| Protecting the "Duke Brand"; Part of a paper I am writing | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 15 2009, 07:21 PM (2,257 Views) | |
| Baldo | Jan 16 2009, 09:37 PM Post #16 |
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Remember we are only reacting to what we know about, as darby pointed out, does he meet with the parents to console them with the knowledge that he is confident the team is innocent of the rape charges and is behind them? It wasn't a matter of saying "that he is confident the team is innocent of the rape charges and is behind them!" He just refused totally to meet with any of the parents when this was happening. Get that? How can you justify that? The depositions will be brutal and Richard Brodhead will be on the hot seat for quite a while. What else we don't know about?
Edited by Baldo, Jan 16 2009, 09:38 PM.
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| Texas Mom | Jan 17 2009, 12:13 AM Post #17 |
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I think darby is dead-on, Bill. Also, remember the context of the 2005-2006 school year- the Rolling Stone article and "I Am Charlotte Simmons." Duke, the Ivy League wannabe, was embarassed by both of these. At that point in time, liability issues surrounding alcohol abuse, especially underage alcohol use, were getting lots of press and provoking lots of conversation among college administrators. (I've always thought that there must have been some interesting discussions during the summer of 2005 amongst different deans of students at various conferences about how to deal with liability/alcohol issues.) Add in the race, class, gender issues and you get a perfect storm for Brodhead and Steel to use to show the "alpha males" who was boss.
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| Tidbits | Jan 17 2009, 01:16 AM Post #18 |
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Duke Brand.... Duke Brand.... oh, yes ... Duke Brand was the hero of the romance novel I read last summer. |
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| Baldo | Jan 17 2009, 02:55 AM Post #19 |
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I agree with Texas Mom and the others. darby is spot on. I went back and reviewed the Bowens-Chambers report. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/mmedia/pdf/Bowen-ChambersReportFinal05-04-06.pdf It is an interesting exercise after knowing so much more now, than we did when it was released. It's release date is May 4, 2006. The "investigation" wasn't even completed and Dave Evans wasn't indicted until 15 May 2006. So what was the purpose of this report if Duke was going to take a "hands off" approach and let the DA handle this? Cover Brodhead’s ass and Duke’s Brand What was it basic conclusion? Duke Officials were too slow in response because it was a Black accuser, racial slurs, and the Lacrosse Team. They missed the entirety of the story. But that was expected as Brodhead stacked the deck to get the correct conclusions. As KC said (reported in Mike Gaynor’s column) Brooklyn College History Professor Robert K.C. Johnson questioned the suitability of President Brodhead's "investigators": "Former Princeton president William Bowen was a well-known critic of intercollegiate athletics and co-author, with Derek Bok, of a high-profile defense of racial preferences in the college admissions process. Julius Chambers, former general counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and NCCU chancellor, was a similarly aggressive advocate of the 'diversity' agenda in higher education. Bowen and Chambers took it upon themselves to add a third member to their panel, Danielle Carr Ramdath, who their report identified as an 'African-American woman.' (The report did not disclose either the race or the gender of Bowen and Chambers.)" Professor Johnson's summary of the predictable result: "The resulting report unsurprisingly reflected its authors' long-held beliefs. Though claiming that they were 'not arguing for filling positions of any kind by applying a race-gender quota system,' they demanded creation of new positions that women or minorities were all but certain to fill. They faulted Duke administrators for not determining Crystal Mangum's race immediately — an argument that prompted then-Academic Council chair Paul Haagen to wonder, 'I'm not sure that somehow or other we should have responded differently if it had been a white woman.' And, in a stunning passage, they explained that Duke needed to balance its students' due process protections against the fact that 'in the eyes of some faculty and others concerned with the intersecting issues of race, class, gender, and respect for people, the Athletic Department, and Duke more generally, just didn't seem to "get it."' As a result, these professors (which included Peter Wood, Karla Holloway and Houston Baker, each of whom Bowen and Chambers interviewed) saw the lacrosse team as the 'manifestation of a white, elitist arrogant sub-culture that was both indulged and self-indulgent.'" http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/gaynor/070712 It suffers woefully from a lack of understanding about the events and makes much of the fact that the "victim of the alleged assault" was black. Yes they call her a victim of the alleged assault. They also take their shots at the Lax Team. See the Report of the Lacrosse Ad Hoc Review Committee, especially pp. 7-16. The Report states: "By all measures that we considered, the disciplinary record of the lacrosse team was noticeably worse than the records of all other athletic teams (p. 14)." Professor James Coleman, who led the study of the lacrosse program, was quoted by The News and Observer as saying: "The deplorable disciplinary record of the lacrosse team reflects the extent to which they let down those who trusted them, including their coach, their families, and the university" (May 2, 2006, p. A1). page 6 It served as another attack on the Lacrosse Team while protecting the Brand. Edited by Baldo, Jan 17 2009, 10:52 AM.
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| Baldo | Jan 17 2009, 12:52 PM Post #20 |
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Victor Davis Hanson is an writer I enjoy. He is professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, where he initiated the classics program and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He co-wrote 'Who killed Homer" which is the story how ancient languages and knowledge which formed the basic of western civilization have been devalued in modern University education. His web site , http://victorhanson.com/ He wrote this about the Duke Lacrosse Frame/Hoax April 19, 2007...The same ancient pattern of arrogance and retribution appears in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Three Duke players were unjustly accused of rape and sexual offense by an African-American stripper. Local district attorney Mike Nifong, some of the Duke humanities faculty, the Duke University president, and the ubiquitous race hustlers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all swarmed on a perfect scandal for political advantage and self-promoting sermonizing. After all, beer-drinking, rich white lacrosse athletes were supposedly brutalizing a poor woman of color, forced by her poverty to submit to them sexually. Despite no evidence, the accused students were charged with felonies. The coach is long gone, and the entire team was disbanded for the year. The academic mob added its own rush-to-judgment easy condemnations. Then Nifong won re-election as a populist crusader against supposedly racist preppie sex-offenders. Seemingly ignoring evidence that the victim was making the charges up, this lynch mob went headlong into mad excess....snipped http://jewishworldreview.com/0407/hanson041907.php3 I often refer to the prism of race, class, and gender and that idea comes from Prof Hanson when I heard him on the radio describing what was happening in university faculties. Everything had to be judged through a "prism." The Bowens Chambers report is certainly an example of that. The “Race, Class, and Gender Prism” filters the data, much like a prism breaks up white light into separate colors so does the “ RCG Prism” break up events into "colors" and interprets them in terms of race, class, and gender. You can see this in the report and its upset over that it was a AA "victim", not just a victim. They criticize Duke's Administration(actually they blame it on underlings of Brodhead) for not passing that important data to him. Brodhead escapes from his chosen panel, gee I wonder why? BTW Prof Hanson says the prism should be. "In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense." Nonsense surely describes Duke's Administration and Faculty response. Bowens Chambers nonsense goes futher and actually praises Brodhead in what has to be one giant brown nose. He convened a Crisis Management Team (CMT) which met for the first time at his residence on Saturday, March 25, and then met often thereafter. We believe that the President should be commended for his unequivocal acceptance of responsibility for addressing the myriad issues raised by the allegations and the public reaction to them. Pg 9 BC Report The Duke lacrosse Frame/Hoax became an attack on the white upper class male Lacrosse team. That was the “perfect storm” because they were the perfect offenders for the race, class, and gender adherents. The truth didn’t count, it was the theory that was senior to the raw data.. Professer Lisker, Director of the Duke's Women's Center would joined in repeating buzz words, like a "town-gown" and "the perfect storm." "There are so many kinds of anger," Donna Lisker, director of the Duke Women's Center, said of the stormy campus reaction that has included demonstrations. "There is anger about sexual violence. There is a racial component and a town-gown component. One of my colleagues called it the perfect storm." Baltimore Sun http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2006/11/from-wall-of-silence-to-community.html Bowens-Chambers does not criticize the 88. Nothing is mentioned about taking out the “We’re Listening” Ads nor Houston Baker’s racist and inflammatory public statements denouncing the lacrosse calling for the suspension of the entire Lacrosse Team. It isn’t even mentioned. Professor Houston Baker wrote in a public letter about 'a culture of silence that seeks to protect white, male, athletic violence.. abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." As Michael Gaynor pointed out , “All this contributed to a racially charged lynch mob atmosphere and endangered the lacrosse players both on and off campus.” Even in their conclusion they promote solutions and delineate them in terms of race. They just don’t say former President of Duke they say “outgoing white woman, Nan Keohane.” “It is important to recognize that the make-up of the senior leadership was inherited from a prior administration that was headed by an extremely able and outgoing white woman, Nan Keohane. When President Keohane retired and was succeeded by President Brodhead, the complexion of the leadership group changed markedly. We are certainly not arguing for filling positions of any kind by applying some race-gender quota system. But we would encourage President Brodhead to find ways to bring a wider range of talented individuals to his council table.” Pg 15 BC Report So what is the final conclusion of this esteem Panel? We conclude that, once he was in possession of the necessary information, President Brodhead has provided strong, consistent, and effective leadership in a situation that would try the talents and patience of even the most skillful leaders and crisis managers among us. One senior administrator, who was not included in many of the deliberations of the CMC and who might have been expected to be critical of the president, urged us to urge others to have compassion for the president and to support him. We do.pg 12 BC Report So the end product was to kiss Brodhead’s rear and offer compassion for him meanwhile slandering the players and adding to the idea they were a team out of control that should have been disciplined earlier. And in their final eight lessons to be learned they have this.. #7 Take a large step back and think freshly about the role of athletics, and especially the aggressive recruitment of scholarship athletes, in the context of Duke's educational mission; and perhaps provide regional if not national leadership in addressing questions that are by no means peculiar to Duke.page 17 BC report Richard and the 88 must have been very happy with the report! Ever wonder how much Bowens & Chambers got paid for that report? I do, perhaps we could get an answer. I bet we would be shocked. In the end the report is an embarrassment, a product of adherents to diversity, affirmative action, and proponents of the Race Class and Gender solutions. Edited by Baldo, Jan 17 2009, 01:03 PM.
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| MikeZPU | Jan 17 2009, 01:33 PM Post #21 |
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Baldo: two excellent posts in succession, offering much insight and analysis. excellent posts by others preceding, e.g., darby's post. The logic of vilifying the LAX players still astounds me. I guess they made a decision that they would RATHER appease the PC lynch mobs, feeding them what they wanted to hear, and thereby leave themselves at great risk to have to pay Crystal a huge award for not having reigned in the LAX players and letting them go wild (according to their fallacious and PC-biased reports) without serious discipline for years -- they would rather do all that than stand up for the truth and stand up for their own students. Just astounding ... Edited by MikeZPU, Jan 17 2009, 01:35 PM.
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| MikeZPU | Jan 17 2009, 03:25 PM Post #22 |
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Of course, they also risked huge payouts to the LAX players if the whole thing went south .. which it did ... they've already made big payouts to Reade, Colin, and Dave ... they've already paid out tons of legal fees ... and my guess is other big judgments will be forthcoming ... |
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| Baldo | Jan 17 2009, 05:55 PM Post #23 |
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Of course we did learn one important fact from the Bowens Chambers report ...the official report of the Duke Police Department was submitted and reviewed by the Duke Police Director, Robert Dean, at 7:30 a.m. on March 14. This report indicated clearly that the individual making the allegations was a black woman—though information about her race and about the racial aspects of the case did not reach key administrators (including President Brodhead) until March 24. The substance of the report, including the fact that the students involved were lacrosse players but not the fact that the presumed victim was black, was communicated by Mr. Dean by phone to the Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students, Sue Wasiolek, on the morning of March 14...snipped pg 2 BC However the fact that DPD & Duke's Police Chief Dean didn't think the charges would amount to anything was not given any credence. But as we all know, this wasn't about the truth. It was about giving Dick a free pass and even a pat on the back and showing him compassion. Edited by Baldo, Jan 17 2009, 05:56 PM.
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| chatham | Jan 17 2009, 07:01 PM Post #24 |
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Wait a second now. Giving the race of a victim is NOT politically correct. After all, doesn't the newspapers say when a problem arises, say a type of crime, it is not their responsibility to report the race of the person? Don't the web TV sites say they don't report the color of the person the police are looking for? Don't people complain about that because it would make it all a lot easier to know a thief's race and find him/her or identify someone? So what are these politically correct higher ups in the PC world of education saying that brodhead was not told the color of the victim? Wasnt that the way it was suppose to be? Is that even acceptable as a thought process by these people to require someone know the race of someone? Shame on them. SHAME ON THEM for printing their racist complaints protecting one of their own. Shame on them. It is actually embarrassing to see PC people use race as an excuse for someone not doing the right thing. |
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| Payback | Jan 17 2009, 08:56 PM Post #25 |
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This April 1994 document comes midway between the controlled terror of the preface to THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE, where Brodhead first had to acknowledge that not everyone was still writing only about dead white men (and that there were appalling dangers to his own career if he persisted in doing so without acknowledging the existence of dead white women), and his amateurish editing of THE JOURNALS OF CHARLES W. CHESNUTT, his attempt to establish his street creds with the considerable help of librarians in transcribing the manuscript and identifying people and events mentioned in it. Here is Brodhead having recovered from stark terror and feeling pretty sure that he can occupy a safe middle ground without having to surrender totally to Political Correctness and to embrace it passionately. YALE ALUMNI MAGAZINE APRIL 1994 Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English. An Anatomy of Multiculturalism The current debate over the canon is growing polarized between defense of tradition against "barbaric" innovations, and defense of change against the "tyranny" of received wisdom. At the risk of making both sides unhappy, the dean of Yale College argues for a more nuanced approach. April 1994 by Richard Brodhead There once was a time when literate culture -- the things educated people know and believe other people should know -- possessed certain well-marked features. The contents of literate culture were internally coherent; they were widely agreed to; and above all they were agreed to be universal in their interest or meaning. What happened in education, according to this understanding, was that we came out of whatever local, parochial origin we happened to have been born in to meet on the ground of the universally significant. In literature, we studied the work not of those who expressed themselves "like us," but of writers who transcended such limits of time and place -- writers with names like Homer and Shakespeare. In philosophy we read not those who thought the way people think where we came from, but thinkers of perennial, transcultural significance: Plato, for instance, or Rousseau. A current caricature says that this model of education was only ever subscribed to by the elite, but historically this is quite untrue. During its long reign the concept of universal culture was often valued especially highly by outsiders. When W. E. B. DuBois, the great African-American intellectual of the turn of the last century, looked for an image of a profound human unity to set against the racial segregations being perfected in his time, he turned to the literary classics: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). You would recoil if I sat next to you at the whites-only lunch counter, DuBois implies, but Shakespeare doesn't when I sit and read his plays. For DuBois, culture restores the common ground that local social arrangements deny. The educational revolution for which multiculturalism is a shorthand name embodies an unravelling of this older consensus. Multiculturalism has arisen through the spreading of the idea that the so-called universal was in fact only partial: one side of the story pretending to be the whole story, the interests of some groups passing themselves off as the interests of all. "Tonto! Tonto! We are surrounded by Indians!" the Lone Ranger said in an old joke; and like Tonto, many contemporary readers have come to respond: "What do you mean 'we?'" So a line like "The Odyssey exemplifies the fundamental human desire to wander and adventure," a classroom truism not long ago, would now provoke the quick retort: "'Human' to be sure, if humans are assumed to be men. But what about that wife who sat home while Odysseus got to wander?" In recent years the growing suspicion of alleged universals has led to a heightened sense that there are always many parties to every human experience, and that their experiences of the same event are often profoundly divergent. In the wake of this realization, it has come to seem that real education is to be found not in the move from the local to the generalizedly "human," but in the effort to hear and attend to all the different voices of human history -- the voices of those who have dominated the official stories, but also those silenced or minimized by the official account. We know we are in the neighborhood of this new plan of education whenever history is given us in plural, contending versions: when the story of The Odyssey is also considered from Penelope's point of view; when Columbus's discovery of America is seen not just from the European but also from the Arawak or Taino vantage; when the history of the Pilgrim settlement takes into account the different history it produced for native populations; and so on. We have all seen the profound educational shift that has taken place in this country as the second of these models has begun to displace the first in recent years. Having been taught in the older of these ways, but lived to teach and be reeducated in the newer one, I have had, by pure historical coincidence, an intimate experience of this great tectonic shift. Here I offer a few reflections on how this still-unfolding revolution looks to a person who has seen it from both sides. There are, in truth, a great many things to say about this transformation. The first and most obvious is that it embodies a playing out in education of a contemporary social drama that ranges far beyond the sphere of education itself. When our successors look back on the second half of this century, the Civil Rights movement will surely strike them as one of the most decisive developments in the history of our time. As we know, this movement led a nation that had accepted legal segregation to become first embarrassed by, then to seek to reform, the practice of discrimination based on race. Having begun with this focus, the Civil Rights movement has extended itself by the force of analogy, creating the perception that many other forms of social differentiation -- the different treatment of women, of other minorities, of the disabled, and so on -- were as unjust and unjustifiable as racial discrimination. The modern sentiment that men and women should win advancement only on the grounds of individual ability, and not because of the groups they can be lumped into, has made for changes in college admissions, corporate hiring, professional recruitment, and virtually every other social practice in the United States. In the world of education, it has expressed itself as multiculturalism. Multiculturalism embodies the ideal of equal opportunity implemented at the level of the curriculum -- the urge to open the field of study, like other places of visibility and prestige, to women, minorities, and others previously left out of account. To its partisans, multicultural education is a matter of justice done at last. But there are many who are in sympathy with these social goals who still regard their educational effects as pernicious. One common cry is that this movement's political ends are leading it to abandon a long-cherished heritage education has passed down from generation to generation. But to this it can be replied that the history of education is a history of change more than any of us like to admit. We all tend to share the sense that the things we studied in school had probably been taught there since time immemorial, and so should continue to be taught until the end of time. But our schoolings were themselves often products of reforms that had succeeded and then been forgotten. What subject could seem more timeless than English? But English wasn't thought a fit matter for university study before the 19th century: it was a modern, vernacular literature, and education's business was with the Classical. My own field, American literature, entered college curricula later still, not much earlier than 1940, having been dismissed as a mere colonial appendage of English after English got itself academically accepted. "What . at one time has been held in little estimation, and has hardly found place in a course in liberal instruction, has, under other circumstances, risen to repute, and received a proportional share of attention," President Jeremiah Day wrote in the Yale Report of 1828. Seen against such a background, it may be possible to regard current curricular revolutions as the latest chapter of a long story of change, not an unprecedented deviance saved for modern times. But the central objection to multicultural reforms comes from the belief that traditional literate culture is more meaningful than newly promoted objects of study -- that the lives and works of the hitherto ignored, however much we may wish to feature them for sentimental or political reasons, are less remarkable human achievements than the classics, and their study therefore less rewarding. (Saul Bellow meant this when he asked: "Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?") This is a weighty charge, but to it we might reply: How could you know that these things are less valuable except by having studied them, extended them your sympathy, and given them your patient attention? A silent premise of much of my education was that there were all manner of things not worth knowing about and that we could know they were not worth knowing without bothering to consult them. When I came to the study of American literature, for example, I often read that Hawthorne, Melville, and the other geniuses of the American Renaissance wrote in opposition to a popular sentimental literature of unimaginable banality, and -- in a beautiful convenience -- my contemporaries and I understood that there was no need to read this work in order to be confident of its perfect worthlessness. From a later vantage I can testify that when one takes the trouble to look into them, ignored or downvalued traditions -- even the mid-19th century sentimental novel -- can turn out to contain creations of extraordinary power and interest. (There would be no need to make this point for our own time, when the achievements of women and minorities are unmistakable; what contemporary literature course would leave out such great American writers as the Asian-American Maxine Hong Kingston, or the African-American Toni Morrison, or the Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez?) My own career in the last 15 years had led me to be increasingly engaged with writers from outside the traditional canon. In my courses I now frequently teach authors from hitherto ignored traditions together with their more famous contemporaries -- Frederick Douglass and Fanny Fern with Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott and Charles W. Chesnutt with Mark Twain. And in my classes such writers do not just add new material, they substantially change and enrich the terms on which every author is grasped and understood. In my experience then, without causing any defection from the classic authors I still love, teach, and value, the changes associated with multiculturalism have brought a real renovation, a widening of the field of knowledge and a deepened understanding of everything it contains. Yet without in any way retracting what I have said, it seems to me possible to wonder whether current ways of conceptualizing and implementing multicultural education are as problem-free as some proponents imply. If the older model of education had its limits, the new program has a potential to enmesh us in limits of its own; and a full assessment would want to reckon these dangers together with the advantages it might supply. To mention three problems very quickly: Multiculturalism has promoted an inclusionistic curriculum. Its moral imperative not to discriminate leads it to want to put everything in and leave nothing out. But there is an undeniable danger that the practice of universal curricular representation can degenerate into high-minded tokenism. Everyone has seen the new-style school anthologies and curricular units with snippet samplings of all the nation's or world's peoples. Like all official school instruments, these show the strong sense of feeling answerable to a vigilant cultural authority that watches their every move. The old-style textbook paid obeisance to an imaginary censor who asked: "Are we being sufficiently patriotic? Are we avoiding blasphemy and smut?" The new one's choices show it similarly attentive to a moral overseer who asks for instance: "Have we got our Native American? Our Asian-American? Is our black a man? If so, have we also got a black woman?" I mean no denigration of these groups when I say that a curriculum composed by checking off the proper inclusion of such groups often results in tokenistic representation, and, worse, in what I'd call "Epcotization": the reproduction of complicated cultural experiences into so many little manageable units, pleasurably foreign yet quickly consumable, that we can wheel in and out of at high velocity and leave with a complacent sense that we have now appreciated that. To my mind, it would be not a hater but a lover of serious multiculturalism who would feel that much contemporary multicultural education teaches naive, presumptuous attitudes toward the cultures it intends to honor. A week on Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima or Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in the well-meaning modern classroom and the mysteries of Chicano or African life seem to lie revealed! But I would have thought that one of the first points we would want to learn about other people is that their lives are not so easily known, and that their cultures exist not to display their beauties to outsiders, but in part to protect them against such intrusions. As the benevolent study of other cultures gets more deeply installed in the earliest levels of education I can imagine the objects of multicultural appreciation rising up against their appreciators to say: "Recognize our reality, yes, but stop thinking you can know us so easily." Such a reply has already been heard from the Native American woman who wrote to the New York Times to ask, in response to an article on a California grade-school curriculum in which children learned to perform mini-versions of tribal rituals, how they would like it if their children were taught how to perform the crucifixion with popsicle sticks? Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote this warning against the presumptions of culture-crossing in her ethnological study Mules and Men (1936): "The theory behind our [i.e., African-American] tactics: 'The white man is always trying to know somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind.'" In a parallel naivete, the "It's a Small World" or "Rainbow Curriculum" tends to put forth an Edward Hicks model of cultural relations, displaying a peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb and every other beast. But this humane image conceals the lesson that the relations among cultures tend quite as often to conflict as to complementarity. I remember a colleague of mine coming back from a year in Berlin to report how mystified European academics were by the American desire to teach all our separate traditions in place of a unified, common culture. In the vicinity of Eastern Europe, he said, such a presentation would be a reminder of ethnic conflicts always threatening to erupt into violence. This was in 1988, on the eve of the Yugoslavian civil war. In addition to these potentials for naivete, a second danger of modern multiculturalism lies in the tendency to confer a dubious absoluteness on group identities and group labels. Some parts of American society are experiencing a kind of romance of gender and ethnicity at present, in which an alluring aura comes to surround an object to the extent that that it can be found to derive from a formerly marginalized group. Through this familiar logic, a book like Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree won wide adoption as a high and junior high school text in part because its author was understood to be an Indian (it has since been learned that he was a white segregationist); and even so powerful a book as Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has received a curricular exposure out of all proportion to its interest because its author fit the double categories Woman and Black. (For Hurston's ironic reflections on such an abstraction or generalization of her meaning, read her essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me.") To practice this kind of extrapolation from the person to the category catches a valuable half-truth, namely that none of us is only individual, and all of us have had our individual lives shaped by the social positions we have lived in. At the same time, a perpetual and unself-critical practice of extrapolation from person to category negates the countervailing truth -- that no human group is homogeneous, and that no person has his or her identity set solely by the groups he or she belongs to. When we teach the habit of thinking of people as Men and Women and Whites and Blacks we run the risk of teaching -- without meaning to -- that people can be adequately identified by such generalizing labels. But this way danger lies, for what made the multicultural revolution necessary in the first place was the existence of a world where qualified people could be denied places in schools because they were blacks, or because they were women, and so on. Last, just to the extent that they value the enrichment it supplies, proponents of multiculturalism will want to protect against another lurking danger: the presumption that its contributions have a monopoly on everything important to know. Occasionally one meets people for whom multiculturalism means not the amplification of a knowledge now found incomplete, but the notion that what has heretofore been ignored is valuable, and what has hitherto been valued is pernicious, part of a conspiracy of dehumanization and oppression. I confess that I have met products of recent education who knew the new pan-ethnic literary canon to perfection but who were ignorant of great traditional authors and content to be so; people who had subtle thoughts about (for instance) Nella Larsen's recently rediscovered novel Passing, but who took no interest in Faulkner's nearly contemporary novel of racial passing, Light in August, since Faulkner was a famous misogynist. What is this attitude? A new manifestation, surely, of the same presumption I mocked in multiculturalism's more traditionalist foes, the presumption that what I already know and like is worth knowing, and what I don't is fit to ignore. But no educational program can contain the whole of wisdom. Every educational model closed-mindedly embraced can be made a home for prejudice and self-limitation, the new as much as the old. Multiculturalism's great achievement was to teach us that traditional literate culture did not include everything worth knowing, and that the right corrective for its limits was to reach outside its boundaries and learn to appreciate the different things encountered there. But multicultural education will do itself a favor if it remembers to apply this same lesson to itself: to be aware of the boundaries its own enthusiasms establish, and to strive to feel the power of things outside its ken -- the works of traditional culture not least. (And there are still plenty of world cultures that are not registered with any detail or seriousness even in "reformed" American education.) The current revolution in education has opened our eyes to many worlds of human experience that lie outside of received accounts. In so doing, it has produced an enormous enrichment and made school an exciting place. But what multiculturalism is not is an all-purpose solution to the problem of education. Like all educational programs, it has things it can teach us, and like all programs it will enforce its inevitable limits on us if we do not take pains to avoid them. That said, it seems to me that the major challenge for thoughtful education now is neither to try to prevent the multicultural revolution nor simply to help install it in power. Rather, it is to subject this program to the fullest possible exercise of intelligence, imagination, curiosity, and self-criticism, so that as we add its contributions to the field of knowledge, we maximally realize its powers of extension -- and maximally protect ourselves from its powers of limitation. END And when Brodhead did surrender to the Gang of 88 (none of whom is defending him now, right?) people began saying nasty things about him and began suing him for big bucks and began exposing his shoddy excuses for "scholarship" and just kept on and on posting negative comments on that blog hooligan site, LIESTOPPERS. Edited by Payback, Jan 17 2009, 08:57 PM.
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| Baldo | Jan 17 2009, 10:38 PM Post #26 |
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May I suggest a rebuttal from Victor Davis Hanson Blissfully Uneducated http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazine-contents/blissfully-uneducated By Victor Davis Hanson From the July/August 2007 Issue Colleges lost their way in the 1960s, contends VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, a classics professor. Students now get a ‘therapeutic curriculum’ instead of learning hard facts and inductive inquiry. The result: we can’t answer the questions of our time. Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it? Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history? Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too? Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history. Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression. Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance. The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege. By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered. Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university. Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic. Many educators and students believed that America was hopelessly corrupt and incorrigible. The church, government, military, schools, and family stifled the individual and perpetuated a capitalist, male hierarchy that had warped Western society. So if, for a mere four years, the university could educate students to counter these much larger sinister forces, the nation itself could be changed for the better. Colleges could serve as a counterweight to the insidious prejudices embedded in the core of America. Unfortunately, education is a zero-sum game in which a student has only 120 units of classroom instruction. Not all classes are equal in the quality of knowledge they impart. For each course on rap music or black feminism, one on King Lear or Latin is lost. Presentism and relativism are always two-edged swords: today’s Asian victims of racism are tomorrow’s Silicon Valley engineers of privilege. Last year’s “brilliant” movie of meaning now goes unrented at Blockbuster. Hypocrisy runs rampant: many of those assuring students that America is hopelessly oppressive do so on an atoll of guaranteed lifelong employment, summers off, high salaries, and few audits of their own job performance. Once we understand this tragedy, we can provide prescribed answers to the three questions with which I started. “Ho,” like any element of vocabulary in capitalist society, is a relative term, not an absolute slur against women. “Ho” is racist and sexist when spoken by white men of influence and power, jocular or even meaningful when uttered by victims from the African-American male underclass. If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history? If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons. In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense. Victor Davis Hanson is professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, where he initiated the classics program. Edited by Baldo, Jan 18 2009, 03:16 AM.
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| darby | Jan 25 2009, 12:53 PM Post #27 |
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It's sometimes hard to remember that the internet "rarely" forgets... The Brodhead dichotomy... Statement from Captains of Duke University Men’s Lacrosse Team ( following the 05/28/06 meeting with Brodhead )
Brodhead must consider the captains believable, so what does he do? Duke Suspends Men's Lacrosse Games Pending Clearer Resolution of Legal Situation
The captains deny the rape allegations and they must have been believed since Brodhead and Alleva and the BOT ( supporting all statements ) only acted on what was admitted by the captains. Brodhead in his 60 Minutes interview virtually admits he believes no rape was committed but can't act as though he does... 60 Minutes Interview with President Brodhead
Are those just made for T.V. words???? Or did he really believe that? And even after expressing those heartfelt sympathies, what happens next? UPDATED: Statement on Release of Sealed Warrant and Cancellation of Men's Lacrosse Season from President Brodhead
Based on the arrest warrant... Hah! He cancels the rest of lacrosse season, suspends Duke lacrosse indefinitely, suspends the indicted player and fires the coach. So now he believes the warrant and not the captains? Or is it something more? I think his statement following the suspension of the season is more reflective of his true agenda. Letter to the Community from President Brodhead
I added that part for comedic relief.. [snip...] He starts his communications with precisely 2 paragraphs discussing the seriousness of the allegations, then comes the manifesto..
He goes on in describe in gut wrenching detail how based on this single allegation ( that he knows is false ) he plans to implement policies that will solve all of the injustices of the downtrodden.. Not only in the Duke community but in the surrounding Durham as well. God bless you R. Brodhead, you have learnt your lessons well. And finally, compare the actions of Duke against the words of Brodhead from the 60 Minutes interview...
Poppycock... he knew all he needed to know after 05/28/2006... And even while trying to be evasive, still hints that he might believe the players over the DA.
It is my not so nuanced opinion that Brodhead's actions are driven by forces so overwhelming that they actually supercede his own logical knowledge of truth. A very, very troubling, although not unprecedented condemnation of one in such a high position of influence. Edited by darby, Jan 25 2009, 12:55 PM.
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| abb | Jan 25 2009, 01:03 PM Post #28 |
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It is my considered opinion that this will be as significant a development as any other with the ascension of the web as an information distribution system. Networked computers have unrivaled archiving power that transcends any law library or newspaper morgue ever in history. We prove it here every day. |
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| Payback | Jan 25 2009, 01:14 PM Post #29 |
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Can't anyone recognize a "slight modification"? Brodhead just made a slight modification. He's good at modifications of the truth, too. There is no truth, he is sure, since the facts keep changing. If ever any sentence revealed Brodhead as a product of the New Criticism, where you banish all information about the writer and the history of the production of a literary work, it's his firm declaration that the facts kept changing. He really does not know that facts don't change. No one ever told him at Andover or New Haven. Edited by Payback, Jan 25 2009, 01:18 PM.
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| chatham | Jan 25 2009, 02:00 PM Post #30 |
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RB: Well, I’ll respond to you in this way. I have read all the same things that everybody else in America has read and seen on TV about this case and I share the concerns of people in general. I think the public has a legitimate interest in knowing whether this is a real case, whether this was a case that was brought in an honest and straightforward fashion. HE IS LYING HERE. FIRST, HE HAS SEEN MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE IN AMERICA HAS AND SECOND, HE REFUSED TO LOOK AT A LOT OF EVIDENCE THE DEFENSE OFFERED TO HIM. HE IS LYING. HE HAD A LOT MORE INFORMATION THAT JUST WHAT THE PUBLIC SAW. They told me … first of all, they expressed their extreme regret and contrition for the episode of the evening, for the shame it had brought on them, the shame it had brought on their families and the shame it had brought on the university. I was glad to hear that from them. But they also categorically denied that the rape had taken place. IN THE LAST SENTENCE WHY DID brodhead USE THE WORDS "BUT THEY ALSO TOLD ME" RATHER THAN... AND THEY ALSO TOLD ME... IT APPEARS THAT brodhead IS TRYING TO SAY HIS STUDENTS TOLD HIM ONE THING BUT HE BELIEVED ANOTHER THING. HE ACCEPTED THE ADMISSIONS OF SHAME BUT NOT THE ADMISSION OF TRUTH? IS THAT WHAT brodhead IS SAYING? WHY DIDN'T brodhead, ALSO SAY HE WAS GLAD HE HEARD THE TRUTH FROM THOSE GUYS. |
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