But there’s a difference between reading headlines and sitting in an auditorium overflowing with frustrated and angry students. Back on the campus that James Duke built, emotions boiled over quickly at the town hall, with a group of nearly 100 students taking the stage with a call-and-response chat even before university officials took their seats.

“You have created a space for us to fear for our lives, and you continue to maintain that space,” the students said in unison. “Duke, you are guilty.”

One by one the students, mostly undergrads, addressed the university’s president, Richard Brodhead, who was accompanied by Provost Sally Kornbluth and Dean Valerie Ashby. “I do not feel safe as a black female at Duke,” Katrina Miller told him. A female Asian American student, weeping, said, “If everything had gone according to plan...I would have been another suicide because I don’t feel safe here. I don’t feel that I belong here.”

As an alumnus, and a member of the Duke Alumni Association board of directors, I’d been following the highly disturbing series of events on campus: In April, an undergraduate hung a noose from a tree near the student union; in October, a Black Lives Matter poster was defaced with the “N” word; students of Asian ancestry have been repeatedly ridiculed and stereotyped. Then, in November, while Jack Donahue slept in his dorm, he told me, an individual entered and scrawled on a corridor wall with a black sharpie: “Death to all fags @Jack.” Donahue is gay.

The university didn’t address the incident publicly for two days, and then dismissed the incident as “defamatory speech.” LGBT students saw it differently. “No, it was a hate crime against an individual, as well as a community, and should have been named as such,” said Tyler Nelson, the president of Blue Devils United, the student LGBT organization. Christopher Brook, the legal director of the ACLU of North Carolina agreed, “It certainly sounds like this event meets the Hate Crime Prevention Act definition of a hate crime.”

Donahue missed the town hall to attend IvyQ, an activist conference of LGBT students, but I had spoken to him a few days earlier. I asked him if LGBT students felt safe at Duke. “No,” he replied without hesitation. Donahue had earlier told The Chronicle “hatred like this is exactly what keeps innocent victims of circumstance in the closet and queer people living in a constant state of fear.”

Duke students living in a constant state of fear? Was this an exaggeration or a frightening new reality for many? Listening to them speak up one after another, I sadly came to realize it was the latter.

“I shouldn’t have to feel obligated to call my mother every night to tell her that I survived another day at Duke,” Miller told Brodhead at the town hall. “There’s no space for me at Duke.”