Sunday Roundup

The AP’s Aaron Beard reflected on the past year for Duke lacrosse in a piece published last week—a season that, he noted, “ended in an almost eerie come-full-circle moment: For the second time in three seasons, Duke’s lacrosse team had lost by a single goal to Johns Hopkins in the NCAA championship game.”

Though the defeat was a crushing one, Beard predicted that, with some time to reflect, “it’s a loss that’ll start to look pretty good once the sting subsides.” And, indeed, the transformation is remarkable—from the “wanted” poster, and “castrate” signs, to 88 of their own professors taking out a full-page ad denouncing them, to regular race-baiting attacks from a demagogue prosecutor . . . to a situation where most (apart from a handful of bitter sportswriters) welcomed their march to the championship game.

Beard commented on Collin Finnerty’s reception at Monday’s game against Johns Hopkins, where he “was mobbed by friends and well-wishers as he made his way through the stands.” Finnerty, unencumbered, explained, “They went through a tough time and had a tough year with everything in the case. It’s back where they belong, and I’m happy for them.”

As Coach John Danowski correctly observed, “These kids have done everything and more that’s been demanded of them (since the scandal), and they’ve lived just about a perfect life. They just lost a lacrosse game today.”

Read the full article here; it is, typically, first-rate.

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For those who haven’t seen it yet, Green Eggs and Bacon is an excellent new blog on Durham events. The blog includes recent posts on the police inquiry plan; strategies for pressuring the Duke administration; and the condition of the Duke faculty.

Read more here.

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One impact of the decision of many Duke departments to prioritize the hiring of figures who specialize in the analytic triumvirate of race, class, and gender is to ensure that specialists in more traditional approaches to scholarship are not hired. As a result, courses on more traditional topics are either eliminated from the curriculum or “revisioned” along heavily ideological lines.

A good example comes in a course from the History Department’s fall 2007schedule. This term, Group of 88 member Jocelyn Olcott co-taught a course with Wahneema Lubiano—which gives a sense of her ideological perspective. Olcott describes her research interests as the “feminist history of modern Mexico”; her book “shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship” by examining “how women inhabited the conventionally manly role of citizen by weaving together its quotidian and formal traditions, drawing strategies from local political struggles and competing gender ideologies.” In most circles, such interests would hardly be considered mainstream, although at Duke, that isn’t the case.

What course will this self-described specialist in Mexican feminism, whose most recent journal article is entitled “Miracle Workers: Gender and State Mediation among Textile and Garment Workers in Mexico’s Transition to Industrial Development,” teach in fall 2007?

“Regime Change and U.S. Interventions.” The course description:

This course will examine episodes of U.S. interventions abroad that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected regimes. While we will focus on Latin America as the primary region of study, we will also consider comparative cases. Readings and research will consider cultural, social, and economic tools of intervention as well as military and diplomatic methods. Students will divide into four research teams and, using documents provided by the instructor as well as those that student find on their own, will research and write histories of U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Chile, Iran, and Congo.

So—for $43,000 in tuition and fees—parents are sending their children to be taught about U.S. foreign policy toward Iran by a specialist in Mexican feminism. Amazing.

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This week’s humor section comes from the Liestoppers forum. First, some proposed suggestions for Durham’s new slogan—of which City Councilwoman Diane Catotti surely would approve:

• Welcome to Durham! We’ve Been Working on the Railroad

• Durham—Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

• Welcome to Durham: We Put the “Lie” in “Liestoppers”

• Welcome to Durham: City of Mendacity

• Durham: Justice for Just Us!

The latter slogan especially reflects the Catotti approach.

The “blog hooligans” also are running a poll asking readers to predict the Nifong defense. Best choices include:

• Insanity
• Cy made me do it
• !@#%# Cheshire

My money is on the third option.

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I haven’t written about the De Anza rape case largely because apart from the superficial (highly publicized rape allegations against college athletes), the differences between it and the Duke case far outweigh any similarities. The issue in the De Anza case is consent; witnesses exist; the acknowledged behavior was far more troubling than anything associated with the Duke case; and the chief prosecutor certainly can’t be faulted for politicizing the inquiry or for any sort of procedural misconduct.

Any hope, however, that the Duke case might have caused journalists to reflect on how they cover rape cases was belied by a column in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. C.W. Nevius eight times described the accuser as the “victim”—not even tossing in the “alleged” qualifier—and stated, again without qualification, that at least one of the partygoers was “assaulting her.”

Moreover, he provided a Nifongian standard for taking tape cases to trial. The district attorney, he declared, “should do the right thing—what the victim wants—take it to trial and let a jury decide.” Durham County learned what happens when a prosecutor abandons prosecutorial discretion and makes the “victim” a de facto district attorney. Hopefully, Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr will have learned from Nifong’s mistakes.

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An intriguing post at JinC at the relationship between the Duke police and the Durham police in the critical days before the April 4 non-lineup “lineup.” The post asks some good questions, and notes that circumstantial evidence suggests that the link was far closer than has been previously realized.

Liestoppers explores the issue as well.

All of this yields a question: What did the Duke Police know about the procedures to be used in the April 4 lineup, and when did they know it?

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Hostility to the NCAA’s correct decision to grant the Duke players an additional year of eligibility seems especially strong in Virginia. UVA coach Dom Starsia has denounced the move to every reporter who will listen, and last week Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Paul Woody criticized it as well.

“The behavior of the Duke players before the night of March 13,” scolds Woody, “hardly was exemplary”: “the two women working as exotic dancers who were present March 13 did not show up by chance. They were hired by a lacrosse team member. One of dancers made the false accusations against the players. Such behavior by the athletes alone was reason enough for the Duke administration to take disciplinary action against the team. Canceling the season should have sent a message to every Duke athlete.”

Is Woody claiming that every sports team some of whose members drank beer or participated in distasteful entertainment over spring break should have its season cancelled? Perhaps he should apply for a job as sports information director at BYU, which would thrive under such a system.

“By taking this case to the NCAA,” Woody claimed, “the school administration essentially condones the players’ behavior.” The Duke administration did no such thing. It said that, because of Mike Nifong’s misconduct and the threat to the players’ safety it caused, there was no way the season could continue.

A good case can be made, of course, that the Brodhead administration did not cancel the season because of safety concerns. But at the heart of Duke’s appeal was a correct premise: that even an administration not cowed by faculty extremists within its midst could not have allowed the games to go on, because in the environment that existed in Durham last spring, there’s no way the school could have guaranteed the players’ safety.