OK, so the Duke lacrosse students were not an official fraternity, but then I will seize upon Anthony’s point that they were acting as a team and therefore should have been conscious of the need to be on good behavior. It sounds as if they didn’t even observe good how-to-watch-strippers behavior. I read that some insulting remarks were flung at the dancer and, for that kind of thing, I think you can be thrown out by the beefy bouncers in regular stripper bars. So she didn’t even have that protection. Probably also, at whatever private men’s type events that feature stripping, the same rule would apply: Someone would eject the jerk who insults the dancer. This incident had even less control than that. These boys are THAT green and there were no adult males to instruct them.
I realize that in loco parentis, though officially banished, lives on in all kinds of stifling regulations on today’s campuses. But I think REAL in loco parentis would make a lot of those regulations unnecessary. As has been noted in our discussion, a lot of the problems come from girls/young women trying to act as if nothing bothers them–they can drink and have sex in any way shape or form–only to find that things do INDEED bother them, or that they greatly underestimated how brutish the uninstructed, unformed young male can be, especially when incited by loose female behavior. Then the girls go running to the administration, where eager feminists await the opportunity to put further shackles on male students.
The withdrawal of in loco parentis happened partly because the new egalitarianism insisted that students had to be respected as adults. But they don’t BEHAVE like adults. Even many adults don’t behave like adults. So I’m for bringing it back, even though I am a party of one. Also, as I said in my last post, incidents like these dont just involve the principals (and even if the boys are exonerated, think of the expense and the grief and the shame to the families and the mark against them and all that), but the whole society has to be subject to lectures on the continuing inequalities that mock our pretensions to be a just society, and so on, and etc.