The Duke Disaster and the Decline of Higher Education

Future discussions of higher education in America should begin with the book I want to share with you today, but for that very reason, no one who needs to read it will. Written by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007) reads like a fast moving detective story but has the moral impact of a bomb. The fallout from the false rape allegations against members of the Duke University lacrosse team has already had a significant impact in the legal world. Public officials are talking about how to prevent prosecutorial abuse, and District Attorney Mike Nifong has been disbarred. In the media, the Duke case has contributed to a growing disenchantment with national newspapers like the New York Times and, since bloggers and online sites were more on the ball than major newspapers, this case has contributed to the increasing respectability of less official news outlets. In academia, however, I have heard not a word spoken about what kind of measures colleges and universities should take to make sure something like this does not happen again.

Many of the details of the Duke scandal are already well known, but Taylor and Johnson have many keen insights and observations that are worth highlighting. For years, Duke was committed to becoming both an intellectual and athletic powerhouse. Those two goals were bound to contradict each other. Building a stellar program in the natural sciences would have cost a lot of money, given the equipment top scientists need, so it was cheaper for Duke to try to build a stellar program in the humanities. Unfortunately, Duke tried to build its humanities program at just the time that the humanities were mired in leftist assumptions about race and gender. Duke took the easy way of hiring big names in the humanities, but those big names were not necessarily the best people to teach at Duke and live in North Carolina. As Taylor and Johnson note, “They tended to fit into the culture of the South and Durham poorly” (p. 8). So Duke found itself with a large core of very leftist faculty who came to the University in a short period of time. Meanwhile, Duke began building sports teams, but rather than invest in something as expensive as football, Duke decided to invest in teams like lacrosse. Lacrosse teams, however, are just the symbol of white power and privilege that leftist faculty are inclined to despise. The final piece of the puzzle is the way Duke handled student drinking. Throughout these years, Duke was getting a reputation for being a school soaking in booze as well as money. University officials decided to crack down on the drinking by forcing keg parties off campus. Thus students were increasingly renting houses in nearby neighborhoods for the purpose of partying, which incited tensions between town and gown. The scene was set for a party that would bring down the house.

The actual party lasted only for a few minutes. The stripper who later turned on the lacrosse team was too drunk to dance for more than that. Although the evidence that the rape charge was false was clear from the beginning, it took months for that evidence to come to light, thanks to prosecutorial misconduct, an overzealous media, leftist faculty, and cowardly university administrators.

Richard Brodhead, Duke’s President, comes off as a man who will placate the loudest and angriest faculty voices at any cost. Even worse, he seems unable to recognize his complicity in the faculty’s rush to judgment. His stated policy was to let the justice system handle the case—in other words, to be objective and not to interfere—but his condescending moral judgments of the team, his callous refusal to listen to their side of the story, and his refusal to make a single statement disagreeing with the leftist faculty left most people with the impression that he had decided that the players were guilty before they were even tried. Brodhead, the authors conclude, “threw in his lot with the mob” (p. 137). He kept suggesting that something very bad must have happened that night, that the lacrosse team had a pattern of racial problems (it didn’t), and that the rape allegation indicated a campus culture that needed stringent social regulation. “If our students did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree,” he announced. “If they didn’t do it, whatever they did is bad enough” (p. 190). His most decisive action was in firing the lacrosse coach, who was, by all accounts, a pillar of respectability in the community and a role model for his players. Even when he finally reinstated the lacrosse team, he stressed that he was “taking a risk” in doing so (p. 237).

The faculty acted even more reprehensibly. A large number of them signed a full-page ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education defending the stripper. They came to be known as the Group of 88, and their story is the most depressing part of the book. In the midst of a charged atmosphere, they committed themselves to “turning up the volume” and thanked the protesting students for “not waiting” (p. 145). Taylor and Johnson point out that this group included only two professors in math, one in natural science, and none in law. “More than 84 percent described their research interests as related to race, class, or gender (or all three)” (p. 147). “Fully 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty signed the statement, followed by women’s studies (72.2 percent) and cultural anthropology (60 percent)” (p 147). Even after their allegations were discredited, they continued to rationalize their behavior and promote their cause. Karla Holloway considered herself a victim of the whole affair (p. 242). Others said they were victims of “professional liberal-haters” and “right-wing ‘blog hooligans’” (p. 326).

The Group of 88 portrayed the lacrosse players as spoiled sons of privilege and power, even though they were hard workers on and off the field and did not party more than their peers. The faculty made a fair trial in Durham almost impossible. Taylor and Johnson state that, “This appears to be the only case in American history in which a university’s professors had spewn such vitriol against their students as to make it impossible, in the view of defense lawyers, for them to get a fair trial in the vicinity of the university” (p. 305). Fortunately, the three who were charged with rape were privileged enough to have access to powerful (and expensive) lawyers. If they had not been privileged enough to hire the best, they would be sitting in jail right now.

Shockingly, or perhaps predictably, the most strident faculty voices were rewarded for their bigoted rush to judgment. After the storm passed, Brodhead elevated the African and African American Studies Program to departmental status, allowing them to establish a doctoral program, even though their thirteen members had attracted only thirty three majors. Even after more than nine hundred students petitioned the Group of 88 to apologize, none of them did. Indeed, in a report by a Campus Culture Initiative committee, which included several members of the Group of 88, chastised those who opposed the Group of 88 and proposed, as a remedy for racism and sexism, that all Duke students be required to take courses in race, class, and gender differences that are taught primarily by the Group of 88 themselves. The report also recommended the dismantling of fraternities due to their exclusivity but praised “campus organizations that encouraged self-segregation among minority students” (p. 340). In other words, the lesson Duke administrators learned from this rush to judgment was that they should pass harsher judgment on fraternities and white students by imposing more diversity training on the campus.

Conservatives are often portrayed as zealous, dogmatic, and narrow minded, but Taylor and Johnson demonstrate how liberals today more often fall into those categories. Mike Nifong was so convinced of his moral superiority that he pushed this case forward even when it meant that he had to break the law. He was possessed with a self-righteousness so strong that it blinded him to any evidence that contradicted his self-image. He was so bound and determined to do the right thing that he no longer knew what was wrong. Taylor and Johnson also examine what they call “the feminist overkill” in the seventies to the judicial system’s lack of sensitivity to rape victims. The changes the feminists achieved, they document, went too far. “In today’s politically correct world, men accused of rape often face a de facto presumption of guilt that is hard to dispel no matter how strong the evidence of innocence” (p. 373). Feminists wrongly argued that women almost never lie about rape. Numerous studies now document that the rate of lying is somewhere between 9 percent and half of all rape claims. “Terrible as it is for a victim to see a rapist escape punishment, it is far, far worse for an innocent person to be convicted of a sex crime” (p. 372). How many people would agree with that statement today?

Their last chapter examines the assault on excellence in higher education. Diversity experts advise universities to move away from the traditional disciplines toward interdisciplinary topics because, as one expert explained, “scholars and teachers engaged in these studies are also predominantly women and feminists, and men and women from racial/ethnic groups” (p. 394). Diversity advocates are forced to manufacture crises and exaggerate the world’s woes in order to justify their positions and their agendas. They quote a study that shows that the number of self-described liberals or leftists in the academy has increased from 39 percent in 1984 to 72 percent in 2006, with the highest increases in the humanities and social sciences. During this same period, the number of self-identifying liberals or leftists among the general public remained the same. “As a result, by virtually any measurement, the ideological gap between the faculty and the students they teach is wider now than at any other point in American history” (p. 397). Only faculty contempt toward students could account for the malice of the Group of 88. What is really sad is that the Duke scandal could have happened at any university in America, yet administrators continue to reward, promote, and encourage the most leftist voices in university faculties. In a breathtaking defiance of moral responsibility, university officials respond to the blatant lies and obfuscations of the left by giving leftists more faculty power, as if the best way to treat a fire is to throw kerosene on it.

Perhaps one way to understand just how scandalous the Duke story is to imagine the following scenario: A bunch of black basketball players at a great university are accused of raping a white woman. A significant number of faculty and the top administrators conspire to ruin their reputation by spreading rumors about their rowdy behavior. The university president fires the popular and respected coach and cancels the basketball season. Campus vigils call for the most extreme forms of punishment for the players. Even after their innocence is widely known, faculty and university officials continue to call for their prosecution. After the charges are dropped and the prosecutor is disbarred, university officials refuse to admit they did anything wrong and faculty continue to insist that the basketball players were a bad influence on campus. Some even suggest that they “had it coming.” Finally, a book is written that documents university behavior more outrageous than anyone could have suspected. Do you think anybody on America’s campuses would be talking about it?

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