The Chronicle

Issue date: 10/10/07 Section: Columns
Last update: 10/10/07 at 6:57 AM EST

Jordan Everson

For the first time ever, I stayed in Durham over a break from classes. To my surprise, Durham does not shrivel up and die without Duke students.

In fact, the oft-heard student refrain that "there's nothing to do in Durham" has never proven less true. Between the World Beer Festival's absurd number of beers (which must be seen to be believed), Sati's 35-cent wing night, Broad Street Cafe's bohemian attractions and Southpoint's usual excellence, the problem with Durham is no longer that there isn't enough to do but that there's too much.

Durham is a beast on its own. As much as we Duke students would like to pretend that our business is essential to the bars, restaurants and shops around here, no one-except maybe Shooters-really caters directly to us on a regular basis.

In this aspect, Durham contrasts directly with Chapel Hill. Whereas we have Brightleaf Square, the American Tobacco District, Ninth Street and Southpoint, Chapel Hill has Franklin Street. And Franklin Street is undeniably for the students.

The one time I went out last weekend, I went to Chapel Hill. It is, and it feels like, a college town. Even late into the morning hours, several bars and restaurants were packed with students.

Why doesn't Durham feel like a college town? Well, we of course are a smaller fish: UNC is about two and a half times the size of Duke. And we are also swimming in a bigger pond: Durham has four times the population of Chapel Hill.

But I suspect that the geography of our campus also detracts a great deal from our college-town potential. If an outside observer were dropped onto West Campus by helicopter he would think Duke was a rural school, not in the middle of a city with more than 200,000 residents.

And because Durham is its own entity independent from Duke in a way Chapel Hill is not, there will inevitably be town-and-gown friction. Duke and Durham are simply too different to get along without tension, although that doesn't mean we can't lighten that tension as much as possible.

So no, Durham is not and will never be a college town like Chapel Hill. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

Chapel Hill looks an awful lot like Ann Arbor, Mich., to me. Okay, so Ann Arbor has two main streets instead of one, and they root for football up there instead of basketball, but the similarities vastly outweigh the differences. They have the same beer specials, same typical college-town restaurants, same fraternity houses and same atmosphere.

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