Police on SWAT Team, "New Racism," and Duke Sex Scandal

The quick and dirty about what's been going on around theAncient Eight (and some other schools too).

After the police raid of a Yale undergraduate party last week at a New Haven nightclub, students attended a press conference this past Tuesday to respond to the police raid. Even though the police department has defended its actions, New Haven’s mayor,  John DeStefano Jr. said in an interview with the New York Times that the presence of officers in riot gear and SWAT team was “excessive and inappropriate” and “should not have been part” of the inspection.”

“We undertook 16 inspections over the past two weeks, and most went fine and accomplished our mission of enforcing under-age drinking,” DeStefano told The Times. “Clearly, there were some things that could have been better handled Friday night, and this department needs to look at that.”

At Brown, Professor Tricia Rose advocated in a Thursday night lecture the imperative to question the idea of a colorblind society. According to the Brown Daily Herald, Rose argued that “the ideology of color blindness has resulted in a ‘new racism’ that suppresses the study and research of race-specific topics.”

In New York City, Columbia launched on Thursday what the Columbia Daily Spectator calls the “first-ever” Center for Palestine Studies in the United States. Although the University’s Middle East initiative is over 50 years old, the center, created in the honor of former Columbia professor and prominent public intellectual Edward W. Said (who received a Ph.d from Harvard in English literature) is intended to promote Palestine studies in a diverse array of subjects that, according to the Daily Spectator, range from politics to the arts.

In North Carolina, Duke is back in the national spotlight for something related to the sexual practices of its students. This time, however, a 42-slide PowerPoint presentation created by Karen Owen ’10 that details the sexual performances of 13 Duke athletes went viral.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.