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George Orwell at Duke...; recalling the CCI
Topic Started: Nov 1 2010, 08:44 AM (236 Views)
Quasimodo

http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

More on the CCI

Feb. 1, 2007

(snip)

The two workable recommendations:

(1) create more physical space for student social activity around campus;

(2) streamline the faculty administrative structure to increase faculty-student interaction.

It’s hard to see how anyone could object to either of these goals, and Brodhead should allow these two and only these two items to form the legacy of the CCI.

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Three minor items give a sense of the report’s quality and biases:

(1) The report’s first line: “Duke University is a university of the 21st century, emboldened and challenged by the dynamics of a changing world.” Is there any university in the country to which this statement would not apply?

(2) The 25-page report—a product of months-long inquiry by prestigious academics—cited a grand total of two (2) publications. The chosen duo? William Bowen’s screed against Division I athletics; and Janet Reitman’s widely disparaged Rolling Stone article—which, perhaps because it places the Duke student body in the worst possible light, is assigned reading in Anne Allison's spring semester class. Apparently, CCI members decided not even to try to conceal the membership’s biases.

(3) The report listed four and only four campus groups and offices with which CCI members “connected”: the Women’s Center; the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life; the Council on Civic Engagement; and the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. Some might suggest that this quartet would provide a rather one-sided view of campus culture.

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(snip)

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Other items in the report are unintentionally revealing.

(1) “There are often pressures for conformity which work against our institutional vision as an inclusive academic community.” (p. i) “The Committee came to better understand problems that exist—ranging from simple acts of uncivil speech and intolerance to what some have called a ‘culture of excess.’” (p. 4) “Last spring’s events revealed that Duke must do better in learning how to engage difference constructively.” (p. 8)

Some might think that these statements describe the potbangers or the Group of 88. In fact, the report’s implication is that those who opposed the potbangers or the Group of 88 were guilty of exercising “pressures for conformity” or engaging in “uncivil speech and intolerance” or of failing “to engage difference constructively.”

(2) “Last spring’s lacrosse event and its ensuing controversies evoked strong emotions and discussions about issues of race and gender, class and privilege, difference and respect, athletics and academics, and town and gown.” (p. 1)

[One could have said the same about Scottsboro...]


It appears as if CCI members suffered from a form of Durham Rip van Winkle disease, having gone to sleep on or about April 6 and missed “strong emotions and discussions” about issues of faculty groupthink, prosecutorial misconduct, a rush-to-judgment mentality, or professors who fail to respect all their students, regardless of race, gender, or athletic status.

Those “ensuing controversies” the CCI members were bound and determined to ignore. I wonder why?

(3) “In their first year at Duke, about 15% of Black students reported that Duke instructors treated them badly because of their race/ethnicity,” as opposed to much smaller percentages for other groups. (p. 6)

This claim is a shocking one: the CCI has suggested, without any hard investigation, that a considerable portion of Duke faculty members engage in racist behavior.

(4) [update, 1.12am]: A commenter notes, “I was astonished to read in the CCI report that the Duke Class of 2010 includes 41 percent students of color. Yet, the next paragraph calls for additional consideration for admissions from 'under-represented groups.' What groups could remain under-represented?”

A good question, to which the CCI offered no answer.

(5) “Analyses conducted over the last four years indicate that this decision has increased the number of students who are not adequately prepared to benefit from, or contribute to, the work of the academic community, event with enhanced academic support services. This places Duke’s admirable graduation rates at risk, reinforces negative stereotypes, and does not serve the best interests of these students themselves, their peers, or their faculty.” (p. 22)

Reread the statement above. Some might think it came from an ultra-conservative critic of “diversity” college admissions policies.

But it came from the CCI. For those who guessed that it refers not to African-American students with poor SAT scores and pre-Duke academic preparation, but instead refers to a class of Duke students consistently targeted by the Group of 88 and figures such as Peter Wood and Orin Starn, a free guest pass to the next “Shut Up and Teach” event is yours for the taking. [ie, student athletes]

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In the end, there never was any doubt about what the CCI would produce,
with Peter Wood and Group of 88 members Karla Holloway and Anne Allison chairing or co-chairing three of its four subgroups. . .

The most chilling provision of the CCI report is the Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative, with the Group seeking to use the lacrosse case to force all Duke students to take their classes. The report urges a requirement that all Duke students take a class that engages “the reality of difference in American society and culture. The vast majority of these offerings are taught by . . . the Group of 88.

Over the past 10 months, most Group of 88 members have made clear their belief that the Faculty Handbook provisions requiring Duke professors to treat all students with respect do not apply to them. The idea that all Duke students should be forced to take a class from a Group of 88 professor or a handful of the Group’s ideological allies in the name of “improving campus culture” is Orwellian.
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Payback
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Quasi, do you want to post KC's 10 January 2007 piece about Holloway's resigning from the CCI? In case your jaw needs to drop further . . . .
Edited by Payback, Nov 1 2010, 10:36 AM.
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Quasimodo

Payback
Nov 1 2010, 10:35 AM
Quasi, do you want to post KC's 10 January 2007 piece about Holloway's resigning from the CCI? In case your jaw needs to drop further . . . .
Quote:
 
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/01/holloway-leaves-cci.html

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2007

Holloway Leaves CCI

Karla Holloway has resigned her position as race subgroup chair of the Campus Culture Initiative, to protest President Brodhead’s decision to lift the suspensions of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. “The decision by the university to readmit the students, especially just before a critical judicial decision on the case, is a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship,” said she. “I could no longer work in good faith with this breach of common trust.”

Holloway had not always been so concerned with the significance of “judicial decision(s) on the case.” This summer, she wrote that “justice inevitably has an attendant social construction. And this parallelism means that despite what may be our desire, the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts.” Therefore, since the presumption of innocence “is neither the critical social indicator of the event, nor the final measure of its cultural facts,” judgments about the case “cannot be left to the courtroom.”

Holloway’s departure from the CCI is a welcome development. Holloway’s comments over the last nine months had shown little or no respect for a wide variety of groups on campus, and so her occupying such a prominent place with the CCI seemed a basic contradiction in its mission.

Male athletes?
“The ‘culture’ of sports seems for some a reasonable displacement for the cultures of moral conduct, ethical citizenship and personal integrity,” reinforcing “exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those ‘othered’ by their sports’ history of membership.”
Those who defended the players targeted by Nifong? They believed that “white innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.”

Women’s lacrosse players
who had worn armbands expressing sympathy with Seligmann, Finnerty, and Dave Evans? She denounced their “team-inspired and morally slender protestations of loyalty that brought the ethic from the field of play onto the field of legal and cultural and gendered battle as well.”

The sympathetic article announcing Holloway’s resignation from the CCI came in a publication called Diverse Online. Here’s how its author, Christina Asquith, described the scene last spring. “Initially, many at Duke supported the dancer. Students held candlelight vigils on campus and 88 professors, now known as the ‘Group of 88’ signed an advertisement in the student newspaper calling for the administration to take a stronger stand against the players.”

Apparently Asquith didn’t receive the memo on the new party line regarding the Group of 88’s intentions.
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/printer_6857.shtml

Duke Fallout Continues as Top Black Professor Resigns From Race Committee

by Christina Asquith, January 10, 2007

(snip)

“The public support [the administration] has extended to these students has been absent in regard to faculty who have been under constant and often vicious attack,” she wrote

(snip)

In an October editorial, a science professor accused those who had not supported the lacrosse players of abandoning the Duke family.

“The faculty who publicly savaged the character and reputations of specific men’s lacrosse players last spring should be ashamed of themselves. They should be tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail and removed from the academy,” he wrote.

Holloway says she was deeply shocked by that editorial, and the administration’s failure to offer even a note of support to her.

[How much support did the Admin give to the falsely-accused?]


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