society, namely that religious groups are exempt from standards that we uphold for our general society.
Despite being a citizen for almost a year now, I still find it hard to get excited about electoral politics in the United States. Call it a bad case of E.D. (i.e. electoral dysfunction) if you will. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for the day I could call myself a U.S. citizen. When it finally happened in a Department of Homeland Security office in Newark, N.J., I didn’t see what all of the fuss was about. I got asked if I was a terrorist, communist or Nazi, took a short civics exam and watched a government-issued DVD with a recorded greeting from President Barack Obama. I finally became a citizen when a squirrely man led a group of us through an oath while he reminded us of just how momentous this occasion was. I was expecting sparks to fly or to gain superpowers or to suddenly feel free. But nothing magical happened. I had some Dunkin’ Donuts with my mom afterward; it felt like an appropriate first meal as an American.
It’s been a mild winter. For me, that means a bit more than barely seeing an inch of snow. Past winters have been colored with an absurd amount of sleep, sometimes reaching 14 hours a day. Even when I managed to get out of bed, I would barely have the motivation to leave my room. I couldn’t imagine a life where I didn’t feel lonely or hopeless. Through my eyes, the entire world was bleak, lifeless and covered with a dull shade of gray. The medical term for this is depression. Last winter, my depression reached a point where I could no longer succeed as a student, much less properly function as a human being. It was the second time I took a leave of absence for my depression.
I can still fondly remember the excitement of opening up a brand new Highlights Magazine as a child, flipping through the pages and finally landing upon the comic feature “Goofus and Gallant.” In the comic, Goofus and Gallant were a pair of boys that showcased proper behavior for children in certain situations with a caption explaining each boy’s actions. For instance if the scene was of a classroom cleaning up at the end of the day, we would see Goofus walking away from the group with the caption: “They can clean up, I’d rather go read.” Next to him we would see Gallant helping his peers tidy up with the caption: “Gallant pitches in.” If the discussion surrounding Pi Kappa Phi’s Thanksgiving party has made anything patently obvious, it’s that Duke students as a whole could use some basic advice, not so much about bathroom etiquette or respecting your teachers but more along the lines of how to discuss issues surrounding race, cultural appropriation and the pernicious effects of our “party culture.”