| Refresher: 2 good books worth reading | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 28 2010, 10:10 AM (250 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Feb 28 2010, 10:10 AM Post #1 |
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http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-bookshelf-ii.html Wednesday, June 20, 2007 On the Bookshelf, II Two books on the case have now been officially released. It’s Not About the Truth, co-authored by Don Yaeger and former coach Mike Pressler, offers a behind-the-scenes look at how everything that happened since last March affected Pressler, his family, and the senior class he had recruited to Duke; the book also provides background on Duke lacrosse, Durham, Crystal Mangum, Nifong, and a summary of the case. A Rush to Injustice, co-authored by Nader Baydoun and R. Stephanie Good, provides a personal memoir of a how a Duke graduate came to view with distaste the actions of his university. (snip) Former lacrosse captain Dan Flannery recounted a vignette from the 2006 Senior Ring dinner, held at Brodhead’s house, late spring 2006. Brodhead thanked Flannery for attending, and added, “I have to believe we will be better someday because of this, of the situation.” Flannery’s response: “I don’t share the same opinion. I’ll believe that when mothers no longer have to take antidepressants.” Flannery’s fellow 2006 senior, William Wolcott, found it “hilarious when Brodhead was interviewed and he said the facts keep changing. I felt like calling the guy and saying, ‘Hey, facts don’t change. The truth doesn’t change. Lies and versions of events, those things change. But the truth doesn’t change.’” (snip) Chuck Sherwood, Devon Sherwood’s father, asked Yaeger, “Did it ever occur to them that they may have the kind of kid—this team—that if they saw one of their teammates doing something that was inappropriate that the other guys would have interceded and stopped it? Those are the kind of kids that I believed they had on the team.” In the Baydoun book, Jim Coleman expressed a similar sentiment. “When we’ve got 46 students saying they didn’t do anything and not a single one of them is saying anything happened, which is a pretty good indication that they may be telling the truth, we find a way to support them without saying we’re indifferent to the truth.” The university, he argued, should have been more concerned with possibility its own students were being railroaded. The Group of 88 In the Baydoun book, Bill Thomas, an attorney for an unindicted player, was blunt and on-target in his comments. The Group’s statement, he observed, was “horrible”—it basically said, “Thank you for not waiting to see what facts develop here. Thank you for jumping to conclusions based on race and social status.” The attorney concluded, “They all should be ashamed of themselves, every single one of them.” (snip) Jim Coleman, meanwhile, discussed with Baydoun the “absolutely outrageous” possibility of in-class harassment—something the Brodhead administration has never investigated. Said Coleman, I think any professor who confronted and tried to embarrass and call out kids in front of a class should be disciplined. I think that’s totally inappropriate and shouldn’t be tolerated on a university’s campus. That’s just inexcusable . . . (snip) Lacrosse parent Donna Wellington recalled one of the low points of the affair, Father Joe Vetter’s March 26, 2006 sermon: A casual listener might have concluded that he more facts than even the DA at that point . . . He was already condemning these boys without knowing any of the facts, and my husband told him that he would deeply regret this when the real facts did get revealed. If a priest is going to rush to judgment, where can anyone go for support and counsel about surviving the inevitable barrage of false accusations, and finding spiritual strength and solace in God’s eventual justice and truth? I didn’t know what to say to him other than to point out that this was a man with obvious human frailties and prejudices, and that he was very misguided. John Burness, meanwhile, deflected critics of the administration’s handling of the Group by noting In the time I’ve been at Duke, our faculty do and say all kinds of things. The university doesn’t comment on that . . . Our job is to provide a venue for free speech, and then late the debate go. We hope it’s enlightened, but at the end of the day, you have these debates and people learn from them. We don’t go condemning faculty members for what they say when they do that. This argument would have been more compelling had Brodhead not thrice specifically commented on the Group’s statement—defending it in a January Chronicle interview and then in “Duke Conversation” events in Philadelphia and Chicago. N&O columnist Ruth Sheehan noted the difficulty in not getting any positive responses from Duke about the team: I did have a conversation with John Burness about the university’s role in the case at some point and asked why when all of this was coming out that they didn’t help us understand the truth, why they didn’t spin the other side to us. They could have helped us, that’s for sure. One thing he did say to me at the time, which is a convenient excuse but also true, was that they also have to be really careful about how they handle student information. That caution, I think, made things worse. (snip) Baydoun reveals a fascinating story, about how he had dinner last March with former basketball captain Larry Saunders, at which a daughter of a mutual friend, Duke student Emma Stevenson, was in attendance. Emma and her friends at Duke had been thinking who the least likely member of the lacrosse team would be to commit a crime.* “They joked that Nifong would probably indict someone as unlikely as Collin Finnerty because Collin was one of the nicest guys on the team and one of the least likely to hurt anyone.” They were “shocked and dismayed” when Finnerty was indicted. Edited by Quasimodo, Feb 28 2010, 10:11 AM.
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7:15 PM Jul 10