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.

George Mason’s president has taken it upon himself to excuse those students who decided to blow off class on Monday after GMU’s (and, lest we forget, classical liberalism’s) victory over UConn. If I were a GMU faculty member, I’d likely have invited the president to take over all of my other duties at that point, or perhaps to go fornicate with himself. Under my breath, of course.

þ: Deadspin and PTI.

I figure if I keep publically linking to the ads where the University of Memphis advertises its craphole instructor positions, maybe they’ll be shamed into paying a living wage:

The University of Memphis invites applications for a non-tenure-track position in political science at the rank of instructor for the 2006–07 academic year. The main responsibilities of the position are in the area of Comparative Politics, International Relations and American Politics, and include lower division courses in these areas plus an upper-division course in International Relations Theory. The teaching load is five courses per semester; the salary is $30,000—$32,500, depending upon experience and qualifications. The Instructor will teach three on-ground courses for the Department of Political Science, and two on-line (RODP) courses for the University College. The University of Memphis is a comprehensive, research institution with an urban mission. The Department of Political Science offers the B.A. and M.A. degrees.

For the record, my undergraduate alma mater is classified as a research university by the Carnegie Foundation; it charges out-of-state students $14,836 per year to attend the institution. In 2004–05, according to the AAUP survey, its median salary for professors at the assistant rank was $53,100.

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)

Will someone explain to me exactly how George Mason’s run to the NCAA Final Four is supposed to be a victory for libertarians? Yes, the economics and law faculty have a few more libertarians than the average (although this is offset by the political science faculty), and yes, George Mason wasn’t much of a federalizer, but I’m unconvinced how a team full of “scholar-athletes” (read “partial qualifiers”) who I doubt can even spell “libertarian” at an institution that receives millions of dollars of subsidies from the Commonwealth of Virginia and the federal government every year represents some big victory for classical liberalism.

The apologia by Kenyon College’s dean of admissions for her college’s policy of discriminating against female applicants in favor of promoting campus gender balance has raised hackles from traditional opponents of affirmative action and proponents alike. Closer to my regular reading lists, Laura of 11D also reacts.

My sense is that Ms. Britz’s argument, like most supporting affirmative action of any kind as an end in and of itself (or those justifying it in any terms other than as a narrowly-focused effort to redress past discrimination at institutions that engaged in such discrimination in the past), falls on its face, but that Kenyon—as a private institution—ought to be able to pursue whatever admissions policies it thinks are appropriate, no matter how misguided the college may be. Of course, whether or not taxpayers ought to subsidize those policies directly or indirectly, which they do at Kenyon and most other institutions of higher education in this country, is another question entirely…

If you go to the Ivies, you’ll get taught by grad students and contingent faculty. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, but nonetheless it is to some. (New factor in the U.S. News ratings, anyone?)

Confidential to parents: drop the 40 large per annum on a liberal arts college education for your kids instead.

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.

I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining the faculty of Saint Louis University (in St. Louis, Missouri) for the 2006–07 academic year as a temporary assistant professor of political science. I don’t have a lot of specific details to share yet, beyond mentioning I will be teaching three undergraduate courses a semester in the fields of American politics and research methods.

From what I’ve heard from friends and colleagues, St. Louis is a very nice place to live and I am really looking forward to spending at least a year there. I expect to be going to St. Louis in the coming weeks for an orientation visit and to make a research presentation, so I expect I’ll have more to say then.