We try not to lean too heavily into the Duke–UNC-CH rivalry in this newsletter, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Mostly that happens in basketball season, but this time it’s TV.

Season three of Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty debuted last week, and the Tar Heels are pumped. Not only is the show based on a series of young adult novels by UNC-CH alum Jenny Han, but the new season was filmed on the Chapel Hill campus. It’s all providing lots of fodder for the admissions team.

Compare that to Duke’s recent starring turn in HBO’s The White Lotus, which led the university to publicly complain about a character wearing a Duke shirt while contemplating suicide. While UNC-CH was also lampooned in the show—thanks to a fictional drawling, pill-popping alumna—it didn’t leave quite the same impression.

There’s a widely memed still from the show we could embed here to dramatize Duke’s likely feeling, but that might make things worse.

Erin (who is Team Conrad, btw) will have more on the impact of The Summer I Turned Pretty soon. But here’s what we’ve got this week.

— Matt Hartman […]

Matt Hartman is a higher education reporter for The Assembly and co-anchor of our weekly higher education newsletter, The Quad. He was previously a longtime freelance journalist and spent nearly a decade working in higher ed communications before joining The Assembly in 2024.