I admit, the text of their “letter” seemed to imply that they were guilty just because. And if they weren’t, they were still guilty, just because.
I gotta say… Duke went down a lot in my estimation beacuse of the mess. I don’t particularly approve of stripper, but it’s a rolleyes :rolleyes: thing, and the letter was a gross backstab to what academia ought to stand for.
Anyway, sorry to inject more morality into the debate than was aready there.
So they’re supposed to go to jail for something others did? Glad I don’t live in your world.
What does that even mean? What the hell is symbolic discipline?
What exactly do you want in this case? Do you want the professors fired? Denied tenure? Placed in a pillory? Forced to play lacrosse against the Duke team?
While you’re about it, if you want to symbolically discipline everyone who ever makes denunciations in criminal cases before all the evidence is in, you’re going to need a lot of time, and a lot more pillories.
The former Duke lacrosse coach who was fired settled a lawsuit with Duke. But now he is trying to reopen his lawsuit and get more cash because he claims Duke defamed him. Also Barry Scheck is a lawyer for the players suing Duke and the city of Durham and Nifong. You might remember him from the OJ trial.
Hol’ up, bro. I think Mr. Slant was just talking about what the local culture claims, not what he believes.
The plain fact is that (probably all) the professors who signed it had tenure. They probably can’t be disciplined ubstansively in any way. However, they could certainly be held up to public scorn by the administration. IIRC the administtration was straight on the bandwagon with them in condemning the lacrosse players.
Yeah, so what? Just because a thing is difficult does not make it wrong. People should be ridiculed for making fools of themselves like this - particularly for injecting politics into a straightforward criminal case. While Nifong was the one who did wrong, people like these are the ones he did wrong for; he wanted their votes and their acclaim.
Some professors who were not in the 88 group said the 88 looked really dumb. As was mentioned above once you get tenure you just about have to kill someone (or commit some other major crime) to lose your job as a professor.
Not my world, friend.
Just reporting how those folks think.
The academic establishment there is a mix of old hippie and Marxist.
FYR, I’m white, male, work for a decent-sized Fortune 1000 run by white Republicans, and can sleep at night without feeling guilty.
We do that all the time here at SDMB. We still haven’t seen the Blago evidence, for example.
I would say their faculty is very similar to the majority of big schools- by big I mean schools that play Div. I FB in the ACC, SEC, PAC 10, Big 10, etc… Tech schools might have less of the very liberal professors.
Mr Slant, I thought you were expressing your opinion. :smack:
I’m sorry for lumping you in with them.
I mean…
I mean… do you really think there are people who go around believing what Mr Slant said, in that phraseology, and even more, go around saying it out loud?
Because that’s what you have to think in order to not have understood Mr Slant’s sarcasm.
Do you really think that, though?
-FrL-
Yes, because I have seen that type of extreme opinion both verbal and written.
ETA That’s why I apologized to Mr. Slant
Sucks to be Nifong: http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008May28/0,4670,DukeLacrosse,00.html
Then surely there is someone somewhere online–surely more than a few, since the Internet’s a big place–who is right now expressing the opinion, in all seriousness, that it is, or should be, a crime to be White in the United States.
I just did some googling and came up with nothing. Care to give it a whirl?
-FrL-
Frylock, it may take me a while, but I can find plenty of such examples directly associated with the Duke Hoax. You will not believe the rhetoric that was tossed about.
Hopefully I will have time to search for it tomorrow.
Good luck.
I need to edit my request to make it weaker, though, because I misquoted the post I meant to be quoting.
I’m looking for serious, explicit claims that simply being white is, in and of itself, an action so oppressive that it should be punished.
That’s the view Pat Runner was attributing to Mr Slant and which he has affirmed he has heard and seen expressed, seriously and explicitly, on more than one occasion.
-FrL-
It was a common theme among the Mangum supporters that the lacrosse players should be punished for what white men had done to black women in the past. Does that count?
In a country of 300 million people if you look hard enough you can find just about any wacko idea being put forward by a group of people.
I didn’t mean this specific case, just the extremeness of that viewpoint. Just look at some of the stuff that kanicbird and Der Thris have posted.
Look at Free Republic.
I took the post seriously only because so many extreme views are being expressed on any number of issues that the sarcasm was lost.
And i would not be surprised if there are people who believe that viewpoint.
I’m not sure. I took Pat Runner to be referring to a view that being white is itself so bad and oppressive it should be punished. That’s not quite the same thing as what you said. (Though perhaps this is what Pat Runner had in mind, I’m not sure now.)
Still, I confess, I’m surprised if anyone expressed the closely related view you’re talking about, as well. I’d be interested if you could point me to examples of people seriously, explicitly, suggesting that the Lacrosse team should be punished regardless of their own innocence* because of things their ancestors did over a century ago.
-FrL-