May 1, 2006

2 Reports at Duke Assail Drinking and Lax Code of Conduct

Members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team are “academically and athletically responsible students” but “socially irresponsible consumers of alcohol,” according to an internal report released this evening about the team’s behavior. And the university is, to some extent, complicit in that irresponsibility because it inconsistently enforces conduct codes and tolerates “large-scale violations of its alcohol policy,” says another internal report, this one on the student judicial process.

The reports represent almost half of the five steps to respond to “angers, fears, resentments, and suspicions” that Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, outlined almost a month ago in his first major statement on the alleged rape that has sent the institution reeling (The Chronicle, April 6). “We now have something we have lacked to date, namely, careful, evidence-based inquiries into student behavior and institutional process,” Mr. Brodhead said in a written statement issued tonight.

The report of the Lacrosse Ad Hoc Review Committee, led by James E. Coleman Jr., a law professor, characterizes the team’s players as good kids who drink too much. They are polite and engaged students who volunteer at local elementary schools and for the Special Olympics, and who excel at their sport, the report states. They clean the team bus themselves and treat their equipment manager and groundskeeper respectfully. However—“paradoxically,” the report naïvely says—they drink excessively, urinate publicly, destroy property (by hitting golf balls at a campus building, for example), and disrupt their on-campus and off-campus neighbors with loud music and noise.

“Both the number of team members implicated in this behavior and the number of alcohol-related incidents involving them have been excessive compared to other Duke athletic teams,” according to the report. A chronology of the “clannish” players’ misconduct, beginning in the fall of 2000, includes such offenses as “theft of pizza,” “playing drinking game,” and “suspicion of throwing water.”

Duke lacrosse players have no history of racist behavior or sexual assault, the report says, and their team should resume competition next year, it recommends. However, the report stipulates, the athletics department should develop an “explicitly articulated” code of conduct for all athletes, which the university should enforce strictly—not in the informal, arbitrary way it now responds to some athletes’ misconduct.

The report of the Academic Council Student Affairs Committee, led by Prasad Kasibhatla, an associate professor in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, says that the university’s honor code should focus on citizenship, not just academic work. Students should have opportunities to learn about the honor code throughout their college careers, not just at freshman orientation. And the university should consistently enforce discipline policies related to the honor code, to eliminate the current “confusion, ambivalence, or cynicism about the validity of and commitment to” the code, the report recommends. Also, Duke should develop an “off-campus housing code of conduct,” it says.

Both reports identify the main problem as excessive drinking. Policing efforts or not, Mr. Brodhead has “no illusions that it will be easy to address the issue of alcohol abuse,” he said.

Previous: For-Profit College in Colorado Faces Student Lawsuit Alleging Deception
Next: Immigration Rallies Draw Support but Little Disruption on Campus