Duke's Tenured Vigilantes (DukeLax)

Duke's Tenured Vigilantes The scandalous rush to judgment in the lacrosse "rape" case. by Charlotte Allen 01/29/2007, Volume 012, Issue 19

The Duke University "lacrosse rape case" is all but over. On Friday, January 12, the prosecutor, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, petitioned the North Carolina attorney general's office to be recused from the case, and the office complied, appointing a pair of special prosecutors to take over. Nifong's recusal, it is widely assumed, paves the way for the dismissal of all remaining charges against the three defendants--suspended (but recently reinstated) Duke sophomores and lacrosse team members Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, and a team co-captain, David Evans, who graduated last year--owing to a complete lack of physical, forensic, and credible testimonial evidence linking the three to any sexual or other violent crimes.

Nifong's resignation from the case followed on the heels of two other events. One was an extended interview with the alleged victim conducted by one of Nifong's investigators on December 21--the first time anyone from the district attorney's office had talked to the accuser since Nifong announced he was personally taking over the case from the Durham police on Monday, March 27, 2006. That was exactly two weeks after the accuser, an African-American woman then 27, first said she had been sexually attacked by white members of the Duke men's lacrosse team at around midnight, the night of March 13-14.

During her December 21 interview with prosecutors, the accuser offered either the seventh or the twelfth (depending on how you count) significantly different version of the story she had been telling medical personnel, police officers, and news reporters about what happened after she, an employee of a Durham escort service, showed up at about 11:30 P.M. on March 13 to do some stripping and exotic dancing for a party at a Durham house rented by Evans and two other Duke lacrosse captains. This time around, the accuser, contradicting all her earlier accounts, said she could not remember whether she had actually been penetrated vaginally by the penis of any of the three lacrosse players whom she had identified as her assailants, which prompted Nifong to drop the rape charges the following day (charges of sexual assault, an equally grave felony, and kidnapping still stand against all three as of this writing). The accuser also altered her story about who had attacked her and when, now maintaining that Seligmann, then age 20, had merely held her leg and looked on while the other two, 19-year-old Finnerty and 23-year-old Evans, attacked her orally, anally, and vaginally in one of the house bathrooms. Earlier she had insisted that all three--or perhaps as many as four, five, or even 20 lacrosse players--had participated in the sexual assault as well as kicking, beating, and attempting to strangle her.

Her descriptions of her assailants' appearances also changed on December 21, apparently so as to accommodate the lanky, six-foot-three Finnerty; she had earlier described all three as chubby or heavyset and of medium height. Finally, she moved the time of the alleged assault a half-hour backwards, to around 11:30 on the night of March 13, which could get around Seligmann's airtight alibi of cell-phone, taxicab, and ATM records indicating he had left the house before the midnight hour at which she had previously maintained that the gang rape occurred.

The other event that undoubtedly inspired Nifong to withdraw from the case was a mid-December revelation under oath by Brian Meehan, head of a private testing laboratory under contract with the Durham district attorney's office. Meehan revealed that DNA samples from at least five different unidentified men had been collected from the underwear, pubic hair, and private parts of the accuser during a medical examination at Duke University's hospital shortly after the alleged gang assault, and that none of that DNA matched Seligmann, Finnerty, Evans, or any other previously tested member of the lacrosse team. Meehan testified--and also told 60 Minutes for their January 14 broadcast--that he, with some input from Nifong, had deliberately left these results out of a lab report issued on May 12, three and a half weeks after the April 17 indictment of Seligmann and Finnerty (Evans was indicted on May 15, the day after he graduated). A prosecutor's deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant (in this case, evidence that would account for the mild swelling around her vagina that a nurse at the Duke hospital had reported, and would also impeach her statement that she had not had sexual relations for at least a week before the alleged assault) violates Durham and North Carolina procedural rules and possibly the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process in criminal cases.

Nifong may also face sanctions from the North Carolina State Bar for other ethically debatable conduct: obtaining a court order for all 46 white members of the 47-man Duke lacrosse team on March 23 to submit to DNA testing, even though he knew by then that the accuser had not been able to identify a single one of them as a suspect in two separate police photo lineups (the DNA tests exonerated all 46); for ordering a third photo lineup on April 4 after the first two had failed, which the accuser was told consisted only of pictures of lacrosse players (it was from this lineup that she picked out Seligmann, Finnerty, and Evans); and for publicly denouncing members of the lacrosse team as "hooligans," insisting--without bothering to interview his star witness--that "gang-like rape activity" had occurred, and urging those who had attended the party to "come forward" and break the "stone wall of silence" with which they were supposedly covering up a gross crime. Nifong seemed not to have read his own police reports, in which Kim Roberts, a second woman hired from the escort service that night (and who also changed her story several times), called the accuser's rape allegations "a crock."

Nifong, courting Durham's substantial black vote in a May 2 Democratic primary for reelection as district attorney (a primary that he won handily, as well as the election itself), also played the race card, pointing out that "racial slurs and general racial hostility" had accompanied the alleged attack. Indeed, there had been two racial epithets let loose that night, as the accuser and Roberts left the party after dancing for only a few minutes (according to Roberts) because the accuser, paid $400 in advance, declined to perform, whether because she was insulted by crude remarks made by the partygoers, because she was too drunk to dance when she got there, or because she had combined alcohol with a prescription muscle relaxant she had taken earlier in the day. As the two women departed, one lacrosse player shouted the n-word at Roberts and another yelled, "Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!"--a riff on a Chris Rock routine that the shouter undoubtedly thought was funny. Everyone would agree that both remarks were unacceptable, but there is no evidence that either Finnerty or Evans made either of them, and Seligmann was already elsewhere, as electronic records showed.

Mike Nifong's handling of the case was clearly outrageous. But he would probably not have gone so far, indeed would not have dared to go so far, had he not been egged on by two other groups that rushed just as quickly to judge the three accused young men guilty of gross and racially motivated carnal violence. Despite the repeated attempts by the three to clear themselves, a substantial and vocal percentage--about one-fifth--of the Duke University arts and sciences faculty and nearly all of the mainstream print media in America quickly organized themselves into a hanging party. Throughout the spring of 2006 and indeed well into the late summer, Nifong had the nearly unanimous backing of this country's (and especially Duke's) intellectual elite as he explored his lurid theories of sexual predation and racist stonewalling.

"They fed off each other," said Steven Baldwin, a Duke chemistry professor who finally broke his faculty colleagues' own wall of silence on October 24, publishing a letter in the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, denouncing his fellow professors for what he called their "shameful" treatment of Seligmann and Finnerty and rebuking the Duke administration for having "disowned its lacrosse-playing student athletes." In April, Duke president and English professor Richard Brodhead had abruptly suspended not only Seligmann and Finnerty but also the remainder of the Duke lacrosse season, plus a third player, Ryan McFadyen (also recently reinstated), who had nothing to do with the alleged assault but had made the mistake of sending an email to his teammates on the early morning of March 14 describing a plan to "kill" and "skin" some "strippers" in his dorm room (like the "cotton shirt" remark, this was another tasteless joke, parodying Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho). That same day, April 5, Brodhead told the lacrosse team's coach, Michael Pressler, that he had until the end of the day to leave campus for good.

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "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."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege. Nonetheless, in the Duke lacrosse case the theorists manufactured a metanarrative of their own, based upon the fact that Durham, North Carolina, is in the South, and the alleged assailants happened to be white males from families wealthy enough to afford Duke's tuition, while their alleged victim was an impoverished black woman who, as she told the Raleigh News and Observer in a credulous profile of her published on March 25, was stripping only to support her two children and to pay her tuition as a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black state college in Durham that is considerably less prestigious than Duke. All the symbolic elements of a juicy race/gender/class/white-male-privilege yarn were present. The theorists went to town.

The metanarrative they came up with was three parts Mandingo and one part Josephine Baker: rich white plantation owners and their scions lusting after tawny-skinned beauties and concocting fantasies of their outsize sexual appetites so as to rape, abuse, and prostitute them with impunity. It mattered little that all three accused lacrosse players hailed from the Northeast, or that there have been few, if any, actual incidents of gang rapes of black women by wealthy white men during the last 40 years. Karla Holloway's online essay was replete with imagery derived from this lurid antebellum template. She described the accuser and her fellow stripper as "kneeling" in "service to" white male "presumption of privilege," and as "bodies available for taunt and tirade, whim and whisper" in "the subaltern spaces of university life and culture." On April 13, Wahneema Lubiano, a Duke literature professor, wrote in another online article, "I understand the impulse of those outraged and who see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus."

The academic-speak of Lubiano and Holloway was undoubtedly a bit arcane for the average reader, but there were plenty of news reporters and commentators to translate the pair's concepts into plain English. On April 22, Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick penned what read like a pop version of Lubiano: "The Duke lacrosse team's rape scandal cuts too deeply into this country's most tender places: race and class and gender." Lithwick alluded to "[m]ounds and mounds of significant physical evidence" that a rape had occurred (this was after the meager results of the accuser's medical examination had been publicized as well as the negative DNA tests for the lacrosse team) and maintained that anyone who believed the players were innocent had a "creepy closet under the stairs" of his brain. Lithwick's position was that the facts of the case were essentially unknowable, as though this were Rashomon and not a matter of whether a grave felony had occurred that could send three young men to prison.

Following just behind Lithwick was Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post on April 25. "[I]t's impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries," Robinson wrote. He continued: "The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination--all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave." He characterized Duke as a hotbed of "preppy privilege" and referred to the accuser as "the victim," whose main mistake had been choosing outcall stripping as a profession. On May 24, another Washington Post writer, Lynne Duke, weighed in with yet more Robinson-style rhetoric: "In the sordid but contested details of the case, African-American women have heard echoes of a history of some white men sexually abusing black women--and a stereotype of black women as hypersexual beings and thus fair game." Like Lithwick, Lynne Duke placed great stock in the supposed results of the accuser's medical examination, which even then were known to be ambiguous.

This race/gender/class/white-male-privilege scenario that the press so eagerly bought into was supplemented by another animus that plagued several key Duke faculty members: a deep antipathy to the school's athletic programs--especially the lacrosse program, typically peopled by the graduates of exclusive prep schools who exemplify "white privilege" to the program's critics--and to the student-athletes who participate in them. The News & Observer article of March 25 that featured the uncritical interview with the accuser ("Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal") also quoted Paul Haagen, a Duke sports-law professor, stating that athletes who participated in "helmet sports" such as football, hockey, and lacrosse ("sports of violence" was Haagen's other term) were highly prone to violence against women. A Duke English professor, Houston Baker (who has since moved on to Vanderbilt), picked up the theme in a March 29 public letter to Duke's provost, Peter Lange: "How many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege?" Calling for the immediate dismissal from the university of the entire lacrosse team and its coaches, Baker characterized the events of March 13-14 as "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." On March 31, Duke history professor William Chafe wrote an op-ed in the Chronicle declaring that "sex and race have always interacted in a vicious chemistry of power, privilege, and control" and comparing the behavior of the lacrosse team to the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, a visiting black teenager from Chicago who might have whistled at a white woman.

Another Duke historian, Peter Wood, and Orin Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology, began expressing hope that Duke would drop its preppie-ridden lacrosse program permanently and perhaps even withdraw from Division I competition altogether, according to a story by Peter Boyer in the September 4 New Yorker. In a June interview with an alternative newspaper, Wood characterized Duke's lacrosse players as "cynical, arrogant, callous, dismissive--you could almost say openly hostile." According to Boyer, when Wood had received a negative evaluation from a student for a course he taught in 2004, he concluded that it had to have come from one of the ten lacrosse players taking the course. Wood also confided to Boyer salacious details of a booze-fueled and indisputably vulgar campus "hook-up" culture of casual sex and freewheeling parties among Duke's athletes and fraternity jocks that could have been torn from the pages of Tom Wolfe's Duke roman à clef I Am Charlotte Simmons. That novel had been pooh-poohed by most of the intellectual elite as the voyeuristic fantasies of an un-hip old man when it was published in 2004, but by 2006 many members of the Duke faculty, including Wood, were parroting its observations. As in Wolfe's novel, the good-looking Duke co-eds who attached themselves to lacrosse players (their campus nickname was "lacrosstitutes") were at the very apex of the Duke female hierarchy.

Karla Holloway's online article similarly called for unspecified curtailments in the Duke athletic programs. "[S]ports reinforces exactly those behaviors of entitlement which have been and can be so abusive to women and girls and those 'othered' by their sports' history of membership," she wrote. Holloway also scolded the Duke women's lacrosse team for showing solidarity with the accused men by wearing their jersey numbers on their sweatbands during a playoff game.

As might be expected, the press took up the anti-lacrosse meme as well, showering hostile attention on what had been previously regarded as a niche sport. On March 30, Baltimore Sun sports columnist David Steele described lacrosse as "a sport of privilege played by children of privilege and supported by families of privilege" and hinted that the Duke team ought to apologize en masse to the stripper-accuser. In a March 31 piece titled "Bonded in Barbarity," New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts wrote: "At the intersection of entitlement and enablement, there is Duke University, virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside. . . . The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke's lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings." Roberts accused the team members of maintaining a "code of silence" to cover up the alleged crime.

On April 23, Fox News columnist Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of Southern California, wrote an article titled "Why Would Accuser in Duke Rape Case Lie?" Seeming to channel Nifong (and also Jesse Jackson, who had entered the fray to offer the accuser a full scholarship to continue her studies at North Carolina Central), Estrich harped on the theme of stonewalling and wondered why no lacrosse parent had said to her son, "you go in there and tell the police the truth about what happened." It is hard to believe that Estrich was not aware by that date of Seligmann's airtight alibi, the procedurally flawed April 4 photo lineup, the negative DNA results for the 46 players (those were released on April 10), and repeated efforts by lawyers for the accused to present Nifong with evidence of their clients' innocence, including an April 18 meeting with Seligmann's attorney that Nifong curtly cut short. Instead, Estrich, taking an odd stance for a professor whose specialty is criminal law, castigated the three young men for having the audacity to "hire . . . lawyers." The purpose of this exercise of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel was "to trash the victim and the prosecutor," she declared.

Newsweek had this to say about the lacrosse team in a May 1 story: "Strutting lacrosse players are a distinctive and familiar breed on elite campuses along the Eastern Seaboard. Because the game until recently was played mostly at prep schools and in upper-middle-class communities on New York's Long Island and outside Baltimore, the players tend to be at once macho and entitled, a sometimes unfortunate combination."

One likely reason for the speed and enthusiasm with which members of the Duke faculty and the media produced their morality play that simultaneously demonized lacrosse, wealth, the white race, the South, and the male sex was that it offered something otherwise missing in Nifong's case: a motive for the players, whose time-dated photographs at the March 13-14 party show them sitting torpidly on couches in the house living room, to rise suddenly in a state of power-drunk frenzy and commit gruesome acts of sexual violence. Means and opportunity were presumably there that night, but why would these "macho and entitled" young athletes who could have any Duke "lacrosstitute" of their choice free of charge, or, given their parents' money, pay for a real prostitute if they wanted to, bother with rape?

The race/gender/class/male privilege scenario also absolved its promulgators of having to consider the fact that the evidence of the players' guilt was flimsy from the outset and grew flimsier as each day passed. Indeed, Lubiano, in her online article, dismissed the whole idea of evidence--and thus legal guilt or innocence--as just another set of socially constructed "narratives" to be deconstructed by her. The accused were apparently guilty by reason of their "dominant" social position, which made them "perfect offenders" in Lubiano's eyes.

Not surprisingly then, some 88 Duke faculty members, including Holloway, Baker, and Chafe, signed a full-page advertisement drafted by Lubiano and published in the Chronicle on April 6. The "listening statement," as they called it, did not exactly endorse Nifong's confident assertions of criminal activity and guilt. What the ad did endorse was a series of campus demonstrations in late March and early April at which Duke students, outside groups such as the New Black Panthers, and (reportedly) some members of the Duke faculty had shouted "rapists" and "time to confess," hurled death threats, banged on pots outside lacrosse players' residences at early-morning hours, and distributed "Wanted" posters bearing the photographs of all 46 white lacrosse players. "To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard," the ad read. It also stated: "These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and to themselves." That suggested the 88 signers believed the accuser's story.

The faculty ad, together with such other faculty phenomena as Baker's letter and Chafe's op-ed, undoubtedly contributed to Duke president Richard Brodhead's impulsive and abrupt treatment of everyone at the university who might have had anything to do with either lacrosse or the March 13-14 party: firing the coach, canceling the season, suspending McFadyen over his vile email, suspending Seligmann and Finnerty after their indictments without meeting with either, and seeming to disbelieve the word of the lacrosse captains (including Evans), who had met with him on March 28 and assured him that they had fully cooperated with the police and that no sexual assault had taken place at the party. As former Harvard president Larry Summers learned to his chagrin in 2005, a college president courts big trouble by trying to buck a radicalized arts and sciences faculty. Furthermore, Brodhead seemed to be rewarding the "Group of 88" for its "thank you" ad in the Chronicle, setting up a "Campus Culture Initiative" to investigate racism and sexism at Duke on May 5 and appointing two of the ad's signers, Karla Holloway and anthropology professor Anne Allison, to chair two of its four committees and Peter Wood to chair a third.

"There just wasn't anything clear in Brodhead's statements that we were going to believe our own students," said Michael Gustafson, a Duke engineering professor who has criticized the university's handling of the March 13-14 incident. "There was obviously conduct with which Duke did not agree--parties with underage consumption of alcohol, hiring strippers, and if that was the whole story, then Brodhead was absolutely right to condemn it. The problem comes into play when there's a rape allegation. There was never a clear distinction drawn between those incidents and rape, so there was never a clear sense that the students were innocent until proven guilty."

As the summer progressed, evidence of that innocence mounted: Witnesses attested to the accuser's erratic behavior before and after the alleged crime, and her history of never-proven accusations of violence and gang rape. In June a faculty committee commissioned by Brodhead to investigate the lacrosse team and headed by Duke law professor James Coleman issued its report. The 25-page document found no evidence of racism or sexism on the part of team members and found both their academic performance and their off-campus behavior to be generally exemplary (Wood turned out to be the only one of ten surveyed pro fessors who had a problem with lacrosse players). "By all accounts, the lacrosse players are a cohesive, hard working, disciplined, and respectful athletic team," the report stated. What problems there were that had resulted in disciplinary citations by Duke centered around alcohol: underage drinking, booze in dorm rooms, noise, public urination, and on one occasion, stealing a pizza--but in that respect, the report found that lacrosse players were indistinguishable from the Duke undergraduate population in general. On June 13, Coleman, a criminal-law specialist, called for a special prosecutor to replace Nifong on the case. "It's unusual [for a prosecutor early in an investigation] to state that a crime occurred and that a group of people was responsible for it," Coleman told me. "That led to the assumption by a lot of people that a rape had occurred and that the accused were not cooperating with the police. That's why I was so outraged."

Nonetheless, news articles and columns continued to flow from the mainstream media dissecting the accused players' "privileged" backgrounds and the lush green lawns in front of their parents' suburban houses. Finnerty and two former prep-school classmates had previously been arrested for simple assault in a November 5, 2005, brawl outside a Washington, D.C., bar. It was the kind of first-time offense that usually results in a quick guilty plea plus community service (that was how his friends' cases were resolved), but because of his indictment in North Carolina, Finnerty was obliged to stand trial in order to be convicted (and placed on supervised probation). In a July 13 column, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher mocked the "battalions of lawyers" hired by Finnerty's family and the "upstanding young gentlemen in their blue blazers and pressed khakis" who stood as character witnesses for him. Fisher suggested that the bar fight "does open a window onto a larger truth" about Finnerty's propensity to "find fun in tormenting the innocent." (In a telephone interview, Fisher denied that he had been referring to the Duke sexual assault case.)

On June 27, washingtonpost.com law columnist Andrew Cohen excoriated some of his fellow journalists for reporting criticisms of Nifong's handling of the case (Newsweek by then had done an about-face and was openly skeptical of the rape charges). "I suspect race and money and access to the media have a lot to do with it," Cohen wrote. As late as August 25, the New York Times carried a front-page story parroting an ex post facto memorandum prepared by a Durham police officer at Nifong's request that detailed numerous injuries allegedly inflicted on the accuser that contradicted the contemporaneous reports of medical personnel and other police. That story was ripped to shreds a few days later in Slate by Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal. Taylor, along with Rush Limbaugh and a handful of bloggers--notably Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson and La Shawn Barber, an African-American woman--were nearly the only members of the media to express skepticism about the accuser's story from the outset.

Eventually, and especially after an October 15 episode of 60 Minutes showed a video of the accuser pole-dancing at a club a week after her supposed trauma, a handful of news commentators admitted they had rushed to judgment. On December 18, after Nifong dismissed the rape charges, Susan Estrich reversed herself and called for his removal from the case. Suddenly, it would seem, Estrich had discovered that the April 4 photo lineup procedures had been "unduly suggestive" and that the decision to indict the three players had been made before the results of the DNA tests on the victim's person were in. In an email, Estrich blamed Nifong for misleading outsiders and taking advantage of a disturbed woman who, "liar though she may be, is also a victim."

Lacrosse is now back at Duke, a group of Duke economics professors have signed a statement supporting Brodhead's decision to rescind the suspensions of Finnerty and Seligmann (the university had quietly changed those suspensions to less opprobrious administrative leaves at the end of the summer), and a D.C. judge vacated Finnerty's assault conviction right after Nifong dropped the rape charges. Neither Finnerty nor Seligmann is back on campus, however, and one very large issue still lurks: an angry and unrepentant Group of 88 on the Duke arts and sciences faculty.

Karla Holloway resigned her position as chairman of the Campus Culture Initiative's race committee to protest the re-admission of the two players. One of the signers, Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson, published an op-ed in the News & Observer on January 5 that was sharply critical of that convenient scapegoat, Mike Nifong, but she mostly blamed "right-wing 'blog hooligans'" for trying to make her and the other signers look as though they had prejudged the lacrosse players. Tossing in a few red herrings, Davidson complained that the real "social disaster" in the Duke case was that "18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line" and "women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's." Plus, we don't have "national health care or affordable childcare," Davidson wrote.

Other signers of the ad may be more worried. One of them, political science visiting professor Kim Curtis, has been sued by Kyle Dowd, a 2006 Duke graduate who alleges he got an F in her class after she discovered he was a lacrosse player (the university later upped the grade to a D, claiming a calculation error; Curtis did not respond to an email requesting a comment). Another signer, Duke philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg, explained in news interviews that he had signed the ad only to protest underage drinking at Duke and the hiring of strippers by students "when they could get as much hookup as they wanted from rich and attractive Duke coeds." Yet on January 17, several members of the Group of 88 published an open letter on the Internet, a defiant je ne regrette rien: "There have been public calls to the authors to retract the ad or apologize for it, as well as calls for action against them and attacks on their character. We reject all of these."

The week before, Brodhead had issued a "letter to the Duke community" that seemed to attempt to mollify the university's critics (including many alumni) who had criticized his peremptory actions against Finnerty and Seligmann. He described suspension as "not a disciplinary measure." Yet the letter seemed even more intent on placating the arts and sciences faculty, whom he described as victims of "blogs and emails" that attacked them "in highly repugnant and vicious terms." Brodhead described the sexual-assault allegations as having raised "troubling questions about sexual violence and racial subjugation." It was back to business as usual at Duke, back to the business of metanarratives.

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/

Durham needs God

Now would be a good time to erect a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments and place it in front of the Durham County Courthouse. Can it be any more apparent that without God's law to inspire us, our justice system becomes a reflection of our own prejudices resulting in a vicious cycle of injustice?

Paula Mann
Durham
January 22, 2007

The wrong choice?

Last November, the voters of Durham County were given a choice of candidates for the job of district attorney: a left-wing, liberal idiot who had no political experience or understanding of the job, a civil lawyer who stated he would not serve if he was elected and an experienced criminal lawyer. One in eight voted for the criminal lawyer. The lawyer elected has embarrassed the county so much that Duke University's early applications have dropped 20 percent and he has turned the case that he campaigned on over to the state's attorney general.

Says a lot about the intelligence of Durham voters, doesn't it?

John L. Barker
Monroe
January 22, 2007

A question of leadership

After reading the Jan. 16 letters about the Duke lacrosse case, I was motivated to respond.

I am disturbed by the appearance of misconduct on the part of the district attorney's office. It is never appropriate to withhold information related to a criminal case regardless of the magnitude of the charges. It appears that perhaps the entire case was exaggerated.

With no evidence to convict on the rape charges, it is highly unlikely anything will come of this case except a lot of speculation on the public's part of what actually transpired the night of the alleged rape.

I am totally disappointed and discouraged that justice may not be served for either side of this case. I blame the alleged victim, the Duke lacrosse players, the Duke administration, the Police Department and the DA's office. They all failed the Durham community.

Unlike most of the letters to the editor, I do not wish that this case be dropped before the trial begins. That does not undo any wrongdoing on either side. I think that in order to bring closure to this case, the trial should be handled expeditiously with the evidence we have.

The LAX team could have prevented this situation by not sponsoring a party of this type with drinking and lewd conduct. This makes Duke look bad as well. The administration should have disciplined this team a lot sooner. From what I have been hearing, this is not the first time this team has done some inappropriate things.

The Police Department and the DA's office should follow procedures at all times.

Jay Jones
Durham
January 22, 2007

Watch your words

Jon Edge of Charlotte [Letters, Jan. 16] wrote that the City of Durham needs to "purge, and [he] don't just mean [District Attorney Mike] Nifong!"

I want to know what else he means. His letter speaks of the African-American community's response to the case. Particularly, he is concerned that outsiders such as the New Black Panthers came to town to protest. He refers to the accused as the "stripper" and seems to think our city has in some way embarrassed him.

So, what does he want to purge, the African-American community, strippers, his embarrassment, or maybe all of the above? I know that this case has invoked many emotions. But it would be wise to choose words carefully and not let anger and frustration about this case lead one to make racist comments, which will cause more embarrassment and shame than any legal case ever could.

Mike Silver
Durham
January 22, 2007

Here's the connection

Responding to Odessa Shaw's letter of Jan. 8: That Rep. Walter Jones called for an investigation of District Attorney Mike Nifong's handling of the Duke lacrosse case because of one defendant's family's alleged strong ties to the Republican party is a stretch.

The fact is that our district representative, David Price, a Democrat, was not willing to call for an investigation of Nifong, also a Democrat. That both Price and Nifong have mostly black constituents is the real connection.

C.B. BAGLEY
Durham
January 22, 2007

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/21/rs.01.html

KURTZ: Well, I know who I find funnier, but O'Reilly was a good sport. Stick around for the second half hour of RELIABLE SOURCES. A black accuser, three white lacrosse players -- did news organizations fan the racial flames at Duke University?

And a free speech fight. A conservative radio station fights back against liberal bloggers.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KURTZ: Welcome back to RELIABLE SOURCES.

The Duke rape case which sparked such a media frenzy last spring when a black woman made allegations against three white lacrosse players has been slowly collapsing. The accuser changed her story so many times that the rape charges were dropped but sexual assault charges remained.

Prosecutor Mike Nifong bowed out of the case, turning it over to North Carolina's attorney general. But the media's role in this case remains controversial, as does that of the woman whose identity is being protected by news organizations.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CASH MICHAELS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, "THE CAROLINIAN": Here you had the perfect storm of a crime story. The steps over there, you couldn't breathe on those steps. There was a camera here from every part of the country because it was a good story.

GAIL DINES, SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR< WHEELOCK COLLEGE: I think this woman has been hung out to dry by the media. I think questions about her morality, her emotional stability, her psychological stability, which is what happens to women in rape cases, and especially to women of color...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Joining us now from Boston, Callie Crossley, media commentator and panelist on WGBH's "Beat the Press." And in Toledo, Ohio, Christine Brennan, sports contributor for "USA Today" and a contributor to ABC News.

Christine Brennan, when I look back on the coverage, particularly those first few months, it just looks to me like an absolutely awful performance by the media, pumping this into a big national melodrama.

Would you argue with that?

CHRISTINE BRENNAN, "USA TODAY": I'd agree with you, Howie, for sure on that. I think what we saw was the perfect storm for our media in 2006, in this 21st century, the sense that you've got all of these, what, 300 channels now out there, all this time to fill, 24/7, the sound bite rules, the quick hit, make it very simple for the viewer, try to keep that viewer for a few more minutes, fill the time as best you can. Really, an awful performance, an embarrassing time, I think, for journalism. I feel good personally about what I did on the story, Howie. I feel good about some of the mainstream coverage. But even those of us in the so-called mainstream I think went way too far and forgot the idea of restraint in journalism.

What do we know? When did we know? How did we learn it? Instead, for that ratings grab, for that hope of getting attention, keeping ratings, keeping circulation, I think some people lost their minds in this story.

KURTZ: Some people lost their minds.

snip

Chicago Sun-Times

Innocent Duke lacrosse players stuck in P.C. nightmare

January 22, 2007

BY MARY LANEY

If I were one of the parents of the Duke lacrosse players I would be mad as hell right now. Those parents have been put through the wringer for seven months -- and forced to come up with God knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to protect their sons from what appear to be made-up accusations.
Their sons have been called racists and rapists and violent spoiled frat boys and more. Why? Because a black stripper accused the white boys of rape and an ambitious district attorney, running for office in Durham, N.C., saw the case that could bring him the winning votes from African Americans.

I have two sons and, had this nightmare happened to them, I would be going after not only the district attorney but some Duke professors and the university president as well. They put political correctness before due process in the railroading of these young Duke students.

Charles Osgood of CBS News once said, "Being politically correct is always having to say you're sorry." And some members of the faculty of Duke University were very politically correct last year. As soon as the now dubious claims of rape were leveled, 88 professors wrote an open letter decrying racism, sexism and sexual violence on that campus. They urged the student body to get out and let their voices be heard.

The president of Duke, being equally P.C., fired the lacrosse coach, suspended the players from school and canceled the rest of the championship lacrosse season -- all before a trial was held.

Meanwhile, the alleged victim was telling various stories. First, she told police she had been raped by a big group. Next, she told a nurse it had been three or five men.

The event hit the airwaves with the speed of a raging fire.

~~more~~

http://www.suntimes.com/news/laney/222495,...LANEY22.article

Thank you for your thoughtful analysis and reply, JLS.

3. So in college professor are suppose to be seeking new knowledge. In high school teacher are suppose to know thoroughly the received view.

Thus primary and secondary teachers are licensed based on what they know. Who could license some engaged in the search for new knowledge?

These two points of yours is where many of the problems currently arise in Academia, in my experience. The primary/secondary curriculum, (certainly, I know this to be true) in California is being authored by college professors who have inserted this "new research" into the K-12 curriculum. The students, then arriving at colleges, are winding up in social science courses under the direction of professors who are dancing the wingding to "appear" as offering "newer research information". When in fact, they come across as flaming, wild-eyed, ranting lunatics. En sum, they've been bested by the curriculum being taught in grades K-12. And so, the best they can offer in the way of newer "research" engages in meta-parapsychological means and they thus appear as flaming Educational Regressives.

While the students in K-12 will have learned the prescribed nostrums ("America is evil, whites are evil, males are evil"), at the college levels the alleged repositories of "new research" engage in psychologic positioning of each and every student as the "victim", and the classrooms resemble more a social lab with live students, than an objective, fair-handed inquiry into newer ideas.

David Horowitz, FrontPageMag, this morning features a substantive analysis upon "education versus indoctrination" at Penn State. While Penn State has a substantive "educate/do not indoctrinate" policy in place, as the article shows, it is far too easy to move the goal lines. If students do not have the basis by which to know they are being indoctrinated, how can there be a measurement for assessment of a class. This was certainly so in California. May still be.

You can get rid of the untenured by giving them a one year notice of nonrenewal. You can only get rid of tenured faculty members for cause, misappropriation of state property or other criminal behavior.One year notice of nonrenewal. Is this to give the college time to find the replacement? One year's notice: to allow said professor to remedy and or negotiate/sue?

In my view the way to reform college departments is for:

I concur with each of your points outlined, but the one I am most keenly aware of and careful of is this:

3. Make it part of the job description that Professors will profess their discipline and not launch into nondiscipline related areas. That is that art or literature professors won't test people on politics. [BTW, keep in mind this one would most often be used as a club against any conservative academic who had been accidently hired.]

Already, and have witnessed this in CA. CA State/U system offered a counter "educational freedom" document (to David Horowitz initiative) which would, clearly, have been used against Conservative Professors. The ACLU has its hands into all matters in CA concerning "education" at all levels.

Would you have wanted this solution to break up the great 1970s University of Chicago economics department of Friedmand, Stigler, Becker, etal that produced many Nobel prize winners because they were all conservative economists? Would you want this to become an accredidation standard and used to force Liberty U or Hilsdale College to hire leftists?

Exactly, and no. And nor do I concur with "quotas" regarding political affiliation. This is exactly the hand the Marxists wish Constitutionalists and Conservatives to take, as it then would empower the rest of the "separate and divide" nation the Marxists wish to impose.

It is a tough problem that requires good university leadership to avoid or solve. And setting up a system to get good university leadership is as big a problem as Brodhead shows us.

I disagree with you not at all on this score. The problems must be addressed at all levels of education, IME.

In California, pre-D.Horowitz' initiative, we attempted to address the situation another way, and through increments.

1. Recognizing that indoctrination had removed the primary requisites for a successful college experience (i.e., the 3rs), colleges were being overburdened with students tremendously incapacitated to deal with college level inquiry and research. Such students, having received high marks in the primary and secondary levels, were livid, claiming various forms of discrimination, placing said outrage upon college administrators and professors, were understandably feeling betrayed by the high standards of college. And college faculty were being stressed by having to supply endless "remedial ed" coursework for highschool graduates, endless counseling to mitigate the fury, shock, and dismay of such students. CA conservatives proferred "outreach" to such highschool campuses where known "passing the buck" of education was occurring. These were not quotas, but outreach. And curriculum was designed to fast track these students into the basic elements of education (3rs) while said student was in fact in a pre-req class. At same time, educational benchmarks discussion went into high fury between the left and right at all levels. Overall, the synthesis of approach was to address all levels of education, in a pinch, for redress.

The "No Child Left Behind" Act is harsh to some, beneficial to others; it certainly infuriates the left, given, that they will lose funds should they use indoctrinating curriculum instead of those which solidly educate in non-victimizing ways.

In summary, after David Horowitz' initiative, the Educational Elite retaliated by offering an "educational freedom" initiative which preserved moreso the rights of Marxist instructors, then actually offered fairness to those of any other flavor. Nonetheless, in the ensuing years, more and more educational variety is appearing on campuses. The left gets more screechy, and rails about how they are being "silenced" and "censored". When, in fact, they are upset that they are losing their special tyrannical position in education.

I do not disagree with your expressed opinions about race and racism, in post. I've seen and heard much the same.

But, having followed this case from onset, I disagree that the Duke boys were "drunken testosterone filled, athletic jocks". Yes, there were alcoholic beverages present. I've seen not an iota of evidence which suggests the boys were drunk. I've seen ample evidence that CGM was not of a sober bearing whether results from drugs and/or a combination of drugs/pills.

Frankly, and IME, I've seen much more violence coming from children in the K-12 levels of over-prescribed ritilin-like drugs; but hardly the outcry from "community" members over such erratic behaviors in the young.

Secondarily, I find it silly of those who wish to place the blame squarely on "jocks who drink". lol. As most college administrators posit: The college levels are a place for inquiry. And deep research. One could just as readily posit the Duke boys were following that prescribed mantra to a T. Should the same "morally outraged" writers opine upon students who engage in trashing pro-Republican signs and offices during elections? Not a word, ever. Do they opine upon those who block traffic just to make a "social justice" statement? No. Do they ever stand up for those students in politically correct classrooms who are grade-punished and/or vilified in classrooms? No.

Silly is as silly does.

If CGM had not made up these heinous lies, no one anywhere would have known or commented upon "jocks drinking". It's just a stupid out for the pretend moral "outrage-ives".

The Klan was about - power and money. The NAACP is no different. To fool the simples into believing it was about "skin color": "Pay attention to the pot; but not the kettle".

It's newer name is "by any means necessary"; and finally, aptly coined.

Innocent Duke lacrosse players stuck in P.C. nightmare
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/laney/222495,CST-EDT-LANEY22.article)

January 22, 2007

BY MARY LANEY

If I were one of the parents of the Duke lacrosse players I would be mad as hell right now. Those parents have been put through the wringer for seven months -- and forced to come up with God knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to protect their sons from what appear to be made-up accusations.

Their sons have been called racists and rapists and violent spoiled frat boys and more. Why? Because a black stripper accused the white boys of rape and an ambitious district attorney, running for office in Durham, N.C., saw the case that could bring him the winning votes from African Americans.

I have two sons and, had this nightmare happened to them, I would be going after not only the district attorney but some Duke professors and the university president as well. They put political correctness before due process in the railroading of these young Duke students.

Charles Osgood of CBS News once said, "Being politically correct is always having to say you're sorry." And some members of the faculty of Duke University were very politically correct last year. As soon as the now dubious claims of rape were leveled, 88 professors wrote an open letter decrying racism, sexism and sexual violence on that campus. They urged the student body to get out and let their voices be heard.

The president of Duke, being equally P.C., fired the lacrosse coach, suspended the players from school and canceled the rest of the championship lacrosse season -- all before a trial was held.

Meanwhile, the alleged victim was telling various stories. First, she told police she had been raped by a big group. Next, she told a nurse it had been three or five men.

The event hit the airwaves with the speed of a raging fire.

Well, the Durham district attorney set up a "lineup" of pictures for the alleged victim to identify those who she said raped her. Such lineups, by law, are supposed to include some pictures of uninvolved people. But that's not how the acting district attorney of Durham did it. You see, Mike Nifong was running for election to the office, and wanted a strong case. So he gave the woman only pictures of members of the Duke lacrosse team -- in effect, a multiple choice test where there could be no wrong answers.

She picked three of the lacrosse players.

Nifong then sent all fluids taken from the woman at the hospital, along with her clothes, to a lab for DNA testing. The lab technician told the district attorney that he found DNA from several men in the woman and in her pants, but that none of it matched any Duke lacrosse player. In fact, there was no DNA from any lacrosse player anywhere in or on this woman nor on her clothing. Despite this, the district attorney kept the information secret even from defense attorneys, and days later indicted the three Duke players for rape.

Last month, the victim told the district attorney that she couldn't tell if she had actually been raped. Nifong then dropped the rape charges, but held that the three Duke players would still be tried for kidnapping and sexual charges.

To recap, the victim has changed her story several times and now says she isn't sure she was raped. The "lineup" where the lacrosse players were identified was illegal. The DNA taken from the woman excluded all Duke lacrosse players. The district attorney had the DNA evidence before he indicted the players, but withheld this evidence from the defense, and later lied about it in court, but still refused to drop all charges against the players.

Now Nifong has recused himself from the case and the North Carolina attorney general has appointed a special prosecutor to take his place. Meanwhile, the parents of the young men still have to pay lawyers to represent their sons against charges that should have been dropped months ago or never brought at all.

I'd be mad as hell if I were one of these parents. I hope they sue everyone involved in this railroading of justice.

I've known first-hand the fury and indignation of the parents of the Duke LaCrosse players. And when one has been through the fire more than one or two times, one sees that which isn't clear, perhaps, to others:

Political Correctness raises a "bar" by which to empower with funds the leftwing Lawyers Operations. The Democrats, most often, the recipients of "donations" from the various leftwing based "enterprises" are then used as stats in the articles and presses regarding "creating a good economy" by the Democrats.

Years ago, some illegals in Florida got caught in a crime. These illegals got off (using leftwing lawyers, ACLU-matrixed) and won their case against the State of Florida. The illegals sued the Florida taxpayers for $400K per illegal, and won. Said illegals then turned right around and "donated" most of that money to left-wing race-based groups who then used said money to hire more of their own kind and do press releases and help design pub ed curriculum and medical insurance/coverage laws, ad nauseum.

It's right out of their 60s singsong: Up against the Wall, RedNecked Mother..." A natural result: Create a chimera, raid and redistribute the coffers.

But never call *that*: holding down and raping.

"Now, the WilmingtonJournal article "We're Watching YOU MR. COOPER", make a great deal more sense, no?"

So, the "Duke Three" as the WilmingtonJournal commonly refers to the Wrongly Accused, are the Reparational Great White Hope!

It looks like Cash Michaels is the author of the "Mr. Cooper" article, as he replied directly to my posts regarding it. He also seems not to like being called out regarding his racist and extortionist views and tactics. Check out this exchange b/w Cash and I (nothing but non-answers and personal attacks):

Round 1

From Cash's letter:
"Our goal is to seek justice and truth while respecting the rights of everyone involved. We accept these cases with our eyes wide open to the evidence but with blinders on to all other distractions."

GbA to Cash:
Without question!
So, do you or do you not realize that he rightly and justifiably should be ignoring you, despite the clearly extortionist tone of your letter?

Cash to GbA:
Should you be cleaning up Army mess or something?

Round 2

From Cash's letter:
"After all, as a Democrat, just like Mike Nifong, you need the Black vote for any future political aspirations."

GbA to Cash:
Ah yes, the Democratic Party: the party of George Wallace. Did you know that Lincoln, "The Emancipator" himself, was a Republican?
When will the "African-American Community" wake up to the fact that it is -- as it has been for 40 years -- the Democratic Party's tool?

Cash to GbA:
Maybe when you wake up to the fact that the truth of this case will be determined in a court of law, not the cesspool of the blogs and message boards. Any other good questions?

Round 3

From Cash's letter:
"You have to be willing to also charge anyone else who may have committed a crime (like who went into the accuser?s bag and took the $400.00 in cash she was just paid? After careful and deliberate research of laws in at least 80 nations, including this one, we believe that that?s generally called a ROBBERY!!!)"

GbA to Cash:
Don't forget the other $1,600 she made earlier that evening taking sperm donations at the NCCU frat party, that make up the entire $2,000 Crystal claimed to have had stolen from her!
BTW, nothing perverted about that, I suppose?

Cash to GbA:
When you stop getting your erroneous information from Archie comics, maybe we'll dignify your missive with a response.

Round 4:
GbA to Cash:
Touched a few raw nerves, did I? I'd love to be able to answer your questions, but my Ebonics is weak, so please bear with me.
I am not familiar with the term "Army mess." What do you mean by it?
So, Archie has weighed-in on this too? Sheesh! Since you seem to be the authority on Crystal's ever-changing recollections, can you please tell me if there's any truth to the rumors that her next version is going to implicate Elvis, Jughead?
Truth is not determined in a Court of Law. Sadly, such outcomes are limited to the determination of guilt or not thereof, which sometimes belies truth (see: The People of California vs. Orenthal James Simpson).
Lastly, we haven't heard much lately from the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton lately on this subject. I suppose they have distanced themselves so as to limit any potential Civil liability arising from their earlier slanderous, race-baiting remarks.
By the way, is the Rainbow Coalition Scholarship/Jackpot still in play?

No response to these points from Cash (The entire exchange took place on Thursday, 4 days ago). Go figure...

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