When I arrived at DukeUniversity in January to begin a stint as a visiting professor in the cultural-anthropology department, the lacrosse-team scandal was still a few months in the future. But I was already well aware of the fact that the college classroom has become increasingly politicized.
A month before I got to Duke, the Young America's Foundation had issued its annual "dirty dozen" list, which identifies the nation's 12 most "bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation's colleges and universities." A course that I teach at OccidentalCollege had landed in the No. 2 spot. Good liberal that I am, I viewed making the list less as a black spot on my record than as a badge of honor.
But I did mind the foundation's implication that a student would learn nothing of value in the course, called "The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie." Although the title might not immediately suggest college-worthy skills, the reading list -- which includes works by Walter Benjamin, Susan Bordo, Sandra Cisneros, and Karl Marx -- should be evidence of serious academic content. I start the course with material about understanding hegemony and Bakhtinian analysis of language.
After the "dirty dozen" list appeared, blogs across the nation began screaming about my class and its supposed lack of intellectual honesty. By then I was teaching a version of the Barbie course at Duke, called "Girl Culture/Power." Bloggers seemed to think that I would give an A to any student who dutifully regurgitated my ideological pap and fail anyone who dared to challenge my philosophy. What I was actually doing with my students was correcting their subject-verb agreement and giving them some of the first C's they had ever received; during office hours, I tried to assure them that their rewritten papers would be much better and handed them tissues to dry their tears.
Of the 25 students in the class, about two-thirds were well-off white women who were in the most elite sororities at Duke. The rest of the class consisted of three brave men (one Jewish, one Latino, and one African-American), several heterosexual women of color, and a handful of what I affectionately thought of as my radical feminists.
The combination was edgy from the beginning, and it was clear that race and class dynamics at Duke are both complex and unacknowledged. Early in the semester, I did an exercise that I regularly use, asking students to sort themselves into groups and telling them only that everyone in the group should be "the same." At Occidental my students invariably sort themselves by race, which provides an opportunity for us to talk about how racial identities shape us even when we are supposedly not thinking about them.
At Duke, however, my students sorted themselves by who was wearing sweatpants, or who had discussed a particular reading in an online post. But even so, all the people of color were in one group.
I brought that fact to my students' attention, and after class, a number of them came up to me and expressed relief that the issue had been brought out into the open. Well, I thought, we're off to an interesting start.
But when the news hit that an African-American woman had accused members of the lacrosse team of rape and assault, my classroom boiled over with resentment, misperceptions, defensiveness, and anger -- all exacerbated by the mix of people taking the course. As students said over and over, this was a group of people who normally would not be in the same room together.
The scandal hit our class especially hard: Many of the sorority girls were very close friends with members of the lacrosse team, and everyone else in the course knew it. Pretty soon, people were literally taking sides in the classroom, with a no man's land of space between the factions. That arrangement mirrored the conditions on Duke's campus, where -- although 32 percent of students belong to ethnic minorities -- many whites have no significant interactions with people of color or anyone "different" in some way, like sexual orientation. Members of the dominant white group feel that other groups are segregating themselves, but do not recognize their own behavior as segregation.
As the lacrosse scandal uncovered many ugly facts about team members' behavior, it also revealed that the worlds occupied by most students at Duke are deeply divided, especially by race and class, and that students know little about the lives of -- and may even fear -- their peers in different circles. When one of my radical feminists said in class, "You don't understand what women of color on this campus go through," many students on the other side of the room heard that as code for "I have an agenda that has nothing to do with this particular case." And when one sorority member said, "It's not fair that all of the boys are suffering for what maybe a couple of people might have done," the other side heard her as saying "I protect white privilege uncritically."
I felt that I was facing at once the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity I had had in my 15 years as a teacher. I had to figure out a way to keep the classroom a safe space for all the students, while allowing people on both sides of the issue to hear and understand each other.
One of the hardest moments was when we heard a rally just outside the classroom, and I suggested that we step outside to listen. After a while, I noticed that, one by one, the sorority girls were going back inside. When I went after them, their pain and frustration were obvious.
"It's just not fair being targeted as a group," wailed one woman. "Well," I said, "maybe you can understand what the women of color are talking about, then. They feel targeted as a group."
The other students returned to the classroom, and one of the radical women proffered an olive branch. "I know it must be hard to think that someone you know and trust might have done something really bad," she said. She knew that was so because one of her close friends in high school had raped someone. She had ended the friendship but had yet to recover from the shock of the experience.
I was struck by the differences in the way administrators and professors at Duke and Occidental think about and interact with their undergraduates on questions of diversity and race. At Occidental I would have expected a town meeting, teach-ins, and coordinated efforts in residence halls to promote dialogue and reduce tensions.
But at Duke, my impression was that the official response to the scandal was aimed externally, as damage control. The students were left on their own to deal with some very big issues, about which all of them had strong feelings. Robert J. Thompson, vice provost for undergraduate education, sent a thoughtful message to all faculty members, encouraging us to be sensitive to how the situation was affecting students, but no one suggested specific ways in which professors should discuss the problem with our students or each other.
Several weeks after the scandal broke, President Richard H. Brodhead announced that he was creating a number of committees to examine, among other things, Duke's campus culture. But that offered no immediate help to students, especially seniors who were about to graduate.
The reason I teach my students about hegemony and Bakhtin -- and, yes, Barbie -- is to give them tools to examine their own lives, to develop insight into the complexities of what might seem simple. So as I tried to keep my course going while helping my students get through the scandal, I decided to offer them a new option for a final project.
The assignment was to pair up with someone in the class whom they perceived as different from themselves, and do ethnographies of each other's world. In the process, I told students, they had to get out of their comfort zones, perhaps by attending an event they would not normally go to, or by discussing issues usually reserved for close friends -- entering a world they viewed as foreign, maybe even frightening. I wanted them to experience how ridiculously easy it actually is to step into someone else's world, to realize that the separation between my world and yours is almost always made and enforced by us.
Imagine my delight as the students expressed excitement about the project. Imagine my even greater delight as two brown-skinned feminists teamed up with two blonde-haired sorority women in a group project; as an African-American basketball player made plans to go to her first sorority mixer; as an African-American male studying engineering discussed race and class with one of the sorority women. Watching them walk away from class comfortably chatting in their unintuitive groups made me feel like a fairy godmother.
But the real magic was performed by the students, who threw themselves into their projects with courage and passion. The papers they wrote were insightful and honest. Many acknowledged having ignored their own privilege; others admitted that they had avoided their more-privileged peers.
It turns out that the bloggers were right: I gave all of my students A's. Not because they used four-syllable words or produced (thank goodness) grammatically correct and elegant writing, but because of their honesty, hard work, and courage. They inspired me, and their achievements as scholars and thinking people demanded my recognition and respect. If that's bizarre radical activism, so be it.
Elizabeth J. Chin is an associate professor of anthropology at OccidentalCollege and was a visiting assistant professor of cultural anthropology at DukeUniversity this spring.