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Athletic, academic plan receives mixed reviews
Gregory Beaton
Posted: 9/26/06
If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then consider professor Paul Haagen quite flattered by a recent parody of his proposal to improve the relationship between athletics and academics.
At the Academic Council meeting last Thursday, Haagen, a Duke Law professor who chairs the council, introduced the "Faculty Athletics Associates Program," which calls for faculty representatives to be assigned to each of Duke's 22 varsity teams.
"I was hoping to increase the connection and depth of understanding between faculty and coaches," Haagen said. "The purpose is to have better interaction in terms of each side understanding the other."
The Academic Council's Executive Committee approved the plan, and 80 faculty members have already offered their services to become part of the program, Haagen said.
But some faculty members are not on board with Haagen's proposal, and a version mocking it has circulated among some within the University.
Co-written by Fred Nijhout and Richard Hain, professors of biology and math, respectively, the imitation is entitled "Coaches Academic Associates Program." The parody statement closely mirrors Haagen's original, but coaches are assigned to academic departments instead of faculty members assigned to varsity teams.
"The purpose of the program is to increase understanding among the coaches of academic life at Duke," Nijhout and Hain wrote. "The hope is to establish a mechanism for meaningful interaction among the faculty, coaches and student scholars, to insure that there will be some coaches with an informed understanding of the experience of student scholars at Duke.
"The program is open to all members of the coaching staff of the University, although it is hoped that most of the participating coaches will come from among those who coach pre-professional athletes and winning teams."
Nijhout declined to comment, saying the parody speaks for itself.
At the Academic Council meeting Thursday, Haagen acknowledged the imitation document, joking that he was "considered worthy of a parody."
Haagen dismissed the criticism, saying even he is unsure of how successful the program will end up being, but it is worth a shot.
"It is nothing other than an experiment," Haagen said. "But did 80 people say they were interested enough to try? Yes."
Some have not been so quick to laugh off the parody. Kerstin Kimel, head coach of the women's lacrosse team, said the parody was a "step backwards" in the relationship between athletics and academics.
"Given the circumstances under which we are all examining ourselves, to me, this kind of banter is childish and completely unproductive and totally disrespectful," Kimel said. "From a coach's standpoint, we really want to extend the olive branch to help improve."
Haagen's involvement in the program began in the spring, when questions were raised about the role of athletics at Duke in response to the controversy surrounding the 2005-2006 men's lacrosse team.
Haagen, who teaches sports law and works extensively with the Department of Athletics, became aware of a program at Princeton where faculty members are assigned to teams. He thought a similar plan could work at Duke, with some adjustments to adapt to the "different conditions."
Working with members of the Athletics Department-including Director of Athletics Joe Alleva, Senior Associate Athletic Director Chris Kennedy, Associate Athletic Director Jackie Silar and Kimel-Haagen drafted the proposal.
Duke's plan calls for faculty members to serve as liaisons for no more than three-year periods and to interact with the team without being required to monitor or report.
"Dealing with a variety of people this spring, I started to get a fairly clear sense that some coaches at Duke were relatively isolated from the faculty," Haagen said. "The coaches are very clear they're part of Duke as a centrally educational university, but they were not linked to people and relationships."
The proposal was met with strong support from the athletics department, Haagen said.
"They believe they have a good story to tell and would like to expose more people to it," Haagen said.
Kimel said discussions about such a program had already begun before the tumultuous events of last spring, as similar programs have been successful at other schools such as Princeton, Trinity College and Middlebury.
"I think it will facilitate better understanding of what we do on the athletics side of campus," Kimel said. "There is a propensity to not see the real-world value of participating in athletics at this level."
Meg Bourdillon contributed to this story.
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A case for violence
Ad astra
Brian Kindle
Posted: 9/26/06
Last spring I attended the annual Take Back the Night speak-out on the Chapel Quadrangle. The last stop on the Night's march between East and West Campuses, and the capstone for Sexual Assault Prevention Week, the speak-out is a remarkable event: Participants step up to a microphone and share their personal experiences with rape and sexual assault, one after another, for hours.
Some stories are decades old, others are incredibly fresh, many are being revealed for the first time ever on that night. It's harrowing, raw and exhausting, but for many of its participants and those in the audience, speaking out seems to be genuinely healing.
Over the course of the evening, several men came forward to air tales of friends or family that had been sexually assaulted, or to pledge their support for efforts to end sexual assault. Although I was impressed by their show of solidarity, I wound up feeling that something was lacking, that the male contribution to the speak-out was more notable for what had not been said than what had.
The majority of rapes and assaults brought up in the speak-out were never reported to the police, but none of the men who spoke expressed a desire to find those responsible and hurt them severely. None of the men displayed the kind of blind rage at the perpetrators that I was feeling at the time. None of them spoke of a willingness to defend his female friends and family with more than his words.
This is no slight on the men who participated in that speak-out; not at all. To be honest, that evening was probably neither the time nor the place for such sentiments.
But in talking about sexual assault on Duke's campus, it's a conversation we never seem to have. As a man, what I am supposed to do about sexual assault? Why do all the solutions offered to me-signing vows never to harm women, protesting the use of sexist language-seem so impotent and lacking?
And most of all, is there a place for my desire for physical confrontation with the perpetrators of these crimes? Is there a case to be made for violent physical retaliation in dealing with sexual assault at Duke?
Go back a few decades, and it seems like my reaction was well within the norm. Men were expected to channel their violent impulses to the defense of the women in their lives. In our grandparents' generation and up until the 1960s, raping or assaulting a woman meant facing the very real threat of being hunted down and beaten or killed by her male relatives. Although I can't and won't advocate this kind of response, I also imagine it would be an enormous disincentive for a would-be rapist.
I don't want to idealize this period of American history any more than it already has been; I know it had its own massive problems, and I'm certainly not arguing for a return to a pre-Sexual Revolution set of cultural mores.
For better or worse, we no longer raise American men to defend women, and we no longer expect them to integrate violence into their lives constructively. We're way past the days when fathers taught their sons the proper way to throw a punch, and in most ways, that's a huge improvement.
But it still leaves me, and, I suspect, much of Duke's male population feeling pretty useless in the face of a tremendous and persistent problem.
In 2004, there were 94,635 incidents of rape in the country as a whole, and although the numbers have consistently fallen since peaking in the 1980s, the Department of Justice still estimates that 61 percent of rapes go completely unreported. It only gets worse on college campuses, with surveys indicating that one in five college-aged women will be raped or sexually assaulted.
I know women who were assaulted here at Duke. You probably do as well. None of them reported it to the police. Their attackers suffered no, or very little, punishment.
Call me bloodthirsty, but I can't help believing that if there were implicit, socially recognized consequences for sexual assault and harassment of women on this campus, beyond chastisement, beyond verbal disapproval, assault and rape would be far less common.
When so many rapists are never brought to trial, there needs to be another mechanism for keeping their behavior in check. To me, one answer may be violent retaliation on the part of the men of this University.
I know that right now many of you are cringing in horror at these proposals, and to be honest I'm not in love with them myself. But at the very least, these ideas-the role of men as the defenders of women, extra-legal consequences for those that commit rape, the use of physical violence against perpetrators of sexual assault-need to enter our ongoing dialogue about rape and sexual assault on this campus.
We need to do a better job of constructing a meaningful male response to sexual assault at Duke if we ever plan on ending it. Until then, I'll be left with two clenched fists and no one to use them on.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Tuesday.