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Friday, March 31, 2006
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Only you can prevent lacrosse fires. "[A]s painful as these times are, the test of a school is not preventing bad things from ever happening, but in addressing them in an honest and forthright way," writes Duke's president in a letter to alumni. Which UD finds a strange sentiment. Of course an important test of any institution is its ability to control its members' behavior so that "bad things" (an infantile formulation that recalls a platitudinous best-seller of years ago -- When Bad Things Happen to Good People -- and suggests that hellfire suddenly roared up and burned the Blue Devils, when in fact they generated their own auto-da-fe) on this remarkable scale don't happen. The slow-burning scandal behind the big bonfire at Duke is that for years (as people like UD, who follow such things, know) Duke has pretty much looked the other way while all sorts of students there behaved appallingly. The simple heart of this, I think, is that Duke's just got one humongous booze problem. Many students there are deeply, permanently, pissed. Duke University today is less a bastion of privilege than an epicenter of alcoholism. The school needs to shut down most of its other operations for awhile and reopen as a rehab unit. |