This UVA fiasco may have put Virginia taxpayers on the hook for potentially tens of millions of dollars in damages from civil lawsuits.
… What did UVA officials know and when did they know it? Under state law, the UVA Board of Visitors is fully responsible for all areas of campus life, including student safety. Many students have been expelled for violating the honor code. But how many for rape? …
UVA’s leaders made a fatally flawed choice for years. Because of that, Virginia taxpayers now face huge financial risks, not to mention suffering a terrible blow to the state’s reputation.
[Eh. When your last leader was the soon to be imprisoned Governor Vaginal Probe, there ain’t much rep to lose.]
… Bottom line: Virginia forgot to take care of its own on state property, at a place of learning where young minds are to be educated, not where bodies are to be sexually tortured.
Well, that last phrase certainly gets it said. Well done.
Just for comparison purposes: Post-Sandusky, Penn State has (so far) paid out roughly sixty million.
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Update: On Penn State, a reader points out:
$60 million is just the victim restitution. Another $80 million in costs, and $36 million still due to the NCAA fund.
Whatever our champion’s flaws be
Whatever the federal laws be
We’ll stick by the man
Cuz… you know… we can!
All praise to the good Dr Cosby
The past few years have witnessed a steady stream of alleged rapes at schools with big revenue-generating sports cultures and Greek systems. Part of the supposed shock of the [Rolling Stone] article involves a sense that [UVa] as an institution is committed to high-minded ideas and taking care of our students, and that we ought to be better than this, even better than the rest of the society. If only that were true…
They made this scurrilous claim in the aftermath of Kean State University’s president having tarted up his cv something wild.
Now that he’s used tuition and taxpayer money to buy a $219,000 table, I suppose we can expect them to say the same thing again.
Orin Starn, the sports-anthropology professor, is less sanguine. Duke, he says, has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.
… If you were starting from scratch at Duke, no one would have imagined an athletics program where the budget is almost fifty million dollars. This huge outlay of expenses and energy and visibility of sports is just clearly out of proportion with what it should be. Yes, athletics has a place in college education, but not this sort of massive space that it’s taking.”
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Even before the lacrosse scandal, alarms had been sounded over the coarsening of undergraduate life. Toward the end of Nan Keohane’s tenure as president, the school undertook an extensive study examining the lives of women at Duke. The project’s summation reads like a scholarly anticipation of Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the 2004 novel (published after Wolfe’s daughter graduated from Duke) portraying college life as a soul-deadening, booze-fueled marathon of sexual predation:
Students rarely go on formal dates but instead attend parties in large groups, followed by “hook-ups”—unplanned sexual encounters typically fueled by alcohol. Men and women agreed the double standard persists: men gain status through sexual activity while women lose status. Fraternities control the mainstream social scene to such an extent that women feel like they play by the men’s rules. Social life is further complicated by a number of embedded hierarchies, from the widely understood ranking of Greek organizations to the opposite trajectories women and men take over four years, with women losing status in the campus environment while men gain status.
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[T]he University of Virginia has allowed its top seeded men’s team to continue playing into the [lacrosse murder] post-season. … George Huguely V, the indicted midfielder from the men’s Cavalier squad, has, for nearly all intents and purposes, already admitted to the crime, and, in my mind at least, also implicated — albeit on a very different level — the culture and friends that provoked reckless excess and failed to take notice of a young man spiraling out of control.
… [T]he fact that Huguely was at times reckless and violent, particularly when drunk, and was alarmingly obsessive about Love, would have been recognized by fellow players, and perhaps coaches, too, and certainly should have been addressed. The fact that this was not his first violent interaction with Love is the strongest charge against the friends and teammates that failed to recognize the severity of the situation.
In truth, there are many places in the game’s culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008–when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic–garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.
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Huguely’s team is … one on which eight players have been charged with alcohol-related offenses. Is anyone paying attention?… If things go terribly wrong, the culture of protection — including parents, coaches and alumni boosters — hire high-priced lawyers who manage to get records expunged and witnesses to forget what they saw.
From the mouths of babes. She’s quite right. As I said in an earlier post, about places like Penn State and Florida State, when sports and fraternities and drinking rule and have long ruled, it’s hard to know how any of that would change.
Fraternities in places like these tend to be the quintessence, the culmination, of all the alcohol and athletics in the larger campus culture. At UVa, “the fraternity system is king and heavy drinking is part of the culture.”
More frighteningly, fraternities are young, tightly-knit, all-male subcultures. In many settings, young, tightly-knit, and all-male is bad news. Young, tightly-knit, and all-male adds group aggression – extreme hazing, fighting, assaulting – to the mix. “Fraternities have become more like lab experiments for the distillation of male sexual aggression” than anything else.
Some have called for UVa to close its frats permanently.
Phi Kappa Psi, like all fraternities, exists to teach bad values to developing young men. Sent off to campus to educate themselves as individuals, fraternity members instead learn to subordinate their values and plans to a collective. After a torturous and dehumanizing selection process, fraternity members are able to write a check and purchase 30 new friends; it’s not surprising that they would see sex — pour a drink, girl is yours — as similarly transactional.
… By deciding to suspend its fraternities temporarily, the University of Virginia has acknowledged that those frats cannot be implicated in any new offenses while the eyes of America are watching. It is a tacit admission that the school cannot risk, not now, another sexual assault being committed. It has decided that the easiest and most palatable way for this to happen — for UVA’s fraternity brothers not to rape — is for its fraternities to cease to exist.
So why bring them back? Shut them down and move on.
Dahlia Lithwick doesn’t weigh in on shutting or maintaining them, but she does get to the nub of things:
Fraternities are nuts.
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UD doubts closing them down is really a solution. Sick and sometimes criminal initiation rituals will persist somewhere on campus at any booze and sports soaked university that ignores them. The Florida A&M marching band didn’t need a fraternity to beat a fellow student to death in a long-tolerated form of hazing.
Perhaps what makes more sense is really serious policing and surveillance of fraternities – policing and surveillance for which the fraternities would pay.
Just as many schools spend a fortune on squads of extra police for their football and basketball games (students are prone to mischief and violence both in and outside sports arenas), so fraternities should be willing to bill their current and past members for the heightened security procedures they need. Hugely wealthy Michael Bloomberg happens to be a proud and loyal member of Phi Kappa Psi; with his passionate involvement in violence reduction, he should be willing to subsidize the hiring of guards and cameras for his brothers. A million dollars a year, say, would set Bloomberg back not at all.
Would university campuses begin to look like armed camps? Yes, but university football and basketball games (plus tailgates and party/riots) already tend to look like that. And as to cameras everywhere – well, most universities already have cameras everywhere.
In the longer term, UD proposes that frat-run universities like UVa choose as their yearly campus-wide book (UD is talking about the popular One Campus One Book, or Common Read, program) Lynn Chancer’s Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, so that fraternity members can begin to think seriously about their problem, and other members of the campus community can learn enough to at least see the brothers coming.
… back room…’
The Eastern theater of the American Civil War rages again, as the traditional fraternal order goes to war against campus pussies.
Men lining the patio of a bar on The Corner were quick to yell “insults and slurs” at the [anti-rape] protestors as they walked by, said Carl Goette-Luciak, a fifth-year student who helped to lead the march.
Others volleyed comments scorning the actions of the crowd as it marched through the streets, but Goette-Luciak contends that facing such a reaction was the protest’s way of “confronting the issue where it lives.”
“If male students at [the University of Virginia] will deride the people who are demanding change, [if they] won’t take seriously how important this moment is, it just stresses the gravity of the situation we’re facing,” he said.
Later in the night, Goette-Luciak said he saw five students, both male and female, tearing down a memorial that students had created at Peabody Hall. In support of those who had been sexually assaulted, students had covered the doors of the administrative building with Post-it notes filled with stories of their experiences and encouragements toward survivors, he said. They also placed stones, creating a “small mountain” in front of the building, to symbolize survivors they knew.
Goette-Luciak said he walked past the memorial an hour or two after the protest when he saw students tearing down the notes and discarding the stones.
“We confronted them and they were very aggressive, very violent towards us,” he said. “One young man in particular, with chest puffed out, kept screaming, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ and then left.”
Baby, you go up against our way of life and you’re gonna hear about it. We’re here and we’re beer, get used to it. We even got girl camp followers.
More commentary on “rapey” (new one on me) University of Virginia, in The American Conservative, in which the author quotes a UVa sociologist —
UVA may be to fraternities what Boston was to the Catholic Church.
— and then goes on to elaborate (he covered the church scandal) the ways in which this analogy is correct.
The first case I wrote about, back in 2001, involved an immigrant teenager who was passed around priests in a Bronx parish. When the boy’s father learned what happened, he went to see an auxiliary bishop. According to the victim’s lawyer, the auxiliary bishop allegedly pulled out a checkbook and offered a payout in exchange for the father signing a paper giving the Archdiocese of New York’s attorneys the right to handle his case. The father may have been a laborer and an immigrant, but he knew a scam when he saw it. He left and hired his own lawyer.
And here we see the University of Virginia following a similar script.
He means your basic cover up / keep it in-house M.O.
I don’t understand the attraction of college Greek life… Too rapey. I do not want my kids, as college students, to be subject to rape, to participate in rape, or to be in a position in which they are pressured to prove their loyalty to their fraternity, their friends, and their university by staying silent about rape.
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Overheard from a recent campus tour guide.
‘Near our Jefferson statue all drapey
Live our buck naked frat boys all rapey.
The contrast is striking
And quite to the liking
Of writers from Reuters to AP.’
Is It Time To Ban Greek Life on Campus?
This, in the land of the University of Georgia!
She doesn’t really answer the question, though I guess she thinks banning them would be a good idea. I mean, she reviews the increasing number of schools doing that, or doing something short of that but on its way to being that… And she reviews the literature on frats.
Several studies have found frat members are more likely to commit rape: (Bleeker & Murnen, 2005; Boeringer, 1999; Foubert, Newberry & Tatum, 2007).
… Sixty-four percent of Greeks report binge drinking, compared with 37 percent of their classmates.
But in his research, Jeffrey DeSimone suggests frat members would likely drink with or without the fraternity; it is the prevalence of alcohol in frat life that attracts pledges in the first place. “Students who join fraternities presumably perceive that membership will facilitate desired binge drinking by matching them with students who share these preferences,” wrote DeSimone.
… she can expect some backlash.
[University of Virginia president Teresa] Sullivan’s absence has not gone unnoticed, said Katherine Schieffelin, whose daughter attends UVa.
“She should be naming the time and date to join her at the Mall to stand in solidarity for the safety of women,” Schieffelin said. “She should be encouraging all who love UVa to join her with candles and flashlights and provide a voice to those students who feel betrayed by this administration.”
When Sullivan was ousted from her post by a faction of the Board of Visitors in 2012, she enjoyed the full-throated support of protesters who demanded and helped secure her reinstatement, Schieffelin said.
“Many people fought hard with similar gestures to keep her in office and instead of releasing this whitewashed statement she should be showing outrage and passion and fire,” she said. “She should be leading.”
Sullivan asked Charlottesville police to investigate and issued a statement Wednesday before leaving the country, assuring the UVa community the school “takes seriously the issue of sexual misconduct.”
The statement was lambasted on the university’s Facebook page by hundreds of students and alumni who said Sullivan did not go far enough.
… also suspends all fraternities.
But what are you going to do? Fraternities are designed for drinking and fucking. Riots and rapes are the totally unsurprising results.
Forget the routine sado-masochistic theater of hazing. That’s a trifle here.
But it’s your culture. If you’re UVa or WVU or Dartmouth or Arizona or whatever, it’s who you are. You won’t be able to suspend them for long.
Unconvinced? Look at the way Florida State and Penn State have responded, en masse, to their outrageous sports scandals. Look at entire local cultures, really, composed of journalists and police and lawyers and trustees and alumni designed to let sports-related miscreants do whatever they want to do. Penn State students rioted when their rapist-enabling coach was let go. Florida State students blocked the latest New York Times account of their foul football team. There’s nothing to be done with such places. Really nothing, beyond what people have done with notorious rape campuses like the University of Montana. They think twice about sending their daughters there.
Nothing to be done except this.
… at the Garrett Park Farmer’s Market
this morning, round black Spanish radish.
Not as something to eat;
she knows nothing about
it as something to eat.
As something beautiful.
She bought six of them,
arranged them on a brown
plate with their turnipy
stems up, and put them
on the black table on her
wooden deck.
If the squirrels begin gnawing
them, fine. It’s all organic.
