Web Site Guide | News | About OWDNA | Neighborhood Info | Photographs of OWD | Media Spotlight | Citizen Resources | Home Letter to Senior University Officials Signed by 60 professors, grad and undergrad students, and staff at Duke. Dear Executive Vice-President Trask, In a recent series of emails, you outlined to the Duke community some of the measures that Duke is taking in response to the recent robbery in the Bryan Center, the third robbery on campus since the beginning of November. We, the undersigned, have some concerns with those measures, and with the ideas behind them, about how best to ensure the security and safety of our community. We recognize that the measures described in these memos are not entirely new, but are part of a longer-term process of security arrangements; nonetheless, this seems like a particularly opportune moment for intervention. Our major shared concern is the way that the administration appears to have decided that the best way to achieve safety and security for our community is to close it off from what surrounds it, to exclude those external to our community from access to it. Like the thinking that governs the increasing popularity of ‘gated communities,’ this is premised on the belief that exclusion rather than inclusion, closed borders rather than open borders, segregation rather than conversation, is the best way to ensure safety and security. It seems to us that this must remain at the very least an open question: many observers of the global situation, outside of the mainstream US media, are insisting that opening our communities rather than closing them off is the better long-term method for achieving security. We are also concerned about the collapse, in your letters, between the importance of feeling safe, and the importance of material safety. Both, obviously, are important, and certainly it is a welcome development to hear that the administration is making it a “high priority” to improve lighting in areas such as the Blue Zone. Feeling safe on campus is an important part of belonging to the campus community; but making people feel safer without making them actually safer is to follow the logic of SUV salespeople, who insist that they are doing a service to society because people “feel” safer driving an SUV, despite statistics that show SUVs are less safe than cars. The analogy might seem awkward: the point we want to insist on is that the majority of rapes, as well as petty-theft crimes on campus, are committed not by those outside of the Duke community, but by those within it. Closing down campus to those outsiders makes us feel safer without doing much to increase our actual safety: worse, the rhetoric used to describe these acts of exclusion as ‘increasing safety’ creates a culture of fear that feeds, and panders to, the desire to exclude. It seems possible that there may also be a causal relationship between the closed-down nature of Duke campus and the student experience of undergraduate life on-campus as homogenous and boring, which would suggest more positive reasons for opening up campus, rather than closing it down. The encouragement that people report “suspicious behavior or individuals,” especially following a description of the suspect in the Bryan Center robbery incident as “an African American male about 5'10" in his early 20s, with a thin to medium build,” seems to encourage racial profiling. While, as stated above, it is important to address people’s feelings of safety, it seems important to do so in ways that are democratic, and the racial profiling that seems the inevitable result of encouraging people to report “suspicious behavior or individuals” is certainly not a democratic response. There are already serious discrepancies between the experiences of Duke that undergraduates have, and the experiences of Duke that university staff have; this kind of encouragement is only going to make such discrepancies worse, rather than better. The university has many excellent projects for creating dialogue and exchange between the campus community and the surrounding communities. It would be a shame to allow this rhetoric of exclusion to contradict or take away from the good work those projects are doing. We hope you take our concerns to heart as ways to allow that good work to continue. Yours sincerely, Simon Hay (doctoral candidate, English) along with more than 60 professors, grad and undergrad students, and staff at Duke. Copies also sent to: President Nannerl Keohane Provost Peter Lange John Burness, Senior Vice President for Public Affairs Judith Ruderman, Vice Provost Academic and Administrative Services Benjamin Reese, Vice President Institutional Equity Donna Lisker, Director of the Women’s Center Leon Dunkley, Director of the Mary Lou Williams Center NB: According to the author, this letter received no reply from Duke officials. Back to top