No Class Issue in Coverage of Brown Rape Case?
April 15, 2010
To call Richard Dresdale a prominent Brown alumnus would be an understatement. Richard Dresdale is Co-founder and Managing Director of Fenway Partners - a 2.1-billion-dollar private equity fund. He is the kind of man who can afford to make $118,000 in campaign contributions - in 2008 alone.
When Richard Dresdale heard that his daughter claimed to have been raped, he behaved as all of us would have: He was outraged. He picked up the phone. He made calls. He wanted the rapist punished.
That it seems almost certain that his daughter fabricated the rape accusation is irrelevant. Why would a father doubt his daughter's word? Mr. Dresdale's conduct is not just understandable - it's totally excusable.
Yet what Brown University is inexcusable. Going against everything it teaches, Brown subordinated reason to emotion:
A former student has sued Brown University in federal court, saying university officials interfered with his efforts to clear his name after another student, the daughter of a prominent Brown alumnus and donor, accused him of rape.
In documents unsealed Monday, the former student, William McCormick III, said the university had failed to follow its own disciplinary policies and sent him home to Wisconsin after the woman’s father made calls to top university officials.
On the same day that Mr. Dresdale called Brown, five Brown Deans ordered the falsely-accused student into an enclosed room. They surrounded him. They handed him a plane ticket, and told him to go home.
They did not investigate the rape accusation. They did not attempt to substantiate the accusation. They did not merely suspend the student for a semester pending an investigation. They sent the farm boy back to Wisconsin - where he belonged.
Unlike Richard Dresdale, William McCormick III was poor. He was attending Brown on an academic scholarship. While earning straight-As, he was also a star wrestler. He could not have afforded to attend Brown University without substantial financial aid.
Didn't this poor boy get kicked out of college, ultimately, for not belonging to the right social class? If William McCormick's father had been Richard Dresdale, does anyone doubt that the case would have been handled differently?
Why didn't the New York Times focus on the unfair treatment this poor boy received? Isn't it unfair when the super rich have poor people expelled without due process - and without any good cause at all?
There's a reason that the Times did not touch the class issue: To the liberal media, a person can commit no greater crime than being born white and male. William McCormick III thus received the treatment he deserved.