Julian Canzoneri, a beat writer for the Sports Section and a member of the men’s soccer team, examines the Duke lacrosse scandal that has taken hold of the national spotlight.
Duke student athletes are used to life in the public eye. Back in March, ESPN simultaneously broadcasted the Blue Devils’ men’s basketball regular season finale against archrival North Carolina, the 23rd nationally broadcast game of the Dukies’ season, on ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU. Outside Cameron Indoor Stadium, ESPN’s “College Gameday” set up shop with hundreds of Cameron Crazies behind them, vying to get their faces on national television.
Now, those same kids likely wish that the media would just leave them alone. For the foreseeable future, Duke and its athletes will be in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
In case you have been living under a rock in Guam for the last month, two white Duke lacrosse players have been indicted on charges of kidnapping and raping a 27-year-old black woman hired to “exotically” dance at a team party. District Attorney Mike Nifong, who is currently running for re-election, hopes to implicate another player in the rape but, as of now, does not have sufficient evidence to do so.
According to several news sources, the reported evidence against the two young men Nifong has indicted, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, is not overwhelming. Authorities took samples of each team member’s DNA save that of the team’s one African American player – the woman is certain that none of the assailants were black. The tests failed to link any player with the alleged incident, causing the District Attorney to arrest the two men the accuser picked out of a photo array.
Nifong was quick to say that many rape cases proceed in this manner, citing the fact that 75 to 80 percent of rape prosecutions lack DNA evidence. But this statistic matters about as much as Gucci and Versace’s fall styles matter to Bill Belichick ’75. What’s important is not that the Duke case has precedents to look back on, but rather what percentage of these earlier prosecutions ended in convictions.
ESPN’s principle legal analyst, Roger Cossack, has said that more DNA tests are likely on the way, which would be good news for the prosecution, as the strategy for formulating the photo array has come under increased scrutiny in recent days. Many legal types questioned whether the results of the array could hold up in court because the District Attorney did not include any pictures of non-lacrosse players in the photos shown to the accuser, who identified Finnerty and Seligmann during the process.
After all, without providing pictures of random people in the photo array, anyone that the woman fingered would be a legitimate suspect because the alleged incident occurred at a lacrosse team party. Gary Wells, president of the American Psychology-Law Society claimed that this lineup was essentially “a multiple-choice test without any wrong answers.”
The evidence does not end there though. Bruises were reportedly found on the woman’s body in the days following the alleged assault, but defense attorneys said that time-stamped photographs will prove that those blemishes existed before the woman claims the incident took place. Now, media members question whether those time-stamps can be doctored to help the defense.
Most recently, a few anonymous team members told ESPN that there was a dispute between the lacrosse players and dancers over compensation. The players said that slurs were used by both sides in the verbal spat.
The accuser’s father also told MSNBC that his daughter has considered dropping the case, but as of now she plans to see it through to a conclusion.
In the midst of the scandal, the school cancelled the team’s season and the coach of 16 years, Mike Pressler, resigned.
Before the program can recover from this mess, the legal system must first make sense of the incident. While it does this, life goes on at Duke, where the majority of television cameras and trucks left after the indictments came down. Still, this case has exposed a division in Durham, North Carolina’s society, between the predominantly white Duke community and the largely black Durham population.
“It hasn’t been the best spring,” said an anonymous Duke source. “The problem [is one] of race-relations and socioeconomic disparity, but it’s not just Durham, it’s all over the country too.”
To put Durham’s demographics in perspective, the 2000 census shows a vastly larger black population but similar income in comparison to Middletown. Durham’s median household income of $41,160 is in the same neighborhood as Middletown’s $47,162 average.
But the reputation of Duke’s student body has always been one of money and privilege. Some columnists even describe the school as a sort of fortress of wealth and opportunity surrounded by urban poverty. But a closer look at the composition of Duke’s 6,000 undergraduates proves that perceptions are not always a reality.
In an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times, Michael Skube, a professor at North Carolina’s Elon University, discusses the black cloud of elitism that hangs over Duke despite its administration’s attempt to diversify its community.
“Few universities do as much to enroll minorities, and yet its public face is one of arrogance and elitism,” Skube wrote.
According to the Wesleyan and Duke websites, 11 percent of Duke’s student body is African American, compared to seven percent at Wesleyan, an institution that prides itself upon diversity. If nothing else, these numbers suggest that Duke is not worthy of being singled out as an intolerant institution.
Even so, this story turned into one of blacks against whites faster than an NCAA tournament Cinderella story coach jumps ship to take a higher-profile job. An Associated Press story released soon after Finnerty and Seligmann were indicted highlighted the proximity of each player’s home to golf courses, forever symbols of elitism. The article also dug up the extravagant tuition of each player’s private high school. So if the racial and socioeconomic undertones didn’t have legs of their own, never fear, misguidedly provocative reporting is here to push the issue along.
Eugene Robinson, in a recent column for The Washington Post, argued that, like it or not, it is unfeasible to analyze this case without acknowledging the racial issues involved.
“It’s impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries,” Robinson wrote. “The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.”
But race and class issues are not the only problems behind this story. The jock culture of invincibility and entitlement – which likely led to thinking that holding this party at all was a good idea – still holds a prominent place in our society. This begins with putting professional athletes on an impossibly high pedestal and paying them millions of dollars. On the college level, players of revenue sports such as football and basketball often receive preferential treatment because they bring cash to the school.
The anonymous Duke source faulted the administration for not cracking the whip sooner with the lacrosse team, which was notorious around campus for rowdy behavior.
“To be honest, the administration and athletic department could have done a little more to control the kids,” he said. “If they do it for basketball, why not for lacrosse? The answer is because it’s not a revenue, high profile sport like basketball.”
The Blue Devils men’s basketball team, under legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski, has always held a sparkling reputation of clean living. If the belief that the Duke administration more consciously controls the off-court activities of the men’s basketball team is correct, it is sad to think that the athletic department may have fallen asleep at the wheel in regulating the conduct of a team that does not produce massive revenues.
Wesleyan, on the other hand, does not have any revenue sports, giving the athletic department no reason to ignore the off-field conduct of any one team over another.
“The administration does a good job monitoring all the sports teams,” said Jared Ashe ’07, captain of the men’s soccer and basketball teams. “In terms of regulating the many rules and regulations for college athletics, the varsity squads at Wes understand what is expected of us and how important it is to represent the school in the right way.”
In addition to overseeing Cardinal athletic programs, Wesleyan Athletic Director John Biddiscombe said he is watching the developments of the Duke story.
“It certainly has produced a lot of conversation among the coaches and administrators in our department,” Biddiscombe said. “I’m certainly following it.”
Adam Kopiec ’07, a catcher on the Cardinal baseball team, added that the reputation of Wesleyan as a top school in terms of academics also helps keep the athletes in line.
“When you come to Wesleyan, you’re an athlete, but you’re a student first,” Kopiec said. “It’s a little bit different than going to Duke. Here, you are coming to compete at a higher level, but most of us are mainly here to get a Wesleyan degree. The name of the school and what that carries pretty much keeps us in line.”
Still, the alleged incident happened at a highly regarded university. Check any college ranking publication and you’ll find Duke near the top. Many Blue Devil lacrosse players even said they will not transfer so as to benefit from a Duke education.
But it’s naïve to think that this type of behavior is unique to the Duke men’s lacrosse team. Just a few years ago, Colorado University’s football program was caught using girls and sex to lure recruits.
“Duke just became the first to be caught in a major storm like this,” the anonymous Duke source said.
While the school is trying to find its way through the storm, the rest of us, including the eventual jurors of the impending trial, are left in place called Wonderland – as in, “I wonder whether or not they did it.” Wonderland does not have golf courses or rough streets and, let’s hope, it can be a place where the final judgment is based on fact, rather than class or race. Maybe it’s naïve to think that’s possible too.
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