Excellent if depressing stuff at Margaret Soltan's University Diaries about the horrible goings-on at Duke. Much of what she says rings true me. I was particularly struck by this passage, which begins with a quote from a reader:
"I went to Landon's sister school and my sister was friends with some of the boys on Landon's lacrosse team. The cheating scandal discussed in this article, and the recent Duke scandal, don't really shock me. Yes, cheating was widespread at Landon and other local prep schools, as was heavy drinking to the point of alcoholism by age 18. But I don't think, as UD suggests in a later post, that either privilege or alcohol is the issue, per se. In many ways, I think it's the parents. In my experience, parents of prep school kids were more committed to their own work and social lives than parenting. I saw parents with very high expectations of their kids, but little commitment to teaching their children values. Money and socializing always seemed to come before family. Parents often turned a blind eye to drinking or even supplied the alcohol or the money for renting beach houses where kids spent unsupervised weeks drinking and having sex. There is only so much Landon, or Duke, can do when the parents exert enormous pressure on their children without teaching them values."Posted by Alan Allport at April 6, 2006 04:17 AMI take issue only a little with this insightful remark. These parents have in fact taught their children values, values thoroughly internalized by some of the men on the Duke lacrosse team. These values are hyper-competitiveness, materialism as emotional compensation, neglect of non-instrumental human relationships, exclusivity and the fanatic small group bonding that accompanies it, and contempt for the less wealthy and less socially successful.