Now that Don Imus has been fired for being an idiot (if only that happened in other industries as well), and the Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong is facing the end of his career (one can hope), there seems to be a great deal of potential for taking a good, long, hard look at how the colleges on the periphery of these cases handled the incidents. While one might easily say that Duke acted poorly by not defending its players and Rutgers admirably with their recruiting event (oops--press conference), such a quick glance ignores something far deeper and just as sinister to American culture, the fact that each school exploited these incidents and, sadly, their students to make a very poor statement on race relations in America.
Neither university has handled their respective issues with a high level of class. The only big time Duke official who said anything positive about the lacrosse players was legendary basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski who told HBO's Bob Costas last fall that the university should have done a better job defending the players. That Duke University hung their players out to dry and allowed the faculty to treat these young men as whipping posts for "white privilege" demonstrates that Duke was more worried about its image as an elite liberal perveyor of all things "diveristy" than its role as an education institution seeking to set an example for its students. Ignorance of fundamental judicial presumptions, rushing to judgment and disloyalty to the very people who keep you in business are the lessons that Duke students and prospective students should take away from the Duke case. Duke's reputation and particularly that of the faculty, have been tarnished for years and that is a small price compared to the damage done to their former students.
But, some may argue, these young men were accused of a heinous crime, why should Duke defend them? Simple, you take care of your own and these boys, depsite the accusations, had not been found guilty of anything and they were Duke students. Yet the University allowed the public and, more importantly, its own faculty to rush to public judgment about these young men because they were 1) white, 2)relatively wealthy upper middle class, and 3) athletes accused of assaulting a 1)black, 2)poor, 3)uneducated, and 4) single mother stripper. Instead of reminding the public about the presumption of innocence, Duke University was swept along in a raging river of vile and filth and failed these men and the teammates because it fit some preconceived mold of what a liberal institution of higher learning should be about--helping correct some vague injustices of the past.
Duke's actions were deplorable and they should own up to their poor actions and help these men and their families pay off their legal bills.
But as deplorable as Duke's actions were, they were in some way understandable because the institution did not want to be tainted by a rape case. What Rutgers did, in particular Coach C. Vivian Stringer, is far more exploitive of the situation than anything Duke did or even could have done. Stringer and Rutgers took what was a sophomoric comment by a second rate shock jock, magnified by the mainstream media hypocritically hyperventilating about race relations in America, and turned her players in to mannequins to display her self-righteousness and perceived moral superiority as a female black coach.
Aside from a small percentage of news junkies at Rutgers, I find it highly unlikely that any Rutgers students, any of Stringer's players, indeed Stringer herself, had ever heard of Don Imus or even heard his broadcast until last week. Seizing upon the opportunity to paint her players as the latest victims of institutional racism perceived as so prevelant in America, Stringer turned what could have been a quick five-ten minute press conference into something I would expect to see out of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson; a race-baiting, grand-standing move designed to make C. Vivian Stringer more important as a black leader than as a basketball coach or defender of her players' honor.
Stringer and Rutgers University have every right to play up their success in the NCAA Women's Basketball tournament, a testament to the hard work and dedication of the players and to Stringer's skills as a coach. But to allow their players to be displayed (and displayed is how the team looked) as victims belittles their accomplishment as players and as students. No longer will these players be portrayed as the best examples of female student athletes at a fine institution, but they will be viewed, perhaps forever, as the team that was insulted by a moron. They will be viewed as a team exploited by a University who tried to make the point that these young women were not as Imus described them (not that many people looked at them this way) but were exemplars of a "better society" as touted by Rutgers.
The youth of the team, comprised mostly of freshmen and sophomores, makes the exploitation even worse. While these young women are clearly confident and competent on the basketball court, they may lack the same confidence in the public sphere and it seems Stringer and the Rutgers leadership seemed all too ready to guide them along the path of victimhood rather than individuality.
To me several of the players looked clearly uncomfortable with the attention and with the words of their coach. But up to the stage they marched, not as worthy runners-up in a great athletic event, but as matyrs to the greater cause of "racial equality," C. Vivian Stringer's ambitions, and the inclusive liberal doctrine of higher education.
The take-away from these incidents is that race matters more than anything else on college campuses, except may that colleges appear to be on the politically proper side of racial issues, despite the consequences to their own. Neither Duke nor Rutgers deserves any praise for their actions. The officials and adults in each case seemed more interested in exploiting each incident than in seeing the right thing done. The schools were more interested in their public relations image than in the welfare of their students.
That, more than anything else, is the tragedy of Duke and Rutgers.
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