| What I Learned From Duke (and Brodhead); by Gary North (2007) | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 10 2010, 11:07 PM (178 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Mar 10 2010, 11:07 PM Post #1 |
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north540.html What I Learned From Duke by Gary North June 23, 2007 (snip) THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS On April 22, almost two weeks after the Attorney General declared the students innocent, Dr. Richard Brodhead, the president (read: senior fund-raiser) of Duke University, gave a speech to the Duke Alumni Association. After the speech, he was asked about the lacrosse situation. He blamed the media for Duke’s troubles. Here is a man who had cancelled the lacrosse season, accepted the "voluntary" resignation of the coach, and had eaten plates of crow dished out by the Committee of 88 and its faculty defenders about terrorism on the Duke campus. You may recall the old TV show, "Bowling for Dollars." I call this speech "Groveling for Dollars." It is posted on Duke’s "Development" website. ("Development": a code word for "Write us a fat check, you fat cat dimwits.") Here are some samples. All I want to tell you about this is that one of the really, really disturbing things about this episode has been to discover that the media – including the most respected forms of the media – if you go back to the early stories, they are all written in the key of hysteria, they are all written to inspire hysteria, and they teach the lesson that hysteria breeds extraordinary mental simplifications. . . . This argument is reminiscent of the complaints by southern politicians regarding "outside agitators" and "yankee reporters" back in 1965. It sells as well to the Duke alumni as it sold to white voters in the South in 1965. Next, President Brodhead insisted, it was all a big misunderstanding – a misunderstanding fostered by the media. Now you know one of the troubles is, we can’t go back to all these networks afterward and say, "Now that that blew over, would you care to give us the same amount of air time to tell the truth about this story?" That is not the way the media work. In Dr. Brodhead’s version of historical reality, the Attorney General of North Carolina did not just declare the students as innocent. He also implicitly declared Duke University innocent. But the media deliberately failed to report this. Duke had a fine opportunity to prove his point, with the media in full attendance. Duke could have demanded that all three civil cases be tried before a jury. Instead, Duke settled out of court with no disclosure. What a shame. Justice denied! Dr. Brodhead is scared. He has lived for over a year being scared, but now he is really scared. This incident may affect the self-respect of graduates of Duke. This could affect donations. This is every university president’s nightmare. He said: Nothing has pained me more about this episode than the notion that people don’t want to say where they went to college, because that name is now a source of embarrassment. A source of embarrassment? Here are millionaires with piles money to donate, and President Brodhead thinks some of them might be embarrassed by the off-the-wall newspaper ad by the Gang of 88. I wonder why. The alumni have seen their university dragged through the mud – mud laid down by a now-disgraced District Attorney. Yet 88 faculty members had publicly justified the mud. "It’s worse than you think. It’s terrorism here!" Meanwhile, the rest of the faculty, except for the economics department, did nothing. Why should any Duke graduate be embarrassed? But they just may be. So, he hastened to add, If you are ever in a situation where you find yourself in that light, you’ve just got to turn that around. You’ve got to walk up and say some true thing about this place that is a source of pride and, Lord knows, there are many. And you know what? At the end of the day, this place will be known as it is. It will be known for what it is. And I hope this will be a better place after this episode. But it won’t be an altogether different place. It will be known for the excellence that characterizes us now. And that’s all of our work, to bring that day about. Thanks. (snip) Under Dr. Brodhead’s leadership, the full insanity of today’s professorial moral indignation – an indignation based on envy against their wealthy and mostly white handlers – became evident because of the lacrosse case. Lacrosse is an elite New England sport, rivaled only by rowing. The temptation for ersatz moral outrage in the name of the oppressed, directed against the sons of their rich employers, became too great for the hippie professors to resist. They went public. The media spotted them. President Brodhead responded: "Red alert! Red alert!" (snip) Richard Brodhead is arguably the most inept president in the history of America’s elite education. Under his administration, the faculty’s most vocal hippies got off their leashes temporarily, and the media covered this. CONCLUSION (snip) Hippies, even in tweed jackets, remain hippies. The high-IQ ones saw their opportunity in 1970: tenured employment. They took it. Until the top 1% of America’s students cease attending the elite three dozen universities in the United States, of which Duke is one, all of which present the same basic outlook on society that Duke does, the war to save this civilization is still in its infancy. The best and the brightest from all over the world are instructed in these asylums. What offers us at least some legitimate hope is this: the tenured and untenured hippies who now occupy the high-prestige seats of higher learning are not taken seriously by all of their students. I am convinced that, a decade after their graduation, a majority of their students will not even recall their professors’ names. Nonsense has a tendency to fade in the face of challenges in the non-tenured world. (snip) Edited by Quasimodo, Mar 10 2010, 11:09 PM.
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7:14 PM Jul 10