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Frieda brought her four graham crackers on a saucer and some milk in a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup. She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple's dimpled face. Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn't join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, was myfriend, myuncle, mydaddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heals. So I said, “I like Jane Withers.” (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 2000 p. 19)

This chapter argues that in 2000 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne (UIUC), retained Judge Louis B. Garippo to moderate information gathering and to prepare a three-part report to legitimize findings that would deliberately result in no substantive action. The framework of a legal proceeding – whereby Garippo served as judge and the Board of Trustees as jury in absentia – provided the necessary “nonfictions and metaphors of traditional jurisprudence” (Cohen, 1935, p. 812) to construct vehicles of communication in which the dialogue and subsequent report on Chief Illiniwek would be seen as impartial and objective. That framework resulted in “The Chief Illiniwek Dialogue Report (CIDR),” authored by Judge Garippo and presented to the UIUC Board of Trustees on November 8, 2000.