A couple of Duke lacrosse-related links for your edification before I turn in: a pseudononymous student posts his lengthy reaction, while Provost Peter Lange and Prof. Houston Baker have a frank exchange of views.

I generally make it a policy not to discuss, directly or obliquely, students in this blog. That said, I think I need to stake out a few positions (particularly for people who are new readers).

First and foremost, I tend to have a very snarky aspect of my personality that gets emphasized in the blog. You may find it inappropriate given the weighty subject matter of this case, but it’s just how I treat more or less everything that gets discussed here—most of all myself.

Let me make something else clear at the outset: I have no qualms about students—even those under the legal drinking age—consuming alcohol (or other drugs) in a responsible, restrained manner. I also have no objection to adults purchasing the services of other adult escorts, “private party performers,” and the like for fully consensual activities. I fundamentally subscribe to the libertarian harm principle—if one’s actions don’t cause harm to others, they should be legal. (This doesn’t resolve all issues or legality or morality, but it covers those at least.)

What is perfectly clear at this point is that the young men present at the party at 610 Buchanan (who may or may not be the same set of individuals as the men’s lacrosse team) behaved extremely poorly and went beyond the boundaries of good taste. It is also clear that there is strong evidence that the alleged victim experienced physical trauma consistent with rougher-than-typical sex, perhaps even rape. What is not perfectly clear at this point is that this woman was raped by three men who were at this party, much less three members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team.

There are a number of troubling aspects to the evidence in this case, many of which revolve around the timeline of events. We are to believe that at least 40 people disappeared completely from a house in a residential neighborhood in less than eight minutes (by the neighbor’s account), perhaps as few as two minutes (if the “passerby” responsible for the first 911 call was actually at the scene at the time the call was made and is not, as is widely believed, the driver/second performer), with nobody seeing where they went. We are also to believe that the driver waited outside for around 30 minutes for the alleged victim to emerge from the house, after already fleeing said house after hearing racial slurs and the subject of the broomstick was broached, apparently without the slightest curiosity about what was taking so long. We are also to believe that the driver and the victim decided to go on a 20-minute cruise through west Durham, in the opposite direction of the victim’s home, after the victim was allegedly assaulted.

Another aspect of the case that’s troubling is what was found—and not found—at the home on 610 Buchanan. The DA has asserted that the DNA evidence in the case may be insignificant because the attackers may have used condoms—yet no condoms were found, despite the police finding a veritable treasure trove of evidence left behind by the alleged victim. If there had been a rape at the house, would they get rid of the condoms—but not anything else, including the false nails that (according to the victim’s account) could have skin cells from one of the attackers? In addition, the most celebrated piece of evidence—the bottle of K-Y jelly—doesn’t even appear on the search warrant as an item to be siezed, even though it is an item you would think would have been mentioned in the victim’s account of the events.

The behavior of the county’s district attorney in the case has also been, to put it mildly, disturbing. He has sought DNA evidence from 46 people, potentially in violation of state law and the U.S. Constitution, then discounted whether the evidence will actually have any probitive value. If the victim had identified an attacker or attackers from the photos of the team members (which were available to Durham police from the Duke athletics website), the dragnet was inappropriate; if she hadn’t, that would be reasonably strong evidence than none of the lacrosse team members were responsible.

He has also insinuated that team members’ decisions to avail themselves of their constitutional right to legal counsel is somehow an effort to obstruct justice in the case. And, his interest in appearing before the cameras somehow dries up when he is asked to respond to these serious issues.

All that said, I’ll tell you something: the victim is probably telling the truth, and she probably was raped that evening (I don’t know if it happened at 610 Buchanan; it may have happened before or after she came to the house, perhaps even at the hands of other perpetrators). But the idiotic behavior of Mike Nifong and her companion that evening has poked enough holes in her case that, in the absence of DNA evidence, it is going to be exceedingly unlikely for anyone to be convicted in this case.

The one exception, of course, is if the “wall of silence” breaks down. I suspect, however, given Nifong’s tactics in this case, it will not. The African-American and Trinity Park communities in Durham are looking for scapegoats, and in the absence of DNA evidence anyone at that party (or on the team, save the lone black player) can be a scapegoat. My guess is that a conviction for obstruction of justice and underage drinking is much more appealing to these kids than the possibility of facing rape charges against a jury full of Righteous Townies, even if the jury verdict doesn’t hold up on appeal.

Of course, the acid test will be next week, when Nifong claims (at least now) that he will file charges. But I will be very surprised if he can identify three—and only three—alleged rapists.

Since there’s no real news today (again, doubtless because Mike Nifong is well away from the nearest camera), here’s the latest on the media navel-gazing.

Rush Limbaugh has helpfully lived up to his reputation as a big fat idiot by referring to the alleged victim in the case as a “ho.” Yet another person to add to the pile of media morons loosely connected with this case.

Meanwhile, another media crapstorm has emerged as the News and Observer’s public editor takes the paper to task for its decision to publish an unrebutted interview last week with the alleged victim in the case, a choice defended by the paper’s executive editor. One wonders about this little tidbit of the editor’s response:

We took care in editing the story not to introduce new accusations—the basics were the same as in police reports, which had already been made public.

This would seem to indicate that the alleged victim had additional accusations beyond those previously alleged—you don’t need to be careful if no more accusations were made.

In other N&O business, John in North Carolina notes that a person claiming to be the mother of one of the members of the lacrosse team has posted a comment to the blog of the paper’s Metro columnist, Ruth “Don’t Call Me Cindy” Sheehan, who has taken to the paper’s pages on two occasions to excorciate the whole men’s lacrosse team.

I had the pleasure of presenting my research on the role of political sophistication in voting for third-party candidates in recent presidential elections this afternoon to the Duke PARISS seminar; I had a decent turnout of about a dozen faculty and graduate students, and got some very helpful feedback from the audience (particularly John Aldrich and Jorge Bravo).

For the morbidly curious, the paper and slides are downloadable from my political science page.

There’s two rape investigation stories in today’s Duke Chronicle: probably the more interesting is this piece by Ryan McCartney, which looks at what the other half thinks of Duke. Included is what may rate as a candidate for Dumb Townie Quote of the Day:

“Most people have been upset about what’s happened in those houses for a long time,” said Trinity Heights resident Wendy Goldstein. “It’s almost like it’s over the wall-it’s the city’s problem.”

I’ve got news for you, Ms. Goldstein: over the wall, it is the city’s problem. These young people are legally adults, and they live on private property. It’s up to the city—not the Duke University administration—to be the primary enforcers of zoning regulations, noise ordinances, and the state alcohol laws. These kids are bad neighbors, by and large, because the City of Durham lets them get away with being bad neighbors by failing to enforce the existing housing codes and the like against the property owners and tenants.

In the other story, Adam Eaglin fills in the details on the reported assault on two Duke students at the Cook Out restaurant on Hillsborough Road, as well as reporting that Duke plans to continue the stepped-up DPD presence around the campus perimeter indefinitely. A sidebar also looks at the legality of the mass DNA testing that was ordered in the case.

On the op-ed front, the editorial board thinks some campus protesters have lost their grip on reality, while columns from Sara Oliver and Daniel Bowes are also worth a read. Finally, Jack Bauer’s Bidet has choice words for many principals and extraneous figures in the case.

In the blogosphere, dukeobsrvr links to the latest in anti-Righteous Townie fashion. I’m pretty sure you won’t be seeing those at the Duck Shop.

Today’s theme is alcohol; UD points to Allison Clarke’s lengthy post on the culture of drinking at Duke, while Paul Bonner of the Herald-Sun catches up with William Willimon, the former dean of Duke Chapel who wrote a report on Duke’s drinking culture in the early 1990s.

Elsewhere in the legacy media, Newsday reports that attorneys for the lacrosse team members plan to release the DNA test results, even if Righteous Townie AD Mike Nifong doesn’t, the New York Times reports that the alleged victim has joined the lacrosse captains in self-imposed exile from their homes due to the media attention, and Filip Bondy whines in the New York Daily News that he can’t get any juicy quotes from the women’s basketball team, who presumably have better things to do than opine about the rape allegations to ninth-tier sports reporters who normally don’t give a shit about women’s college basketball (or lacrosse, for that matter).

Since Nifong is away from the cameras much of this week, I don’t expect any major developments… but I’ll keep an eye on things nonetheless.

Here’s the Newsweek story, which surprisingly is the first I’ve seen that quotes a student I happen to teach, while Bryan notes that it’s made Outside the Lines, the weekly program where ESPN pretends (mostly unsuccessfully) that it can cover serious sports news.

Meanwhile, the Herald-Sun reports that some students on the men’s lacrosse team, in addition to facing past charges for such common collegiate misdemeanors like underage drinking and public urination, had the temerity to not be all they could be in a class on Native American history:

History professor Peter Wood said Saturday he complained to athletic department representatives after it seemed to him a group of half a dozen or so men’s lacrosse players didn’t take one of his classes seriously in the spring semester of 2004.

The course was a survey of Native American history that Wood said has been popular among lacrosse players because of the sport’s roots in American Indian culture.

Wood’s unhappiness with what happened in the spring 2004 class focused on what he termed the players’ “lack of engagement in classroom activities and discussions, and giving priority to unnecessary athletic commitments created by the coaching staff, such as a practice called during class time at 10 a.m. on a Friday.”

The professor didn’t put his concerns in writing and now wishes he had done more at the time.

Wow, student athletes slacking off. I’m shocked and appalled that such things might ever go on at a college campus, and even more shocked and appalled that this phenomenon is apparently unique to student athletes in Wood’s experience. I look forward to other stunning revelations, like names of the lacrosse players who have speeding tickets, the list of scofflaws who had to go to detention once in 10th grade, and a report detailing the kids who didn’t file to pay the state sales tax on their Amazon.com purchases over the past year.

No news per se, so it’s time to do what American society always does on Sundays—sit around and let a bunch of pundits reanalyze the week that was:

Chris at Outside Report (no relation) notes the politics surrounding the case, describing Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong’s newfound role as the White Avenger:

Even though there are several problems with the timeline of events with the rape story, the lacrosse members have already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Ever since this incident, Mike Nifong has been on TV and in the local Durham papers nonstop discussing this case and its implications. He and the police have kept this story overtly vague while leaving little doubt of the Duke lacrosse members’ guilt. The entire rape scandal has been a boon of free press and publicity for incumbent Mike Nifong who I frankly had never heard of before this scandal.

Now, we have word that Nifong won’t release the results of the DNA test and won’t file charges until April 10th. Curiously, that is even closer to the May 2nd primary and will keep him in the papers and on television for another two weeks. Duke students are too oblivious to read the local papers or know a single thing going on in Durham, thus I’m sure none of the lawyers or the national press recognize this political element to the story.

While Duke did not handle this story in the best way, the DA office published this story without any mention of the doubts as if though it had been true. In many ways, its a brilliant political move in Durham, where whites and blacks are equally divided in population (48% white/40% black). The one thing that all Durhamites hate (particularly black Durhamites) is Duke. Nifong has won alot of African-American friends in his strident attack on the Duke elites.

Steve Donohue notes a weird quote in Greg Garber’s latest ESPN.com report:

“North Carolina is the Bible Belt, and a fair amount of folks in the black community feel the sexual attack was something the young woman brought on herself,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke associate professor who teaches black pop culture in the African-American Studies Department. “On a certain level, they’re most concerned with the racial epithets.”

Wow, I really hope that isn’t true. I’ve said that certain aspects of the story have seemed fishy since the very beginning, but if the rape accusations are true, then the most serious aspect of the story isn’t that some rich white kids called black people “niggers”. Yes, nasty racial language isn’t decent or proper, and I wish the word stricken from the English vocabulary posthaste. But think about how horrible that is: if the girl was raped, she sorta deserved it because she was an exotic dancer? I just can’t believe that many people in any community would say, “sure, a girl may have been violated in the most severe possible way, but listen to what they said!”

Last, but not least, Lisa of A Complete Bunch of Pants has a theory as to why Larry Moneta decided to disseminate the “gang threat” rumors. Then again, maybe people are rightfully jumpy after a reported attack on two students in west Durham and a bizarre pair of shootings in Walltown, several blocks north of East Campus.

Lisa also says that Jill Hopman, who wrote this commentary in Monday’s Chronicle, has been banned from Charlie’s. Makes me half-tempted to go over there and do some reporting of my own.

This AP story does a reasonably good job of dissecting the stereotypes and reality surrounding Duke and the wider community in the wake of the rape allegations against the lacrosse team. Also, WRAL tonight carried an interview with a female Duke student athlete who stood behind the team; a snippet of her interview is quoted in this piece that mostly focuses on the threat of gang violence against Duke students.

Another question from my growing mental file: my suspicion is that people who would commit a gang-rape are typically not first-time rapists. Even if that’s not the case, if we are to believe the statistics on rape—that one in four women have been raped in their lifetime, and that most rapes are committed by people who know the victim—I can’t imagine that not one of the 47 lacrosse players (or one of 47 other randomly-selected males, for that matter) haven’t raped someone in their lives. So where are the other rape victims? This has been national news for a week, and not a single additional woman has come forward claiming that one of these guys has raped her. I don’t know that it matters in terms of the credibility of these charges, but it just seems weird in and of itself.

Brendan Nyhan has a link to a timeline compiled by the News and Observer that incorporates the observations of neighbor Jason Bissey.

Meanwhile, Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong has apparently decided that fiddling while Durham burns is going to be his primary strategy in the case. When’s that Democratic primary again?

Apparently the local gang community has made what are believed to be credible threats of drive-by shootings targeting Duke students living off East Campus, according to the Chronicle and a Duke press release.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is not a good sign.

Update: Another link for the insomniacs: TalkLeft also takes note of the timeline inconsistencies.

(I initially drafted this as a comment to a post at Brendan Nyhan’s blog, but it’s gotten pretty unwieldy so I’ll just post it here. Note that it is somewhat speculative, but I think it fits the established facts. “Woman 1” is the alleged victim of the rape, “Woman 2” is the other exotic dancer.)

My plausible timeline works something like this:

• Party happens, although it’s not exactly established when. The neighbors could put a rough time on the “cotton shirt” comment, at the very least. This should be in the witness statement to police.
• Women leave, lax players skedaddle afterwards. This has to take some time.
• Woman 2 decides to make first 911 call from somewhere in Durham to get lax players in trouble with police, not knowing lax players are on Franklin Street (or who knows where) by now. Maybe Woman 1 has told Woman 2 she left stuff in 610 house, and figures if cops are competent they’ll look around and find it. (Knowing the exact address—even if the numbers were actually removed between the incident and today—does seem a bit odd for a mere passerby; I doubt you could read the address at night in the dark from the street even if the numbers were still there, as Buchanan is not a very well-lit street.)
• Police show up immediately, are mystified that nobody is there, find evidence of a party earlier, interview neighbors, then leave.
• Women venture out to Hillsborough Rd Kroger, in West Durham near 15-501, the opposite direction in town from where most African-Americans live, to do something (I can’t imagine they were there for groceries). Woman 2 goes inside Kroger, leaving Woman 1 in car parked in fire lane. Kroger security guy finds Woman 1 in car, calls 911. Woman 2 comes back to car, finds Kroger guard on phone, has to tell what happened.

This timeline doesn’t preclude the possibility of an assault, but it does put it quite a bit earlier than the first 911 call. Or it puts it somewhere other than the 610 house (Edens Quad?).

Unsolved mysteries: why leave everything in 610 house for 2 days—clearly one player was there when the warrant was served (he’s listed as the person receiving the inventory)? What did the police find in the room in Edens Quad and the Edens student’s car? (Related: What lax team members live in the specified room in Edens, if any?)

The victim claims she scratched one of the alleged rapists on the arm, so which (if any) of the 46 lax players had abraisons on their arms? I can’t believe the cops didn’t check this when they were all called in for the DNA testing—which, given the latest out of Nifong and DPD, may have just been a ruse to get everyone in so they could look for the scratches.

Why are two women who allegedly don’t know each other driving around Durham together for at least 20 minutes? Kroger on Hillsborough is 5–10 minutes from Buchanan and Markham at 1 am, and a straight shot west on Markham until it turns into Hillsborough. If you were looking for a drug store or grocery store, there are closer ones (Food Lion on Hillsborough near Erwin Mill Tower, Rite Aid and Walgreens further west nearer Kroger).

This whole thing is damned peculiar. Not that everything needs to add up for the rape allegations to be true, but if there’s no DNA and the women aren’t credible on the timeline, Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong’s going to have some real trouble prosecuting this thing, particularly once Nifong narrows down the suspects and they get good high-priced lawyers who can start poking holes in this investigation and his jury pool tampering and borderline unethical conduct—for example, I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules for a prosecutor to assert that people who have been targeted by an investigation and hired lawyers must have something to hide.

Elsewhere, Timothy Burke ponders the “cotton shirt” comment, while Doug Wright thinks other important issues may be lost in the shuffle if the rape allegations turn out to be false (or at least unproveable). Out in the dead tree media universe, the Chronicle reports on the media circus; there’s also a good op-ed by Boston Cote in today’s paper. Last, but not least, UD offers the following suggestion:

The school needs to shut down most of its other operations for awhile and reopen as a rehab unit.

You know, if I were going to go out of my way to plaster the 610 house with signs showing my support for the lacrosse team, at the very least I think I’d switch on spellcheck in Word:

It’s not my photo, by the way; I found it in Flickr under a CC-license.

Elsewhere, the proprietor (I think) of a blog called “Happy Toilet” sent me this link to his/her post belittling the lacrosse teams’ high-powered ambulance chasers attorneys. Well, high-powered might be a bit of a stretch, but then again Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong doesn’t exactly strike me as Durham’s answer to Eliot Spitzer either…

Update: Friday’s Herald-Sun reports that two Durham cops were at the scene of the alleged rape investigating a reported disturbance 16 minutes before the Kroger 911 call:

Police arrived at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. just two minutes after a woman called 911 to report she and her black friend had been verbally accosted by men outside the house yelling a racial slur early on March 14, according to computer dispatch records.

"Officers responded to the call at 610 N. Buchanan within a minute of the dispatch. The complainant was not on the scene and no one seemed to be at the house, according to the officers, so they cleared the scene after checking the area for several minutes," said police spokeswoman Kammie Michael.

The dispatch records show officers were on the scene for more than 11 minutes.

In the immortal words of Jagged Edge and Nelly, “Where The Party At?” The News-Observer version of the story indicates that police found evidence of a party earlier in the evening, but no sign of anyone at the house. Police believe the first 911 caller was not the victim, but neither story says whether or not it matches the voice of Dancer Number Two, and Durham 911 dispatch apparently has no record of any caller ID information.

The Herald-Sun account also indicates that Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong is beginning to downplay the significance of the DNA testing, and may not even reveal the results of the testing to the public. When’s that Democratic primary again?

While I’m adding links anyway, here’s a post from dcat that makes a lot of good points, found via UD.

This article from WRAL has a pretty good roundup of today’s developments (or lack thereof) in the Duke lacrosse scandal, including ambulance chaser attorney Joe Cheshire, who represents one of the team captains who was not named in the warrant, hitting back at Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong. Also mentioned are a form letter from President Brodhead to all of the parents of current Duke undergraduates, and the Mystery of the First 911 Call.

Speaking of backlash, for the most part neither dukeobsrvr nor his/her commenters are laying down for the dominant narrative in the case, reflecting the impression I got from my unscientific observation of the chatter on a full east-west bus this afternoon.

Surprisingly, the bus that caught fire at the West Campus turnaround yesterday apparently wasn’t arson committed by a Righteous Townie, but instead just the result of routine crappy maintenance by Duke Transit.

In rape investigation news, a dorm room at Duke was searched on Monday, by Durham PD apparently without the foreknowledge of Righteous Townie AD Mike Nifong, the lacrosse team allegedly continues to show (White) Brother Solidarity by wearing their lacrosse team T-shirts around campus and otherwise behaving boorishly (some members having the temerity, for example, to buy lunch from campus hot dog vendor Pauly Dogs and discuss the topic everyone else is talking about with other people in line), DSG surprises nobody by doing nothing, and the local Students for Academic Freedom ringleader went and cried to police about a professor being mean to David Horowitz (which, of course, has nothing to do with the rape investigation, except for wasting the time of prosecutors and police that might be better spent on other things, like, I dunno, the rape investigation). Sadly I was not named in the SAF’s complaint.

In the blogosphere, Duke alum Ralph Luker reacts, while University Diaries links a Washingtonian Magazine story on a cheating scandal at the Landon School, one of the DC-area prep schools that serves as a feeder to the Duke lacrosse team. And, you can go read the original search warrant courtesy of The Smoking Gun (þ: UD and Alfie)—incidentally, the item taken from the house that stands out on the list (the K-Y jelly bottle) is the one thing that isn’t named as an object of the search at the beginning of the warrant.

Elsewhere, Amber Taylor dislikes appeals to conscience based on the alleged victim’s having male (or female) relatives, and Brendan Nyhan notes that, since the second “exotic dancer” has finally surfaced and talked to police, some inconsistencies between the accounts of the evening have emerged.

It’s also not entirely clear to me that the first 911 call, alleging the use of racial slurs by the partygoers, wasn’t made by one of the two women in question—most likely the woman who wasn’t allegedly raped—although it has been presented as being a call by two black women who happened to be passing by the 610 house on foot around the same time as the incident. Today’s Herald-Sun looks at this angle, which I’d been pondering on my own over the past two days or so, since I learned of the 911 calls. (þ: BN)

University Diaries provides a window into the preppy origins of many of the men’s lacrosse team members in the leafy green suburbs of Washington and the other northeastern corridor cities.

Meanwhile, everybody’s favorite poet, Duke president Richard Brodhead, somehow managed to defuse some of the on-campus tensions in his meeting with students this morning (much to my surprise) while up-for-reelection DA Mike Nifong continues to bask in the glow of free publicity as a ringleader of Righteous Townie Anger.

And, oblivious to it all, dozens of Duke students decided to spend the afternoon loitering on the rooftops and balconies of their overcrowded, overpriced, slumlord-owned rental properties along Buchanan Blvd, just a stones’ throw away from the site of the alleged rape, blissfully unaware that their neighbors, if they had their druthers, would have them all lined up and shot in a heartbeat.

If this account is true—and I have no reason to believe it isn’t—I think I’ll be putting a few bucks on extreme (negative) outliers on the IQ scale.

þ: UD, for alerting me to a piece I tuned out after experiencing information overload.

I just witnessed a camera man and some sort of technician chase a black female student (who clearly wanted no part of it) across the lawn in front of the Duke Chapel; I couldn’t tell at a distance whether this was a vain attempt at an interview or just an effort to collect some footage for later voiceovers.

In other good news for the university, we made A-1 in at least one edition of the New York Times today. Lucky us. Needless to say, it wasn’t because the womens’ basketball team beat UConn.

Nothing much new here, but since some of you seem to be coming here for news on the Duke men’s lacrosse rape allegations, there you go. The press conference itself was nothing earth-shattering; it was one of those deals (admittedly like most) where there was something for everybody who wanted to reinforce their preconceived notions.

More interesting perhaps is the team captains’ categorical denial of the charges in the face of DNA evidence. Since Duke students—even lacrosse players, by stereotype—aren’t stupid and presumably understand the rudiments of how DNA works, they’re either extreme outliers on the IQ scale or extremely confident that nothing happened. My money? As far away from this wager as possible.

The blaring headline on today’s Duke Chronicle is “Unrest hits Main West.” I hate to think how they’d report a riot.

Meanwhile, for those of you out in the real world beyond Duke, go read Timothy Burke’s response to the Kenyon debacle.

Update: Actual news on the rape allegations is here, including the not-very-shocking revelation that there are lacrosse team members who have faced alcohol-related charges in the past (your Claude Raines moment of the day) and the news that what really made the dancers run for the door wasn’t the alleged racial slur about the provenance of one of the players’ shirts but instead that “one of the men watching held up a broomstick and threatened to sexually assault the women,” presumably using said broomstick. (þ: UD)

The fun and excitement level of living in Trinity Park seems to be leaning more in the “excitement” direction lately—and not in a good way. The two big highlights: they found a dead guy in a ditch just across from East Friday morning, and a recent party at 610 Buchanan Blvd involving members of the men’s lacrosse team resulted in rape allegations against 3 unidentified team members and a few neighborhood folks seeming to cross the line from holding a vigil to becoming vigilantes—assembling outside private residences and hurling insults at the occupants doesn’t strike me as particularly productive behavior, although perhaps it is understandable given the bad blood between the university and wider community on a variety of issues. (Standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer: I have taught and am teaching members of said team at Duke; I have no idea if any of the students I have taught were involved in this alleged incident, or even at the party in question.)

More thoughts on the latter incident from University Diaries.

Update: See also Brendan Nyhan and the notorious dukeobsrvr .

Priceless: DSG forum attracts no attendees:

High hopes were not met as candidates for Duke Student Government’s 2006–2007 executive offices crowded around an empty lecture hall in the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy Wednesday night.

The contenders arrived at Sanford prepared to share their platforms with members of student organizations, who traditionally choose candidates to endorse.

No students were present, so the forum was cancelled.

Perhaps Duke students are more Downsian than I give them credit for being at times.

Prof. Karlson notes that the budgetary situation at NIU is such that “enrollment impacted” departments (that’s jargon for “all our classes are full”) cannot secure additional faculty, but nonetheless the university has found the money to do a bit of landscaping.

At Duke, meanwhile, the administration has found $240 million (yes, that’s one quarter of a billion dollars, give or take, and that’s just Phase I) to make Central really tie the whole university together, but can’t scrape together the cash for sabbatical replacements in numerous departments. As I commented to the bossman, I suppose money really isn’t fungible after all.

As Duke recovers from the visit of David Horowitz, freshman Oliver Sherouse writes about the best post-mortem of his visit that one could hope for, featuring among other observations this gem:

SAF wants free speech, but only if you agree with them. They want to tell us about this secret conspiracy that involves our professors shouting liberal dogma in every class, ostensibly without us noticing. They want to “educate” their professors on how to profess.

At least a portion of the Duke community acquitted themselves rather poorly at the event as well, although the promised partial nudity from members of the crowd failed to materialize (alas). It makes me almost sad that I was wedged inside a full MD-80 during the event.

It’s just as well that I have labs on Thursday and Friday for my methods students; I think they may be too traumatized to understand the lecture on the difference of proportions and chi-square tests. Hopefully they will recover for next week.