Getting Their Irish Up
Bill McGurn ·
March 26, 2012 at 10:05pm
Melinda Henneberger, who graduated the same year I did from Notre Dame, has a piece at the National Catholic Reporter on the tragic case of Lizzie Seeberg. Lizzie was a student at Saint Mary's College across the street from ND, who reported a sexual assault by a football player after two other students left them alone there. When she took her own life two weeks later, campus police still had not interviewed the player, and the handling of the aftermath -- not least of all Miss Seeberg's loyal ND family -- did not redound to the university's glory. And some of it is downright ugly.
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Aug '10
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that football is king at ND. As the article mentions, there was a very good receiver named Michael Floyd who played for ND and got three DUIs but never missed a game nor was he punished in any meaningful way.
To be sure, ND is no better or worse than most other major college football programs...but shouldn't it be?
Edited on March 26, 2012 at 11:03pmMay '10
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Why campus police? Why not go to real police, who do not owe their paychecks to the university?
May '11
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
I have oftened wondered what the reaction at my alma mater would have been if basketball players were accussed of rape rather than rich lacrosse players.
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Once upon a time -- say, eighty-two years ago when my father was a senior there -- Notre Dame may have been a place in which the virtues were the foremost concern. Now it is just another amoral, impersonal corporation, plotting every move with an eye to its own self-preservation and aggrandizement. My experience with universities suggests to me that there is an inverse relationship between moralizing rhetoric and the sordid reality. Look at Penn State.
Feb '12
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
ND must be one of the few remaining schools that continues to have all-male and all-female dorms. But they allow girls to be in the boys' rooms and vice versa, at least until some curfew. Maybe this needs to end. Not that it would stop sexual assaults from happening, but it would reduce the opportunity.
As an old fashioned Catholic girl, I never would go to a boy's dorm room. My Mom taught me it was asking for trouble.
Nov '10
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
The problem in the sports culture starts much sooner; I know of high school football players who have had felonies buried because they had good arms. That works until the system no longer has any use for them and they are discarded, becoming victims themselves.
Jun '10
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Comments by ND alumnus, Michael Voris:
The Notre Dame 88 (May 31, 2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEOMijcnHBM
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Maureen
I would tell my girls to do the same. In Miss Seeberg's case, however, she did not go to the room alone. She went with a girlfriend and another guy -- who bugged out on her. That seemed to have surprised her.
Also, if you go to the National Catholic Reporter comments, interesting comment from someone who seems to know exactly what medications Miss Seeberg was taking. As befits the pattern, he posts anonymously. That too has been a part of this story. All sorts of people opining about a dead girl and her medication -- but without the guts or class to at least put their names to it.
May '11
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Bill, The comments that etoiledunord linked to are devastating and I fear accurate. I assume you have some influence with the university. Do you feel that Notre Dame is an atheistic instituion in its actions and what do you think will come of this?
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
I have now read Melinda Henneberger's article twice in its entirety, and I have worked my way through the comments as well (most of which, alas, reflect the weirdness of the readership of The National Catholic Reporter). That having been said, the conduct of Father John Jenkins, of some of the other priests at Notre Dame, of the campus police, and of the bigtime Chicago lawyer the university has hired is reprehensible in the extreme. I could not help thinking about what happened at Duke. Institutions and those who lead them tend to be amoral. When faced with something that seems threatening, they tend to be cold, calculating, and ruthless. Behind all the high-minded talk and the pious posturing, there is emptiness.
Feb '12
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
Bill--yes, she went with friends; so what? Don't go under any circumstances. When they left, why didn't she? If anything good can come from this, maybe we can have a return to old fashioned advice from Moms to their daughters. And ND can make dorm rooms off-limits to the opposite sex at all times.
Re: Getting Their Irish Up
As far as I can tell, the key fact here is that the Notre Dame campus police dropped the ball -- as, it seems, they customarily do when athletes are involved. Then, when the young lady committed suicide, Father John Jenkins lawyered up and the institution found itself obliged to defend the football player as an innocent and to soil the young lady's reputation. It reminds me of what the Clinton administration tried to do in the case of Monica Lewinsky. And the Clintons would have succeeded had Lewinsky not kept the semen-stained dress.
There is a tension -- wonderfully depicted in the movie True Confessions -- between the role of Catholic clergymen in positions of authority as pastors and their role as businessmen managing large enterprises. This is very much like the Penn State story where, in and after 1998, protecting the enterprise (the football program) took precedence over the protection of young boys.
As in the case of the Catholic bishops who covered up the crimes of priestly predators and as in the case of Penn State, the only way to force the authorities at Notre Dame to air their dirty linen would be through the courts.