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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch

As a non-carer I am still curious: what role (if any) does it play that these are students, not just basketball players, and Duke is a private school of 6,500 and Michigan is a public university four times the size? Would we be horrified that Dartmouth recruits "gentrified" African-American students at the theoretical expense of ghetto (ick) kids, so long as it draws a respectable number of those gentrified kids to its school whether they play basketball or not? Why can't Duke choose to be a Dartmouth in its admissions -- because it plays basketball and owes it to people to put Blue Devil uniforms on the best players it can find? If it's not wrong for the admissions office to do it's not wrong for Coach K to do, right?

In other words, take "players" and change it to "students" and a lot of the air goes out of your complaints. I'm sure most people care about Duke as a basketball-entertainment-creation-device but neither Coach K nor the Duke admissions department is required to agree with that and reach out to students to whom admission would not otherwise be offered. So it comes down to whether Duke has a demographically appropriate black student population, not whether it has a basketball team that has only one "type" of player. I went to an ACC school and while I know there are complaints about the diversity profile of the Duke team I never heard they were grossly out of line with the diversity profile of the schools with which they compete for admissions. And trust me, if I could have found a way to call Duke a bunch of racist assholes I would have jumped at the chance.

I just don't see it as a valid complaint against Duke basketball that it recruits a certain type of player, when that type of player also happens to fit perfectly with an elitist admissions philosophy of the school, for good or for ill -- unless you believe a basketball coach is duty-bound to give a college dorm room to a kid who can play basketball, and the rest of the admissions process is irrelevant to those kids.

All of this is hinged on a belief that Duke's admissions are racially representative. If they're not, Duke can go fuck itself. But "Duke selects for a type of {black} {student} {athlete}" falls apart if it's possible to remove any one of the words in brackets without falsifying the statement.

admissions tend to work with the applications that come through the front door (or web portal). D-1 basketball coaches tend to work with the kids they choose to visit. there are black basketball players in the city of Detroit who have great grades I'm sure. And for all Jalen's feelings the thing that is also true is that if Coach K had recruited Jalen he would have given the team a chance, I bet. or to say it differently, if K offered 4 Jalens a scholarship, 2 would probably take it- but he doesn't get any Jalens: hmmmmm.