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"We were struggling against a series of revelations that were made to look outrageous," recalls Kennedy, now a Stanford professor of environmental science. A basic narrative of greed couldn't accommodate the complexities of government reimbursement formulas. As Kennedy puts it in his book, "The political climate in which the university had to sail for the next months was thus established not by the major issues surrounding indirect-cost policy but by the carefully crafted public impression that at Stanford we were living high at public expense. Such impressions are difficult to reverse; once newspapers have learned something, they can't unlearn it."
Outrageous or not, the fixation over research funds became the lens through which the media saw any news out of Stanford. A New York Times story about the odd private life of a physician at the Stanford Children's Hospital, written around the same time, referred to "an additional embarrassment for Stanford, which already faces the loss of millions of dollars in federal money for items like furniture and flowers for the home of its president, Donald Kennedy."
When the ABC news program 20/20 aired a segment called "Your Tax Dollars at Work," the Stanford story reached a low point. The broadcast was more hostile than illuminating, Kennedy says, when it reported on the most sensational aspects—including allegations that the Stanford overcharges could be as high as $200 million—two weeks before the Congressional hearings. He says its lead correspondent, in private conversation, expressed embarrassment about the coverage, but for the cameras, he took on the persona of offended inquisitor.
Stanford was vindicated in the end by the government. But almost invariably, such "vindications are never given the kind of attention that the original scandal receives," according to Kennedy.
Kennedy's struggle to preserve Stanford's reputation came at a high personal cost. "It became apparent to me that it was getting harder to get things done." He had become a lightning rod. So he announced his plan to resign. "I think in some really important respects, the university and I were both treated pretty unfairly," he says. "But you can't wring your hands over that sort of thing for very long. I worried for a while about whether the university was going to be all right. We turned out to be fine."
The media coverage of the Duke lacrosse incident revealed more than the seductiveness of a storyline; it also revealed a reflexive reaching for stereotypes, notably, stereotypes surrounding college athletes. In his State of the University address during Reunions Weekend in April, Brodhead told alumni that he hoped the lacrosse team would become known for its volunteer work with the local Ronald McDonald House, which caters to critically ill children and their families. But a year ago, as suggested by protests on campus and outside the Buchanan Boulevard house where the lacrosse team's party took place, and by the distribution of "Wanted" fliers with the faces of team members, many were quick to equate lacrosse with criminal behavior.
Just weeks after the lacrosse party, New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts referred to "a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings." She went on to claim that team members had observed a "code of silence"—a claim that turned out to be unfounded—and likened them to "drug dealers and gang members engaged in an anti-snitch campaign."
The faculty investigation led by the law school's James Coleman painted a different picture. As Coleman says, many—including some university officials—were surprised at his committee's findings that rumors of bad behavior didn't accord with the facts. "We talked with people in the neighborhood about the lacrosse students and all the havoc they supposedly wreaked. And it became clear that it really wasn't the lacrosse kids they were talking about. They were just using the focus on the lacrosse team as a platform for talking about all of their other grievances. We found that was true in a lot of cases."
With the benefit of hindsight, and with the dropping of the charges, The Washington Post said in an editorial, "News organizations, eager to pursue a 'Jocks Gone Wild' story line, aided and abetted [the district attorney's] rush to judgment, all but pronouncing the students guilty before the facts were in."
An antecedent to the Duke case ensnared athletes at the University of Colorado. In December 2001, members of the Colorado football team supplied alcohol and marijuana to recruits, then took them to a party at an off-campus apartment. One of the recruits was accused of raping a woman who lived in the apartment. Eventually, nine women said they had been assaulted by Colorado football players or recruits since 1997. Jerry Rutledge, a Colorado regent, says reporters didn't probe beyond the "jocks-gone-wild" theme. "No one did any investigative reporting. They just jumped on a hot story."
Another regent, Peter Steinhauer, says the media reports agitated sports boosters and skeptics alike. "One side said, I'm never going to give another penny to the university as long as the president stays and the football coach stays. The other side said, do something about these trumped-up charges." A campaign inspired by the National Organization for Women produced some 20,000 letters and e-mail messages questioning the refusal to fire the coach immediately; by ten o'clock on the morning that the coach was put on administrative leave, administrators were wrestling with some 6,500 angry e-mail messages protesting the decision.
Sometimes a scandal, though, turns out to be a series of false accusations—a painful lesson learned in the Duke lacrosse case, and earlier at Colorado. The rape charges against the Colorado athletes were investigated by the office of Boulder district attorney Mary Keenan. She eventually decided not to prosecute anyone, citing a lack of evidence, partly based on DNA test results, and saying recruits believed the party was set up for them to have sex. Keenan was deposed in a civil case brought by one of the alleged rape victims; in her deposition, she said the university's athletics program used sex as "a bartering tool" to lure football recruits.
As Keenan faced re-election in 2004, one local newspaper, the Daily Camera, quoted a political opponent, a former prosecutor, as suggesting that "a challenger might ask why Keenan didn't prosecute players accused of gang rape." That challenger might also "ask her to explain why she put forward the unconventional legal theory" that the university fostered an atmosphere that led to the alleged assaults. The former prosecutor offered another concern: "Should an elected official make inflammatory allegations about the university before the university's conduct was thoroughly investigated?" Keenan succeeded in her re-election bid—suggesting that targeting a university, if not the presumed wrongdoing of its students, can be politically expedient.
Much of the public's and the media's obsession with the Duke lacrosse case hinged on race and athletics, with an African American allegedly the victim of a largely white team. In the Colorado football context, the racial balance was reversed: African-American team members were accused of sexual violence against white women.
Bruce Plasket, a longtime reporter in the Denver area, dwells on race dynamics and media overreaction in a book called Buffaloed: How Race, Gender, and Media Bias Fueled a Season of Scandal. "Headlines, not evidence, were creating guilt—a guilt that would subject 100 young football players, many of them black, to obscene catcalls from opposing fans, racially hateful e-mails directed at players dating white women, and the wrath of a media afraid to be labeled as victim bashers," Plasket writes. "Reporters anxious to beat their competitors in what appeared to be an accusation-of-the-day contest failed to go beyond the salacious accusations to find out how [the coach] actually ran his program."At one away game, Plasket notes, Colorado football players faced taunts of "rapists, rapists."
With a shifting legal landscape (as well as a new coach), those derisive chants have vanished. Steinhauer, who recently finished his term on the regents board, says Colorado has largely put the turmoil behind it. It has put in place "probably some of the strictest rules in the country" surrounding athletic recruiting, with the requirement, for example, that late-night events involving recruits include a coach as chaperone. And Colorado has recovered from the negative exposure: Some years after the first football charges, it has seen its largest-ever freshman class, and its fundraising is up more than 100 percent from the same period last year.
Among the casualties of the Colorado incident was Elizabeth Hoffman, the university's president, who was eventually ousted. She is now provost at Iowa State University. Other issues, especially a brouhaha surrounding a faculty member's extreme statements about the September 11 terrorist attacks, also contributed to her forced departure. (In the early 1960s, a Colorado president resigned after discovery of an illegal "slush fund" for football players and a conservative backlash against "radical" faculty members.) This spring, the men's lacrosse coach at Colorado acknowledged that he had had discussions with his team when the Duke allegations surfaced, and added that the situation for his players was doubly troublesome: The negative echoes from the Duke case hurt the entire lacrosse community, he said. And as representatives of Colorado athletics, his players still saw a need to erase whatever memories lingered from the presumed football scandal.
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