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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

One thing we can already conclude…

…about the Duke story is that Southern culture does not take a hit.

Having looked at the team roster, UD must tell you that if any culture dominates, it’s UD‘s very own ‘thesdan culture (for background on ‘thesdan culture, go here). This is the affluent suburban Washington world in which UD grew up, and in which she has spent most of her adult life as well.

One of the Duke players graduated from Georgetown Prep, a tony Catholic school for boys which sits a quarter mile down the road from where I’m typing this. No fewer than six of the players come from the Landon School, another elegant private school in Bethesda. Two others graduated from Bullis -- the same sort of school, and also just a spell down the road from UD’s house. Two more players graduated from two other nearby private schools.

That’s a significant number of players to come from one small neighborhood.

Far as I can tell, none of the ‘thesdan lacrosse players attended a public school here, a fact that fits like a glove the Abercrombie stereotype of Duke, for all its dithering about diversity.

The clubbiness of the Duke lacrosse roster sheds some light on the now-notorious code of silence the players have all followed in the wake of the allegations. A lot of these guys have been bonded for years. They go way way back. They all went to the same five or six Duke feeder schools.

It’s a very parochial team, that is… and by extension, perhaps, a very parochial university, many people in it having come from one or another of the world’s small pinnacles of privilege and entitlement.




It’s disturbing to discover that a group of American winners, young men profoundly admired and cherished and advantaged, and carefully educated at the best schools, might in fact be absolute savages. Or be willing to collude in savagery. It suggests that what one might reasonably fear about some powerful privileged people might be true: That they regard themselves as a different and better breed altogether, and that they have contempt for what they consider the lower orders -- people who exist to be ignored, mocked, or made use of. Think Tom Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby.

Everything we’ve heard about the Duke story so far -- a story that still lacks corroboration -- resonates with this possibility.