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  1. #41
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Steamboat Springs, CO
    Quote Originally Posted by Richard Berg View Post
    Duke punches above its weight in math undergrads, believe it or not. Not so much in music or journalism.

    Interesting you brought up the OUSF kids, because (at least when I was there in the early 00s) they all got housed together in Southgate, barring 1 or 2 who were enrolled in a dorm-specific program. Not as roommates, but still, it was kind of a weird clustering of people who were supposed to enliven campuswide academics.
    OUSF? Please enlighten us. Thanks.
    Sage Grouse

    ---------------------------------------
    'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013

  2. #42
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Santa Cruz CA
    Quote Originally Posted by sagegrouse View Post
    Having no inside knowledge, but let me speculate -- all the prep school kids were rooming with each other.

    Of course, what happened 50+ years ago was much more reprehensible. Duke assigned roommates on the basis of religion. "Eruditio et Religio," or whatever.
    It's actually the social media thing. My daughter went to college in the last decade and that was what was going on. Social media groups get set up for incoming freshmen and people try to find a roommate online, which is in itself a bit random. Probably the percentage of roommate requests had increased because of social media and certain elements at the university don't like that.

    My opinion is that all of this is overblown. I was one of the few people in my freshman dorm back in the old days that did have a preselected roommate, though it was someone I only knew casually. It was convenient because we were from the same home city and could share rides and our parents had met and could keep in touch. We didn't end up staying together beyond the first year though. My brother didn't know anyone in his freshman class and got assigned to a random roommate on east campus, which was a big problem as he was an engineering major. He ended up getting moved into a triple room on west campus mid year with more random guys. He never developed any relationship with any of these guys and ended up not doing well at Duke that year either.

    My daughter that had the social media roommate started getting along well with her roommate and making friends together. By the end of January, I am pretty sure they weren't on speaking terms.

    There's probably a lot more important things Duke should be doing besides preventing people from rooming with people they choose.

  3. #43
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Santa Cruz CA
    Quote Originally Posted by Bluedog View Post
    Actually, that's the concern of the current admin. That people are choosing to room with only people "like" them and aren't getting exposed to different perspectives. With Facebook and all other social networks these days, it's really easy for people to find roommates ahead of time, so it's not like it used to be where selecting a roommate ahead of time was quite rare. It's commonplace now and people often choose based on race/background.

    Check out the "terrifying" quote from Mr. Briggs as an example (he is against the new policy):
    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/...-freshman-year

    I didn't read the article as don't want to give Forde more clicks, but I agree that the policy doesn't really make Duke a "jock school" - it simply illustrates that athletes are given special permissions and the same rules don't apply to them as everybody else in certain circumstances. Obviously, reasonable minds can differ if it is warranted or not, but certainly there is no multi-million dollar dorm dedicated to the basketball players like there is at Kansas and UK.
    Some choice quotes in that article. My favorite:

    “Policy solutions like the one touted by Moneta and Nowicki are concerned more with the outward, feigned appearances of neoliberal, brochure-worthy multiculturalism, and are less concerned with the needs and requests of actual students living here.”

    I'm guessing I wouldn't want to be randomly paired with Mr. Briggs either.

  4. #44
    I would take the article a lot more seriously if it was written by a member of the Duke community criticizing the policy. Forde, who has many past instances of trying to needle Duke and speaks to his daughter's experience as a swimmer at Stanford while stating Duke "is no Stanford," is not someone who I care to hear this from. The uniqueness of how Duke is situated athletically and academically makes it a poor spotlight when the article itself admits that most D1 schools probably separate athletes to an even greater degree. Even based on the description of the policy in the article, it comes across much more as something where you can see both sides of the argument (the demands of athlete schedules compared to the general student body aren't something to just brush aside) than as Exhibit A in a problem with segregating athletes and NARPs, as the article tries to argue. Honestly, both the new policy of restricting pre-selection of roommates and the policy of grouping athletes together make a lot of sense to me, and I care about Duke's athletes sharing in a common Duke experience with other students.

  5. #45
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    Chicago suburbs
    It really is awful journalism. The bigger story is Duke trying to go against the social media tidal wave and prevent freshman from selecting their own roommates.

    Having freshman athletes room together in a dorm mixed with NARPs is basically the same as “randomly” pairing freshman who say they are night owls or early birds. My daughter’s freshman roommate was selected by her coach but I’m sure that it helped both of them get to the East Campus bus stop at 6 am five days a week.

    Not sure how that is preferential enough to warrant Forde’s scathing assessment.

  6. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by sagegrouse View Post
    OUSF? Please enlighten us. Thanks.
    http://www.ousf.duke.edu/

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by nmduke2001 View Post
    It seems to me that Pat Forde wrote a long article in order to mention that his daughter is a Stanford swimmer and decided to use Duke to get more clicks.
    Ding ding ding!

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