Duke exposed

April 4, 2006 | DURHAM, N.C. -- For those of us who live close to Duke, the recent backlash against the university nicknamed the "Gothic Wonderland" and its students did not come as a surprise.

Tensions in Durham have heated up in the past three weeks after a woman, hired to dance at an off-campus party held by Duke's lacrosse team, accused players of hurling racial epithets at and sexually assaulting her. The dancer is black and attends nearby North Carolina Central University, a historically black college. All but one of Duke's male lacrosse players are white.

Fault lines between town and gown, black and white, the privileged and the poor already existed in Durham. But rarely have those lines been so deftly exposed, all at once, as they have by the allegations of what took place at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in the early hours of March 14.

This confluence of events, people say, is the perfect storm.

"Here's a perfect story of what we've had to deal with in the past," explains Terrill Bravender, director of adolescent medicine at Duke University Medical Center, who lives within a block of the infamous lacrosse party house.

"Last year, in middle of the baby-oil-wrestling party that made it to the national news, there were a whole bunch of people in my yard, milling around, out on the sidewalk and in the side yard. I went outside to ask them to leave, and I saw a guy peeing on the side of my house. So I told him to stop.

"The guy turned around and said, 'What's the matter?'

"I explained that he was peeing on my house.

"He again asked, 'What's the matter?'

"'That's it,' I said. I don't think he really got it.

"So I had my dog there, and I let him go out and sort of jump on him. Then he started yelling, 'What's your problem? I didn't hurt anything! If I hurt anything, I'll pay for it.'

"I said, 'No, you won't pay for it, your dad will. You don't have any money.'

"Then I saw a guy leaning over our fence vomiting into the flower bed. I told him to get the guy out of there, it was unacceptable. Then he tried to have a conversation with me about why was I so hostile toward Duke students.

"These kids have never had to own up to anything. It was more sad than anything."

The antagonistic feelings cut both ways. Students say they're getting a raw deal. They say that residents of Trinity Park, the historic, bungalow-filled neighborhood adjacent to Duke's East Campus, are intent on spoiling their fun. After all, they're simply doing what college kids are supposed to do. When locals call 911 in the wee hours to break up rowdy mixers, Duke students return fire with Op-Ed pieces stating that perhaps the curmudgeons shouldn't have settled down in a neighborhood that's right off their campus.

Since the accusations of rape against members of the lacrosse team were made public, though, neighbors and a segment of students have stood together at vigils and protests, as annoyance turned to anger. Together they have found a new target: the most privileged of Duke's students.

The students in question are "a small number of idiots who are mind-bogglingly arrogant and never have had to take responsibility for anything in their lives," says Bravender, referring, in part, to the fact that students aren't often held accountable by the university for disorderly off-campus conduct. "It's those kids who choose to live off campus, ... so that's what the larger community sees of Duke kids," he says. (Still, plenty of Duke students, those living both on and off campus, do volunteer work in the community. You can spot them hammering nails for Habitat for Humanity houses, reading to kids in public schools and cleaning up creeks.)

Duke sophomore Fiona O'Sullivan finds that some students behave in a way that reveals a "we can do no wrong" attitude.

She searches for an example. "At tailgates," she says, "there are people who get ridiculously drunk and feel they can do idiotic things that aren't acceptable in real life, just because we have this weird sense of superiority, because we're Duke students and can do what we want."

When town residents fill neighborhood listservs with gripes about publicly drunk and disorderly students, they're invariably referring to a subset of Duke students who are considered privileged, and no one seems to represent that stereotypical subset better than the lacrosse team.

"There's a social hierarchy at Duke, and they're at the top," explains O'Sullivan. "They must have such a feeling of power."

Her friend Katie Brehm, also a sophomore, chimes in, "But we give them that power. Why do we look up to them?"

"Because they're hot!" says Julia Blessing, a sophomore from Ann Arbor, Mich. "And they have, like, the best parties."

The lacrosse team's reputation for "Animal House"-like parties dates back at least a decade, if not more. Christopher Johnson, Duke Class of '01, remembers the Duke lacrosse parties as pure debauchery. "Their section would be trashed, there would be girls all around ... There was this machismo, masculine energy," says Johnson, who now works on Capitol Hill for North Carolina's Rep. Mel Watt.

Next page: A team out of control