[TBBBO]

From Durham in Wonderland (http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/):

Holloway Leaves CCI
Karla Holloway has resigned her position as race subgroup chair of the Campus Culture Initiative, to protest President Brodhead’s decision to lift the suspensions of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. “The decision by the university to readmit the students, especially just before a critical judicial decision on the case, is a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship,” said she. “I could no longer work in good faith with this breach of common trust.”

Holloway had not always been so concerned with the significance of “judicial decision[s] on the case.” This summer, she wrote that “justice inevitably has an attendant social construction. And this parallelism means that despite what may be our desire, the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts.” Therefore, since the presumption of innocence “is neither the critical social indicator of the event, nor the final measure of its cultural facts,” judgments about the case “cannot be left to the courtroom.”

Holloway’s departure from the CCI is a welcome development. Holloway’s comments over the last nine months had shown little or no respect for a wide variety of groups on campus, and so her occupying such a prominent place with the CCI seemed a basic contradiction in its mission.

Male athletes? “The ‘culture’ of sports seems for some a reasonable displacement for the cultures of moral conduct, ethical citizenship and personal integrity,” reinforcing “exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those ‘othered’ by their sports’ history of membership.”
Those who defended the players targeted by Nifong? They believed that “white innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.”
Women’s lacrosse players who had worn armbands expressing sympathy with Seligmann, Finnerty, and Dave Evans? She denounced their “team-inspired and morally slender protestations of loyalty that brought the ethic from the field of play onto the field of legal and cultural and gendered battle as well.”
The sympathetic article announcing Holloway’s resignation from the CCI came in a publication called Diverse Online. Here’s how its author, Christina Asquith, described the scene last spring. “Initially, many at Duke supported the dancer. Students held candlelight vigils on campus and 88 professors, now known as the ‘Group of 88’ signed an advertisement in the student newspaper calling for the administration to take a stronger stand against the players.”

Apparently Asquith didn’t receive the memo on the new party line regarding the Group of 88’s intentions.

Labels: faculty

[Alia]

Another article by Asquith in re Karla Holloway, she was going to "quit" three months after she was hired; and so I guess this latest "quit" is being used as an excuse to justify the "quitting":

Black Professors Under Pressure At Duke; Six Black Faculty Quit
By Christina Asquith
Jun 13, 2006, 08:14

Three months after she was chosen to head the committee on race in response to the university’s lacrosse scandal, Duke University Professor Karla Holloway threatened to quit yesterday citing exhaustion.

“I’m working on a culture initiative when I should be doing research,” says Holloway. “Of course you want a chance to make your campus better, but at what cost? When you are serviced to fix the problem and you are also the victim; it’s a double duty.”

By the end of Monday, Holloway had met with colleagues and reluctantly decided to stay on as committee head. But her frustration raises questions as to whether there is too much pressure on Black faculty at Duke to respond to the March crisis, in which a Black exotic dancer accused members of Duke’s lacrosse team of rape and racial slurs — prompting nationwide accusations of racism against the university.

“It’s true,” says Duke provost Peter Lange about the burden placed on Black faculty. “If you have a small number of African-American faculty, and a crisis emerges of the kind that emerged here in March in which African-American students seek support from African-American faculty members, and in addition the institution needs input from African-American faculty, then the burden on them shoots way up.”

Since the March incident, six Black faculty members have departed the university, most notably Dr. Charlotte Pierce-Baker, a professor of women’s studies, and her husband Dr. Houston Baker, a professor of African-American literature. Both left for Vanderbilt University.

All six professors say they left for personal reasons, and many had already made plans to leave before the March incident. However, the timing has led some to question whether an exodus is afoot.

“If these people start to leave, it creates all kinds of concerns for those of us who are left,” Dr. Kerry Haynie, a professor of political science who was recruited to Duke from Rutgers University in 2003, told The News & Observer last week. This year, Haynie has served on seven committees, including one on the culture of the lacrosse program.

...
Spending on retention efforts of Black faculty has more than doubled from $700,000 in 2003 to $1.6 million today, he adds.

Nonetheless, the loss of six Black professors is particularly painful given that the university recently finished an extremely successful decade-long initiative to build up its Black faculty. From 1993 to 2003, the university doubled its Black staff to 88 by offering financial incentives and generous research opportunities.

However, when the race initiative ended in 2003, it was replaced by a “diversity” initiative, says Holloway; and that was when Blacks “fell off the radar”.

...
In response to the charges associated with the lacrosse case, the university formed four committees — race, gender, alcohol and athletics — which meet weekly and report to Duke President Richard Brodhead. The committees will continue to meet throughout the summer.

Holloway says she decided to stay on the committee after she was convinced that it would have more of a voice with her participation.

However, Holloway says her patience is being tried.