Duke University is perhaps best known for its very successful men’s basketball program, which is always ranked each year among the best collegiate teams. Unfortunately, a number of Duke faculty members 20 years ago, along with its president, board chairman, and other Duke administrators encouraged a corrupt district attorney to file false rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault charges against three members of its highly-ranked lacrosse team and did everything possible to try to prop up his case.
As I pointed out last month, the lacrosse case exposed lies and corruption with the local Durham, North Carolina, police department, the district attorney’s office, and the establishment news media, but perhaps the biggest offender besides Durham County D.A. Michael Nifong was Duke University itself. In today’s article, we look at some of the more outrageous actions that faculty and administrators took to encourage Nifong to pursue charges that obviously were false.
Duke Moves to the Hard Left
As an academically elite university, Duke’s leadership sought to raise its profile to compete with the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, and other prestigious institutions. But, as KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor explained in Until Proven Innocent, Duke’s leadership decided to build up its faculty not with scholars in the science fields, since that also would have required huge capital investments in labs and other research facilities. Instead, Duke decided to bolster departments in what one might call identity studies, including African Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and other areas of academics that revolved around hiring faculty members who doubled as social activists.
For the most part, these so-called studies departments are geared toward activism, complete with faculty members who are highly paid, face much lower academic requirements and accomplishments to gain tenure as compared with faculty in more traditional areas of study, and are likely to present themselves as victims of racism, sexism, or another “ism.” These departments tend to proliferate in elite institutions like Duke or Harvard because they can afford to hire faculty who negatively affect campus culture but also check the boxes for “diversity.”
(Several years ago, I looked at the academic resumes of some of Duke’s activist faculty and found the lack of serious scholarship to be the norm. Members of the identity studies departments had to meet a much lower set of standards than their faculty counterparts in academic disciplines such as chemistry or economics. For example, one outspoken Duke professor has listed a book for more than 10 years which she claimed was “forthcoming.” It never was published, but she got credit all the same.)
All of this contributes to a campus culture which is designed to create eternal victimhood for women, racial minorities, and gays, lesbians, and transgenders. The loudest voices on campus invariably came from these faculty and student groups and when the accusations against the lacrosse players were made public, these campus groups exploded in rage.
The Duke Faculty, Administration, and the Infamous 88
When the accusations became known, activist faculty and students held a number of campus protests, including the unfurling of a banner that screamed, “Castrate!” Professors called out lacrosse players in class and accused them of being rapists, while activists used Duke’s facilities to put out leaflets denouncing the team. Any faculty member, student, or administrator who even dared raise the question of innocence immediately was shouted down and bullied.
To make matters worse, 88 faculty members, mostly from the identity studies—cultural anthropology, English, and history departments—signed an advertisement taken out in the Duke Chronicle entitled, “What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?” which implied the players were guilty of rape. One of the professors who signed the advertisement even engaged in grade retaliation against two lacrosse players (who had not been charged with rape), which resulted in Duke having to pay large financial settlements to the students involved.
Duke’s administrative leadership, and especially Duke President Richard Brodhead, Duke Board Chairman Robert Steel, and John Burness, Duke’s senior vice president for public affairs, all decided at the beginning to assume guilt. Burness repeatedly disparaged the lacrosse players to the media (off the record, of course), and the administration abandoned the team to the mob. As I wrote in a paper about the lacrosse affair:
When the players complained to Duke administrators about being verbally harassed by faculty members in class, they were told Duke could do nothing about it, even though the harassment clearly violated the standards of Duke’s faculty handbook. To make matters worse, Duke provided Nifong and the police with information about the players in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and then in a sham court hearing in the summer of 2006, attorneys from Duke along with Nifong pretended that no information had been given to the prosecutor.
The father of one of the accused players even offered to give Brodhead a file containing exculpatory evidence to show his son was not guilty of rape, but Brodhead refused, claiming he had to be neutral. However, it was obvious that had Brodhead seen exculpatory evidence, then it would have been much more difficult for him to be publicly denouncing the lacrosse players, as he had done throughout the affair. For Brodhead, taking the “high road” meant mollifying radical leftist faculty and Durham’s ubiquitous political activists instead of seeking the truth.
Duke’s Law School Faculty Presupposes Guilt
One would think that the faculty of Duke’s prestigious law school would have stood up for justice but think again. Members of that faculty not only signed the infamous Chronicle advertisement, but they also wrote articles that claimed the players were guilty even after a lot of exculpatory evidence became publicly known. In other words, Duke’s law faculty decided that proof of innocence should not be accepted when the ideological climate says otherwise. (The lone exception from Duke Law was James Coleman, a black professor who did stand up for the law and regularly denounced Nifong and his methods).
For example, Karla Holloway, an English professor who also taught on the Duke faculty, wrote a guilt-assuming article in 2007 called “Coda: Bodies of Evidence.” Writing in The Scholar and Feminist Online, a Columbia University-sponsored journal, Holloway wrote that, “Justice inevitably has an attendant social construction. And this parallelism means that despite what may be our desire, the seriousness of the matter cannot be finally or fully adjudicated in the courts.” In other words, justice itself is nothing more than a social construct, so even if it turned out the young men had been falsely accused, it didn’t matter because they were socially guilty:
Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger.
She continued:
In nearly every social context that emerged following the team’s crude conduct, innocence and guilt have been assessed through a metric of race and gender. White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.
Unfortunately, when Nifong tried to imprison an important defense witness, Moez Elmostafa, with false charges in the summer of 2006, neither Holloway nor any other faculty member of Duke’s law faculty objected even though Elmostafa “checked all of the boxes” for what Duke faculty members would have considered an “oppressed” person. To say the case exposed the hypocrisy of the Duke faculty would be an understatement, especially given that it was obvious that he was wrongly charged in the first place.
Duke Lacked Academic, Scientific, and Intellectual Integrity
One cannot emphasize enough that the most outspoken members of Duke’s faculty ignored basic science and clearly were not interested in the truth, which speaks volumes about the academic integrity of Duke University. The administration permitted faculty members from the least-productive sectors of the faculty to intimidate, threaten, and bully faculty members of the higher-achieving departments whenever one of them tried to introduce some sanity to the campus discussion.
During that time, I was in touch with several Duke faculty members on different sides of the issue and was allowed to see some of the emails being sent back and forth. One faculty member told me after Roy Cooper publicly declared the accused to be “innocent,” he realized that, at every turn, Duke’s administration—and especially Brodhead—engaged in what he called “slimy” behavior. That could be said of many faculty members as well.
There also were calls for the original 88 to apologize, but, instead, they doubled down on their original actions while making the Orwellian claim that they had never assumed guilt in the first place. As the case wore on and as it became clear even before Cooper’s announcement that the charges were baseless, some Duke faculty in the higher-performing departments found their courage and began to speak out. The economics department announced that they would be happy to have the lacrosse players in their classes, and other faculty elsewhere at Duke responded positively.
However, the damage done was destructive to the foundations of academics itself. Activism has that way of undermining everything else. If people who claim to believe in academic inquiry, then reject DNA evidence because it doesn’t conform to their ideological narratives, then there is no academic inquiry at all. Truth is, as Karla Holloway insisted, just a social construct and whatever one chooses to believe is true, if those beliefs are backed by a “proper” ideology.
As KC Johnson pointed out, defense attorneys asked for a change in venue in part because of the actions of faculty members helping to prejudice the potential jury pool. He wrote: “That the institution’s own faculty could be cited in a change-of-venue motion should deeply shame Duke.” Unfortunately, not even outrageous and dishonest behavior from the faculty and administration could shame that university.
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