[Durham INC] Making Duke a gated community is not the answer: faculty/student letter to Duke admin

[John Schelp]

History repeats itself. More than 60 faculty, students and staff at Duke sent this letter to Tallman Trask, several years ago. He never replied...


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 faculty, students and staff at Duke. 
Re-printed with permission of the primary author.

Copies also sent to:

President Nannerl Keohane
Provost Peter Lange
John Burness, Office of Senior Vice President for Public Affairs 
Judith Ruderman, Vice Provost Academic & 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
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