The Lemur was always supposed to be more than just a magazine. Duke needed one of those, to be sure. It needed a place for students to wrestle with difficult issues through writing—and to show that they cared about the world, not just their own professional prospects. But we always wanted The Lemur to be, at its core, a community, one dedicated to bringing together interesting people with “big ideas” at Duke and changing the culture of our college, even just a little bit. We’re amazed at how much this community has grown in the last few years, and, more than that, we’re excited about how much it will grow in the future. We believe—truly—that The Lemur can change Duke.
Since February 2024, we have published over 150 articles on our website that have been read by tens of thousands of unique visitors. We released two popular print issues. We’ve hosted dozens of roundtables and seminars, attended by hundreds of Duke students, that have—hopefully—made Duke a slightly more welcoming place for incoming freshmen interested in exploring the world of ideas. We’ve built relationships with academic departments to center student voices in conversations about course offerings and curricular design. And we’re incredibly proud to be able to say that The Lemur has now become a genuine institution on Duke’s campus—it’s a place students know they can come to find friendship, fulfillment, or just an evening of good conversation.
The goal now is to keep this momentum going. We hope that, with each passing year, there will be more freshmen at Duke who feel like it’s not so hard to find people to engage in late-night conversations about literature and culture, history and philosophy, science and religion. We hope fewer students feel pressured to major in Public Policy and Economics by default, or to sign up for a dozen extracurriculars and endeavor to climb the ranks from Treasurer to Vice President to President. We hope more students are setting themselves up for four years of exploration and discovery, and a lifetime of learning.
We’re under no illusions about the challenge ahead. The experience of college at Duke remains, in so many ways, a husk of what it can and should be. We could spend paragraph upon paragraph lamenting all the issues with a contemporary Duke education—Day 1 pre-professionalism, students only taking “easy courses,” rampant grade inflation, overreliance on AI, etc—but you already know these things, and we’re frankly tired of ranting about them. Identifying the problem is not the hard part here. Making these problems feel like they aren’t inevitable is.
So here we want to briefly outline our vision for a “better Duke,” one which The Lemur will be a part of building in the years to come.
First, Duke must genuinely center the humanities in all its administrative initiatives focused on “interdisciplinarity.” If you think of the university’s academic offerings as a network, the center of that network in our current system (excluding the pre-med fields, a world that remains somewhat parallel and walled off at Duke) is the “data-driven” and analysis-oriented combination of Public Policy, Economics, and Computer Science. But as valuable as many of the tools of thought encouraged by these disciplines can be, these fundamentally technical departments do not encourage or allow students to think capaciously and holistically in the way that is required to solve problems with outside-the-box solutions or to appreciate the complexities and contingencies of a world that has consistently proved stubbornly resistant to improvement by way of spreadsheets and calculators. Having these fields at the center of Duke’s academic network—as our most popular majors, and, more notably, as extremely popular minors and double majors with other disciplines—is causing a first-principles problem with how Duke students think about and engage with the world. But the humanities have a wider reach, and have a sense-making power to create contexts in which the tools of data and analysis can be applied toward productive ends.
So how would centering the humanities at Duke work? Well, it would look a little bit like what we’ve done with The Lemur. Connect academic departments with debates and conversations designed to help students see connections that are simply not the focus of lectures, office hours, and internships. Bring together engineers and journalists in book clubs that help each appreciate different ways of thinking. Create more interdisciplinary majors across humanities departments and do a better job of articulating to incoming freshmen the professional possibilities available to someone with a liberal arts degree.
The second part of our vision is essential to making the first happen: creating real community. This part is the beating heart of The Lemur, but we don’t want to take too much credit for it. After all, if we’ve discovered anything in creating this magazine, it’s that it’s not nearly as hard to create spaces for dialogue and debate as the university might think. The solution to Duke’s lack of intellectual community is not throwing money at grand “initiatives” and restructuring residential life. It involves creating spaces for meaningful interactions, starting at the smallest units and working up. This means classrooms, halls, common rooms, and club meetings. This means small groups coming together outside of the current Duke mainstream. When you come to a Lemur seminar, there is no pressure to make a typical “classroom” comment (“piggybacking off what X said…”) or to make sure that your professor clocks your three contributions for the day. These seminars don’t force you to think about what interests you—they create a space where you want to think about what interests you.
And that’s the key. Forming community is all about the ideas that bring people together. One does not find friends by looking for a friend, and a university does not create community by trying to create community. We find friends, and community to boot, when we look at another person and say, “You see the world that way, too!?” This is our insight from years of setting up just these kinds of events. Duke students are interesting people. They like discussing ideas, especially the “big” ones we are so obsessed with. If you build the spaces for these conversations, and, importantly, make them amenable to small group discussions, students will come. And they will not just come—they will stay for hours. They will laugh. They will sit with uncertainty. And, crucially, they will learn. You will have to beg them to leave because the lights are going out in the building.
This is one of the reasons why Duke should stop prioritizing massive speaker events—those Page Auditorium and Reynolds Theater evenings in which students can only engage passively, if at all, and where the Duke community is embarrassingly outnumbered by Durhamites. Real engagement comes from small settings and builds outward and upward, not polite sit-downs that feel more like a night at the opera.
It is the responsibility of the the entire university community—administrators, faculty, clubs, students—to genuinely work together to make these interactions more common. To make them the norm. To make them unremarkable. To make them the culture of the university, not its counterculture.
Shamelessly, we think the best way to do this is just to copy what we’ve already done. But that’s not just self-promotion—it’s pragmatism, rooted in the fact of how easy we’ve found it is to bring people together when you really try. We encourage faculty and other students to create more events like our Foundations seminars; we ask departments to open their colloquia to undergraduates, faculty to start more reading groups, and for the university to expand funding for programs like Transformative Ideas and, indeed, all its humanities departments to create more small-group learning opportunities for students.
Changing the culture at our school—the parts we don’t like at least—will take years of work, and a collective commitment from the Duke community not to let the forces of cynicism and careerism win.
In the coming years, The Lemur will continue its work to create spaces for intellectual conversation and the kinds of genuine togetherness it has become so hard to find elsewhere.
We’re looking forward to this work, and we know that the new editors-in-chief of The Lemur will be two fierce warriors in the campaign.
After over two years at the helm, we are handing The Lemur to two new editors, Cara Eaton and Alejandro Nina Duran.
Cara and Alejandro are Lemur OGs—regular writers, editors, and contributors at our events and strong believers in our mission—and we’re excited to see where they take us.
— Zachary Partnoy & Sherman Criner
I found The Lemur by accident, the same way I find most things special to me. How gratifying it was to stumble upon a group of people interested in discussing topics beyond the scope of day-to-day seminars, lunch dates, and get-togethers. I landed on The Lemur on a listless afternoon in the Brodhead Center, on a simple quest to find a place to publish my writing, ignorant of where participating in such a community might take me. I didn’t know I was joining at the magazine’s inception. I just knew I wanted to continue on.
Since then, I’ve written on a variety of subjects, including aesthetic theory, Marxism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and (pending) Nashville hot chicken. As a rising senior and seemingly sempiternal philosophy student, I’m excited for more. What has stayed with me most cannot be quantified in output but in hours: exciting seminars and editorial conversations that refuse to end, and the resulting friendships that span Krafthouse drinks, Durham restaurants, and Duke basketball watch parties. The Lemur is so much more than our bylines. The people are the thing.
I intend to expand authorship and readership across the wider Duke community, meet people where they are, and reach out to the cynics and nihilists who assume Duke has nothing to offer that fits their interests during my tenure as editor-in-chief. We build The Lemur as a community, one conversation at a time. I intend to have a lot of them.
— Cara Eaton
Reflecting on my own past, I have found most special things in my life often tend to find me. Not the other way around. A twist of fate. A stroke of luck, or whatever you want to call it.
The Lemur found me at a time when most crawl away. They found me, with my doubts spilling from my hand and panhandling for validation in the other. Coming into college, riding the valedictorian high, I was fearful of what was next. I saw college as a way out of the clutches of financial insecurity and into prosperity. Soliloquies of the American Dream in my back pocket. That’s what college was for, right?
It wasn’t until I started accepting the small things that I began to see college life as more than a professional pipeline. One wrong turn through the labyrinths of Sanford led to great conversation. One coffee chat gone-too-long and you’re introduced to a redhead and a Yankee. Many fortuitous encounters with a Yankee and a redhead later, I soon learned about how their intellectual foray into civil discourse became a conviction to see it through. The Lemur was its manifestation. A vision where Duke students would sit with each other, meet at the crossroads of their thoughts, and transform them into poignant narratives. I didn’t know I was gravitating towards the beginning of something big. Like Cara, I just wanted to continue on.
Since joining the Lemur, I have bounced around various topics, including world affairs, the dynamics of masculinity in America, and even Chinese culture and history. Safe to say, I like to put my fingers in all pies. As a rising Junior and Economics major, I carry my head high. Behind the countless hours of WU table-side philosophizing and one-too-many coffees, the enduring friendships I’ve made along the way have stuck with me. The ideas, the events, and laughs all have one thing in common: our community.
As co-editor-in-chief of the Lemur alongside Cara, I intend to continue the simple promise on which the Lemur was founded: to shape, mold, and influence each other’s consciousness—one conversation and memory at a time. To build the Lemur is not a selfish act; it is to be a part of something bigger than oneself; it is to be as unapologetically human as possible.
