Because of the situation with the lacrossse team, Duke has born the brunt of
bad publicity in recent weeks when it comes to college athletics and
scandal. But as badjocks.com points
out, Duke is hardly alone: the site has posted quite a few pictures from various
teams involved in hazing and/or initiation rites.
One thing which you can reasonably expect to happen, oh, about today, is that
across the country, schools are going to tell their athletes to only use
officially sanctioned sites to post pictures and descriptions of team and
personal activities. They can't force them to do it, but they can't be
forced to renew their scholarships, either.
Still, most, probably almost all, of the activities badjocks.com linked to
are consensual, and if the three indicted lacrosse players at Duke are proven to
have forced the stripper at their party into having sex against her will, that
is in a completely different category.
But even then it's not the only case today like that.
In Richmond, four college kids, two of them being athletes, are
accused of raping a female student. The roles are reversed, however,
as the men are black students at Virginia Union and the alleged victim is a
white student at Richmond.
Like the Duke case, and like the events related by badjocks.com, alcohol
surely played a major role in whatever happened in the woods outside of
Richmond.
It's hard to understand how any of these things could have happened in the
absence of alcohol, frankly, and it underscores the severity of alcohol abuse
among college students.
What no one has figured out yet is exactly how to deal with it. Forcing
it off campus, as Duke more or less did, led to other problems, as we see in the
news now, and there's no indication that anything has gotten better. In
fact, it may be worse.