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Monday, April 17, 2006
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The Duke story... ...is moving pretty fast now. It's still unclear whether any team members will be indicted. As always, Chris Lawrence at Signifying Nothing is your best bet for updates and intelligent analysis. For what it's worth, a few premature thoughts: If no one did anything illegal, and therefore no one gets indicted, that's great. If the women at the heart of the case will make such poor witnesses that even with illegality the case won't get made, that's bad, but we'll have to accept it. It's an incredibly murky story, and as time passes it gets murkier. The barbarian behaviors and statements of some of the team members, during this incident and before it in a variety of drunken settings, remain a problem for Duke University. They would remain a problem for any university that insisted on being regarded as a respectable academic institution even as some of its highest profile undergraduates routinely behaved like swine. "To use an old phrase, they saw themselves as being cool cats, and they used my neighborhood as their sandbox," says a Durham neighbor of some of the players. A writer in the LA Times notes: Despite elements specific to time and place, the Duke case joins a growing list of scandals — notably at Oklahoma, Miami, Nebraska and Colorado — that share a common thread. One by one, they have reinforced a growing sense that college sports are spinning out of control, riddled with pampered athletes who consider themselves above the law. Yet universities look the other way: What we see in American culture, whenever you have problems like this, you turn to your publicity person," said [a Duke professor] who played lacrosse at Harvard. |