Letter: Common Ground: When is enough enough?
By Janelle Taylor | October 8, 2018Duke students are lucky enough to have a fall break. This year, students are going to the mountains, going home or staying at Duke.
The independent news organization of Duke University
Duke students are lucky enough to have a fall break. This year, students are going to the mountains, going home or staying at Duke.
I am writing you this letter as an alumna of Duke, a proponent of safe universities for women, a classmate and a colleague to highlight the problem of sexual assaults being covered up and blindly allowed on our university campuses across our country.
I find it ironic that the article on Professor Campbell Harvey's bitcoin cryptocurrency prognostication was run while there are still many places in North Carolina without electricity or internet service due to Hurricane Florence.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Pennsylvania assembly denied a petition from the many Germanic people coming to Pennsylvania to ban slavery.
Regarding the faculty and student protests about changing the name of the Julian Carr building because he was a white supremacist and Klan supporter, if the protesters are standing on principle then they have to also demand the name of Duke University has to be changed back to Trinity.
Dear Editor: If you had asked professors across campus about the “unwritten rules of classroom fashion,” you may have been able to report on the much more important and sinister elements of gender bias in the classroom.
One can certainly understand why the History Department is considering changing the name of the Carr building.
Unfortunately, while the plastic ban is a step in the right direction, the reality is not as green as it sounds.
When Peter Euben recently died, Duke lost one of its finest professors.
When Durham activists toppled a monument to traitors who fought to own other human beings, Larry Moneta compared their actions to desecration of a Holocaust memorial and asserted that these monuments should be removed through "legitimate, law-abiding processes… however long that may take,” regardless of state laws designed to make that nearly impossible.
Yes, this is another letter addressing the whole controversy regarding our dearest vice president Larry Moneta. There are a million criticisms I could give on the incident that happened on Monday, but I want to offer a slightly different perspective, because while this case was clearly influenced by Moneta’s opinions and actions, the perpetrator of other cases may not be so clear.
Watching Larry Moneta, a good man, get torn apart by a national audience is as bad as anything I see in the Charlotte or Atlanta immigration court, where I practice, as unfair and grotesque as any forced apology/public shaming I've witnessed on Chinese state television while in China, where I studied and worked after graduating from Duke, and as vicious as any ethnically charged political attack I saw in pre- and post-war Yugoslavia, where my family fled from in the early 1990s.
In the midst of statements back and forth between Duke and Joe Van Gogh, I urge students and all Duke affiliates to train their attention to the power dynamics at play in "Get Paid"-gate 2018.
The Sanford School of Public Policy recently decided not to renew the contract of Evan Charney, a professor of the practice who teaches PPS 302 (Policy Choice as Value Conflict) as well as courses on free speech and genomics. We, the co-signed, write this letter to demonstrate our support for Professor Charney and to express our desire for the Provost’s office to reverse this decision.
Choosing “Good Sex” as the subject of an email about campus sexual harassment/assault is…zany, at best. It struck me as “tactless” at the time. However, what bothered me most about the email you sent to the entire Duke student body on April 18, urging us to fill out this survey, was the surprisingly oblivious revelation that “we have more female identified than male identified respondents,” followed by a nudge to “step up guys!” Do we really have no inkling as to why women might be more represented, when the current U.S. president’s admitted approach to women is to “grab them by the pussy”?
“N***** lover." I came home from the library to find the racial slander scribbled on the front door of my college apartment. Two racially-charged incidents occurred within two days at Duke University. Following the first incident, many students, including myself, used social media platforms to express their anger and to call for administrative accountability. I never imagined that I would be the target of the second incident.
We read with interest the comments made by John Zhu, the Graduate School’s senior public affairs officer, concerning graduate student pay in the Chronicle’s April 25 article, “Grad students ask for $15 per hour.”
As an organization that is devoted to shaping Duke students into informed and socially-aware young people and to ensuring justice and equitable opportunity for all, the Duke NAACP Chapter stands in full support of the brave student activists of the People’s State of the University.
As alumni of the University, we implore Duke University to meet the group’s list of demands, which includes implementing a $15/hr pay for all employees, hiring faculty of color, and increasing CAPS and Duke Women's Center funding for trauma-trained counselors and psychologists, among many others. We ask that you take the time to sit down with activists and other student leaders and execute actionable steps to address their concerns.
Yet, there is more work that needs to be done, and the demands made by the students on Saturday articulated a vision forward.