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(03/17/03 5:00am)
I have a million-dollar question. Actually, it is probably worth more than that. How does this university ever expect to raise money from the current generation of Duke students? I am not unique in having reason to believe that this may be a problem. Speaking with other seniors regarding a donation to the annual class gift, the most common response I hear is laughter, followed by some smart remark--"I'll never give this university a cent," "I've already paid too much as it is," "Duke can take it out of my parking tickets," etc. The tenor of most of these discussions suggests the alumni affairs and development people may have some difficult days ahead.
(02/24/03 5:00am)
I love the press. Oh sure, it's biased, relies on sensational muckraking, and produces a lot of crap. But when a good story comes out, nailing some crook with cold hard evidence--man that's great. Not that these moments excuse the press for the status quo, but they reveal the enormous and particular good that well-done investigative journalism can serve. The press is also one of our only cultural and political mediums through which we can hold sustained conversations among many people. Articles, followed by editorials and letters to the editor, enable a mass of people to witness and contemplate an unfolding conversation. This conversation is, of course, often impoverished; and that the press is one of our best sources of conversation serves as a further indication of the poverty of ongoing communal debates in our times. Nevertheless, we deal with what we have, and what we had last week were two of the best Duke exposes I have ever witnessed.
(01/13/03 5:00am)
Gone are the days in which the radical left was interesting. In fact, I'm not even sure if there is a radical left anymore, precisely because that would entail having something radical to say. What possibility remains to shock those cosmopolitan enough to feel at home on a campus like Duke's? A lot of people may disagree with the agendas of homosexual marriage, abortion, affirmative action, anarcho-syndicalism, animal rights, equalizing wealth distribution, gun control, minority exceptionalism and radical democracy, but few, if any, really find these ideas shocking or dangerous. And why should they? None, we assume, will have the power in the near future to revolutionize society overnight, some look good on paper, and in the meantime they serve as nutty amusement for those who know better. Interestingly, the only ideas that now rile people up on campus are generally conservative ones, like the peculiar thoughts that reparations are racist, abortion is murder and homosexual relations are perverse. A recent event highlighted the extent of this transformation and succeeded in scaring the hell out of me. I didn't think it could happen, at least not the way it did. A year ago it seemed impossible. But alas, it did happen: I listened to the worst lecture I have ever heard at Duke, for the second time. What's worse--it didn't sound that awful.
(11/18/02 5:00am)
Big Brother is watching you. Or at least he will be soon if the Campus Council life-arrangers have their way. Claiming the moral authority to speak for, as one particularly self-righteous council member put it, "the interests of those in the minority" as well as, we are left to presume, the good of campus as a whole, this small collection of student bureaucrats almost succeeded last week in pulling another fast one on the student body. After discussing their so-called "safety plan" with a constituency only slightly narrower than their own minds, a number of legislators were prepared to pass a resolution calling for, among other things, the installation of video cameras at the entrance to every campus dorm and DukeCard readers for every bathroom. Yes, this is the same Campus Council that spearheaded the war on student smokers, culminating in the resolution to ban all smoking in the residence halls last year. What is surprising is not only the audacious willingness of Campus Council members to freely legislate gross violations of student privacy and sell out their peers to administrative nannying, but also the degree to which these so-called representatives carry out this dirty business divorced from any meaningful contact with the student body as a whole.
