Here, thanks to Superdestroyer...
...one of UD's readers, is fascinating background material on the Landon School contingent among the Duke lacrosse players. No one knows to what extent, if any, the large number of Landon grads on Duke's disgraced team were involved in what happened in Durham. But a culture of cheating, cynicism, and entitlement is clearly already well-established at Landon.
Which one would expect, given the subculture the school serves. UD just wishes institutions like Landon cared enough about the character of their charges to drop their "tradition of honor" bullshit. If you're going to be an incubator of cynics, at least be that honestly.
From Washingtonian Magazine, 2003:
'If jocks rule [at Landon], the boys who play lacrosse now are kings. The game, played with netted sticks and a hard rubber ball, can be as violent as football but with fewer pads. It requires the finesse of soccer and adds the brutality of rugby.
In the last two decades, coach Robinson “Rob” Bordley has built the squad into a national powerhouse. Lacrosse Magazine named it the top team in the country in 2000 and 2001. At the time of the cheating scandal, Landon had not lost a conference game in ten years.
Landon attracts promising students who want to excel at sports. Lacrosse stars get into Princeton, Duke, and the University of Virginia. Lacrosse helps the school raise big money from alumni.
"What brings in money better than a great sports team?” says one alum and donor to the school. “It’s not that they had a great school play but that they won the big game. Right or wrong, it’s true.”
...Alumni, students, and parents interviewed for this article say cheating is not unusual at Landon. Pressure to get good grades is high; the boys know one another well and want to help out; and the faculty is not eager to catch cheaters and turn them in. Adding to the pressure are strict grading policies that make it hard to maintain high grade averages.
“I certainly had the impression there was a culture of cheating when I was there,” says film producer Castaldi. “I failed a Spanish class that others got through by cheating.”
Says Damon Bradley: “More often than cheating, we run into plagiarism from the Internet. Cheating is not something we see in large numbers by any means.”
Cheating has become enough of a problem that a businessman who sent several sons to Landon was moved to write a six-page letter to the school’s board of trustees early this year. Most of his boys had had positive experiences there, but one had been expelled for cheating. The man, a former member of Landon’s board, had investigated.
“Without exception, everyone we talked with told us that there was widespread cheating throughout Landon,” he wrote. All of his sons “over a fifteen-year period of time said that cheating was rampant in each of their classes and had gotten worse over the years.”
The board never responded to the letter; board chair Henry Dudley refused the letter writer’s request to appear before the board on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent.'
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