Posted on 01/05/2007 7:56:09 AM PST by freespirited
DURHAM - Last April I added my name to an ad published in the Duke Chronicle. The ad said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house. The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women. Many black students at Duke disappeared into humiliation and rage as the lacrosse players were being elevated to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism.
As it turned out, 87 other faculty members were alarmed at this distressing side-effect of the lacrosse incident and signed the ad. I am positive I am not the only professor who was and continues to be adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade while also being dismayed by the glaring social disparities implicit in what we know happened on March 13.
A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.
As a professor at Duke, I felt shame when the media's account of the behavior in the lacrosse house came to stand for all Duke students and the institution itself. So many students, faculty and administrators here work hard to live down our unflattering old segregation nickname, "the Plantation." Yet after March 13, Duke again came to symbolize (seemingly for the entire world) the most lurid and sexualized form of race privilege.
The ad we signed explicitly was not addressed to the police investigation or the rape allegations. The ad focused on racial and gender attitudes all too evident in the weeks after March 13. It decried prejudice and inequality in the society at large. "It isn't just Duke, it isn't everybody, and it isn't just individuals making this disaster," the ad insisted.
The lacrosse incident is a textbook example of what Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "social disaster" (a phrase used in the ad). "Social disaster" refers to complex power arrangements that underpin even minor events and give those events symbolic (and disturbing) meaning for society as a whole.
The lacrosse incident became one of the top news stories of 2006 because Americans saw the case as symbolic of many of their deepest social concerns. Race, gender, sexuality, class, athletics, the South, poverty, privilege, the younger generation: those are some features of the brew that captured the world's attention and fed its moral voyeurism.
Like the other faculty members who signed the ad, I constantly receive e-mails asking me to rescind my signature. Some people write out of real misery for their children, Duke students who are distraught that their friends may have been falsely accused and unfairly treated. They believe professors have sided against the lacrosse players, and they are outraged. If we had written what they suppose, we would deserve their anger. But we didn't.
I empathize deeply with these parents and friends. I regret the additional pain they felt when they heard about this ad. However, when I send them the actual ad, they are often surprised that it does not condemn the lacrosse players but focuses on larger campus and national concerns. I was touched, recently, when one mother concluded our thoughtful exchange by noting that she still didn't like the ad, but hoped that her daughter would have the opportunity to take a class with me someday.
On the other hand, most of my e-mail comes from right-wing "blog hooligans." These hateful, ranting and sometimes even threatening folks don't care about Duke or the lacrosse players. Their aim is to make academics and liberals look ridiculous and uncaring. They deliberately misrepresent the faculty and manipulate the feelings of those who care about the lacrosse players in order to foster their own demagogic political agenda. They contribute to the problem, not to the solution.
We are in the midst of a social disaster where 18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line and a disproportionate number of those are African-American. We live in the midst of a social disaster where 30 percent of our students do not graduate from high school (making the U.S. No. 17 in the world). We live in the midst of a social disaster where women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's (and, as of this year, starting to go down again, not up). We live in the midst of a social disaster where we do not have national health care or affordable childcare. And we live in a situation where a group of white athletes at a prominent university can get drunk and call out for a stripper the way they would a pizza.
Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college. Of course the lacrosse story makes Americans of conscience cringe.
There is also a different kind of social disaster in this incident, one that we didn't know about in April. I refer to a prosecutor who may well have acted unprofessionally, irresponsibly and unethically, possibly from the most cynical political motives. If it turns out that Mike Nifong has no evidence (as he insisted he did back in the spring), he will have betrayed the trust of an entire community and caused torment to these young men and their families. He will have added greater skepticism at every imaginable level to an already shaky legal system.
Nor is it only the lacrosse players who will be marked forever by this case. Will future rape victims dare to step forward after such a spectacle? Will African-Americans with legitimate grievances be willing to demand justice in the wake of this public debacle? On every level, this has been a social disaster.
That is why I signed the ad. It is an educator's job to bring the lessons of history to bear as we try to understand the full and on-going social implications of what happened long before March 13, 2006, and will continue long after. Studying this social disaster must be on the lesson plan for our future, no matter what happens next in this miserable incident.
I have heard it rumored that the main qualification for teaching in the Duke Political Science Dept is one must be a Marxist. I am not kidding, just seeking confirmation. Anyone know?
Bingo!!!!!
She is STILL not getting it!
I admire your analysis because it is so much more concise than mine. (You are dead right about the dysfunction; it is rampant in academia.) I will be interested to see if the professor replies to the email I sent her. If so, I may post her response. I doubt I'll hear from her, however; people like that seem to want to talk at us, not with us.
This is a bald-faced lie. "Similar" jobs include an engineer and a secretary working for the same company. Of course the engineer makes more - as would a female engineer make more than a male secretary.
There are many jobs now where women make MORE than men - University presidents is one, librarians is another.
Most jobs are paid by the job - the sex of the person filling the job has nothing to do with it.
These studies claim that since a secretary's job is "just as important" as the engineers job - she should make the same as the engineer.
That's like saying that a janitor at a hospital should make as much as the chief of surgery because the janitor's job is "just as important".
Not how these studies never say the "same" job - but only "similar" jobs.
Similarity is relative.
Liberals eat this stuff up.
Interesting, The left always use the play "The Crucible" to show how the "innocent" was targeted in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings of the 1950's.
Unlike then when the accused turned out to be guilty the Duke case is more like the frenzy of the Salem Witch Hunts.
You are right. It is one of the biggest lies in the article.
When they do the same jobs and have the same education and experience, they make the same money. Men make more money than women overall because they work more hours, don't take time out to raise children and therefore have more experience, are willing to take jobs that require unpleasant duties like lots of travel, and are more likely to major in subjects that most people find difficult if not impossible to master (e.g. hard sciences and engineering).
That someone reciting such nonsense could be a full professor with an endowed chair is pathetic!
P.S. Notice, however, that she and the rest of the Gang of 88 did not feel compelled to plaster the University with a statement and other agitprop over this or the other alleged injustices she cites. For some reason, only the mere unsupported allegation of rape spurred these lefty racists to action.
When all else fails, condemn the conservatives, LOL!
They save us as their last hope.
Bingo. When they ever do get into a debate, they rarely respond directly to any points raised by their critics, but either try to dismiss their critics with pejoratives ("hateful, ranting hooligans") or just repeat their demagogic talking points.
Without access to our tax and tuition dollars, these cesspools of neo-Marxism would for the most part simply dry up. But until we can somehow manage to make our higher education system more accountable to those who actually support it, the best thing to do with these people is to try to expose them to the public and hold them up to ridicule. It would really take the talent of a Dennis Miller to do justice to this particular "professor."
Bovine excrement. The players had requested white or hispanic strippers, IIRC. Therefore, the fact that the "performers" were black becomes irrelevant, except to the race baiting crowd. If the team had requested black strippers - then race may be a factor on part of the players scenario that played out ONLY in the false accuser's mind.
Well stated. After earning my living in broadcasting, I returned to grad school. For nearly 20 years I have taught as an adjunct because the faculty committee meeting is the most insufferable, useless and excruciating activity on earth. Dung beatles and tse tse flies have more redeeming social value.
Question for the prof: Did you and your enlightened cohorts vote for Nifong?
Here is a link to a copy of the ad. I understand it has mysteriously disappeared from Duke U. servers.
http://listening.nfshost.com/listening.htm
Why doesn't she come out and say that it is really, really bad that people levy false charges and prosecutors run with them for cynical political reasons?
I've been teaching as an adjunct for six years, for the same reasons. I don't think I could handle the backstabbing ad maneuvering without snapping.
She is such an idiot that her words imply that black athletes could not have engaged the services of black strippers (or white strippers for that matter).
Furthermore, if Miss Benevolent Dictator here told Precious that she was doing away with the "appalling power dynamics" by prohibiting her from continuing to strip for a living, she would find that Precious isn't the least bit appalled by the arrangement, but rather darn happy that she can do something so lucrative.
I agree with you completely. Professor Davidson's essay is an embarrassing and self-serving attempt to rewrite Duke's cowardice in the lacrosse rape case. When charges against those young men were first filed and liberal activists and media saw the chance to further ingratiate themselves with minority interests, those Duke professors grabbed thier chance to ride the bandwagon and to put themselves visibly on the elevated plane of progressive social humanism. Basically, they were saying, in their ad and here in this essay, 'Hey! Look at us. Aren't we just the best and the brightest! See how we care!' Now it looks like Professor Davidson senses that the blood in the water might be hers and the accuser's and the district attorney's, and not the accused's. Why else publish this essay at this time, an essay that sneakily suggests that the Duke professors' true concern wasn't really about this one case, but about making America better? I have a hunch that the Duke administration and a lot of it's enlightened, elitist professors are going to be doing a lot of fancy dancing in the near future.
And here is the ad:
This is not a different experience for us here at DukeUniversity. We go to class with racist classmates, we go to gym with people who are racists....Its part of the experience. [Independent, 29 March 2006] 2
. . . no one is really talking about how to keep the young woman herself central
to this conversation, how to keep her humanity before us . . . she doesnt seem
to be visible in this. Not for the university, not for us 9
From THIS web site.
It is time to put the humanities and social sciences out of their misery.
No tenure for underwater basketweaving studies.
All the usual academic suspects, IOW. (And why in heaven's name is it "Latino/a Studies," and not "Latino/a/GLBT Studies"? The department name is so exclusive!)
Notably, the ad says what they want if the players are guilty, but says nothing about what they want if they are innocent.
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