Oh Denison!
I went to Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in the 1970’s. It was a wonderful, liberal arts institution; I learned a lot, and had a great experience there. It was also a very serious “party” school.
That point was made clear from the beginning. At the June Freshmen Orientation, I walked into the lobby of my future dorm, Crawford Hall. I was seventeen, two weeks off of the high school graduation stage, accompanied by my parents. An eager Denison sophomore met us there, welcomed us, and pointed in the direction of the beer keg in the center of the room.
Study Hard, Play Hard
That was Denison; study hard, play hard. As a freshman I was in the Student Senate. We spent $22000 a year on beer for the student body. You just had to sign a “petition” with twenty students, and you got a keg for your dorm floor. My resident advisor, the senior “in charge” of “Club Crawford” (somewhere there’s a T-Shirt) let everyone know on Thursday he was making a “liquor run” into Newark: he was twenty-one, place your order.
Not surprisingly, there were nights when things got a little “crazy” up on the hill. Those nights always brought out “those guys.” There was the “naked guy” who always ended up in the East Quad with no clothes on, the “climbing guy” who tried to get to the third floor on the outside of the building, the “screaming guy” who, well, you can figure it out. They all were young, maybe as old as twenty-one; and they did things that they probably aren’t so proud of now.
To quote an infamous Supreme Court Justice, I too “liked beer.” After a long session of second floor Crawford, five of us determined that what the September night needed was traveling Christmas carolers. We wandered campus, serenading through the girls dorms, getting everyone prematurely in the spirit.
Bet on the Freshmen
During my three years on campus, there was a lot of that kind of activity, but other than some shading of the then-current drinking laws, no crimes were committed. That wasn’t true for everyone there. And, with other upper-classmen who lived in Crawford instead of joining a fraternity, we had a betting pool on the incoming freshmen. We knew, some would play so hard, they wouldn’t make the second semester.
We meant that they would drink their way out of school. In the first two weeks, you could see who was out of control and who was not. But there were more serious consequences for a few. There were alcohol related student deaths each year I was on campus, it was only after I graduated that the institution began to face up to the issue.
Yale Too
It seems that Yale University in the early 1980’s was similar: study hard, play hard. It also seems that Yale had a “penis guy,” the partier who seemed to always consume so much beer that he ended up revealing himself. And that guy crossed the “legal” line, time and time again, shoving his “member” into the hands and faces of co-eds who were perhaps as drunk as he was.
His name is Brett Kavanaugh, the newest member of the United States Supreme Court. His actions are documented in a new book coming out, and more importantly, the government cover-up of those actions in the past two years.
I get that things happened when we were younger, but youth doesn’t excuse felonies. And “youthful indiscretions” that actually were sexual assaults shouldn’t get a pass. Even in the 1970’s we knew the difference between pranks and attacks, between drunken foolishness and felonies.
Lying Today
It’s almost 2020, and lying is still lying. What happened back then shouldn’t be lied away by the Justice, and the powerful movement that was behind his nomination.
Kavanaugh represented the fifth and deciding vote on the Court. As we are now seeing, the Supreme Court has placed itself firmly in the Trump camp, interpreting statutes in novel ways to back the President’s view. Precedence is worth less, ideology seems to be worth all.
I would suspect that retiring Justice Kennedy strongly supported Kavanaugh’s nomination. And I believe that Kavanaugh’s financial difficulties were “cleaned up” before the nomination process began. But I don’t think his backers knew about the “penis guy” from Georgetown Prep and Yale. They were as surprised as the rest of the nation. Kavanaugh must have hoped that “what happened in New Haven, stayed in New Haven.”
It did not. But the FBI was told NOT to follow investigative leads. The witnesses were discredited, and the subject was changed. We even know when that decision was made; at the “lunch break” of Dr. Blasey-Ford’s testimony. In the morning she was questioned by the “guest counsel;” a female Arizona prosecutor, brought in to do the “dirty work” of discrediting the witness. But the “guest” didn’t, instead she did what a prosecutor should do, search for the facts.
Senator Lindsey Graham led the charge after lunch, removing the “guest counsel” and launching a screaming diatribe against the investigation and the opposing Party. His fellow Republican Senators picked up the mantle, ignored the witness, and muddled the facts. They moved the hearing to an attack on the Democrats, rather than an examination of Kavanaugh’s youthful actions.
Defending the Indefensible
So Brett Kavanaugh is a member of the Supreme Court, and like many others in the Trump Administration, he has the constant stink of scandal. This latest research has raised all the old questions again, and raised new concerns. The Senators; McConnell, Graham and Grassley, made the call. They chose to cover Kavanaugh’s record, rather than acknowledge his prior bad acts, and move onto a more suitable candidate.
They must defend him now. And, should the Senate majority shift to the Democrats, they will really have to defend him after 2020. Kavanaugh’s seat on the Court represents the vulnerability of the “Trump Majority.” They have gone “all-in” on the “penis guy” from Yale, and now they will have to defend him for decades: good luck with that!
