When being "informed" is not enough
By James Gao | October 28, 2022If your values are at stake on November 8th, what will you do to stand up for them?
The independent news organization of Duke University
If your values are at stake on November 8th, what will you do to stand up for them?
Such hypocrisy is indicative of the problematic nature of American exceptionalism—the belief that America, with its foundations rooted in democracy and freedom, occupies a unique mantle in modern history and thus assumes the responsibility to play a distinctive role on the world stage.
As students attending a university with a privileged position in the local economy and politics, what responsibility falls on us to work towards reparations and dispelling the long-held trope of the ignorant, uncaring Duke student?
I would rather be unknowing than know failure.
We can start by considering whether the term “borderline” has any sociocultural basis beyond a pejorative.
This is not a rational article, and processing social rejection often lacks rhyme or reason.
The courses at Duke that have stood the test of time have pushed me to synthesize the material to some further intellectual point, not just slog through the numerous superficial assignments for completion.
Why spend decades watching and rewatching these animals from a safe distance, highlighting every moment of madness or violence or tension like a quadrupedal reality show? To me, it all boils down to our own human, selfish need for individual discovery.
When we hear the phrase “passing on,” we may think of someone’s death...But there is another way of thinking of it. It has to do with life, learning, and legacy.
I’m scared that I am stuck on the same scratch of a record, that time keeps marching forward without me, tracing endless and expanding circles in my wake, that one day I’ll wake up and wonder when I was supposed to do all those things they say life is really about—the heartache and the love and the mistakes and the fun.
"Well, you don't seem like you're from Mississippi."
I was ashamed of not making full use of the plethora of resources available, and worried that my decision to sit out on many “core” experiences was diminishing the value and authenticity of my college experience—that it made me less of a Duke student.
It saddens me to see that, although new administrators have come to Duke with new sets of promises, they have reverted to the same words, defenses, and strategies against recurrent student grievances.
No one at Duke should be made to feel less like a woman because of their menstrual capabilities—not me, not a roommate, not a teacher, not a peer.
I mean in the more emotional sense: how to draw. Like how to think. How to clear a mind. How to excavate it for memory.
But, at college, we come to know that the value of a friend is found not in their proximity, but rather, in what happens in the gaps between.
The Duke community must make sure that the burden of reassuring others doesn’t fall on Black Duke.
If the glint of the sun catches your dining partner’s eyes just right, it might just illuminate their intrinsic hopefulness and goodwill, revealing them as a bastion of radiance in a world of iniquity.
Inherently, fall break isn't a horrible idea, but in practice it falls rather short.
He recognizes that we human beings are not just broken; we are beautiful and gifted as well.