[Durham INC] Barry Saunders: Big man on campus act won't fly (Durham News)

[John Schelp]

Barry Saunders has an excellent column in today's Durham News. (Additional background is provided below.)

best,
John

****

"The university's heavy-handed approach is galling to city officials, residents and even people associated with the school..."

Barry Saunders: Big man on campus act won't fly
Durham News (N&O), 11 April 2009

There are two times to grab your wallet and run.

The first time is whenever someone bops into a poolroom carrying a custom made cue in a monogrammed leather case and offhandedly says, "Wanna shoot a friendly game?"

The second is when a university tells a city, "This is for your own benefit."

The latter is what Duke University officials are telling Durham officials about their desire to shut down a couple of city streets. As Mayor Bill Bell told me Thursday, the university's ambitions for that area may ultimately redound to Durham's benefit as well as its own. There is, though, a better way to go about it, he said.

The city's analysis of closing Maxwell Street concluded that closing it "may increase traffic volumes on West Main Street between Campus Drive and Buchanan Boulevard."

Nonetheless, "the Public Works Department is recommending the closing of the public right-of-way for Maxwell Street as it is a city-maintained dirt street and included on the inventory of unpaved streets. Closing Maxwell Street will reduce [the street maintenance division's] workload and will reduce the City's inventory of unpaved streets."

Here's something to ponder, though: If the city hands over Maxwell Street because it is unlovely, what happens the next time the university wants yet another street -- one that may be paved and desirable?

The university's heavy-handed approach is galling to city officials, residents and even people associated with the school.

"They have big plans for that area, but they have to be sensitive to concerns," Mayor Bell said.

Among other things, Duke wants to erect security gates and issue residents access cards.

For a university so image conscious, that approach seems tone-deaf. Requiring cards to get into that area is redolent of the pass cards of apartheid South Africa.

No one can blame Duke for wanting to expand or protect its students, faculty and property, but cooperation seems much better than shutting itself off from the community. When Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden said "we're trying to get rid of that fortress mentality," Vice President for Campus Services Kemel Dawkins said, "Duke is as well."

Dawkins didn't laugh, but some people at the council meeting did.

John Schelp, president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, said, "This has been Tallman Trask's approach to security: put up fences and gates and close the streets. He's been methodically isolating the campus from the rest of Durham."

Efforts to reach Trask, Duke's executive vice president, were unsuccessful, but when you compare Duke's proposal to that favored by Columbia University in New York, which is trying to increase its interaction with West Harlem, it's hard to see how requiring access cards is "reaching out" -- despite what Dawkins said. 

****

Additional background...

Here's a 2-min clip of a former Brookstown resident, talking to City Council Monday -- about Duke trying to put up gates and block access to the community where she grew up... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AmoDB86bk8 

Below is a letter from more than 60 professors, graduate and undergrad students, and staff expressing concerns about Tallman Trask's approach to campus security. The authors disagree with Trask that the best way to achieve safety and security for the Duke community is to close it off from what surrounds it.

It's interesting to compare Duke's approach to Columbia University's approach in West Harlem. Here's text from Columbia's website...

> An open and welcoming environment
>
> [Columbia University's] 17-acre redevelopment will be a multiuse center for teaching, academic research and the arts... The plan will transform what is now a largely isolated, underutilized streetscape of garage openings, empty ground floors, roll-down metal gates and chain-link fences on the blocks from West 125th to 133rd Streets into a cohesive, reanimated center for educational, commercial, and community life... 

> Every street will remain public and open to pedestrian and vehicular traffic
>
> New buildings will be set back and sidewalks widened on cross streets opening onto Twelfth Avenue, improving access to the new Hudson River waterfront park. New trees, lighting, street furnishings, public art, and publicly accessible open space will invite people to the entire area. (source: www.columbia. edu)

****

Tallman Trask received this letter more than five years ago. He never bothered to reply...

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,

(signed by more than 60 professors, grad and undergrad students, and staff at Duke. Re-printed with permission of the primary author.)

****