The part that is shocking to me is that despite the fact that one of the LaCrosse team members is black, this is being held up by the black victimology choir as a race driven event.

Typically, the media plays up the race of the victim and the race of the white perpetrators. Typically, the black leadership is doing their darndest to make hay of this. For example:

"Johnson, who is black, says that lacrosse players have always been at the top of the university's social strata because they personify the Duke ideal: rich, white, athletic"... Response: Yes they are white, except when they are black. And what about the largely black Duke basketball team? Are we to pretend that the largely black perrenial championship Duke Basketball players are not the true gods of the campus?

"Although Durham itself has almost equal numbers of black and white residents... blacks make up only 11 percent of Duke's undergraduate student body."... Response: Blacks making up "only" 11% of the student body is a great acheivement considering that blacks only make up 12.3% of the US population. Affirmative Action has been a great gift the the black community, and one not met with recognition or even thanks. Duke has clearly made an extrordinary effort to recruit and admit blacks, payback from the black community comes in the form of accusation and anger.

Wake up people! The son of a rich black surgeon is the winner of this game, and the son of a poor white farmer is the loser. It is a wash for rich whites who get in anyway, and also a wash for poor blacks who don't get in anyway. Socio Economic Status is the dividing line, not race.

Socially powerful student athletes are the top of the social strata at every campus. They are allowed to break the rules and rewarded for it. They get favorable treatment by professors and administrators, and many schoools even codify official advantages to them (preferential dorm selection, better cafeterias, free tutoring, etc.). And yes, this most priveledged of all groups on campus is largely black.

Like all children of the wealthy, we feel a sense of entitlement that you others cannot possibly understand, your all jealous and wish that you were us but your not and you never will be. Get over it.

I believe the use of town and gown so often subtracted from the overall work. The story opened my eyes not only to Duke's problems but to the idea of overusing a rhyme-metaphor. Once was enough.

Jarey

As a graduate student at Duke, I'm not at all suprised by any dimension of the lacrosse-rape affair, from the nature of the party down to the administration's sluggish response. The entire problem is tied together by the need for the university to raise money from alumni, and apparently having a good lacrosse team helps bring in the cash. This has lead a an otherwise outstanding university to have a skewed focus on athletics of all types. By no longer giving preferential admission to wealthy athletes who do not deserve to be here, the university could simultaneously strengthen its academic reputation and avoid repeating the embarrassment that has ensued from the lacrosse incident. I call on all Duke alumni to suspend donations until President Brodhead resigns and is replaced by someone who runs the university for the benefit of scholarship, not for the benefit of sports coaches.

Your obnoxious whining, coupled with your inability to spell, drives the point home even better than the article. This is about absurd losers who will be pathetic middle aged alcoholics, wondering what to do after they have run through all of the money their daddies left them.

Want to be like you? Get a clue.

What the Duke lax team allegedly did is mostly no different than what occurs in every other major university, just as their President inferred. It is not right. But it happens. I went to UNC in the late 90s, about 15 mins down the road from Duke. The only difference was the majority of UNC's athletes are black and when they were caught doing something wrong, ended up in court and/or jail. Unfortunately, none of these kids from Duke will end up in either one. They wont learn their lesson and it will simply continue as it has continued over the last several decades in Durham. There is a reason they refer to the campus as "the plantation".

This article approaches a lot of the issues surrounding the Duke rape allegations in a more responsible manner than many others. However, many of the symbols and assumptions about Duke social life are taken at face value.

1.) Why do people assume that it takes privilege to get drunk and vomit in people’s backyards? Honestly, a Busch Light 12-pack is $6.49 plus tax at the BP station. Getting black-out drunk is one of the things that brings Duke students further from their pedestal. You see Duke sorority girls dressed to the hilt, Hispanic day-laborers that just got off the clock, and janitorial workers from the University that just got off their on-the-clock nap -- in line at the gas station with their god-awful beer, forties of liquor, and cigarettes (both menthol and ultra-light).

2.) About 50% of Duke students are on financial aid and will graduate with considerable debt. The wealth of Duke students isn’t that out of the ordinary when you compare it with a nice suburb, like say Potomac, MD, or Westchester, NY. The thing that makes Duke students look ridiculously wealthy is the abject poverty of Durham. You can’t logically blame students for this problem. Would Durham be better off without Duke? All the analysis of student relations with Durham assumes the current undergraduate students to already be part of the Durham community. If Durham treats students like crap, great students won’t come . . . they will go to Northwestern, Stanford, Wash U, Emory etc. The same is not true for Durham residents. The students are clearly a more valuable resource. This fact does not mean students should treat the community like crap, but that at the least the town should be a bit less hostile to the golden goose.

3.) Duke isn’t a high school. This isn’t like Mean Girls or anything. I go out to bars once or twice a week and I don’t know any lacrosse players well and I don’t really care that much. Right now many writers rushing to post their stories are selecting and probing for the quotes they want.

4.) Renting a house off campus is a less “privileged” way of living as a student at Duke. It’s a lot cheaper than a lot of on-campus houses to start with. Adding to the discomfort, students regularly get robbed off campus, sometimes at gun-point or knife-point.

5.) The main non-endowment funding source for this entire University is the undergraduates (while the health system has a different funding system). The main point is that residents complain about rowdy parties etc., but many of their jobs are funded by the students.

All this being said, if the allegations did turn out to be true, they are inexcusable and the perpetrators and those who knew and said nothing should be punished. But I think that the rest of the University’s social institutions are being put on trial by correlation and preconceptions of far out of the mainstream advocates with long-standing grudges