tnt said:
Are you sure you want to bring up DUKE? Its text book for how a University should react. The entire team was suspended. Not for the alleged rapes though those players were suspended until the cases were decided. The party was enough by itself. They forfeited 2 games for the under age drinking alone. The strippers were another matter. In any event the accused players were one matter everything else was another. The loudest voice was a DA who also answered for his actions. Just exactly how has the athletic department here reacted. I never did hear how a "second chance" player here was disciplined for an assault conviction shortly after arriving back on campus two other players were disciplined after their guilty pleas.. . . . .
You are all correct there was a different standard here. One for meaningless regular season games, one for starters, one for play off games and one for everyone else. Read up on Duke (their athletic honor code is part of the basis fo ours:
http://today.duke.edu/showcase/lacrosseincident/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The link is to Duke's PR explanation; a complete re-write of history. Among other things, it leaves out the University President's declaration that the boys were "guilty until proven innocent," and the fact that he was silent when demonstrators on campus paraded with signs demanding that the boys be "castrated" hardly suggests that the case was about "underage drinking."
The more accurate view is in Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson's "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case."
There, it tells the story of a college president more than willing to "assume the worst" about his athletes, lead the lynch mob, feed the fire, and who ultimately did far more damage to Duke than the original allegations. Duke has since had significant declines in alumni financial support, and drops in applications.
Here, a college president tipped off a serial rapist who was from a culture that does not view the crime as a crime, allowed him and his cohorts here without any measurable extra care because of the cultural "difference of opinion," and then practically bought him a plane ticket to escape the charges to ensure that NOBODY got punished, especially the perpetrator(s).
Were there policies put in place to ensure that Muslim students had greater supervision because of their cultural backgrounds, in particular, of a legal system that punishes the raped woman? Of course not. Nothing was done.
Engstrom's actions were designed to ensure that NOBODY got punished. That's a scandal, a real one.
How to avoid the blowback? Blow up the athletic department by manufacturing as big a scandal as he could think of, all in the name of not doing effectively what that college president had just failed to do on something of an outrageous scale, blaming two athletes for having private lives where, in the privacy of their own homes, relationships get complicated sometimes and having NOTHING to do with anything that the AD or the coach could possibly anticipate or prevent.
Exactly what "Policy" is designed to prevent athletes from having girlfriends? O'day and Pflu should have done "what" to the athletes compared to what Engstrom did for a far more egregious situation?
The bigger scandal was the Saudi student and similar incidents and Engstrom's "PC" handling of those. Those were actual alleged rapes, included violence, and involved UM student females.
But, who'se thinking of that now? The strategy worked.
