Fish, A Barrel, Etc.

Rick Hess writes about the Duke Lacrosse player contretemps at the National Review Online. He recounts how after the incident 88 faculty members quickly sponsored a full-page advertisement in the student newspaper, which declared: “These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and themselves” and “the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides." But as the facts of the case have come into question, the sponsors of the ad are backpedaling...sort of. Hess notes:

Karla F. C. Holloway, the English professor who dreamed up the ad, explains that professors should “give voice to student concerns.” Moreover, as Holloway recently told The Chronicle of Higher Education, no one should have imagined that the ad was accusing the young men of rape. For instance, she says, the phrase “what happened to this young woman” did not mean that the faculty presumed she had been raped. Holloway explains, “Something did happen [at the house]. A party happened. Drunkenness happened. If you want to read ‘happening’ in one particular way, that’s the bias you bring to your reading.”

On the one hand, there's a certain shooting-fish-in-a-barrel element to quoting college professors talking this way. It's a big country and there are a lot of professors, so one could argue that just as you can always find a blond middle school teacher somewhere who's been spending a little too much time after class with her pupils, so too can you always find an academic using academic jargon to make a fool of herself.

But the difference, I think, is that this kind of thinking and speaking is not only normal in higher education, it's encouraged. In fact, it's necessary to get ahead in some fields and land jobs at prestigous colleges like Duke. Most people, in the course of growing up, learn not to say things in public that are so risible that they defy parody. It takes a lot to break that instinct, but our colleges and universities have apparently figured out how to pull it off.