Sunday, 16 April 2006

Sunday Night Linkage

On Grand Jury Eve, TalkLeft’s Jeralynn Merritt reports:

One of the defense attorneys was on the same tv segment I was on earlier today and said the defense team has been told by the prosecutor that two players’ names will be submitted to the grand jury. Despite offers of all team members to surrender if they are charged, the DA refuses to identify the two players. This sounds to me like the DA is anxious to do an on-camera perp walk.

WRAL says Mike Nifong doesn’t need any steenking excuplatory evidence:

Defense attorneys said they had offered to show the pictures to District Attorney Mike Nifong, but he declined to see them.

“As I understand the exchange, as it was reported to me, the DA is not interested in a discussion about our evidence,” said defense attorney Bob Ekstrand. ...

Just as defense attorneys have said Nifong has not seen their evidence, they don’t know what happened after police drove the accuser away.

“Something happened in the interim to cause her to be admitted into the hospital later that morning,” Ekstrand said. “And we should be very interested to know what it was.”

Finally, NYU education prof Jonathan Zimmerman writes a Newsday op-ed in which he opines that athletic scholarships are a form of affirmative action for whitey. He obviously hasn’t seen most college football and basketball teams…

3 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. azbballfan wrote @ Mon, 17 Apr 2006, 12:30 am CDT:

Actually, the article limited its commentary to upper eschelon private universities, which do not have a high number of black students. Therefore the article was correct.

Duke is also known as a university which has more white football and basketball players than other public universities.

The article does do a good job of condemning the attitudes and sense of entitlement promulgated within rich white atheletes by private schools. Of course, this is not very different than the sense of entitlement promulgated by public universities which create special rules for atheletes.

Duke is basically in the same category as Miami, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and USC.

 
[Permalink] 2. Ferdinand wrote @ Mon, 17 Apr 2006, 9:04 am CDT:

I simply don’t understand the point of either the article or azbballfan’s comments.

Duke may have more white football and basketball players than public universities (alzbballfan use of “other” implies that Duke is a public university, an error I believe that was unintentional), however, Duke still has more black football and basketball players than it does white players. How is Duke’s athletic department, or any other university’s for that matter, an affirmative action program for whites?

 

Perhaps the basketball and football teams have the most media visibility and a preponderance of black athletes. Those programs, however, provide internal subsidies for a number of other sports. The essayist focused on lacrosse, a prep-school thing for rich ruffians who can’t skate. Rich ruffians who can skate play hockey (badly; he neglected the recruiting in Minnesota’s Iron Range and the mining country of Canada where the good college players come from) and in the U.S., apart from the Upper Great Lakes, hockey is a rich person’s game once one factors in the ice time, equipment, and travel. Then there’s golf, and tennis, and squash, and rowing, and yachting. (Some of the kids at the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Yacht Club consider the strenght of the sailing program as a factor in picking a college. I don’t know if any of them received scholarships to sail.) Now consider the effects of Title IX. Gymnastics, golf, tennis, rowing, yachting, lacrosse, field hockey (the latter two being dominated by Northwestern), soccer (big with eight year old suburban girls), equestrian (need I say more?)

Put it together… which the essayist failed to do… and the prima facie case is there that whitebread suburban kids receive a majority of the athletic scholarships, not all of them full rides, to participate in these upper-crust sports, while the black athletes appear on the highlight tapes (particularly in early January and again in March) while often leaving college before earning a degree.

 
Comments are now closed on this post.