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The question was one light-hearted Instagram caption among many about COVID-19 and our university’s recent decision to cancel the rest of spring semester classes and activities. I was in Costa Rica when the news broke. Among the most beautiful landscapes I’d ever seen, I felt a deep dissonance knowing that the world was simultaneously so wondrous and so terrifying.
When I first toured Duke, everyone told me about the exciting city of Durham. My tour guide proudly stated that Bon Appetit Magazine had recently named Durham “America’s Foodiest Small Town.” As I began my first semester at Duke, I found this boasting about Durham’s food culture to be well-founded. Downtown Durham offers a wide variety of locally owned, popular and healthy options.
Disclaimer: All names have been changed for reasons of confidentiality.
I know what you’re thinking—another article on housing reform? Yep! And that’s because this whole thing, well, it’s important. Really important, and it’s happening now. So while you might be tired of the conversation, I hope I can at least add a different dimension to the debate, based on both my position as someone who is part of a selective living group and my opinions as an individual. Everything I have to say on the matter is simply my beliefs, and aren’t representative of my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, the group of women with whom I live, or the Duke Students for Housing Reform, a group that I support. That being said, I do believe that my views on housing reform have been shaped by my experience in Greek life, and I know many other Greek-affiliated students who have expressed concern about all of this housing business. I can’t speak from experience for other Duke SLGs, so what I have to say will primarily focus on addressing concerns I’ve heard from those presently in Greek life.
In one of the most dangerous areas of a little-known University in the even less well-known state of North Carolina, there’s a place called Perkins Library. And during midterm season, this is possibly the last place you want to be.
Last year in May, I returned to my hometown of Mechanicsville, Virginia, for the first extended amount of time since I had left for college. Mechanicsville is a small town only about 30 minutes outside of Richmond, but is far from “urban.” The Mechanicsville Tea Party is the most prominent political group, as anyone passing through could probably guess based on the large, bright yellow signs placed along the roads that feature phrases like “Socialism: an equal share of less; Capitalism: prosperity for those who WORK.” My town’s biggest event each year was the Hanover Tomato Festival. The last time I attended, I counted 12 confederate flags.
Okay, sure—Duke students attend a University that’s much smaller than say, a state school like UNC. But almost every day at Duke, I am still surprised by how small it feels. I mean small in the vein of that I am constantly discovering connections that I didn’t know existed between people I didn’t even know knew each other. My roommate is friends with someone from her freshman year who I took a class with last year. A girl in one of my clubs is the my friend’s big. My classmate went to camp with someone I know from home, and so on. Duke is so small, I think to myself, it seems that all of my circles are somehow connected.
As I entered my fourth semester at Duke, I realized a pattern in my starts to the semester: a feeling of dread and of being overwhelmed. Instead of feeling excited for all the amazing opportunities and experiences that will come my way the next four months, I find myself simply anxious about them. Many of my home friends and Duke friends spoke daily about how they couldn’t wait to return to school, yet I found that I simply couldn’t relate.
