The guy could be on his way to a lucrative sideline: Expert witness willing to testify that university athletes who rape unconscious women are innocent of the rape if the athletes are really drunk when they do it.

Forensic psychologist Dr. James Walker testified Friday that [Brandon] Vandenburg could have been so drunk that he had no idea what he was doing, The Tennessean reports.

“He was so intoxicated he was not his normal self,” Walker said. “He was doing things he would not normally have done.”

(A defense team also tried what George Huguely’s lawyer called the “stupid drunk” defense in Huguely’s case. That one was murder. He was a University of Virginia lacrosse player.)

So: Next up for Walker: Former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner. Same MO: Rape an unconscious woman. Apparently they’d both been at a party. She seems to have been very drunk. Let’s assume he was too. Get Walker on the stand!

… Florida State!

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She was totally unconscious so there is no way they can claim consent. It was recorded so they can’t claim it didn’t happen. It was reported not by the victim but by the university so they can’t claim she “cried rape”.

From the article’s comment thread.

The football players’ defense team argues that Vanderbilt’s sinful campus culture sullied the lads and forced their hand.

The editorial board of the New York Times reminds us of a prevailing reality at increasing numbers of American universities — what a writer for the New Yorker, in a long piece about Duke University, calls “the coarsening of undergraduate life.”

At the bottom of the university hierarchy, business-model party schools desperately seek to maintain tanking enrollments through the massive availability of booze, drugs, frats, and sports. Any location dominated by this mix will see assaults and riots; any location whose life virtually depends on these things will see an increase in assaults and riots. Places like these, as they become notorious, draw unaffiliated disorderly people from the towns and cities around them, so that we see the phenomenon of huge tailgates composed of drunks with no intention of attending the football game attached to the tailgate; we see riots at Keene State College attracting hundreds of random non-Keene State people who like violence and know they can get some there; we see growing numbers of sexual assaults carried out by non-student opportunists infiltrating frat parties.

At the top of the university hierarchy, schools attended by the “cubs of some of our most successful predators” (UD loves this phrase, but can’t find its source) feature the same booze, drugs, frats, and sports mix — not because they need to in order to attract applicants (everyone wants to go to Duke, UVa, Vanderbilt…), but because the schools are modeling the work hard/play hard thing that their graduates will need as they prepare to become competitive in hedge fund culture. Some of these students, like poor George Huguely, show up on campus already well-bred, well-soaked, alcoholics; others learn the life.

In a New Yorker article about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, Adam Gopnik writes:

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing [in] … what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor...

You don’t have to gaze at the shit-strewn post-tailgate campus of the University of Georgia to know that the Italianization of the American university campus is an achieved fact in plenty of places, and that there’s too much money at stake (consider, among many examples, the disquieting fact of fewer and fewer students attending football games, and the growing need to ply them with drink to get them to attend) to do anything but ramp up the Italianization.

It is terribly important to get an accurate account of the now-notorious reported rape at the University of Virginia; but we are well past needing to establish the fact that our Italianizing campuses are dangerous.

Shucks, says the pure as the driven snow guy Penn State has brought in to coach football and remove the taint of its past, I can’t take credit for our terrific recruitment so far.

“It has very little to do with me… It’s the staff, it’s the players, it’s the tradition, it’s the history, it’s the fans showing out 72,000 at the spring game. … It’s the whole package. That’s why we’re being successful. We’re just, I think, doing a pretty good job of painting that picture of the vision of what Penn State can be and what it will be… I had a lot of confidence that we would be able to do a good job of finding those guys, attracting them to Penn State and getting them on board to join our family.“

The family, the family, always the family. And what a family. Startlingly dysfunctional. But you bring in a guy like James Franklin, and you’re bringing back solid values. Like for instance at his last job, at Vanderbilt, after four football players were accused of raping a student, he apparently called the student right away:

[Attorneys claim] the victim was contacted by Franklin [and Dwight Galt, also now coaching at Penn State] during a medical examination four days after the rape to explain “that they cared about her because she assisted them with recruiting.”

[Attorneys] went on to say that at some point, “Coach Franklin called her in for a private meeting and told her he wanted her to get fifteen pretty girls together and form a team to assist with the recruiting even though he knew it was against the rules. He added that all the other colleges did it.”

So Franklin means it when he says he can’t take credit for his recruiting success – at least his success at Vanderbilt. If it weren’t for the Comfort Women in the Vanderbilt family (and who knows what he’s got cooking in the Penn State family?), the magic wouldn’t have happened.

[I]f Franklin had a role in organizing a hostess program, that is a new development in the entire story.

What is probably clear is Penn State has either done an extremely thorough vetting process and determined there is absolutely nothing to be concerned with in the long-term, or the school totally swung and missed on the biggest black cloud that could potentially linger over the new head coach. Given the position Penn State has been in since 2011, the margin for error is barely existent.

Penn State. Never a dull day.

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Update: A reminder that Penn State knew what it had in Franklin.

A university football team four of whose members are alleged to have raped an unconscious student, videotaped the rape, and sent the videotape to friends. They will go on trial soon, as will yet other players, named as accessories.

What to do?

The coach has already announced – before the trial, before we all get to see the film and read the text messages, before everything – that his non-raping players have “dealt with this, and we’re trying to heal and move forward.”

It’s all over, see, and now it’s just about the wounded – his players – somehow finding healing and turning the page. So that’s what to do.

But there are already indications that the poor lads are trying to heal approach might not work.

Take this open letter to Vanderbilt University, written by a recent graduate who, post-rape allegations, is having “a hard time feeling good about my allegiance” to the university.

If a Vanderbilt football player dropped out after his freshman year to go free Tibet, I’d be proud. When they’re kicked out for revolting crimes, I’m ashamed. It’s that simple.

This alumnus

proposed to the administration of the Women’s Center that they partner with athletics for some sort of… anything. Fundraising. Volunteer drive. A patch on players’ uniforms. Whatever, as long as it shows real public support for survivors of sex crimes, or works to prevent future incidents. The point was to give fans who are depressed by recent news something to be proud of, morally. The point was to show that Vanderbilt football stands with survivors of sexual violence.

Response from the Vanderbilt administration? Fuck off.

This annoyed the letter writer. That’s why he wrote the letter.

In making the decision to hold its breath until this thing blows over, the administration decides to be among those (many) institutions that contribute to a culture of quiet enablement.

Vanderbilt begins to look like Yeshiva University.

In one of the many bracing annual rituals surrounding university football – a newspaper article recounting the most recent and most heinous player arrests around the country – Nick Saban offers this intriguing analogy: The big-time university football coach is like a professor who can do everything right but still experience cheaters in her classroom.

Let’s examine the analogy.

In the same article, reporters ask rape-ridden Vanderbilt’s coach if he is “recruiting more players of questionable character in an effort to win.” The guy draws himself up and puffs out his chest and gets way huffy about the question… They all do this when the question gets posed… All of the coaches who recruit criminals to win games employ the patented area woman offended for fourth time in one day method in response to this oft-posed question. Gentlemen, how dare you! The gall!

It’s the same thing for UD, a professor. UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship. Has she, in her zeal, recruited a few bad apples? No, because you can never know how a person is going to be in advance… And everyone deserves a chance… And you talked to their mothers and their mothers insisted they’d behave… How dare you insist that UD‘s desire to win a contest overrode any sense of morality?