No Time to Party: An Ode to Durham's Shooters II Saloon
Partying is the most valuable luxury at American colleges.
What Is Shooters II?
During my time at Duke, I always saw Shooters II nightclub — a Durham staple for undergraduates — as a jungle somewhere south of the Tropic of Cancer. Former valedictorians, science fair winners, and 1500+ SAT scorers devolve to the most animalistic instincts. Humidity clings to your skin, or is it your sweat? Perhaps it’s other people’s sweat? Perhaps it’s liquid from a drink spilled by your intoxicated peer.
Of course, this must be legally procured alcohol. She has a wristband after all! Meanwhile, you trudge around in your Vans “party sneakers”, which have been deteriorating to complete disrepair since you started dedicating them to parties and beach visits in junior year of high school. With every step, the rubber of your sole peels off the sticky layer on the floor — comprised of beer, wine, various liquors, and perhaps other substances. It’s chaos, but it’s all a part of the Duke experience.
But now? That era might be coming to end as Shooters II has closed on the Wednesday nights for the entire fall semester.
Before I delve into Shooters in the Year of Our Lord 2024, I want to give some context of what Shooters II is. Shooters II serves as the nightclub mecca in Durham, North Carolina. For two or so decades, this Western-themed bar and dance club has given high-achieving Duke students a social outlet on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. You might question the significance of a nightclub near an undergraduate institution. Isn’t this an absolute necessity in a college town — not much different from a fire department or a Waffle House?
Ah, yes. I completely agree. On the surface, there is nothing inherently unique about a college having a nearby club, which many of the undergraduates frequent. If you are looking for a plethora of bar-hopping options, then Durham isn’t for you. As an American high schooler pursuing acceptance to a top institution, Vanderbilt will provide you more thrills in Nashville, Tennessee. You could even drive 15 miles southwest of this Durham campus to Chapel Hill, the location of Duke’s rival UNC, and reach West Franklin Street, UNC’s main drag speckled with dozens of establishments for 21+ libations. Carolina’s layout much more closely resembles the layout of the typical American college town. You likely won’t find much different in Gainesville, Florida, or Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Universality of Shooters II
How does Durham’s Shooters II Saloon differ? None of those bars in Chapel Hill have as much monolithic, omnipresent sociocultural power as Shooters II has at Duke. When you’re the only game in town, you have a grip on the psyche of the inexperienced underclassman. If you can toggle between bars in Chapel Hill, then the influence fragments. The abstracted metonym of West Franklin Street holds way more power in Chapel Hill than any single establishment.
Shooters II also has accessibility universal to all Duke students (unless you have not yet turned 18 years old). Unlike many bars, Shooters II allows everyone 18 years and older into the bar. If your ID says you are at least 18 but under 21, the bouncer draws a black “X” on the top of your hand in Sharpie so that the bartenders know not to serve alcohol to you. Those who are 21 years and over receive wristbands, which bequeath patrons with the magical power to order from the bar.
Of course, I have full awareness that many underage college students use fake IDs to buy alcohol at bars, grocery stores, and liquor stores. At Carolina, I bet that a very large portion of freshmen every year procure fake IDs somehow. Many probably already have them from high school, but needing to get a fake ID to buy alcohol poses a big hurdle for many college students. The fake ID has a financial hurdle. Buying an effective one can cost you approximately $200. Many students do not have the freedom to clandestinely spend $200 on the black market without their parents noticing, but it more so has a psychological hurdle than a legal one.
Obviously, if an alcohol-serving establishment catches someone, using a fake ID violates the drinking laws of all 50 states although the probability of getting caught might be quite low. Even though using a fake ID at a bar is a public crime out in the open, you are not doing something as flagrantly and conspicuously illegal as smoking a crack pipe in front of a police officer. (A few years ago, I would have said blowing marijuana smoke in a police officer’s face, but too many states have legalized or decriminalized cannabis.)
You have to remember the type of students that ultimately attend Duke. These kids have likely followed the rules their entire lives to the letter so that they could get into a selective university like Duke. They did everything that their parents told them. They did everything that their teachers told them. Clearly, this generalization does not apply to every Duke student, but I would say this disposition is disproportionately true for the Duke population as compared to schools with higher acceptance rates. Getting into college requires jumping through several hoops and following a series of many rules and deadlines. The process often rewards the risk-averse.
A teenager who excels in that realm to get into a school akin to Duke likely has a lower propensity to break rules, such as state alcohol laws against fake IDs and underage drinking. Even if a rational Duke student accepts that getting caught has a very low probability, s/he may not want to take the risk at all. The expected value of illegally obtaining alcohol with friends and getting drunk does not outweigh the cost of getting caught, but — in reality — the downside is not necessarily getting caught. Rather — a risk-averse, neurotic 19-year-old Duke student may not want the anxiety rattling in her brain as she approaches the bouncer at the club with her fake ID. Shooters II cuts through all of that psychology.
Sure, the students with fake IDs can still try to use them, but Shooters II gives an out for the anxious Duke student who still wants to socialize with her peers before she turns 21 years old. I largely speak from personal experience because, before I turned 21, I neither bought nor used a fake ID — but I also never drank alcohol. Therefore, using one brought me very little expected value because I was never going to drink alcohol anyway. I continue to abstain from alcohol at my current age of 26 years old. I hope that I am not purely speaking for my own experience and that other Duke students have experienced the same thought processes as me even if they do choose to drink as the majority of college students do.
All these factors make Shooters II a place where everybody converges. On a Saturday night as a Duke student, if you want to party, you likely end up at Shooters II. It does not matter what fraternity or sorority you may have joined (if you chose to join Greek life at all). It does not matter how popular you are. It does not matter if you are an athlete. It does not matter how talented you are at conversing with the opposite sex. Everyone can end up at Shooters II at some point in the night, and it’s legally open to all freshmen the moment that they step onto campus for orientation week and their parents start driving back to Westchester County, New York.
Coming of Age at Shooters
I have established my point that Duke students might hold a disproportionate amount of risk aversion compared to those at other universities. This risk aversion leads to many students less willing to go to the black market to buy a fake ID card, but what other social differences will these students have with those at schools with higher acceptance rates? Much of my analysis here is anecdotal and based on my experience. The student body at Duke may have changed significantly from my time there between 2016 and 2020. Even though that is really not very long ago, we went through the pandemic and post-Floyd BLM movement since then. American culture has changed massively in the past four years.
I posit that this risk aversion leads Duke students to have disproportionately fewer experiences from high school. More specifically, these are high-achieving students who did not go to as many parties, drink as much, or interact as much with the preferred sex as the students at other institutions. When you spend a large portion of your time trying to get into a top school, you ignore or postpone other experiences that American teenagers normally have.
Finally, Duke sends you an acceptance letter in either December or April of your senior year. You get to Duke in August with people socially similar to yourself. You might come from Miami. The girl next to you might come from Seattle. The guy next to you might come from Raleigh. It does not matter. Many of you postponed or rationed those vices of the typical high school experience, yet you have all found yourselves in this one corner of Durham, North Carolina.
Perhaps your parents denied you those experiences, or you alone subjected yourself to self-abnegation. It hardly matters now because you get to get to Shooters II with these other wide-eyed freshmen from all corners of the country. You put on your sticky party sneakers, and you see what the night brings you. Many “firsts” for many people come after a night of Shooters, and maybe you will have some “firsts” too as so many matriculating freshman classes have before you!
Or at least … that’s how it used to be. The Class of 2028 might be missing out on these opportunities.
The Death of Shooters
On October 8, Shooters owner Kim Cates made a post on Instagram announcing that her nightclub would not be open on Wednesday night anymore during the fall 2024 semester. This news largely shocked me as I know how integral the Wednesday night trip to Shooters is to the Duke social experience, especially, to those naive freshmen. Now, of course, Cates promised that it would return in the second semester, but I have doubts. For students to want to go in the spring semester, they must be accustomed to it from the fall semester. This especially applies to freshmen. If Shooters is closed for the majority of your first semester at Duke, you will not grow an attachment to it for the remainder of your freshman year.
Social tradition can extinguish very quickly at a university. Four years after your graduation, nobody at the school attended the school with you. Nobody remembers you. The students who were freshmen when you were a senior have now graduated themselves. All it takes is a closure for a few months to train a new generation of Duke students to not go to Shooters on Wednesday nights as Duke students have done for two decades prior.
I do not know Cates’s direct motivation for suspending Wednesday night shooters. Again, she does claim that it will return, but we do not know that. I would assume that she is making an economic decision although she never responded to The Chronicle, Duke’s student-run school newspaper. In that vein, I would then assume that she does not have the demand to justify keeping the nightclub open on a weeknight and pay for the staff and other operational costs. If I am making an accurate assumption, why would she open the nightclub again in January? I do not know the year-round figures of attendance for Shooters, but perhaps attendance increases once the basketball season gets into full swing? Students definitely do celebrate big basketball victories at Shooters, but what does Cates decide to do in August 2025? Do those freshmen experience Wednesday night Shooters?
In The Chronicle article from October 8 about the suspension of Wednesday night Shooters, writer Claire Cranford quotes a sophomore named Pranav Hooda. The article states
… although [Pranav] does not think the end of Wednesday Night Shooters will have a significant impact on social life, the closure is significant because of “what it stood for”
Pranav Hooda’s statements juxtapose those of another sophomore named Caroline Gallagher. Cranford wrote the following about Gallagher’s thoughts of the suspension of Wednesday Night Shooters:
Sophomore Caroline Gallagher said that she’s “very much indifferent” to the closure since it “doesn’t impact [her] social life.” She also noted that she does not think Duke’s social scene will affect the upperclassmen experience and will “maybe” affect first-years.
The article ends with another statement from Hooda:
I just hope … for anyone who's reading this to keep Wednesday Shooters in their prayers … and maybe one day, we'll get it back.
Caroline’s use of the adjective “indifferent” very much stuck with me. I reckon that there are more Carolines at Duke now than Pranavs, in other words, students who do not care versus the high-achieving high schoolers who applied to Duke because of this “work hard, play hard” branding.
This indifference mirrors larger trends in this new generation. The fact that teenagers these days are doing less drugs/alcohol and engaging in less risky behavior than ever before has become ubiquitous. The acolytes of Nancy Reagan have won, but is there a cost? Should kids be doing more drugs? Should they be going out more? Now, the drugs comment is tongue-in-cheek. If teenagers are consuming less drugs in the 2020s, that’s a good thing, but the cause is not because teenagers are getting better at “saying no” as DARE told everyone in the 1990s. Rather, teenagers have fewer opportunities to “say yes”. They are “saying no” to socializing and going to parties, which happen to be the occasions during which adolescents engage in risky and perhaps illicit activity.
Again, I am not promoting an idea that freshmen at Duke should engage in more underage drinking or drug use, which perhaps could be associated with Shooters. I am more worried about what the restriction of Shooters signals about the environment that we have created for high schoolers and college students. Despite assumptions about college getting “easier”, the stakes have never been higher.
The Opportunity Cost of Partying
So many of these trends have come in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools like Duke have killed fraternities. They have started inflating grades, and research by professors Dan Goldhaber and Maia Goodman Young of the University of Washington in Seattle have corroborated this speculation. They published in the August 2024 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management research via a longitudinal study at Washington State University regarding grade inflation before the pandemic and after the pandemic.
GPAs for Law School
Grade inflation in higher education is real after the pandemic, and it has real impacts on the choices that college students make. Duke is just one example. High schoolers will often ask if grades actually matter in college. Well, it depends on what you do. If you want to apply to law school or medical school, you must guard your GPA with your life.
Let’s say you are entering your sophomore year at Duke. After graduation, you want to attend Yale Law School, probably the most prestigious law school in the country. If you look at the graphic above, you will see the GPA statistics of the Class of 2027 matriculating into Yale Law School. The IQR of GPAs of those who attend is between 3.91 at the first quartile and 4.00 at the third quartile. In other words, 50% of all students in that class earned between a 3.91 and 4.00 for their GPAs in undergraduate.
As that hypothetical sophomore at Duke, those numbers should intimidate you because they signal that — if you earn a GPA below 3.91 — Yale effectively knocks you out of contention for acceptance. Assuming you earn As for every other grade in every other class at Duke, you can only afford to earn one or two Bs if you want to have a chance at Yale Law School. With those numbers in mind, why would you dedicate any weeknights to go to Shooters? Why would you dedicate any time to party? You have no time to party.
These figures have only inflated in the past few years. Yale knows that grades are inflating. If you cannot get straight A’s at some granola liberal arts program with a squishy major, then you definitely can’t hack it at Yale Law School. They have enough perfect GPAs from the Ivy League to accept. Of course, we speak of the “upper Ivies”. Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth don’t count around these parts. Sure, some would count the non-Ivy of Stanford, but they’re a bit too “free-minded” out in the Bay Area. We aren’t taking a risk on a school in the city where Jerry Garcia founded the Grateful Dead.
With all this in mind, why would they waste one of their 200 spots on your imperfect transcript from Duke? Where even is that? South Carolina? Isn’t that the school that Zion Williamson and Jayson Tatum went to for one year? This isn’t undergraduate admissions anymore! Yale has 1600 slots there! The law school only has 200 slots! We could likely extrapolate all these realities to medical school too although I do not have as much familiarity with that process.
Moreover, you essentially have zero room for error here, so why would you waste it a Shooters II saloon? Every minute that you spend there on Wednesday night is a minute that you could be studying for your organic chemistry midterm tomorrow or working on some grand research project, which they say is “requisite” now if you want to get into a good graduate school.
Duke Twenty Years Ago
Twenty years ago, couldn’t you still find these hyper-competitive students at Duke? You definitely could, but — because of grade inflation — they had much more room for error and, consequently, room for relaxation. They had the liberty to unwind at Shooters on a Wednesday night. Even though Duke and its other peer institutions have notably decreased the difficulty of attaining an A in any given class, the stakes only increased. If it’s easier for you, then it’s easier for everyone, and do you really think you’re so special?
In 2004, Duke also had a completely different student body. Duke had not caught up in exclusivity to its peers up north. During the first term of the Bush administration, Duke had an acceptance rate of 22 percent! Some students would kill (literally) to have those odds! Duke accepted me in 2016, and the acceptance rate was 10%. Now, in 2024, it’s approximately 5 percent. As a result, the students who go to Duke in 2024 have gotten way more intense compared to 2004, the year when Shooters reached its level of preeminence in the Duke campus culture. They’re even way more intense than the year that I stepped on campus in 2016. There is a very good chance that I would not get into Duke again if I were a high school senior now, just nine years later. A lot has changed since fall of 2015 when I applied! That was BT! That stands for “Before Trump” for those “in the know”.
To return to Yale University, Yale’s undergraduate acceptance rate in 2004 was 9%. This is much higher than today’s rate of 4%, but it has not decreased as much as Duke’s acceptance rate has. Duke has massively closed this chasm of exclusivity between itself and the Ivy League, which has had high exclusivity for decades. The Duke as we know it today may have only emerged in the late 2000s or early 2010s.
When I traveled to Durham for my admitted students weekend in April of 2016, the student tour guides would parrot that mantra “work hard, play hard”. We study! We go to the library! But after that big test is done, we go right to Shooters and go crazy! To reiterate, they were still pushing this talking point in 2016. When I look back on that time, I am wondering if the truth of that stereotype had already mostly waned by then. By the end of my time at Duke, I think that the tour guides were clinging onto talking points from the mid-2000s.
I toured many prestigious universities during my time in high school between 2013 and 2015. The talking points on official tours seemingly were always about a decade behind the reality. They served as a lagging indicator of what the school was like today. For example, so many schools would brag about their quidditch teams nearly a decade after the final Harry Potter book had come out and a few years after the final film in the franchise. From first-hand experience, I know that people played quidditch at Duke, but was it as popular as it would have been in 2006?
I do not know, nor do I know if we can find any statistics to explore that possibility. In the Year of Our Lord 2024, uttering JK Rowling’s name is worse in real life than it was to utter Voldemort’s name in the books. I went to Duke largely before the Great Awokening in 2020, so I do not know if quidditch has the same popularity. By the way, they say that, if you say Rowling’s name three times in a bathroom mirror, she will appear behind you and start spouting TERF talking points about the intersex Olympian boxer Imane Khelif from Algeria.
Despite all the uncertainty, I do know that, in July 2022, the governing body of quidditch officially changed the name to “Major League Quadball” as to cut ties with Harry Potter and JK Rowling. All these developments occurred after I had graduated from college.
Final Thoughts
I will end with an anecdote of something that my professor said in my Primate Sexuality class in my spring 2017 semester. Yes, that was a real class, and — unfortunately — I forget her name. It was within the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology. If this seems like a stupid class for a university to offer, I will note that Duke has the premier primate research facility out of any institution in the country.
This professor would talk about mating habits of primates and selectivity. Female primates have the luxury to be selective, and they want to choose the strongest and healthiest mates with whom to produce offspring. Very strangely, my professor extended this reality to our situation as students at Duke. I guess that we sometimes forget that we as Homo sapiens are primates, specifically great apes, as well. She probably should not have done this. It’s fine when you’re discussing other creatures, but don’t bring us into it!
She asserted that our best opportunity to find a mate in our entire lives would be at Duke University because it would be the highest concentration of young people and highly intelligent people out of any environment in which we would ever live. Sure, many of these students will go to work in the bustling metropolis of New York City with many educated yuppies, but it’s still not the high concentration that Duke University has. Your apartment complex in FiDi is not the same as your dormitory in Durham, North Carolina.
While I was writing this article, I remembered what that professor said because of my jungle metaphor for Shooters at the beginning. It brought me back to the jungle of Shooters II in which these nerds were devolving to their most animalistic instincts in a humid, sweaty environment. Perhaps this professor would have asserted that Shooters would be the best opportunity within Duke campus to find a significant other. Nonetheless, this professor made this comment in 2017. Is it true today in 2024? Is there an opportunity cost to date in college? If you do not have time to party, why would you have time for a girlfriend or boyfriend? Okay, just do it later … once you get into Yale. Okay … once you become partner! Once you graduate medical school! Once you get into residency! The hoops never end.
Duke has become somewhat unrecognizable to me since I graduated only four years ago, but think about how much our culture has changed between 2020 and 2024. These trends will likely continue as Duke and other schools become more and more competitive and the opportunity cost of partying will only heighten further. In the 2020s and 2030s, college freshmen at Duke and other elite institutions will simply have no time to party, but maybe I am wrong. Maybe Shooters II will stay open all year in the 2025-2026 academic year. Maybe the semester of fall 2024 is all a historical aberration, but that word “indifferent” from The Chronicle article keeps rattling in my brain.
In this moment, I speak to that Duke sophomore boy named Pranav Hooda. If you can hear me, Pranav — I am keeping Wednesday Night Shooters in my prayers just as you advised.