pay a visit sometime to New Haven, Connecticut. I once interviewed there for a faculty job. We entered the building, part of the med school, through a door with a keypad and then signed in with a security guard. The junior faculty who had school children assured me that everyone on Yale faculty sends their kids to private schools, which were 'wonderful'. And housing was reasonable in safe areas of town. It wasn't just a town-gown problem, it was very much a black-white problem. I was offered the job; decided to go elsewhere.

I've lived in two college towns where there was a small percentage of arrogant idiots, often connected with the fraternity systems. I'm not sure what causes this...it could be that there were always young men who regarded drinking, vomiting, vandalism, littering and verbal abuse as their birthright. But I think it has been made much worse by several things.

One is our fascination with being young. At one time young men who went to college aped their elders, donning tweed jackets and calling themselves "college men." Today you can see people in their late 20s around the campus dressed like children playing in the backyard, slouching across campus with their skateboards under one arm. Agreed, the skateboarders may not be the vandals, but they aren't stabilizing influences either.

Another is the advent of the protective parent. When a University of Florida student was arrested on charges of hiring a hooker for public sex at a frat party, his mother's reaction to a reporter was "We love our son and we're proud of him." There are a lot of baby boomer parents who never taught their kids discipline. The parents of the high-school "Spur Posse" of bys who used girls as targets of sexual conquests a few years ago had similarly benign reactions.

In the 1960s the belief that "you can't fight city hall!" gave way as people did fight city hall to try to bring an end to discriminatory laws, pollution, police abuses and corruption. But along the way some people adopted a belief that when you are in trouble, there's always a way out. I've noticed that it often involves parents hiring an attorney to run up to the college town to get their son off the hook.

Law enforcement officials are sometimes lax in prosecuting young thugs. When a group of fraternity boys gang-raped a 17-year-old girl at a "Little Sister Rush," the prosecuting attorney dropped the charges after a hired defense attorney met with hiom to tell him that they were really just a bunch of nice guys.

Some of these young guys, like the student peeing on the faculty member's house, have no idea that what they are doing is "wrong." A few years ago at the University of Florida a fraternity boy had a breakup with his girlfriend, and decided to get the pet cat back from her apartment. His approach was that a gang of fraternity boys went to her place and kicked in the door. It escaped them that this was breaking and entering, or home invasion.

I live three blocks from the Buchanan Rd. Lacrosse house. I am the first to admit that Duke, and Durham, is beset from within by a alot of horrible shit. Crippling poverty vs. heartless wealth, pervasive racism, and a small but visible group of college students (found nationwide) who are just vile people.

But tonight a group of women, many of them black women, will represent Duke for the National Women's Basketball Championship. They are athletes too, and they speak for their school and their adoptive city just as loudly as any disgraced Lacrosse team.

The real lens through which this kind of crime must be viewed is not being spoken of in the media. It is hatred of women, not racism, as real as racism is.

They are alarmingly common, now, the stories of a vulnerable woman ambushed by a gang of guys, who are already in a gang of sorts -- athletic team, the Air Force Academy, the police force.

The response is always the same -- outrage by part of the community, while the rest rallies 'round the accused, insisting they are good guys and proceed to villify the victim and tear her to pieces, with the lead chorus of, "women lie about rape!" followed by, "she asked for it." The number of reasons given for asking for it, tend to boil down to, "she exists."

Disintegration of culture? The unraveling of a nation into us and them?

Fox.

If these kids did what they are accussed of, let them go to jail and let them rot. The ones who stood by and did nothing should face severe punishment as well.

But...now that we're having this conversation, let's get one thing straight--99% of the time, an escort service is a prostitution service. Period. Of course, if she was a prostitute, it doesn't make the rape any less horriffic, and the perpetrators should pay just the same. But stop calling her a dancer or a stripper. And if you don't think that detail makes a difference, watch what happens in court...

The salient point in "Vetran"'s post, and in the article itself, is that these young men seem not to have any idea that what they're doing is wrong. And why should they? After all, they've been shown time and again that nothing they do carries any consequence -- not only by their parents and their school, but by the nightly news and the culture at large. It doesn't take exceptional insight to see that part of the appeal of belonging to the uppermost stratum of any society is the comparative freedom from accountability that membership therein affords. (Indeed, a guy like Ken Lay must right now be feeling, above all else, very surprised at his current situation.)

Which brings me to a related point. While I don't want to downplay the significance of race in this country's day-to-day troubles as well as its larger historical ones, it seems to me that this particular problem -- privileged idiots stomping around on those less privileged simply because they can -- probably has less to do with race, per se, and more to do with that other elephant in the American parlor: class. Whatever actually happened to that stripper -- racial epithets included -- would not have happened, had she not belonged to the relatively powerless and voiceless underclass. A century ago, that working class mother of two might have been Irish. The fact that she is black is probably, in an awful sort of way, fortunate, since that fact has gotten a lot of people involved in this affair who might not otherwise have heard about it, or cared.

So what to do? Well, it seems to me that this kind of problem on college campuses has less to do with a "boys will be boys" attitude than it does with the school administration's fear of losing the future benefits that its well-placed and well-heeled alumni might bestow. Whether or not it ever owns up to this fact (and it obviously won't), Duke and other schools like it have in various ways actively fostered the sort of image that appeals to wealthy sociopaths and their offspring because it knows that's where the money is. And this amounts to leading by example. Too bad the example being set is one of sycophantic cowardice.