via (as is often the case) my morning rounds, LieStoppers has some posts on an article at The Daily Progress about the Nifong Hoax, from the perspective of some of the lacrosse players.  I've been fortunate enough to meet Bo Carrington and so can read his quotes and have them end up in his voice.  Among the most important parts in the story was the following:

Bo Carrington wasn’t wearing anything that suggested he was a lacrosse player. Other than his 6-foot-4, 220-pound frame, the graduate of Charlottesville’s Covenant School looked like any other student walking across campus.

But on that March afternoon in 2006, Carrington was recognized. Not for who he is, but for what seemingly everyone on campus - and people across the whole country, for that matter - assumed him to be.

A group of his peers surrounded him and started shouting: “Tell the police what you know! Why are you protecting these rapists?”

It was no organized protest - just a spontaneous demonstration triggered by nothing more than the midfielder’s presence. Two of his teammates had been charged with rape by a stripper hired for a party at a house leased by members of the squad. The campus was outraged and the entire team was being blamed for misconduct.

Now - how is it that he was recognized, you might ask?  I wonder if the infamous "Vigilante" poster had anything to do with it (ya think?).  It goes to show in a small way just how dangerous that particular piece of propaganda was.  It goes to show that the second paragraph of Cathy Davidson's guest column was, at best, written without a properly researched basis in the reality of the overall campus atmosphere and, at worst, with an ignorance or sense of avoidance of the situation that is inexcusable.  Here's the element that probably generated Vice President Burness' line in the story of:

“We’re sensitive to the fact that [Carrington and Schoeffel] and others believe that an apology is appropriate,” Burness said. “That has not yet been determined to be the position of the university.”

Bo Carrington's experience above, along with the experiences of other members on the team, go to show that the university, through its not having taken down the GoDuke.com pictures in a timely manner after receiving a request to do so, and through its not actively removing the "Vigilante" posters from campus, and allegedly through there being university employees who distributed materials that led to an unsafe and hostile environment for some of our students (for example, handing out various posters and chant sheets, or creating an address list of the lacrosse families, or sending a message to an open forum that a particular student should be discredited if at all possible), did not fulfil its obligations to those students.

As an engineer, a fundamental canon of the Code of Ethics of pretty much every professional organization and engineering honor society I've joined includes the following:

Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public 

Given that, I believe it is only fair that university administrators should live by a code which, in part, reads, "Administrators shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the student body," and when they fail, as they did in this case, they should both apologize for that failure and take the necessary actions to make future mistakes less likely.