Fallacies New York Post

CAMPUS COWARDS' SICK DOUBLESPEAK
By THOMAS SOWELL

Brodhead: Joined lynch mob in Duke "rape" case.October 3, 2007 -- AT the very bottom of page 28 of last Sunday's New York Times, right opposite the obituaries, was a news item almost exactly the size of a 3-by-5 card.

It was a fraction of an Associated Press dispatch about Richard Brodhead, president of Duke University, apologizing for "not having better supported" the Duke lacrosse players last year when they were accused of rape.

When this story first broke last year, it was big news not only on the front page of the Times but on the editorial page as well.

The way things were discussed in both places, you could hardly help coming away with the conclusion that the students were guilty as sin. But now that the Duke president apologizes for the way he handled the case, that gets buried on page 28 at the bottom, opposite the obituaries.

Straw Man Arguement: The speaker assumes he knows about the readers and refers to them. As well, he uses descriptive words or figues in this paragraph, that should be better used in poems, or when it is necessary to embellish a piece of writing, such as "guilty as sin", and an article getting "burried" in the newspaper.

In the full Associated Press dispatch, including the part left out by the Times, Richard Brodhead said that he regretted the university's "failure to reach out" to the players under indictment, "causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support."

Brodhead got a standing ovation after this speech at the Duke law school - but to call what he said "spin" would be much too charitable.

Irrelevant Conclusion: The readers would like to know, instead of how much attention did Brodhead receive, what might the Duke students--or their families think about this? How does this affect the Duke School? The speaker reaches a conclusion that is irrelevant.

The issue was never his failure to "support" the students or their families. Universities aren't equipped to determine guilt or innocence. That's why trials are held in courts instead of on campus.

It was none of the university's business to "support" either the students or those who were accusing the students.

This last two short paragraphs show "Red Herring". The speaker is talking about Brodhead's desision, and suddenlt he talks about what universities have and lack.

What Brodhead did was join the campus lynch mob by firing the lacrosse coach, cancelling the rest of the team's season and suspending the students.

Now, after reaching an out-of-court settlement with both the students and the fired coach, Brodhead gets a standing ovation at his own law school for an apology that sidestepped the real issue and might well have been part of the out of court settlement.

Brodhead isn't the only university president who can walk through a sewer and come outsmelling like a rose, at least to those in academia and the media.

Again, Red Herring, because the speaker is about to talk about other cases, rather than focussing on this one, on Duke School.

At Columbia University, President Lee Bollinger got kudos for courage for having Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak on campus. It would "impoverish public debate" to exclude controversial speakers like Ahmadinejad, Bollinger said.

But apparently it didn't "impoverish public debate" to have a representative of the Minuteman organization disrupted and shouted down with impunity at this same Columbia University earlier this year. The "courageous" Bollinger did nothing to punish those students who used storm-trooper tactics to silence a point of view they didn't like.

Sadly, Columbia isn't unique in either its double standards or its double talk. A Harvard dean back in 1987 limited the number of "controversial" outside speakers allowed on campus, on the grounds that it was expensive to provide the extra security needed to prevent disruption or violence.

Since the only speakers who are likely to provoke campus disruption and violence are speakers that left-wing students don't like, this act of preemptive surrender gave campus storm troopers a de facto veto over who can speak on campus.

The real problem on these and other campuses is that no one has to take responsibility. With the power being in the faculty, administrators can evade responsibility, and trustees are not around enough to exercise the ultimate power that is legally theirs.

Moreover, so long as alumni and other donors keep sending money, there is no price to be paid for caving in to the threats of campus ideologues.

The article itself might be some sort of circular reasoning, because the speaker never reaches a stable conclusion, for changing the main topic so much. He talked a little about his personal opinion on Brodheads's choice, but he focused on Brodhead himself more tnan on what he said.

He never talked about the future for Duke's School, or what the community thought about Brodhead's speech.