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Sometime later this year, the Intellectual Climate Committee (ICC) will issue a report about, well, Duke’s intellectual climate. Following on the heels of a stack of similar reports, how can the ICC’s contribution distinguish itself?
Somewhere out there is a single metaphor that describes every facet of the Duke experience. Who better to find it than us columnists? Many efforts at pinning down such a metaphor have appeared on these pages, but I’ve managed to narrow the search down to two possibilities. Duke is either Steven Seagal, or an apricot.
Peter Thiel got plenty of attention in May when decided to give 24 teenagers $100,000 each to stay out of college for two years. The widespread skepticism about Thiel’s idea was warranted, but a key truth remained largely unnoticed—Thiel Fellowships do nothing more than reinforce the status quo.
Never mind that Americans have long enlisted a callow iconography of Irishness as a means of flogging soap, beer, T-shirts, and Ben Affleck movies. There’s still a certain satisfaction in hearing a barmaid announce to the regulars in her pub that you have “come back to us from the States,” as though your return to the homeland, mongrel Irish pedigree in tow, were as inevitable as an early-summer sea gale. It’s equally charming to be told, by a botanist from Kildare who’s had several pints, that he’s glad you’ve chosen to come to Achill Island because it’s a slice of the real Ireland: “You don’t go in for that Paddywackery [stuff].”
Have you ever seen a column in this paper that used the term “culture,” as in, say, “campus culture?” I sure haven’t.
Can the house model give Duke more “community”?
It’s not clear what would constitute a campus-wide moral problem. What is clear is that much of the ongoing talk about morality at Duke has surprisingly little to do with direct concerns about the moral life of students on this campus.
The ongoing popular uprisings in the Middle East have left observers in the West scrambling both to figure out what is happening and to form opinions about what should happen. It’s not surprising that Westerners have struggled to interpret a distant regional movement, but it is cause for concern.
If our trustees care at all about what a Duke education means to individual students, they should value the advice of someone with up-to-date, firsthand knowledge about Duke students. That’s the significance of new Young Trustee Michelle Sohn’s “unique perspective,” taken generally.
Over the past five decades, thousands of Duke students have probably shared my feeling that no one other than Reynolds Price could have enticed us to take a class about Milton. But it was well understood that, “Paradise Lost” notwithstanding, you’d learn about more than Milton in Price’s class.
If there was one glaring problem at Duke, it’s that our name wasn’t embossed on the side of any large, cool-looking buildings in China. Problem solved. Duke’s Kunshan campus, a place sure to feature some sweet buildings, is coming soon.
Wikileaks’ latest release of confidential government documents reminds us once again that the spectacle of the private/secret becoming public is always… a spectacle, at least. Good thing we know by now how to parse an embarrassing scene without getting more worked up than is necessary.
President Brodhead’s recent “Dear Duke Students” letter was almost certainly a well-intentioned gesture. That doesn’t mean that it should get a free pass.
ACES registration is here. As always, the English department can count on its loyal majors for some free publicity. But this time, my own reasons for shilling are a little bit unusual.
The United States is still at war. I won’t use this space to reprise the arguments about the virtues or sins of our ongoing fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as the 112th Congress prepares to take office, Duke undergraduates have a moral stake in demanding that policymakers direct these wars and future conflicts with the right kind of humility and respect.
If you’ve taken a physical education class at Duke, you probably remember it as a brief, biweekly break from the typical academic grind. A good characterization, but P.E. might be slightly more valuable than you think.
The problem is not that a Duke alumna published an eye roll-worthy expose on her college sex life. The problem is that the whole thing has been framed as if it were in fact Duke’s problem.
The move to implement the house model is a logical attempt to address the basic unfairness of campus housing policy. Let’s leave it at that.
Troubling pieces of legislation like Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration bill, France’s proposed ban on wearing face-covering veils in public and last year’s Swiss law banning the construction of minarets may seem like simple acts of bigotry. True enough, but there’s also something more far-reaching at play.
If you’re an upperclassman, you’ve probably defended your choice of major against someone else’s attacks at least once or twice. Next time, don’t bother.
