Over the past two decades, Duke has worked hard to prompt and promote opportunities for faculty and students to engage deeply and genuinely with ideas and with each other. We have affirmed diversity as fundamental to our research and educational goals and have undertaken significant efforts to transform the campus into a more vibrant and inclusive community…

We have also sought to diversify our undergraduate, graduate, and professional student bodies and provide them with depth of understanding of themselves and the world that equips them to become better scholars, leaders, and citizens…(Making a Difference: The Strategic Plan for Duke University, Sept. 29, 2006)

Helping “to transform the campus into a more vibrant and inclusive community” is the primary goal of the Center for Multicultural Affairs (Multicultural Center). This is a formidable task since the campus is made up of multiple communities with great degrees of heterogeneity within communities. It commands a multifaceted approach university-wide. What these communities all have in common, however, is that they exist within the Duke campus environment enjoying varying degrees of recognition and support.  Therein lies the challenge.

Contributing to the complexity of this challenge is a dramatic 30% increase in student of color enrollment in the first-year class over the past twenty-two years (from 8.5% in 1984 to 36.6% in 2006). This rapid shift in demographics has altered the look and culture of the campus often resulting in intergroup tensions. As this dynamic continues to evolve, our commitment to build community and positive intergroup relations intensifies. The Center for Multicultural Affairs takes great pride in knowing that it is one of the spaces created on campus to help meet this welcomed challenge.

Some overarching themes in our current and future work include: Building intergroup relations among ethno-racial cultural groups and between disparate student groups; Raising campus awareness of the heterogeneity within communities of color at Duke, along lines of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and national origin; Fostering the growth of students of color as young leaders and young scholars through programming, advising, and facilitation of student-faculty interactions; Providing institutional support for students of color both within and outside the structures of established cultural organizations; Creating room for different expressions of ethnic identity, not only cultural but also political and intellectual; Providing educational programming and resources for the campus on the changing landscape of race relations and multiculturalism at Duke and beyond; Offering programming on issues of equity and social justice designed to prepare students to be effective participants in their future pluralistic communities, and crating a multicultural space where all members of the campus community can interact on multiple levels on a daily basis.

We look forward to the day when the Bryan Center (home of the Multicultural Center) will be “re-imagined” and transformed into a space that will “serve as a lively community center for Duke’s many cultures and constituencies; when the Multicultural Center will be staffed by a set of program coordinators that will mirror the diversity of the student body, and when we will be able to accommodate all of the student communities with whom we work with adequate space and resources for self-expression and communal endeavors. This will truly be a transformational moment to celebrate.