On the Duke Lacrosse Team Debacle...

[epilonious]

I am a Duke University Alum. I graduated in 2003 with a B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in Computer Science (and yes, that was hard to do considering that Bio and CPS don't get along at ALL). Along with my Roomate, I moved to Atlanta to take up a job in the Computer Science and pretend that Georgia Tech students and Graduates secretly hated me. And I can tell you the first thing I thought when Duke started making headlines about it's lacrosse-team scandal: "Wow, Duke has a Lacrosse Team?"

Since then... the whole thing has turned into a media fracas of amazing proportions and it seems to be due to the following "juicy" factors:

1. It seems to involve a tale of privileged caucasian men being sinisterly mean to (a) poor african american woman(en).
2. It is causing a lot of unrest in both the Durham and Duke communities.
3. It involves college-age students and rape.

It seems the media loves to post news about this and the media-consumers love to read news about it it. And who can blame them, as it is an extremely tittilating tale how this will all pan out. Having gone to the university for four years not more than 3 years ago, I can also imagine some of the things fueling the fire. I'll start with the last things first.

3. I dunno about your university or place of higher education... but Duke had some serious complications with two high-profile campus rapes causing quite the hubub over the years I was there. The concatenated tale went something like this: 1. A woman would go to her dorm bathroom late-at-night... 2. encounter some strange man in said bathroom, and would be assaulted. 3. The Campus's final response after these two rapes was to make co-ed bathrooms.
Now... lemme explain... as there is a long convoluted tale behind this. In the case of the first rape they said that the offending male was some strange guy no-one had ever seen (IE, not a resident of the dorm) so campus administration re-tooled all the bathrooms (which were left unlocked prior) so that only people with dorm-keys could get into the bathrooms. This worked well for a while, and the students didn't grumble too much as it wasn't that much of an inconvenience. But eventually as people had their friends and associates visit and would loan them their key it became a nuisiance... eventually people would just have their key on an easily-accessible coathanger.

Thus... when the SECOND rape occured, now apparently perpetrated by some guest of one of the dorm residents... everyone was given a key based on their gender, and the locks were retooled again. The students, finding this more inconvenient than before (some floors had co-ed bathrooms which were now arbitrarily labeled "male" or "female") were only quicker to make any bathroom keys easily accessible regardless of gender. Hence... co-ed bathrooms.

The entire point of these arbitrary rule changes upon even the accusation of a rape, is that Duke is hypersensitive to dorm-rape... as they should be. The lacrosse players, however, were in a dilapidated house that the lacrosse team paid for... and resides mostly out of Duke University control. I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if one of Duke's actions after this whole debacle would be to somehow reign in off-campus housing. This would be incredibly ironic because Duke reigning in so much on-campus housing through the 90's is mostly what foisted so many drunken shenanigans into the Durham neighborhoods.

2. Durham and Duke University have always had sort of that uneasy one-factory-town relationship. The actual Duke basically built durham up with his cigarette factories in the early 20th century... and at the end of his life he moved all the money he had made into a rather prestigious university and medical center which continued to support the town, much more so than the actual cigarette factories now. Ironically, Durham and Duke always work to maintain a really good relationship. The college has always set-up community service to be an important part of Duke living groups and has all sorts of community outreach programs. The medical center also has a really bitchin' clinic. However, Duke still tends to be inhabited with a lot of upper and upper-middle class people and Durham tends to be the lower-middle class that goes to work at Duke. I think there might always be tension no matter how many "we need to get over this our campus wall" speeches are given.

1. Thus, when some hot-shot honky jocks have a huge party and have strippers come to their off-campus location.... I can understand how shenanigans have becomes the cigarette ashes on the chapparal. This whole thing is bringing about 15 different dichotomous tensions to a point. A few I can think of on the top of my head:
- The Protesting Students for the right to protest Vs. The society for the right not to give a crap. Duke has a LOT of idealistic kids with free time, so naturally it has a couple of metric tons of pure activist substrate. There is pretty much a protest every day now between groups supporting race rights, sex rights, class rights, and the right to remind ourselves what innocent-until-proven-guilty means.
- Administration vs. Students: This sort of BS is exactly what the administration was trying to avoid by locking-down campus-living-groups and promoting a wide variety of sensitivity training and semi-controversial, mind-opening productions. Now the students are going to fear further lockdowns and proactively try and get more freedoms back, while the Duke administration has to figure out how to assuage a LOT of different people that seem to just be pissed off about any number of things.
- Geeks vs. Jocks: The Lacrosse Team was just starting to get good, apparently... but at the same time, you'll never hear about people getting raped at a biomedical research seminar (BME makes a lot of money alongside any athletic branding). I'm sure someone will be making reasons to steal the lacrosse team's budget.
- Priveleged vs Underclass: There are lots of stories on record about stupid people getting drunk and being intolerantly stupid... it seems this scandal has brought a lot of these tales (be they urban myth or just-last-week) up to the pulpit.
- Race: Just like Cynthia McKinney Scandal.. it looks like there might be a who-is-more-racist competition. I'm gonna vote for Martians... Those Racist Bastards.

Oh well, That's my take, I imagine some of it will change as, well, actual case details fill out... and I really like some of the points that are being brought up by my friends like chalicechick and her friends.