The change in choice catchphrase from "the perfect storm" to "the turning tide" neatly sums up the trajectory of public sentiment regarding the lacrosse affair. The tide refers mostly to the detritus of the storm, the shattered sense of justice shoved first in one direction and now the other by equal and opposite forces of apoplectic anger.
Apoplexies leave little room for introspection; they tend to seize the body and kill it.
Once upon a time, when lacrosse was just a sport, an appeal for seeing beyond black and white, innocent and guilty, victim and perpetrator incontrovertibly held high ground in an intellectual community. Now such an appeal for perceiving complexity falls on deaf, and defensive, ears. After being burned by the so-called complexity that rendered the lacrosse players faceless white entities, many understandably find reason to rebuff that familiar call for seeing in layers-reason to hold that there is no cause for creating complexity where there is none, and reason to believe the crisis indeed boils down to a battle between truth and lies, right and wrong, good and evil.
This deadlocked, dead-end debate marks a clear-cut failure to differentiate between the lacrosse case, which centers on the futures of three indicted individuals and whether they should be tried in a court of law, and the lacrosse crisis, the implications of which will rock the University and play out in the court of public opinion long after the acquittal of three young men.
I say acquittal because legal evidence and common sense suggest this case was over before it began. The crisis, on the other hand, rages on like a forest fire and continues to be treated as such, as if it will burn itself out and leave the soil richer in its wake.
If only the flying finger were really that productive.
By crisis, I mean those conditions that allowed for the spark of an accusation to become a raging social inferno on a national scale. The crisis encompasses not only the hasty initial reactions, but perhaps more disturbingly, the ongoing reactions to those reactions, which return in kind the abusive generalizations and negation of people as first and foremost individuals. The crisis is embodied by the self-righteous finger-pointing that threatens to tear at the fabric of parent, student, alumni, faculty, staff and administrative relations. The crisis extends beyond Duke's low stone wall, for image is not a superficial concern for an institution that aims to attract and educate the next generation of world leaders, the best and the brightest whose knowledge of Duke comprises blogs and media reports of a university eating itself from the inside.
The word that best describes the complex, cannibalistic crisis at hand: ironic. We claim to be a community of learners and have been thrown the biggest curveball in our institutional history, but we have failed to come away with the ability to recognize our neighbors as potential learners, rather than primary transgressors to be "tarred and feathered."
There must be a few pots-and-pans bangers out there who regret participating in that particular fight for rape victim rights. If you're wondering what they were thinking when they presumed guilt over innocence, perhaps they thought no further than their personal experiences with the cyclical violence of rape, and later considered their protest vindicated by Nifong's damning commentary-but have now learned some things and regretted some things, like all of us, in retrospect.
Some are calling for President Brodhead's head, and declaring the administration has utterly failed its students.
President Brodhead is not perfect, though I say this not with specific imperfections to cite, but with the knowledge that he is human. Like us, bestial though our bloodlust may be. Imperfections he may have, but outrageous are contentions that he lacked thought. President Brodhead is nothing if not a man who thinks. Cite "60 Minutes'" unflattering cutting and pasting if you'd like, but as a bewildered freshman, I most clearly remember anxiously watching that first press conference, as he implored that we withhold judgment above all else.
The administration is a swarming mass of humans, which makes for greater problems in the perfection department. But when the lacrosse crisis broke, they had a duty not only to the players, but a commitment to protecting an entire community. It's easy to forget that. They fumbled in an unprecedented situation and, in some senses, they failed-but to a lesser degree, some would argue, than the lacrosse captains who personally hosted the out-of-control party that, by their own admission, compromised their teammates, school and their own roles as leaders, not in a Division I sport, but of a team and community, period.
Round and round the finger revolves.
We know we're in dangerous straits, devolving as a community of learners, when after one multilayered crisis, a large flock finds it acceptable to call for our professors, minds respected for real reason in the international community, to "stick to the classroom" and "just teach."
That's not the Duke I signed up for. No tide, no matter how strong, should be slamming us this far off the course.
Crisis or no crisis, it just has no case.
Jane Chong is Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Wednesday.
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