Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Dick the Duke University President

By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal
(c) National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, Feb. 11, 2008

When a mentally deluded stripper accused three Duke University
lacrosse players of a brutal gang rape at a March 2006 off-campus team
party during spring break, dozens of activist Duke professors were not
content merely to give great credence to the rape charge, even as
evidence of its probable fraudulence poured into the public record.
They also treated the lacrosse players as pariahs for having hired
strippers at all. So, too, did Duke President Richard Brodhead, Board
Chairman Robert Steel, other campus administrators, many in the media,
and others.

Duke U and their Leftist co-horts star witchhunt witness

On Super Bowl Sunday, Duke University played host to a group of
strippers, prostitutes, phone-sex operators, and others in a “Sex
Workers Art Show.”

Never mind that hiring strippers violated no law or university rule.
Never mind that nobody had made a fuss about the 20-plus stripper
parties that other Duke athletic teams, fraternities, and sororities
held that year. Brodhead and other officials and professors continued
to express horror long after the supposedly “privileged” lacrosse
players had abjectly apologized. To underscore its horror, the
university adopted a new rule: “Strippers may not be invited or paid
to perform at events sponsored by individual students, residential
living groups, or cohesive units.”

So, some might be surprised to learn that on this year’s Super Bowl
Sunday, Duke University played host to a group of strippers,
prostitutes, phone-sex operators, and others in a “Sex Workers Art
Show” to display their “creativity and genius.” The university spent
$3,500 from student fees and various programs to pay the performers
and cover expenses.

One account of the February 3 show in the on-campus Reynolds Theater
– from which I have redacted the more repulsive particulars — was
posted on the Internet by Jay Schalin, of the conservative-leaning
John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

“The performers did not just take their clothes off — and the actual
nudity part of the show was rather tame. But mere nudity could hardly
compare with a show that began with the Art Show’s founder and
director, Annie Oakley, imploring the audience to stand up and shout
‘I take it up the butt!’…

“A transvestite, naked except for some strategically placed tape, with
the words ‘F___ Bush’ painted on his chest, kneeled on all fours and
lit a sparkler protruding out of his rectum with ‘America the
Beautiful’ playing…

“A stripper, in the guise of a U.S. flag-draped Lady Justice, …
yanked a string of dollar bills out of her posterior as the sound
system played Dolly Parton’s version of ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ She
ended her act by saluting and holding up her middle finger to the
crowd. The announcer referred to the performance as her ‘Infamous
Patriot Act.’ Her most private area was kept covered by a small
American flag…

“A dominatrix donned a large ’strap-on’ male sex organ, and pretended
to masturbate while the crowd was urged to shout ‘faster, faster,’ in
Chinese.”

The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, reported that the show
“riveted a crowd of students and community members,” with “rowdy
cheers and awkward silences.”

This event was sponsored by a student group called Healthy Devils,
with co-sponsors including Duke’s Women’s Center, the Program for the
Study of Sexualities, the Student Health Center, Students for Choice,
the Campus Council, and Sexual Assault Support Services. The show has
toured or will tour other campuses including Harvard University, the
College of William & Mary, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan
University, and the University of California (Davis).

Duke Provost Peter Lange, responding to my e-mailed questions,
explained that the sponsors had followed normal procedures to get
university funds and facilities. Duke “routinely hosts shows and
speakers that some people find controversial or even objectionable,”
he wrote, as part of its “strong commitment to free speech and
academic freedom.” He added that the university takes no position on
the views expressed.

Fair enough. But how can the Duke administration reconcile its
solicitude for the right of some groups to pay strippers to perform
with its disdain for lacrosse players who did the same?

“There is an obvious difference,” Lange responded, “between strippers
performing at a private party and a group of artists touring
university campuses across the country to present a show with
political discussion, musical theater, and displays of sexuality.”

So people who take off their clothes and dance for money while others
watch are not mere strippers, but rather “artists,” if they go on
tour, call it “musical theater,” and toss in scatological and vulgar
political effusions?

Another way of looking at it, Schalin’s article suggests, is that
“inviting strippers to perform does not appear to be a problem as long
as the intent is not to titillate men, but to shock a mixed audience
with vulgarity and disparage mainstream American values.”

Kenneth Larrey, a senior who founded Duke Students for an Ethical Duke
to promote fair treatment of students by the university that had so
savaged its own lacrosse players, skipped the Super Bowl to document
the university’s hypocrisy. The show was, he says, “far, far more
grotesque than we could have imagined.”

To be sure, Annie Oakley did voice one coherent political message:
Women are driven into the “sex industry” because the “only other
option is working a minimum-wage job or less.” But this theme was
undercut by one performer’s admission that she had left a regular job
to make more money for “my extravagant partying lifestyle” and by
others who described choosing sex work after college.

While the show portrayed “sex workers” as both artistic “geniuses” and
victims of society, males who pay strippers to perform had better have
politically correct motives. The Sex Workers Art Show passed the
political correctness test because, in the words of its website, it
not only “entertains, arouses, and amazes” but also offers “scathing
and insightful commentary on notions of class, race, gender, labor,
and sexuality.”

As if the nation’s campuses were not sufficiently steeped in such
stuff already.

The lacrosse players, on the other hand, had no pretensions beyond
titillation and male bonding. For this they were likened to slave
masters of the Old South by many a professor and columnist. Professor
Mark Anthony Neal, for one — a practitioner of what he calls ”
‘gangster’ scholarship” and “intellectual thuggery” — accused the
players of “hoping to consume something that they felt a black woman
uniquely possessed.” Never mind that the booking agency had told the
players that one stripper would be white and one would be Hispanic.

Brodhead told the Durham Chamber of Commerce on April 20, 2006, “If
our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree.
If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough.” (Emphasis
added.)

This was a dagger aimed straight at the hearts of sophomores Reade
Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, who had been arrested on rape charges
two days before. In his eagerness to trash two young men in their time
of direst peril for having attended a stripper party organized by
their captains, Brodhead ignored the strong, by-then-public evidence
that both were entirely innocent of rape.

Such smears have so far cost Duke well over $10 million to settle a
threatened lawsuit by the three wrongly accused players. (The third
was indicted after Brodhead’s “bad enough” gibe.) Three other players
have filed a lawsuit and 30-some others are threatening to sue.

But no Duke administrator or professor has been disciplined in any
way. Indeed, the only one fired at Duke as a result of the bogus rape
charge was Mike Pressler, the university’s lacrosse coach for 16 years
and the 2005 NCAA Coach of the Year. Brodhead fired him in April 2006
while misleadingly suggesting that his players were a bunch of
racists. This at a time when rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong, who
has since been disbarred, was winning an election by spreading similar
smears to Durham voters and potential jurors.

Less than a month later, a faculty committee that Brodhead appointed
to investigate the coach’s leadership and the players’ characters
found that Pressler had been blameless. It also found that the players
– although far too prone to the alcohol abuse, noisy parties, and
related petty misconduct that are endemic on campus — were otherwise
an admirable group of student-athletes with no history of racist talk
or behavior.

Despite all of this, Steel — who is also an undersecretary of the
Treasury — and Duke’s board have strongly supported Brodhead’s
handling of the lacrosse case. In December 2007 a board committee
voiced what its chair, and board vice chair, Daniel Blue, called
“overwhelming support for the leadership that the president is
providing.”

Brodhead and the board understand how the p.c. game is played. If only
the lacrosse players had understood that, they could have lined up
university funding to hire a better class of strippers:
college-educated white people spouting vacuous political bromides and
sporting dollar bills and sparklers in the right places.