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One recent morning, when I awoke from troubled dreams, I found myself transplanted into the cool dawn air of a desert. The chilled sand cradled my body as the camels harrumphed and my fellow students dozed in a circle of sleeping bags. When I then awoke in my bed in Durham, my first thought was to fact check.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Students will soon be able to see the guideline that the Office of Student Conduct uses when determining sanctions for sexual misconduct.When a student brings a sexual misconduct case to Student Conduct, Duke convenes a hearing after allowing an independent private investigator to interview witnesses and establish the facts of the situation. A three-person panel consisting of one student and two staff or faculty members then presides over the hearing.Student Conduct provides these panel members with tools to make sentencing decisions, such as rubrics with suggested sanctions based on prior history of the accused, as well as information on similar cases from a database of the past five years of conduct hearings, said Stephen Bryan, associate dean of students and director of the Office of Student Conduct.The decision to reveal the written guideline panel members are given was made at the annual meeting to review campus judicial process Monday, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta confirmed."We will make clear in writing the sanction guideline for sexual misconduct," Moneta wrote in an email Monday.Previously, the written guideline that the hearing panels look over as they determined sanctions for students found responsible for sexual misconduct were not available. This change comes after the decision last summer to set expulsion as the starting point for discussion when a student is found responsible for sexual assault. Duke Student Government President Stefani Jones, a senior, said that publicly codifying the guideline would help students better understand the possible sanctions for a given offense if they proceeded with the conduct process.
*Editor's note: the students' names were changed due to the sensitive nature of their experiences.
A photographic essay inspired by spring's sunny skies.
Imagine someone who’s not an employee walks through an employees-only door. What happens to him next?
Shooters II Saloon is officially a ski-friendly establishment.
Duke students have been lining up for Me Too Monologues for years, but soon, audiences at other schools might have the chance to do the same.
She is a character, insofar as she is portrayed onstage by an actor. But she is also a real Duke student who wrote and anonymously submitted a monologue to express something of herself that can’t be shared easily. The power of "Me Too Monologues," which starts its largest-ever run this weekend, derives from the chilling and exhilarating knowledge that the men and women who wrote each monologue could be sitting next to you in the theater, laughing and crying alongside you. It humanizes the burdens, obstacles and successes of 16 different students from different backgrounds in a single evening of highly personal theater.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Although they may not know it, anyone who has lived on East or West Campus has felt the touch of a ghost. It seeps through hallways and dorm rooms in the cold dark of winter nights. It whispers through the pipes and burns any who come too close. This relic of bygone times haunts the dark space that just a stone's throw from Smith Warehouse. You may notice it at night, painted an eerie blue by hidden lights, towering over the sidewalk valley below. It breathes the steam that heats our campus.The East Campus Steam Plant finished construction in 1929, when all of Duke's famous architecture was still shiny and new. Since then, though, the coal boilers have been exhumed and replaced with natural gas boilers, leaving the 175-foot smokestack as a silent ghost of its former self.In the three decades before the renovation started in 2008, the building reportedly fell into extreme disrepair. Ivy and plants took over the walls and trees grew down through the roof. Nobody knows for sure who inhabited the cavernous insides of the building during those wild years.Even with decades of neglect, though, the structure held out. Its architect, Horace Trumbauer, endowed his plant with two-and-a-half-foot thick walls to bear the load of 100-ton coal cars that parked on the roof of the coal plant and poured their freight directly through the building into a coal bin below. The endurance of that Durham brick has kept the building going through hard times, and it may well last another 84 years and beyond. The past is gone but the steam keeps rising.
This weekend's events will honor the 50th anniversary of Duke's desegregation. What now is history, though, was for many years just a distant possibility until the Board of Trustees gradually caught up with student support for racial equality.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Duke's yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of undergraduate desegregation comes to an end this weekend.The months of events, which have been in planning for more than two years, will culminate in a specially commissioned jazz performance by Billy Childs and Diane Reeves on Friday and a reception at the Washington Duke Inn on Saturday, with plenty of panels and programming in between. To mark the occasion, The Chronicle's Julian Spector sifted through the University Archives at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library to find original documents detailing the process of desegregation at Duke. Some of the documents are available for viewing in the slideshow here.As the celebration of the 50th anniversary winds down, it leaves a renewed awareness of the role of diversity on campus going forward."One of the many goals was to raise awareness among current students, alumni and others about the history of the University, but also to bring attention to the things that have yet to be done," said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations. "To say that Duke or any institution like it has fully realized its potential in matters of race and diversity and inclusion is probably unrealistic."
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>On a typical summer afternoon, North Carolinians might head to the Outer Banks for swimming or to the mountains for a hike. But this year, thousands flocked to a festival of politics on the lawn of the state legislative building in Raleigh. More than 900 went all the way to jail.The Moral Monday protests materialized at the end of April and grew to a nationally recognized political movement in a matter of weeks. North Carolinians spanning all demographics coalesced at Raleigh to protest a comprehensive host of legislation passing through the conservative state house and governor’s mansion, laws which protesters considered dangerous to the state and downright immoral.The events raised too many questions to answer in one story—Why did this happen? What did it accomplish? What drives respected community leaders to face arrest of their own free will? By examining the protests through the eyes of Duke community members who experienced it firsthand, though, we might get close.The ActorJay O’Berski, assistant professor of the practice of theater, frequents Durham area stages as an actor and director for his theater troupe, The Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern. This summer, he played the role of male arrested protester in a larger drama.When he heard about the protests from a Duke colleague who attended the first one, he looked into it and found something that resonated. As a Duke professor, O’Berski decided he was in a position of security that allowed him to take action. Whereas someone in a different occupation might face repercussions for protesting, O’Berski’s department chair congratulated him.“All of the legislation that they pushed through targets the little guy,” he said. “If it targets children, brown people and women only and doesn’t affect white guys like me, in an effort to supposedly right the wrongs and make the state work better, then it’s completely corrupt because it’s the privileged who need to sacrifice and the poor who need to benefit. They have it completely topsy-turvy.”What he found when he got to Raleigh was a piece of theater performed on a grand scale and fueled by grassroots emotion. After a pep talk from state NAACP leader Rev. William Barber, O’Berski and the other protesters who were willing to face arrest donned green arm bands and boarded a bus downtown. Not just any bus—“the most beautiful bus you’ll ever experience in your life,” with plush seats and potent air conditioning. After a mass rally on Halifax Mall, a field overlooked by the legislative building, the crowd of protesters parted to make way for the elite crew who had volunteered to face arrest.They processed in ranks of two by two, running the gauntlet through supportive onlookers who shouted their thanks, O’Berski recalled.“It felt like a cross between a gladiator and Fay Ray in King Kong—you feel like you’re going to be this sort of virgin sacrifice,” he said.Once inside, the core group made its way to the central atrium between the senate and house chambers, where they held hands and sang songs until the legislative policeman with a bullhorn said to disperse or face arrest. They didn’t disperse.The booking process took a while. A policeman cuffed and read the rights to each of the 84 protesters arrested that week, on June 17. That was the seventh Moral Monday, when the total arrests neared 500. The next step was taking the arrestees down to the legislative cafeteria, from where they boarded prison buses bound for the Wake County Detention Center, just outside of Raleigh.“It is a sweaty, mesh-windowed prison bus straight out of ‘Cool Hand Luke,’” O’Berski recalled. “When your bus pulls out, the NAACP has organized people chanting, ‘Thank you, we love you,’ screaming through bullhorns. You can’t see them through the mesh. That was completely surreal.”The HistorianThe protests that burst forth this summer hearken back to North Carolina’s leading role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, said William Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin professor of history. He didn’t just write histories of the movement and the Greensboro sit-ins, he saw many of the events first hand. He sees his historical scholarship as running parallel to his interest in social justice. This philosophy sent the former dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences to jail this summer.When a small group of black youths decided to violate local segregation codes and sit down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. in 1960, they kicked off a series of protests around the nation and led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which became a leading organizer for civil rights actions.But those North Carolinians also spurred changes within state politics, Chafe said, leading to a recognition that the state needed to treat people of all races and backgrounds more fairly. Former Duke president Terry Sanford, who served as governor from 1961-65, became a voice of this new vision for North Carolina, boosting funds for public education, launching a statewide war on poverty and even sending his son to a desegregated school.This year, when Chafe saw the legislature voting to reject federal funds for Medica expansion, cut spending for education, cut unemployment insurance and change the tax structure in a way that hurts many but helps a few, he felt he needed to act to preserve the legacy of the state since the sit-ins.“In effect, to let them get away with this without protest would be almost to sanction going back to the North Carolina of 1900-1960,” Chafe said. “I felt the necessity of making a statement to protest that kind of reactionary politics.”It remains to be seen, though, how such a statement will change the course of North Carolina politics or whether it will be effective in doing so. The protests cannot change the makeup of the current legislature until it comes up for election in fall 2014. For Chafe, then, the political tactics of the protests—large, visible rallies and hundreds arrested in acts of civil disobedience—play into a long-term electoral strategy.“You’re not going to change the minds of the radical people enacting this legislation, but you are going to be able to lay the groundwork for voter registration and ‘get out the vote’ campaigns, and for conveying a strong signal that this is not where North Carolina wants to be,” he said. “[Getting arrested] provides very clear evidence of the fact that an awful lot of people are willing to make that sacrifice and take that risk, which in turn encourages others to demonstrate their support.”Chafe sees evidence that this message is getting through. As the Greensboro sit-ins spread from their point of origin, the current protests have branched out from their metropolitan Raleigh roots with events throughout the state. A rally in Asheville in early August drew an estimated crowd of 10,000, Chafe said, which he called impressive for a town of 84,000. The test now will be whether the rallies can produce a grassroots infrastructure capable of mobilizing widespread turnout more than a year from now, when there won’t be a presidential race to draw voters to the polls.The CanvasserGunther Peck, Fred W. Shaffer associate professor of history and public policy, met his wife when they led a movement to organize graduate students at Yale to push for better compensation. Years later, their passion for organizing people to vote led them to Moral Monday, to face arrest side-by-side.Though he has organized for the Obama campaign, Peck sees the drive to register voters as a nonpartisan ideal—the work of “a radical democrat, with a small ‘d.’”“We need a democracy in which everyone not only can vote, but that they want to vote and that whatever decisions we come to collectively represent not a slim majority of the people, but ‘the people,’ whatever that is,” he said. “To me, that is a moral issue. I have a naïve, perhaps, belief that if everyone voted, that our democracy is better.”Peck registered about 2,000 voters since he moved to Durham in 2002 and organized a network to register even more. When he noticed that Duke student voter turnout for the 2008 primary fell well below that of other Triangle-area universities, he pushed to give Duke something the other colleges had: an on-campus voting site. He worked to secure it for the general election and saw voter turnout jump from 11 percent of students registered in North Carolina to 84 percent, with three times more students registered for the general election.The youth vote turned out to be one of the strongest voter demographics in North Carolina in 2008, and they went overwhelmingly in favor of Barack Obama, Peck said. The Voter ID law passed by the legislature this summer, though, throws up several roadblocks to this group’s ability to vote.“It’s going to discourage a lot of people who have the right to vote but don’t have the means or the money or transportation or the documentation, or they have a status as students that makes it extremely problematic for them to vote,” he said. “It’s no accident that those are the people who elected Barack Obama. It does feel like payback.”The law pressures in-state students to vote at home rather than at school or jeopardize their parents’ tax exemption for a dependent child—which can amount to several thousand dollars. This means a student voter will have to change their driver’s license to a college address, vote absentee or travel home to vote on a Tuesday in the middle of the semester, Peck said, all of which are new requirements needed to exercise the right to vote. Non-student voters will need new documentation in order to vote and will have fewer opportunities to vote early, among other changes.Peck and his wife, Lecturing Fellow in English Faulkner Fox, now have to decide how to deal with the legal ramifications of their arrests. They could plead guilty, which comes with a $180 fine and 25 hours of community service, or they can go to trial to challenge the charges of second-degree trespassing, failure to disperse on command and violating legislative building rules. Peck said he considered doing the community service—“I thought I’d register voters.” But now he’s thinking of protesting the charges.“We have done nothing wrong,” he said. “We sang spirituals in the legislative building. We sang songs after office hours.”With a household of several children, including a seven-year-old, they can’t take the risk of going to trial if it could end up with both parents in jail, Peck added. The NAACP has promised free legal protection either way, but the choice belongs to the individuals. Although the summer’s actions may be over, the effects are still coming to bear on the people involved and those who watched them.
In June 2011, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas published a first-person account in the New York Times Magazine revealing that he was an undocumented immigrant. The green card his family had used to bring him to the United States as a child was fake. He nevertheless managed to build a career as a journalist, reporting for The Washington Post on the AIDS epidemic in Washington, D.C. and winning a Pulitzer Prize for contributing to the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Since revealing his undocumented status, Vargas has been working on a documentary and founded the group Define American to use the power of stories to “shift the conversation on how we think about immigration and citizenship and identity in an America that is changing.” Vargas spoke with The Chronicle’s Julian Spector about these issues, in advance of his appearance on campus Sept. 16.
The heat is rising and summer classes are really getting into the swing of things. To keep you cool on the weekends, The Chronicle’s Julian Spector keeps an eye on the events horizon to give you an interesting weekend. This weekend brings strong musical offerings, as well as a literary take on the Bull City and a quirky adaptation of Shakespearean romance. If that’s not enough to keep you satisfied or you’ve found something else cool to do, tweet some ideas @JulianSpector.
This weekend, say goodbye to May and prepare for the balmy days of June in Durham. This week’s offerings are more activity-oriented. You can try your hand at salsa dancing, explore some small-town festivities and learn how to grow your own culinary herbs. If you’re looking for something to pass the time this weekend, The Chronicle’s Julian Spector has just the seasoning you need.
Summer has really sunk its fiery teeth into dear old Durham, but with some help you will have no problem staying cool and hip under the southern sun. With free live hip-hop, West African grooves and phantasmagorical beer, The Chronicle’s Julian Spector knows what you should be doing this weekend.
Duke EMS is now better equipped to be the hero Duke students deserve.
The Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life has changed its name to appeal more broadly to the campus community.The center reopened as the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity when it moved from the lower floor of the West Union Building to a location near the main entrance of the Bryan Center this summer. The new name was chosen in order to be inclusive of those who identify with labels besides those in the original acronym, said Janie Long, director of the center."A big thing for me is that the center be very inclusive of students who would like to be connected to this space, that any student could see this space as a resource to explore their identity," Long said.The shift clarifies that all are welcome at the center, including straight allies, who may not have felt included by the previous name, Long added.But the new name also reflects a proliferation of sexual and gender identities. In recent years an increasing number of Duke students have expressed identities beyond the LGBT labels, said senior Jacob Tobia, who served as co-president of Blue Devils United, the student arm of the center, last year. Students have moved beyond the previous labels to identify as intersex, queer and demisexual among other terms. Expanding the title of the space will be liberating for students who find that sexual or gender labels do not fully describe them, Tobia added."I identify as gay sometimes and queer sometimes, but the name gay or queer will never contain the whole of who I am," Tobia said. "Having a space that is less concerned with labels and more concerned with diversity and exploration is something that's exciting for me."The name may need more explanation than the previous one, but it also prompts students to explore the differences between sexuality and gender identity, which people often lump together, said senior Denzell Faison, who also served as co-president of BDU in the past academic year.The change coincided with the move to a newly renovated space just off the plaza entrance to the Bryan Center, which puts it in a higher-traffic location than the previous spot underneath West Union. This marks an improvement, Faison said, because visibility is crucial to the center's mission."We didn't want the center placed in a basement somewhere where it could easily be avoided," he said. "When people visit campus, they will see that Duke values all students, no matter how they identify."This acceptance was less clear when Long came to Duke seven years ago. A couple years into her tenure, somebody vandalized the door of the old center and broke the small plastic sign into pieces, she said. The replacement was a sturdy metal sign bolted to the wall that could be read from the plaza.That old sign for the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life now sits propped up on Long's desk in the new site."That sign was a real milestone," Long said.
Endeavoring freshmen searching for God in the midst of Orientation Week need look no further than Brody Theater on East Campus.
Many people hear a politician’s bold assertion and wonder if it’s true. Journalist and incoming Duke professor Bill Adair takes that question and finds the answers.
