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Today will mark the thirtieth column I have written for The Chronicle. It will also mark my last. I would like to dedicate this to all those who took the time to read what I had to say—whether they agreed with it or not, but especially if they didn’t.
I received a lot of hate during The 40% Plan campaign—in The Chronicle, the Weedicle, on Facebook, and in person. I didn’t enjoy it, but to be clear, I can’t complain about it. You don’t play football and then grumble about being tackled. But I mention this fact for the question it raises—why bring this upon myself? Indeed, the “why are you doing this?” question was one I received repeatedly throughout the campaign. I was a second-semester senior, with his next four years planned out, launching a campus-wide movement for a very esoteric and seemingly random amendment to a student government constitution. Didn’t I have anything better to do with my life?
Every year at Duke, there seems to be at least one or two pieces of writing, in The Chronicle or other publications, woefully lamenting the lack of a dating culture on our campus. Such jeremiads usually also lambast the hook-up culture at the same time, and to make matters more interesting—or awkward—for the reader, they might even contain a personal tale or two. Early on in my columnist career, I swore to myself I would never partake in such a tradition.
A common and misleading argument made by members of the Duke Student Government Executive Board against The 40 Percent Plan is that it will harm small groups. This objection makes no sense. Here are seven reasons why.
As a Duke student, each year you pay over $116 to the Duke Student Government in student activities fees. Yet you have close to no control over where your own money goes after it leaves your bank account. Other students and I are launching a campaign, called The 40% Plan, to rectify this situation. The plan gives financial power back to Duke students, allowing each student to allocate 40% of his or her student activities fee each year to groups of his or her choosing. This will give about $270,000 of students’ money back to student control. We need 1,000 petition signatures to get a referendum on the ballot to make this policy a reality. I encourage you to sign.
I spent my freshman summer in Mound Bayou, Miss. working for a local outreach organization called St. Gabriel’s Mercy Center. Mound Bayou is one of the oldest historically black communities in the United States. Extraordinarily rich in history, at one point it was an economically vibrant town. Today, however, it is unfortunately one of our country’s poorest communities. In 2011, the year in which I volunteered, 84 percent of Mound Bayou’s residents were receiving government support. For many of them, this support was their sole source of income.
Last year, you spent approximately $33.57 to fund The Chanticleer, and you probably didn’t even know it. The Chanticleer, better known as Duke’s student yearbook organization, has controlled an average of 21.57 percent of the total Student Activities Fee budget since 2007. That’s an average of $103,000 each year for the last seven years. This occurs despite the fact that The Chanticleer is, by all accounts, an overproduced and unread publication. As a Chronicle article detailed just last July, boxes of Chanticleers dating back to the 1990s stack to the ceiling in a West Campus subbasement behind lock and key. Piled high and gathering dust—that’s your student activities fee hard at work, ladies and gentleman.
Every pre-med student at Duke should watch the documentary “A Lion in the House.” A 2007 Primetime Emmy winner, it is available for rental on both YouTube and Amazon. It follows five children and their families over the course of six years as they go through pediatric cancer treatment. The children and parents come from divergent socioeconomic, educational and cultural backgrounds, and their stories are each unique. The documentary gives a glimpse, albeit small, into what it’s like to be a childhood cancer patient or the parent of such a patient. As someone who lived what this documentary showcases, I cannot think of anything else a student could experience—absent being a cancer patient or caregiver him or herself—that could provide a more holistic understanding of how illness impacts both patients and families, both inside the hospital and especially outside of it.
For the last year and a half, I have collected adages whenever they popped into my head. I knew that, one day in the future, I would lack the time to write a proper column and could simply print a list of maxims instead. That time came this week. Forgive my laziness. Hope you enjoy!
Last year, I wrote a column extolling the virtues of being a member of a minority political viewpoint on campus. Today, I write a companion column delineating the detriments that arise when campus discussion is dominated by the liberal viewpoint. And it is my claim that, paradoxically, those harmed above all by this status quo are liberal students.
Like many first-years at Duke, I arrived here three years ago intent on achieving a specific list of goals. I know this because I typed them out on a Word document. I even titled it “College Objectives.” It’s been fun for me now, as a senior, to reflect back on these priorities. One goal was to go through my entire college career without ever revealing my political identity writ large. Another was to learn how to play the violin. I don’t think I have ever failed at so many ambitions in such a short span of time. Today, I stand before you a disappointment-of-a-senior by my freshman-self standards. I’m an openly Republican columnist, unable to so much as squeak a sound out of a violin.
This past summer I spent four straight months in London. And while I knew a couple of people there, took weekend trips to other European cities to visit Duke friends, and made plenty of new London acquaintances (there is a pub culture in the United Kingdom that is really quite wonderful), I nonetheless spent a great deal of time by myself. I lived alone in a single-room flat, explored London alone during the post-work-day evenings, and even spontaneously (some of my friends think embarrassingly) toured Madame Tussauds alone, constructing a whole Facebook photo album of myself posing awesomely (or awkwardly) with wax figures. I did my best to keep off Facebook and Google chat, and I rarely spoke on the phone. I was as alone during this summer as I’ve ever been during any summer. And I found it incredibly rewarding.
Oftentimes I feel as though the views of the Republican Party are not properly characterized in Duke campus discourse. Today I’d like to briefly summarize four oft-ignored perspectives on the Republican economic agenda, which isn’t as scary as it is usually portrayed in Duke campus debate.
If you read at an average pace, it will take you four minutes to finish this column. By the time you’re done, approximately nine U.S. students will have dropped out of high school. That’s 1.2 million dropouts a year—dropouts who are qualified for only 10 percent of new jobs, are eight times more likely to be incarcerated and are 50 percent less likely to vote. When Texas projects how many prisons it will need 10 years from today, one of the data points it considers is the percentage of literate Texas fourth graders. The correlation is strong—six out of 10 American prison inmates are illiterate.
Dear Gov. McCrory,
“Why should I respect a Republican or Democrat’s political views on campus when he or she draws conclusions completely contrary to my own?” Some of us at Duke answer this question with, “I shouldn’t have to. If my opponent is wrong, then there is simply no reason to respect what I deem to be conclusively wrong.”
Four months ago, when the news reached me in London about the Aurora, Colorado shooting, I was greatly angered. As a lover of all things comic books, and an addict of Super Hero movies, this tragedy resonated with me more so than any other mass shooting that had preceded it in my life. The idea that an arena others and I loved so much could be transformed into a stage of evil—I found it hard to grapple with emotionally and spiritually.
There was a moment during my cancer therapy that I now distinctly remember as an emotional turning point. It was on a day near the very end of my first year of treatment—the hardest year of the three in which I received the most difficult of my chemotherapy regimen. Bad news had followed bad news had followed bad news on that day. And though over time one gets used to the continual pummels of the cancer journey—learning to take them and continue on like a well-trained boxer—this long series shook me from my strategically developed numbness. As I stood by my bed at the end of that day, I did not clasp my hands in prayer as was my usual custom. Rather, overcome by anger and grief, I threw my arms up wide. I did not understand why more seemingly unnecessary struggle had been brought to my doorstep.
It’s not often in a person’s life when he or she experiences news that becomes a flashbulb memory—the term in memory psychology for an exceptionally vivid snapshot of the time and place in which a piece of shocking, consequential news is heard. Countless people, for example, remember when and where they first watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I’m sure many of you probably remember where and when you first heard you were accepted to Duke. This past Tuesday, Oct. 29, I experienced a flashbulb memory of my own. I heard there were going to be more “Star Wars” movies.
About a year ago at this time I was going through a major soul searching process. Some might have even called it a sophomore mid-college crisis. At one point I actually sat down with my computer, opened a word document, and, among many other questions, attempted to answer: “What do I want out of life?” and “Why do I want those things?” and “What was I put on this earth to do?” I did this in the New York City apartment of my brother’s graduated college friends, in the midst of a pre-game they were throwing before a night in the city. I did not indulge in the drinking at the time, but talk about an odd moment to be moved to career and life introspection.
