Djupe, Paul A.

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Djupe, Paul

Denison University

Denison University Denison Digital Commons Faculty Publications 2023 The D Key Paul Djupe Denison University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/facultypubs  Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Djupe, Paul, "The D Key" (2023). Faculty Publications. 1784. https://digitalcommons.denison.edu/facultypubs/1784 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Denison Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Denison Digital Commons. For more information, please contact eresources@denison.edu.                     The D KeyPaul A. Djupe November 28, 2023By Paul A. Djupe, Director of the Data for Political Research MinorCongratulations, you’ve been accepted to attend Denison University! Here are somestickers. What do you do with them? Are you a sticker person whose laptop case colorcannot be discerned? Are you proud to be accepted into this liberal arts college? Are othersputting this sticker on their keyboards? It’s easy to let these questions get in your head.Fortunately, 127 is here to help.First, you’re not alone. We asked about how students represent Denison on your laptop inour October 2023 survey. As you’ve no doubt noticed, sporting the D key is not exactlyunanimous, but neither is it rare. From our estimates, about 20 percent have the D key and athird have a Denison sticker. But does it signify anything? Is it a biased coin flip or does it tellus something systematic about your campus experience?It is pretty clear from the data that those who have the D key are much more involved oncampus. Or, as the following figure shows, those involved in more group types (sports, arts,volunteering, governance, etc) are more likely to sport the D (or a sticker  –  I collapsed1/5                  those categories together for analyses here on out). A slim majority of those involved in 4 or5 activities sport the D key compared to just 10 percent of those uninvolved. It’s no surprisethat those invested in campus find visible ways to demonstrate that commitment.But sporting the D is also a cultural phenomenon with some interesting and not entirelyexplicable patterns. Take class year. I would expect that commitment grows across years asinvolvement in the major and in campus activities deepen. But the results suggest thatcommitment peaks in the middle years among men and kicks up after freshman year forwomen and trans/non-binary (I’d rather not combine these categories, but I had to in order tohave enough cases to analyze). It’s not clear from just one year of data whether this is atypical trend or whether it’s just particular to the classes matriculating at the tail end of covid.Speaking of gender identity, the gaps here are really something. It is no surprise that menare the least engaged  –  this is a national problem that applies to work, marriage,organizational life, sex, and more. And it applies here too; men are involved in about half agroup less (2.3) than women (2.7) and T/NBs (2.9). Women are much more likely to show aDenison sticker, but T/NBs do so even more. Are men just less into stickers than others?2/5     I was curious if the gender gaps would hold across racial identities and it does for the mostpart. Women are 20-30 percent more likely to sport the D, but that gap swells to 40 percentamong Latino students. There aren’t many “other” racial ids in the sample (just 3 percent),but the gender gap flips among them.3/5        It is also interesting to note that there is a class pattern to sporting the D key, at least amongmen. It is the least common among those men who indicate their family as working class aswell as upper class. Only the middle three class categories have substantial Drepresentation. For women, representation rates are pretty high across the board, thoughwomen from middle and upper class families show school spirit at somewhat lower rates. Wedidn’t ask about this, but I wonder if class correlates with whether Denison was a first choiceschool.4/5                It’s also important to note what is not connected to the D key display. They don’t reallyapprove of Weinberg more (73-69), they don’t really like Alex Pan more (58-55), they don’tlike the concept of mindfulness anymore (74-74), and they like the Sunnies just the same(54-53), but they like the 127 blog just a little more (51-46). Thanks D keyers.It’s just a red sticker with a white letter. Some decide to put it on their keyboard, especiallyafter freshman year. It doesn’t seem to mean a whole lot, but the D key probably does sendsome signals. On the basis of the sticker alone, you could profitably guess that stickeredstudent is involved on campus. Beyond that, they think and feel about the same as others,though they may cut a distinctive profile by their typical gender ID and race.Paul A. Djupe is a local cyclist who runs the Data for Political Research minor. He startedonetwentyseven.blog a few years ago in a bid to subsidize collective action and spreadaccurate knowledge about campus and what goes on there. He also writes about religionand politics in the US.5/5

The D Key

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The D Key

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