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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Duke Lacrosse Scandal Case Study

A study of the Duke lacrosse scandal; which method is really at play, Utilitarian or Communitarian?

On Monday, March 13, 2006 the Duke University lacrosse team held a party at the rented home of the team’s three captains. The members of the team hired two strippers and requested that these females be either White or Hispanic. Two exotic dancers were sent over. They were black. The next series of events not only come into serious conflict but emerge as completely different versions of a party gone out of control. In the end, one of the dancers, 27-year-old Crystal Mangum tells authorities that she was taunted with racial slurs, beaten, choked, sodomized and raped inside the bathroom of the rented house. Allegations, arrests and community turmoil erupt as officials attempt to figure out exactly what happened. To no-ones surprise, the role of public relations becomes a key focal point and the country watches closely as the details of this case unfold. As future practitioners we are not only concerned with the details of the case but must pay attention to the approach being employed as this information is vital to our profession. The question presented to us is whether or not the Duke case supports the use utilitarianism or communitarinism, but before we attempt to answer that a closer look at the facts must be taken.

According to official reports, below is a detailed time-line of the events surrounding the Duke lacrosse case:

March 13, 2006
Duke University's lacrosse players throw a team party at an off-campus house, hiring two strippers to perform.

March 14, 2006
One of the dancers tells Durham police that three members of the lacrosse team forced her into a bathroom, where they beat, raped, and sodomized her.

March 23, 2006
Forty-six of the team's 47 members comply with a judge's order to provide DNA samples and be photographed. The team's sole black member is not tested because the victim said her attackers were white

March 25, 2006
School announces lacrosse team will not play two scheduled games, citing the team's decision to hire "private party dancers" and underage drinking at the party.

March 28, 2006
Duke suspends lacrosse team from play until it has a "clearer resolution of the legal situation" of involving team members.

April 3, 2006
District Attorney Mike Nifong stops granting interviews about the case.

April 5, 2006
Coach Mike Pressler resigns and Duke President Richard Brodhead cancels the team's season after authorities unseal a search warrant containing an e-mail from player Ryan McFadyen in which he says he wants to kill and skin strippers. McFadyen is suspended from school.

April 10, 2006
Defense attorneys announce that DNA test results find no match between the players tested and the woman accusing the players of rape.

April 11, 2006
District Attorney Mike Nifong says he will continue investigating the rape allegations

April 17, 2006
A Durham County grand jury returns sealed indictments against two Duke lacrosse players.

April 18, 2006
Duke lacrosse players Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty are taken into custody on charges of rape, sexual offense and kidnapping. Each is released after posting bond of $400,000. Nifong says authorities continue to try to identify a third possible assailant.

April 25, 2006
Granville County authorities confirm the accuser told police 10 years ago she was raped by three men when she was 14. None of the men were charged.

May 1, 2006
A Duke University committee recommends the school's lacrosse team resume play next season, but adds the team needs strict monitoring because of a history of problems tied to alcohol.

May 2, 2006
D.A. Nifong fends off two challengers to win the Democratic primary for district attorney. Because he has no Republican challenger in the fall election, he is all but assured of remaining in office.

May 8, 2006
A university report concludes Duke Administrators were slow to react to the scandal in part because of initial doubts about the accuser's credibility.

May 15, 2006
A grand jury indicts a third member of Duke University's lacrosse team on charges tied to a woman's allegations she was raped and beaten at a team party. David Evans, a senior and team captain from Bethesda, Md., was indicted on charges of first-degree forcible rape, sexual offense and kidnapping.

June 5, 2006
Duke University President Richard Brodhead announced the men's lacrosse team will resume play next season, but under strict rules and close monitoring. Brodhead said he and the school's athletics administrators would rethink their decision if they see any repeat of "patterns of irresponsible, individual or team behaviors familiar from the past."

June 29, 2006
A Duke University lacrosse player suspended for sending a vulgar e-mail about killing strippers was reinstated and can rejoin the team in the fall. The school had suspended Ryan McFadyen, 20, of Mendham, N.J., after authorities investigating rape allegations by a dancer at a team party released a search warrant for his dorm room that included the graphic e-mail sent from his Duke account.

A Brief Look at Utilitarian Ethics at Work
Dallas Cowboy case study (by Jacqueline J. Lambiase and John Mark Dempsey)
Back in 1998, a locker room horseplay incident, which would later be described as a fight, left one player, Everett Mclver, with a serious injury (a deep cut on the neck). In the days following the fight, both the new head coach of the team, and the team owner defined the incident as a “scuffle” and “family matter”. After pursuing the story, print and broadcast journalists learned that Michael Irvin, a star player and also a player with a turbulent legal history, was involved in the fight. For one week, the media struggled with the Cowboys’ organization in an attempt to gain more information and the truth. Accused of stonewalling the press, the Cowboys were faced with the question of whether or not using a “no comment” strategy was the best approach. In the end the Cowboys were able to separate and elevate themselves from the community and managed to keep their key player on the team.

Evidence of Communitarianism amidst the Duke Scandal
When reviewing some of the efforts made by Duke to restore their image as a leading university in the United States, some communitarian attempts were recognized in their course of action. Duke has intentions of launching a Campus Culture Initiative, self-examination of the behaviors of not only the athletes, but all students of the university. These behaviors include those that are thoughtless of others, among them their off-campus neighbors; disrespectful behavior across lines of race, gender, and other forms of difference; and the abuse of alcohol.

This effort displays Duke as taking a look at the outside community and acknowledging their characteristics and differences. By taking a look at what is outside of the isolated Duke population, the faculty and students are more aware of the entire Durham community. This will hopefully diversify the minds of the Durham people and promote a more cosmopolitan state of mind throughout their society. This step will help Duke "evaluate and suggest improvements in the ways Duke educates students in the values of personal responsibility".

Duke will also create a Presidential Council, made up of people from the Durham community, national higher education circles and Duke that will scrutinize Duke's responses to the incident and advise the president on whether the responses are appropriate and effective. The council is headed by Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, a member of the first cohort of African American undergraduates admitted to Duke and now Provost of the University of the District of Columbia, and Roy Bostock, a former Duke Trustee and director of the Duke University Health System, and he now chairs the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

By including diverse members in the council Duke will have the opportunity to receive different views and perspectives of each action taken. Obtaining all critiques and suggestions from each of these members, who represent various parts of the community, will offset an awareness of the cultural diversity in Durham and incorporate the idea of Cosmopolitanism. Duke is taking steps toward acknowledging its lack of social integration by encompassing attributes from many others outside of their own close knit community.

A More Familiar Road
While there is evidence to support that communitarian ethics were applied, the Duke case will most likely go down in history as yet another case that employed the utilitarian approach.

We know that utilitarianism stresses the importance in trying to bring about the greatest good to the greatest number while valuing the rights of individual freedoms over collective responsibilities. This theory has been widely accepted and almost exclusively applied in the field of public relations. The problem with utilitarianism is that it gives little or no attention to the benefits for the minority. Furthermore, the byproduct of utilitarianism often produces an “us against them” attitude. We found this to be true with the Duke lacrosse team, a band of bothers, who found themselves in the middle of a controversy involving heated racial debates, community outrage, privilege in educational institutions, and more. And much like the Dallas Cowboys they aren’t talking. In fact, on Duke’s official web page the names, faces and hometowns of the men on the lacrosse team have been removed. Further proof of utilitarianism is seen when reports, by a Duke committee assigned to review the facts of the case, was released in May. The committee recommended the school's lacrosse team resume play next season, but added that the team needed to be strictly monitored because of a history of problems tied to alcohol. The same report also revealed findings that university administrators learned of the team's "extensive disciplinary record" in 2004, but except for Coach Mike Pressler and the school's dean of judicial affairs, no one else at Duke "appears to have treated the lacrosse team's disciplinary record as a matter of serious concern."

End Results
It is therefore our conclusion that the primary stakeholders in this case ( the lacrosse team, and Duke Officials) have elected to accept the greatest good for the greatest number to mean what is best for the team, while we are left to ask the question-what about everyone else.

An attempt to receive information form Duke’s public relations person, John Burness, was made but he did not respond to our request for information.

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