Let's see:
1. Ok if you think it is a small group of lacrosse players who caused this to happen to themselves by prior bad behavior even though they did not rape Mangum, then you are among a pretty small minority here. No prior bad behavior is an excuse for what is going on in Durham now. I personally am not big in to conspiracy theories and have pretty much tried to ignor the sub-threads on how corrupt Durham is etc. I don't care that much as that is the Durhmites' problem. But when I read stories about intentionally giving college kids with a future an arrest record when you would let other go with a citation, I see a problem.
2. As for the faculty, have I missed it and some of the 88 backed off their statement in that ad they ran? BTW, Duke has about 800 faculty members if you take away medicine which has nothing to do with the undergraduate program. Thus the 88 make up over 10% of the regular faculty. If you remove the untenured who might have shared the views, but have been reluctant to let their views be known, it is getting closer to 15%. [Maybe some of the 88 are adjuncts, ie not regular facutly. I am not sure.] But this seems like a significant fraction to me unless some have publically backed off their statements.
3. By slumming I meant, if your child was one who claimed to have gotten into MIT, but chose Duke instead. A few people do that, ie slum academically, but more such claims are hogwash. Most people at that level of academics go to the best place they are admitted. BTW, this is a conservative site and not that politically correct. No one is much concerned that you are "really offended" with my use of the term slumming.
Is not the primary issue the silence the Duke faculty and the overall problem of political correctness at colleges? I can imagine the same "silence" at almost every university and college in the country. How do we get the more objective members of the faculty to voice their concerns and support their students?
I have a story.
I have a relative who is a very impressive guy. He was on the President's Council of Economic Advisors. He wrote President Reagan's energy policy address. He was up for Secretary of Energy but didn't want it. His recommendation to Reagan was that the entire department be abolished. He believes in small government.
He has taught at many schools - CalTech, Graduate School of Business at Michigan, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has worked at numerous "think tanks" - RAND Corporation, AEI.
He's in Who's Who in America with a lengthy list of impressive achievements. And where did he get his undergraduate degree? Harvard? No. Yale? No. He went to Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Yep, good ol' BGSU. He did graduate first in his class, summa cum laude. He had been thinking of becoming an accountant when a professor recommended he go to graduate school. He did a tour of graduate schools and had alot of interviews which brings me to the point of this story.
At one of these schools the professors were very unfriendly towards him. They clearly looked down on him and the reason became obvious when one of them made this comment - "If you're so great, why did you go to Bowling Green?" The words "Bowling Green" were said as if it were a disease or something. Needless to say he did not go to graduate school there. He went to Penn and also did post-graduate work at Nuffield College, Oxford.
I should say that the unfriendly school was NOT Duke but it was one of the schools that has been mentioned in your discussion.
He got his PhD at Penn and his classmates all went to schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton. He got the highest grades of anyone in his classes there though. Larry Klein, a Nobel Prize winning professor said he was the best student he ever had. He has always been proud of having attended Bowling Green.