When I first started writing for The Gothic Guardian as a freshman, I was full of story ideas and eager to help define the modern young conservative. But, after three years of writing mostly about fiscal policies and economics, I must acknowledge the challenges of keeping up with both news and politics.

I am apparently not unique among young Americans, many of whom also wrestle with political and news media fatigue. In a Gallup poll from March 2010, only 20 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 were “very enthusiastic” about the fall midterm elections, compared with 44 percent in the age group who were “not enthusiastic.”¹ Young Americans are also more likely to be disinterested in the news, politics-related or not. In a study by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard titled “Young People and News,” researchers found that 45 percent of young adults (aged 18-30) more or less did not read newspapers or Internet-based news.²

Maybe the culprit is the disconnect between the scope of these issues and events and the young people themselves. It seems that students struggle when we are forced to consider these issues outside of the classroom, where we are able to write long essays about public policy and political science. In the real world, when I consider writing about the federal debt ceiling it is much easier to get frustrated because ultimately my voice is only one of the many.

But the thing is, though it can be difficult to change the debt ceiling (although anything is possible!) it is still entirely possible to make a difference. Even if our aim is always to make a bigger impact (as opposed to a smaller one) on the world, the key to doing so is usually to start at the local level. When Duke students help with tsunami relief efforts, for example, it is often by collecting donations locally. When we help campaign for politicians, we usually do it by raising awareness in our local area. Even college writers for a publication like The Gothic Guardian are encouraged to focus on campus and Durham issues and events, because it is in the local niche where we can add something new to the conversation. The best solution to fighting apathy on a national scale is to fight it in our local communities and at our universities.

Duke students, while not be able to run for office or lobby in Washington, D.C. yet, can still get involved in the policy decisions taking place around them. According to recent Duke Student Government survey results, 45.8 percent of Duke students had no opinion with regards to the statement “DSG effectively represents me.”³ According to The Chronicle, voter turnout in this year’s DSG executive election was 49.2 percent, which is a significant increase over turnout from past years, but nevertheless a number that can be further improved on.⁴ The data suggests that nearly half of Duke students are probably not sufficiently involved in student government or do not have enough information on DSG initiatives to form a constructive opinion of the organization.

This is a huge problem, because DSG represents the link between the students and the administrators and also functions as a primary way for students to make a difference at Duke. If we’re living up to Duke’s reputation for possessing dynamic students, then the percentage of students who simply don’t feel strongly about their student government needs to decline significantly.

Duke students are known for getting involved. Whether it’s with a political campus political group or Duke Partnership for Service or even Investment Club, there are numerous ways that students can learn more about the world around them and make a difference. Students have vast resources at their disposal to carry out their plans — they just have to take the time and have the initiative to actually make something happen.

The point is: there are no limitations on what young Americans can accomplish. When we get tired of writing political opinions, we can try our hand at community service or cultural group projects. If we feel dissatisfaction about our dining policies, we can run for DSG office. If we are uncomfortable with gender relations, we can go to talks and forums. And if we simply have too many midterms to worry about, we can at least vote in DSG elections every April.

References
1 Newport, Frank. “Dems Hold Slight Advantage in 2010 Election Preferences.” Gallup. 9 March 2010.
2 Report prepared by Patterson, Thomas. “Young People and News.” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. 2007.
3 DSG Survey Commission. “DSG Survey Commission 2011 Final Report.” Duke Student Government. 30 March 2011.
4 Tanaka, Sanette. “Schork elected next DSG president.” The Chronicle. 7 April 2011.

One year ago, the dining plan contract fee increased $70 — from $19.50 to $90. This came at the end of a long, protracted dispute between DSG and Campus Services. The fee increase was suggested for the purpose of reducing the Duke Dining deficit, which had then ballooned to $2.2 million. Finally, after the administration allegedly agreed to adhere to a list of stipulations, the fee increase was agreed upon. The most important stipulation was that the increase was to exist for only one year.

Unfortunately, that’s not happening. Early last semester, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta announced that the $90 dining fee will remain in place until at least 2013. The main argument behind the administration’s sudden change of heart is that the leadership in place now is not the leadership that was in place then. Whereas the agreement was proffered between DSG representatives and former Vice President for campus services Kemel Dawkins, this summer led to the dissolution of Campus Services altogether and the responsibilities of the defunct office were routed to Student Affairs.

While representatives stated publically at the conclusion of the fee negotiations that Dawkins gave them his word that the fee would be in effect for just one year, the administration is now saying that there was no written agreement from the negotiations – only a verbal promise from an administrator no longer employed by the university. DSG asserts that the intention was draft a written contract last year, but nobody signed it.

There is no doubt that DSG failed to take the necessary precautions to protect the student body – while the administration likewise failed to find methods of closing the deficit that are more amenable to the student body. If DSG is not going to apply adequate pressure to make that happen, it is hard to blame Student Affairs for going forward with a permanent fee increase. Though we would like to think that the administrators spend a majority of their time working to make campus better for us, the fact remains that Duke is running a massive deficit in many areas and it is their responsibility to close that deficit by any means possible. You know, except for dipping into the endowment. That would be impossible.

I digress. The fact is: this isn’t as big of a deal as it seems. A $70.50 fee increase sounds pretty stark, but it is important to place it in context – Duke tuition goes up several thousand dollars a year. The more important takeaway, for me, is that DSG settled for nothing more than a transient personal promise from an administrator who was not guaranteed to be at the university when it came time to enact the promise. While the fee increase – relative to tuition – is not very large, the tuition is not something we have any avenue of fighting. This fee increase is the opposite – it is something that DSG has more than enough power to negotiate, and the fact that DSG failed to protect the student body speaks rather poorly of the DSG officials involved, and the general health of our student government.

Ever had sexual relations with an underclassman, or someone who is your subordinate in a Duke Club hierarchy? Under the university’s new sexual misconduct policy, you are likely guilty of sexual misconduct.

The university’s new policy, adopted in summer 2009, destroys the importance of context clues and nonsensically broadens Duke’s adjudication of sexual harassment to indict students who are clearly innocent of any sexual misconduct¹. As such, the policy is both antithetical to the proper enforcement of sexual misconduct on campus, as well as lethally dangerous for students.

On March 4, 2010, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote a concerned email to President Brodhead discussing the university’s policy².  The letter highlights three (among other) especially ambiguous textual areas of the policy which, FIRE argues, make Duke’s new policy inconsistent with the North Carolina statute on sexual misconduct.

The first problem centers around the clause, “[r]eal or perceived power differentials between individuals may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion.³” Are the sexual partners of Duke Basketball players or seniors automatically incapable of consenting if they are underclassmen girls, as FIRE intimates⁴?

It seems like this clause’s elasticity destroys the importance of context; power differentials must only vaguely be “perceived” and/or “unintentional” to qualify as power differentials with implications for the possibility of consensual or “coercive” sex⁵. So everything from public sex to sex in private in both committed and casual relationships might qualify as coercive sex regardless of the expressed consent of both partners at the time. Perhaps Duke students are the “cream of the crop” because we have been legally interpellated as such⁶.

The second troublesome issue is the policy’s definition of conduct as being categorically “without consent” whenever an individual is intoxicated or “high.⁷” In other words, “in some situations an individual’s ability to freely consent is taken away by another person or circumstance.⁸” Again, the clause’s elasticity obscures the importance of context. As FIRE points out, parties are an inevitable reality on a college campus, and this new policy treats casual drinkers and “wasted” people identically.⁹

As a result, it uses the forest to hide the trees, as the cliché goes; the policy conceals the real acts of sexual misconduct at Duke by legally defining many consensual acts as coercive sex. For the welfare of the students, shouldn’t our policy differentiate between the consenting capacity of someone who has had one drink at a party and someone who has just downed a fifth?

The third particularly frightening issue covered in FIRE’s letter concerns the rights of the accused under the new sexual misconduct policy. “Due process” for students accused of sexual misconduct is constituted by a completely disparate set of criteria from any other area of UCB policy.¹⁰ While the normal UCB jury consists of a 3:2 student: faculty ratio, the ratio is reversed in sexual misconduct cases.¹¹

Additionally, students involved in typical misconduct accusations are permitted an advisor who may advocate on their behalf; in sexual misconduct cases, the advisor may not speak at the tribunal. The normal rights of the accused are foregone under the new sexual misconduct policy, implying that the accused in these cases are presumed to be guilty in a way which is not applied to other potential offenders.

Overall, the new policy is surrounded by an atmosphere of “guilty until proven innocent.” Students accused of sexual misconduct are treated differently from other students at every ideological level, regardless of the policy’s claim that “[s]tudents accused of sexual misconduct have the same rights as any student accused of a policy violation.¹²”

Duke students adhere to a strict community standard with minimal infractions each school year, and should be treated with the respect of a consistent sense of due process, even those accused of sexual misconduct. Furthermore, Duke students who are involved with “perceived” powerful groups on campus seem especially and arbitrarily singled out by the policy.¹³ The very serious issue of sexual harassment is trivialized if students are implicated for coercive sex simply for being upperclassmen or varsity athletes.

References

1 Duke Sexual Misconduct Policy. http://www.studentaffairs.duke.edu/conduct/resources/sexualmisconduct

2  “FIRE Letter to Duke University President Richard Brodhead.” March 26 2010. http://www.thefire.org/article/11692.html

3  Duke Sexual Misconduct Policy, ibid.

4  Ibid.

5  Ibid.

6  Quote appeared in a letter-to-the-editor of Duke’s The Chronicle. First cited by Rupp, Lindsay. “Rape Policy Mandates Reporting.” The Chronicle. August 28, 2009. http://dukechronicle.com/node/149519

7  Duke Sexual Misconduct Policy, ibid.

8  Ibid.

9  “FIRE Letter to Duke University President Richard Brodhead.” Ibid.

10  Undergraduate Conduct Board. http://www.studentaffairs.duke.edu/conduct/programs-services/ucbinfo

11  “Fire Letter to Duke University President Richard Brodhead.” Ibid.

12  Duke Sexual Misconduct Policy, ibid.

13  Ibid.

Fees, unions, directed choice, two-million dollar deficit: these are the buzzwords that have framed the dining debate in recent months. While the issues of creating a self supporting dining program and providing the campus with diverse foods both receive much attention, other pertinent issues in Duke Dining are less broadly discussed. Of these issues, the most troubling is the lack of healthy options available to low income students on a small dining budget.

It is a well-known that Duke students tend to be wealthier than their counterparts at many other institutions. It is almost assumed that everyone on campus is sufficiently affluent to eat well. For most students, it is normal enough to eat out several times a week and to add food points as they run out in the closing weeks of the semester.

There are, though, those students that cannot afford to buy more food points at will and rely on outside dining. The students that are forced to eat their meals on campus and to monitor their food point usage  are also the ones ignored in the current dining model. While most students cannot afford to eat at the Wa-Duke every night, these students’ choices are even more limited as they are forced to accept lower quality and less healthy food choices on campus.

I consider myself an average Duke student. I think I eat well. I eat out about once a week and often spend time off campus with meals on my own tab.  When I am on campus, I do not seek out the most expensive meals, and do try to put some effort into not overspending on food. Each semester I buy the cheapest meal plan at $1,710. Each semester, I overspend this amount by about $200 to $300. At 21 meals a week, this means over the course of a semester (once you take out the 20 or so meals I eat off campus), I can spend about $6.50 per meal on average. Even someone who has an appetite the size of mine, but can’t afford to eat out and acquire additional points, will only have about $5 available per meal. Thus, these students are forced to strictly dictate their meal choices by the price of the items they buy.

In a survey of the dining options on campus, price and quality of the food are definitely positively correlated: the more expensive the item, the healthier it tends to be. This is to be expected though. No one is expecting a sirloin steak and spaghetti to carry the same price tag, but Duke dining should not allow the health-value of food to have such a large range.

For example, a meal at the Great Hall (main dish with 2 sides and a drink) will cost $9 to $10 depending on the particular entrée, well above the allocated $5 dollars.  A meal at Alpine Atrium, a fairly healthy option, will run between $8 and $8.50. Meanwhile, a meal at Chick-fil-a will cost $6 to $6.50 and a Big Mac meal at the campus McDonalds costs $5.09. Of all the meals presented here, only one is remotely close to meeting the average meal cost goal demanded by an affordable university meal plan.

Even within the same restaurant, healthier options tend to be more expensive. A soda at the Great Hall costs $1.19, but a comparable fruit juice costs $1.69. A fried chicken sandwich at Chick-fil-a costs $2.85, but the same sandwich grilled will cost an extra $0.70. The price differential for a salad is even greater, at  $4.85. At McDonalds, the Big Mac is one of the cheapest meals on the menu. While these small increases in price may not seem significant, a few extra dollars per meal is a huge burden for students struggling to stay within their budget.

While the debate rages on about how to close the dining deficit, the dining ‘people’ need to realize this campus needs an eatery where students can regularly eat nutritious meals without spending $9 to $10 each meal. The Great Hall is not a viable option, as its products are drastically overpriced, not to mention generally unappetizing. Another issue with the Great Hall is its lack of service on weekends, which assumes that every student has the means to eat elsewhere for the weekend. Changes need to be made so that every student can eat both healthily and affordably.

One image that is permanently embedded in my selective memory of Duke’s campus is the pile of barf that missed an overflowing trash can two feet away. It not only looks disgusting and smells putrid, but its rancid presence is there for criminally long periods of neglect.

Hardly a figment of your imagination, the misplaced vomit assaults your senses like a canker sore in your cognizance, because it is the first thing you see (and smell) on Saturday morning and Sunday morning and Monday morning as you are recovering from your own sinful revelry or all-nighter.

The irony of waste management at Duke is that it is not there when you need it most…kind of like an insurance company. Housekeeping staff works diligently to maintain hospitable environments on the weekdays, but is nowhere to be seen on the weekends when their services are in greatest demand. A key component of services in any industry is the timeliness of its service.

Could you imagine if the best TV shows were during the early afternoon, or if bars and clubs were closed after dinner time? Better yet, let’s be more relevant and imagine if Jimmy Johns took nights off and religious services took weekends off. The current scheduling for housekeeping (more specifically waste management) is absurd, because the services at Duke do not cater to the needs of the student population.

Depending on the quad, it’s arguable that Friday night accumulates more trash than the other four weekdays combined. Saturday night’s partying and revelry is often on par with that of Friday, resulting in a sanitation disaster by Sunday. As a result, housekeeping staff undoubtedly have “a case of the Mondays” when they return to find the campus a mess.

My heart goes out to the folks that have to deal with large amounts of trash, the smell of rotting Italian and Chinese food from Friday night, and a welcoming pile of vomit waiting for them.

Whether Duke is aware of the inconvenience of the situation and student backlash against the inefficient management is irrelevant. The campus has other inefficient arrangements and more pressing issues that it continues to neglect. (Think Duke Police, Duke Dining, and Duke Transportation)

What I’m concerned with is not whether Duke is willing to do anything about it, but whether it can do anything about it. Duke likely has entrenched labor agreements that prevent many of its employees from working on the weekends, probably stemming from a “right to weekends” clause.

If not for legal restrictions, an obvious solution would to be to make employees work on different days. The current arrangement has the accumulated trash of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday collected on Monday morning, obviously very inefficient.

Instead of working only weekday mornings, they should work the mornings of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. This still gives employees two days off a week (Monday and Wednesday) while providing students with desperately needed services on the weekends.

There are going to be people who complain about the right to weekends, but it should not hold up given that many services on campus remain active on weekends (dining, law enforcement, library).

But what can Duke students do to help ameliorate the situation? We can not summon the powers of Margaret Thatcher and throw a political coup to rid Duke of labor unions and senseless regulations. We can, however, not depend on the government (sorry, I mean Duke administration) and create our own solutions. Here are three alternative conservative solutions that the student body could easily adopt to remedy this issue:

Solution 1: Volunteer

As champions of community service, Duke students can easily create a student organization that collects garbage on Saturday and Sunday mornings from each quad and put the waste in their respective metal containers for trucks to pick up on Mondays.

This requires no more than 5 people per quad for 20 minutes for each morning. If we have activists saving Africa, promoting democracy in China, and fighting for the rights of transsexuals, I think we can get 5 people per quad to help out on this.

Solution 2: Privatize waste management on the weekends

Duke organizations that have the ability to fund services (ex. Campus Council, DSG) can pay private waste management companies to take out the garbage and clean messes on the weekends for a nominal fee.

The large scale of such operations suggests we can probably get a better deal through an overall agreement for the entire campus than through individual quads making their own arrangements. I believe this is a service that many students on campus would be more than willing to have their quad councils pay for.

Weekly, it shouldn’t cost more than 50 dollars per quad to take out 20-30 bags of trash. Compare that with the other events and ludicrous things that our student services organizations pay for on Duke students’ money.

Solution 3: Self-sufficiency

This is my personal favorite, but the least feasible given that Duke students have a pathological dependency on student services. The self-sufficiency solution simply means that we do it ourselves in arrangements that we can set up with our RAs.

Just as we take turns taking out the garbage at home, students in the same hall can take turns taking out the big bags of garbage and putting them in the large metal waste bin. And just as we have to clean our own bathrooms at home, students in the same hall can also take turns cleaning bathrooms on the weekends by doing simple chores such as picking up paper towels, wiping down toilet seats, and scrubbing table counters. Part of being a responsible citizen and an independent human being is taking care of your own environment and being conscious of your quality of life.

Regardless of what may be hampering Duke’s ability to conduct effective waste management that schedules according to students’ needs, we can take it upon ourselves to solve the problem. As members of a civil society, we can conjure our own reasonable solutions, guided by conservative principles such as “voluntary community”, “privatization”, “personal responsibility”, and “freedom from dependency”.

There is something about youth that is uniquely susceptible to hubris.

The phenomenon may help to explain why so many young people have an uncanny affinity both for utopian ideology and for the elitist snobbery, sometimes masquerading as self-anointed intellectualism,which accompanies it. Students today seem increasingly elitist in their political views, as they dismiss the reactions and arguments of those who they deem less educated than they are.

Not only is this supreme self-confidence hysterically unwarranted, it hinders a great deal of actual learning. It dovetails with an obnoxious belief in the specialness of Now, captured succinctly in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign line that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and seems to all too often preclude introspection among the college-age demographic. With a health care debate and economic crisis reinvigorating American populism, it’s worth considering why students are so in the wrong when it comes to their high opinion of themselves.

When we choose to go to college to further pursue our education, the implicit assumption, one would hope, is that we recognize that we have more to learn. For budding scientists and engineers, perhaps this consists of technical knowledge. But for students of the humanities, the path forward can be less clear. Before this ambiguity, there may be a tendency for some students of the liberal arts to view their education as a rubber stamp—a necessary process that must be undergone to enter the professional world, rather than something of intrinsic value.

Alternately, I would argue that for most students of the humanities, the real purpose of an undergraduate education is to develop our thinking skills and situate ourselves within an intellectual history. To do so, we must necessarily look back on previous thinkers who have explored and reflected on age-old questions and themes relating to the human condition, most of which continue to be the subject of dispute and contestation. This lack of settlement, one would think, should inspire both humility and curiosity.

Yet the do-gooder attitude of these self-appointed “intellectuals,” characterized by a righteous indignation at the moral or intellectual inferiority of other persons or some aspect of society, seems too frequently driven by emotional and egoistic, rather than rational, impulses. This is not to say that the ideological liberalism with which the mentality often conspicuously dovetails lacks an intellectual tradition—far from it. Indeed, students of all political stripes benefit from immersion in arguments from thinkers on the left, as well as from on the right.

But for the lay student, leftist policy positions, with theirutopian self-confidence in the ability of a select few ivory tower academics to lead society towards greater wisdom, are pure hubris. The assumption underlying this attitude, too often, is that because of our Duke education, we are automatically and uniquely qualified to hold these positions without reflection and introspection. Our status as “de facto” intellectuals is reason enough.

The more one reflects on this idea of “student intellectuals,” the more laughable it becomes. If anything, our education should lead us to ponder the extent of our own ignorance.

The idea that we are already “intellectuals” by virtue of where we stand insulates students from the type of deep self-reflection and self-criticism that true education requires. Learning demands the humility to question oneself and one’s most basic assumptions about the world—and accepting that those assumptions exist.

Part of this approach involves the recognition that we are not ahistorical beings, existing independent of a history of ideas. Indeed, we live very much within such an intellectual history and are deeply influenced by arguments originating with intellectual ancestors both dead and alive, whether we recognize it or not. Our education should help us recognize our place within this history and lead us to reflect on the influences we have inherited and selected.

Instead, the attitude of the amateur egoist privileges the young intellectual as if his beliefs are the purely the product of a spontaneous creativity, rather than the absorption of external influences. This generates a sense of certainty unbecoming of a recent teenager. When students—barely twenty years old—think themselves above imperfection and fully prepared to judge the actions and ideas of those much older than them, fully devoid of any context, we may have a problem.

To be sure, this is not yet a rampant phenomenon and a good many students at Duke are genuine and reflective in their temperament. But for all of us, little humility would go a long way.

The International House and Multicultural Center merger has done more than spark debate.  In some students and student groups the issue has unleashed deep-seated anger at an administration seen as unresponsive or un-engaging of student concerns.

This concern arose primarily as a result of what was viewed by the student body this past November as administrative indifference, and decision-making made behind closed doors regarding minority students’ campus resources.

The virtual termination of the Multicultural Center (MCC) by merging it with the International House (I-House) should be a topic for student concern, and as the campus’s Republican Party president, I was approached numerous times with suggestions on how I can best support the administration and speak out about such a necessary budget cut.

After all, we would be Republicans In Name Only (a designation feared by many conservatives these days) if we were not foremost smart-money conservatives with our finances, and unafraid to cut programs that do not work.  But when it comes to minority student resources on campus, such as the Multicultural Center, the notion of cutting funding is particularly delicate.

It appears to me that the administration would be remiss if it cut a resource such as the Multicultural Center.  It must be said that this merger appears to be a termination of the MCC, merely disguised as a merger, and merged with a highly technical and in reality unrelated organization in the International House.  The MCC seems the most logical, when comparing these two groups alone, to cut.  Therefore, it is not unrealistic to assume that a merger with the I-House would leave us not with an I-House/MCC, but with an I-House.

It is not my belief that dire financial circumstances have led the administration to think of ways to cut back in this economic downturn.  Dr. Airall spoke against this as the notion behind it in her forum held on the subject November 16th.

The Duke Endowment as a protective net for the university is certainly dwindling.  DUMAC’s website cites that the endowment has reduced to $4 billion at the December 2008 mark, going in to fiscal year 2009.  This, from around $6 billion earlier in the year, wherein “endowment and investment declines and a projected slowing of other revenue streams, Duke officials are working to close an estimated $125 million budget shortfall over three years.”

But 4 million in our endowment coffers is nothing to scoff at—in fact, if it can be easily liquidated, this should adequately shield my graduating class from any severe downturn if it were to occur, and the same for many more graduating classes down the line.

The endowment may not be doing what it is intended to do—namely, grow exponentially—but it is still there in good form and promising status in case of future emergency.  Building moratoriums established this past year are small assurances that our endowment is entrusted to individuals seeking to maximize its return.

But what will the firing of two high-profile MCC employees, of whom I only hear positive things from cultural student group leaders and minority students on campus alike, bring?  What does the “merger” as a whole seek to accomplish, if not budget cutting?  It does not appear to my young and simplistic accountant’s mind that this merger is an advantageous money-saving technique in the least.

The only other answer to the “why” question, then, must be related to the “Global Cultures Initiative” alluded to by Dr. Airall which appears, at least in my mind, to be a curious idea. The vision for this new “Global Cultures Center,” an umbrella for the newly merged IH and MCC, is designed, The Chronicle reported in November, to “fit more cohesively into the University’s vision of an international education, bringing together domestic students from multicultural backgrounds and international students.”

But, I do not believe this to be very cutting-edge.  The implication that international students and domestic minorities have the same needs, grievances or mission seems not just a little silly.  While I believe organizations that teach differentiation by minority group are unwarranted, especially in a nation which can admiringly boast of an elected black President, our first declaration in favor of such cultural unity should not be that all non-whites are culturally related to all foreign transfer students, both answerable to a single “Global Center.”

At any other time, I would argue that differentiating minorities by group perpetuates the racial profiling and stereotyping they seek, at the same time, to abate, but merging the interests of minorities with internationals is a wrong way of going about such unity as a first step.

For now, it does not appear to me to be a totally ridiculous move to have cultural groups and multicultural centers on campus, and where we can cut back, I propose that we do.  But, I am content in my non-involvement with multicultural centers and yet, with respect enough for their existence, I understand when a needless termination is taking place.

The administration asked for this response when they tried to force out the MCC under students’ noses, and should have expected nothing other than pushback at a place like Duke.

Financial expert Suze Orman, alongside serving her tenure as a longtime idol of my mother, sometimes says some very true things.  At the close of every show, she reminds viewers: “People first, then money, then things.”  As conservatives, we should use our heads and realize which cuts are worth making, and which fights are not worth fighting.

Here’s another article related to the Duke Lacrosse incident and the need for more universities to follow due process in cases related to sexual assault.

Amanda Auerbach, a contributor for The Gothic Guardian, also wrote about sexual assault at Duke in our first issue for 2009-2010.

A grad student at Duke recently published a story on Salon.com documenting his experience living in a van to better afford tuition.  An interesting read for anyone that needs a break from studying during finals week!

http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2009/12/06/living_in_a_van/index.html

Visitors who spend more than five minutes walking around Duke University are sure to encounter evidence of the campus’s commitment to the environment. Buildings have motion-sensor triggers for their lighting systems to preserve energy. Where there’s a trash bin, there are usually several recycle bins nearby. The buses that run between campuses have stickers on their sides declaring their commitment to use low-grade, high-efficiency fuel. And then, of course, there’s the Smart Home.

Spend ten minutes walking around Duke University, however, and a few other things come to light, like empty computer labs, or showers in dorm bathrooms that run water without patrons because the handle has gotten stuck, or massage chairs in the basement of dorms.

The university is exceptionally conscientious, it seems, in terms of its spending on everything besides… well, spending.

Take, for instance, the vents outside of the Bryan Center. These vents periodically emit a light mist, presumably with the intention of giving students a means to cool down on a hot day. While this is a nice idea, it leads one to wonder why these vents are a better investment than, say, installing air conditioning in dorms. Surely students spend more time in their own homes than they do on the plaza outside of the Bryan Center.

One might also references the massage chairs in the basement of Bell Tower. They are available for use by all students, but the dorm in which they are housed is a fair distance from the main quad on East, making it inconvenient for most students to access them, and in any case a mere two chairs cannot possibly cater to the entire freshman class (that is, assuming we make the rather questionable assumption that massage chairs are needed to cater to students in the first place). The upshot of these considerations is to suggest that the chairs have far less utility than their installers expected.

A basic massage chair model costs anywhere between $2,000 and $4,000. That money could have been invested elsewhere, perhaps in new temperature control handles in some dorm shower stalls. Sometimes these handles become stuck, and because Resident Life and Housing Services (RLHS) is not available 24 hours a day to perform maintenance, if this happens at night or on the weekend water might be left running continuously over the span of several hours. This incurs a sizable cost for the University, not to mention its environmentally-unfriendly effects.

Duke also does an exceptional job of providing its students with advanced technology and information access; for example, there are numerous computer labs scattered around the campuses. Not all of these labs, however, are situated in accessible places. Lilly Library might boast highly visible media rooms and a regiment of desktop computers in its foyer, but fewer students know of the computer lab in the basement of the West Duke building, or the one situated in Brown.

Is it really beneficial to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lab with twenty computers that, on average, is utilized at half of its capacity or less? Or, more importantly, is it really necessary to have two such labs?

The more time spent on campus, the longer the list grows: expensive projectors in classrooms that only host one or two classes a semester, sprinklers that don’t shut off after it rains, Solo cups for Tailgate because the student body cannot manage to clean up after itself. Why is Duke spending money in these areas instead of, say, installing air conditioning in residence halls? Or offering more scholarship funds? Or investing in a dining plan that offers three meals a day?

News reports discussing financial difficulties at Duke have been appearing in various publications since at least as early as May of this year. The University has proposed several budget-cutting measures, many of which include reducing its number of employees.

Given the preceding observations, however, is it any wonder that Duke is in trouble? Global financial issues certainly have not improved the situation, but Duke’s fiscal behavior is also responsible for issues currently facing the university. A little more fiscal responsibility would go a long way.

We can live without the massage chairs.