Our lunch event with Kathryn Lopez and Carrie Lukas went smashingly today. Charlotte will have a full recap up this afternoon. In the meanwhile, to get you excited about Thursday’s panel on the Duke lacrosse scandal, I’d like to share a fabulous article that Frederick Hess had on National Review Online this morning.
Hess took many members of the Duke faculty to town in his column, and I’d have to agree that they deserved it:
“This spring Duke’s cultural anthropology department is offering the course ‘The Hook-Up Culture at Duke,’ co-taught by department chair Anne Allison, who was one of the 88 to sign last spring’s ad. Part of Allison’s syllabus asks, ‘What does the lacrosse scandal tell us about power, difference, and raced, classed, gendered, and sexed normativity in the U.S.?’
“When an engineering professor saw the syllabus and inquired about it, Allison was annoyed. ‘The very query seemed hostile. I mean, I’m not asking him about his class,’ she told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“In January Duke’s provost, Peter Lange, addressed the faculty’s behavior by offering a ringing call for everyone to be nice. Lange told the faculty, ‘When we hear things we don’t like, we need to judge the substance and not the person, assume the better rather than the worse of intentions.’
“Meanwhile, Kyle Dowd, a Duke lacrosse player who graduated last spring, is suing the university and a political science professor, claiming that the professor – one of the so-called Group of 88 – unjustly failed him and a teammate. In response to Dowd’s initial appeal, Duke cited a ‘calculation error’ and raised his grade. But the lawsuit proceeds.”
Check out the whole article here.