Meanwhile, in University-Land
The
University of Texas is debating a curricular review which sounds considerably more ambitious than Harvard's....
Writing in the Washington Post, Eliot A. Cohen says of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper on the "Israel Lobby," that "
yes, it's anti-Semitic."
Residents of Durham are pleased that Duke has cancelled the rest of the lacrosse team's season. Meanwhile, the lawyer for some of the lacrosse players has put out the story that the players felt
"ripped off" by the two strippers [let us be honest about this, rather than using the euphemism "dancers"] they hired, who allegedly were paid for two hours and quit "dancing" after two to three minutes. The lawyer, Joe Cheshire, says that some of the players might subsequently have used "inappropriate" langugage, but that no rape occurred.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a lot of stereotyping about the nature of the lacrosse team and all lacrosse teams. They have the "elitism of preppies, the boorishness of jocks," according to
this article in Slate, which produces not a whiff of evidence to prove either charge. (The writer says that most lacrosse players are damaged by their time spent at single-sex "academies," despite the fact that he doesn't actually name any of them.)
And
writing in the New York Times, Allan Gurganus declares that "glamorous boarding-school sports are magnets for the attractive, competitive and wealthy young people that increasingly define Duke's student body."
How many unestablished facts does that sentence contain, I wonder?
Gurganus' conclusion: "When the children of privilege feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing, we must all ask why."
Interesting. Seems to me that if such stereotypes were used when writing about, say, a primarily black team, lots of alarms would (and should) be going off.....
Something clearly happened at Duke that night. What it is, we still don't know. But Gurganus has these guys all but tried and sentenced to exile in Tasmania. "Victimizing, even torturing..."? Perhaps we should wait for a trial before being so certain.
