I think it would be a shame to bring down Duke. While I do feel the 88 and the current administration need to be thrown out with the trash; I don't think throwing the whole university out is even remotely reasonable. That would be like imprisoning an entire city just because one citizen committed a crime. If we say it was wrong for the 88 to declare the entire lax team evil; how can we, in good conscience, declare an entire university and all of it's community worthy of destruction? I don't get it.
BTW, I did my Ph.D. research, in part, at Duke's library.
Well don't worry too much - Duke as a whole will survive, they will still have their endowment and the institution is not going anywhere, but the administration and the faculty members who behaved so recklessly should pay a heavy price (knowing liberal academia as well as I do, they probably won't face the slightest sanction, but they should).
There should be a serious house-cleaning of the PC-fanatic administration. They probably can't/won't do anything about tenured faculty who took part in the lynch mob, but if any of the "88" are not tenured they do not deserve to be.....
fwiw, the worst scumbag I encountered in quite a few years around academia was a liberal dean from Duke who was a real POS. Yeah, it was just one person, but also a character-type..... a PC-vicious POS who was in every way just like the "88" ..... ready to frame and fry innocent people for political convenience.
When I say I want the university to pay, I don't mean that I want Duke, my alma mater, to be destroyed. I mean that I want Duke as we know it now to be reconstructed--to remove Nifong, to examine its predilection for hiring RADICAL faculty, for some serious administrative introspection about what they did here and why. The extremists need to go and they do need to shell out some serious bucks because they understand nothing else.