A Blue Devil Bubble: The divide between Durham and Duke university

BY CORA WILLIAMSON

     Sweating cocktails leave rims on the oak counters of new bustling bars, kids and couples enjoy live jazz by the bronze bull with ice cream in hand, and lively chatter spills out of restaurant patios accompanied by spices of ethnic cuisine. Durham serves as a great home for families as well as adventurous college students. 
     Duke University, known for its academic prestige and
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PHOTO CREDIT: CORA WILLIAMSON
On a beautiful cloudless day, Duke University looks striking against the vibrant colors of it’s landscaping. Baldwin auditorium is one of the many classic structures on campus that welcomes new students.

strides in the medical field, is located in the heart of Durham. Though it is integrated in the city through its various institutions, such as Duke hospital, Duke gardens, and Duke forest, the university's spirit is more of an underlying layer of the town. Established in 1838 under the name of Trinity college, later being renamed Duke university in 1942, Duke has built its reputation to the level of an “almost-ivy” private university. With it being so sought after and a private school, Duke has an endowment of almost $12 billion dollars. With that amount of revenue, Duke is able to provide its students with everything they could possibly need, so for many students, there's barely any need to venture into Durham at all.
    “For the humble price of $70k a year, Duke creates a little world in which all of our needs are filled… it would be very easy to spend an entire academic year without ever leaving campus. Besides journeys to Shooter’s or runs to Harris Teeter, very few of us actually experience Durham," Journalist Alex Heap wrote in his 2018 article ‘Bursting the Duke Bubble.’
     Durham is an exponentially changing city and has become, in more recent years, a desirable up-and-coming area for young families, Duke students, and wealthy STEM experts. Though it’s exciting to watch a humble town flourish, this spike in new houses, restaurants, and boutiques has also led to unavoidable gentrification and higher rates of poverty and crime within low-income neighborhoods. 
     “I see a lot of people going to Mad Hatters and walking around Ninth Street. In 
in terms of studying and that kind of thing, people like to typically stay on campus. People use their dorm rooms very heavily,” shared Connor Solvason, an undergraduate freshman at Duke from Charlotte, NC. 
    



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 For many Duke students, the farthest they will stray from the self-sufficient campus is a few blocks off East Campus to wander Ninth Street or blow off some steam at clubs/bars like Shooters or Divines. Because Duke is a college town basically within itself, Duke students are experiencing the college as an almost entirely separate entity from Durham. 
     "I don't really feel that much like I'm living in Durham. I feel like I'm living at Duke. So I would say that my experience has been really different, except maybe, you know, with the occasional, like, walk down Ninth Street, which is really familiar to me,” shared Nate Jones, a former DSA student and current undergraduate freshman at Duke. 
    The Duke Bubble has perpetuated most of its relationship with Durham, but in recent years the university has made efforts to get students more involved in Durham, service-wise and with the culture of the city. 
    “There's initiatives to try and get you more engaged with Durham as a community. That's actually something that I'm getting involved with here on campus. I'm on the Duke student government Durham Community Affairs Committee, so I'm trying to find some initiatives that'll get students off campus and involved with Durham more,” Jones explained. 
    Despite the bubble being prominent, it isn’t nonpermeable, and the bubble isn’t without justification. The campus does an outstanding job of offering its students an infinite amount of opportunities and multitude of resources. 
    “There's so much; there's everything you need there—the sites, gardens, where you don't really have a need to leave and it kind of keeps you contained there.” Solvason concluded. ​