Diversity Over Careers at Duke

The Career Center at Duke University was slated to get some new digs. This is a good thing since its function is to help shepherd students into actual careers, which is ostensibly why people go to college in the first place. The career center’s page states:

“The Career Center, working in partnership with faculty and colleagues, provides career advising to all Duke undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni. Recognizing the unique talents and needs of each individual, the Career Center encourages students to make the most of their Duke experience by accessing relevant campus resources, developing career interests and values, and establishing and maintaining important human relationships with their peers as well as Duke faculty, staff, and alumni. The Career Center works to build and maintain relationships with alumni and employers who can provide internships and learning opportunities, entry-level positions, and opportunities for experienced professionals.”

Presumably, accessing the Career Center can help you get a job so you can make money, eat, rent an apartment, buy a home, contribute to society, and allegedly pay your student loans. Okay, go ahead and laugh.

According to the Duke Chronicle, the Career Center was supposed to take over the space on the first floor of the Bryan Center that had been previously occupied by the Office of Student Affairs. That did not sit well with the student body, which claimed the space had been promised to student groups that had been demanding a place to gather for decades.

In an open letter to the administration in October 2021, a coalition of student groups stated they were upset that the decision to move the Career Center was made without their input, stating in part:

“Asian students, Latinx students, Black students, Indigenous students and students with disabilities have all released demands including improved cultural spaces on campus in the past five years. Moreover, these demands are decades old, dating back to at least the 1990s with Spectrum, a multicultural student coalition, making multiple demands and proposals for a multicultural student center. Marginalized students have been sidelined and ignored by Duke. Multiple student organizations have raised the issues of the spatial politics of the Center for Multicultural Affairs (CMA) being located in the basement of the Bryan Center and the constant promises of inadequate spaces being “temporary.” These spaces are often inaccessible to students with certain disabilities and invisible from the larger student body.”

The letter concludes by stating that since the Bryan Center is for students, students should be at the “forefront” of decisions on how the space is to be used.

The Chronicle reports that for the short term, the former home of Student Affairs would become the Center for Multicultural Affairs. A mid-level suite will become a shared space for offices for the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Base, La Casa, the Black Student Association, Duke Native American, and Disabled Student Alliances. The Career Center will be moved to a corner suite on the lower level.

Yes, college should be a time for exploring life and ideas. And students should be able to form whatever clubs, organizations, and alliances they want. But college is also a time for transitioning from the teen years to adulthood and becoming a productive member of society. Career centers help in that transition. After all, haven’t we been told for years that to be successful, we had to go to college? I guess that depends on your definition of success. If you want a life that caters to your demands and you believe the world is designed to meet those demands, then I suppose success has been achieved here. The lesson that has not been learned is that smart people know how to manipulate and even create those desires and demands to make you dependent on them, while still managing to convince you that you retain control over your life.

On the upside, you can take your college degree and ruin companies, institutions, and people who don’t act, think, or look like you. So there’s that.