The independent news organization of Duke University
This has been my favorite thing that I have done at Duke. I say without an ounce of exaggeration that it has been the honor of my college career to serve as your plague jester.
And with that in mind, beloved, the only things left to do are wish for the protection and joy of each and every one of you.
Next time you take a walk around campus, notice the trees that compose the forest our university sits within.
Subscribe to our weekly email about what's trending at Duke
I have learned to let go of expectations for what my future will look like. It makes enjoying my present location more difficult. Often the real future surprises us and we end up making mistakes that disappoint our past selves. But just like TV shows, we must continue to chug along and write a new season or a tired sequel.
Fear will make you shrink back rather than live into the grand future set before you.
By refusing to acknowledge how racism manifests into these incidents, the administration ultimately emboldens perpetrators to continue terrorizing communities of color on campus.
This is the general pattern of the column: the author will throw a weak rhetorical punch before running away. In the end, all we come away with is knowledge of the things he dislikes—a boring read made confusing by its lack of purposeful moves.
Greek life does not make sex-offenders out of good people, nor does it make us any more exclusive than we naturally are as humans.
The war against political correctness is a war against accountability.
But what there is not is a multitude of sermons on what it means to be in happiness, in extended states of peace, or to be okay with thriving and not expecting that suffering will bring an end to every good moment you experience.
What’s the point of playing a fixed game? Perhaps the answer to that question is that politics are not a game at all, but for many people—particularly those of us who are not cis white men—a matter of life or death.
I am a month away from graduating and concluding the most transformative four years of my life. It fills me with equal feelings of fear, excitement, and deep sorrow.
Duke is composed of several categories of people who hold a stake in the university and care about what it does and what happens to it. Like an urban mural or a ceiling fresco, I want you to picture them all arranged in a close group how they’re normally not pictured: right next to each other, sitting around a table, talking in earnest about the place they all love.
I strongly prefer sweet to savory, so when I saw people walk out of the Brodhead Center carrying white cardboard boxes, my first instinct was that the academic deans were doing another Insomnia Cookies event, or that CaFe was selling cookies by the dozen.
Graduation is a momentous occasion, maybe most of all for the families and loved ones who have invested so much in their students. They deserve an invite, just as they have received at peer institutions.
If it wasn’t for the women—their voices, their courage, their strength, their wisdom, their ingenuity, their expertise, their love, their care and concern—where would we be?
It shouldn’t have taken a mass shooting to garner attention towards the rampant discrimination that Asian Americans face.
If the “work hard, play hard” Duke is ending then what will take its place? In its place will be the independent’s conception of Duke, a school where students work hard, pause for online moral preening and then work harder.
As I continued to expand my political understanding and envision a more just world, I found what I had taken for granted all along: the arts.
Women deserve to be seen for the strong, beautiful, magical beings that we are. Our bodies deserve to be treated as holy, hallowed and revered dwellings, not just when men find them “attractive” for their own use, but in our autonomy and individual existence.
