thedrifter
04-12-07, 09:42 AM
Carroll: Duke's sorry faculty
Thursday, April 12 at 12:00 AM
The most remarkable fact about the Duke lacrosse fiasco is not that it took nearly a year for obviously flimsy charges to be dropped against the players. That’s a long time, but it was only in January that the North Carolina attorney general took over the case from the corrupt Durham County district attorney.
Nor is it the fact that District Attorney Mike Nifong would so crudely exploit stereotypes of well-to-do white male athletes in order to entice black votes in a re-election campaign. Race-baiting is a time-honored political tactic, although one deployed more frequently decades ago — and then mostly against blacks, of course.
The most remarkable feature of this legal debacle isn’t even the cheerleading for the prosecution that could be found in such major media as The New York Times. As biased and credulous as many reports were, a few were first-rate. For example, the late Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes deftly demolished the prosecution’s case in a report last fall.
No, the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.
K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College, has followed every twist in the Duke scandal on his Durham-in- Wonderland Web site. He chronicles the faculty’s performance as the hysteria mounted.
“In late March (2006),” Johnson writes, “Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the ‘abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us’ and demanding the ‘immediate dismissals’ of ‘the team itself and its players.’ A week later, on April 6, 88 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying ‘thank you’ to campus demonstrators who had distributed a ‘wanted’ poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players ‘rapists.’ By contrast, no Duke professor publicly criticized Nifong’s conduct.”
David Evans, one of the accused, told 60 Minutes that he moved out of the house where the rapes of a black stripper allegedly occurred because of menacing mobs. The Duke president, no profile in courage, canceled the lacrosse season and fired the coach. As recently as a few months ago President Richard Brodhead was still defending the 88 professors who trampled on the presumption of innocence, going so far as to describe some of them as victims, too.
A few Duke professors did acquit themselves well or eventually locate some semblance of a spine. Law professor James Coleman denounced Nifong’s handling of police lineups. Seventeen members of the Duke economics department signed a letter in January criticizing Nifong and assuring student athletes they were welcome in their classrooms.
But for the most part the faculty either supported the branding of three athletes as racists and rapists, didn’t care enough about their plight to speak out, or were cowed into suppressing any call of conscience.
Would those athletes, facing a similarly dubious claim of rape, have fared any better at America’s other elite universities? The idealist yearns to answer yes. The realist, sad to say, knows better.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Ellie
Thursday, April 12 at 12:00 AM
The most remarkable fact about the Duke lacrosse fiasco is not that it took nearly a year for obviously flimsy charges to be dropped against the players. That’s a long time, but it was only in January that the North Carolina attorney general took over the case from the corrupt Durham County district attorney.
Nor is it the fact that District Attorney Mike Nifong would so crudely exploit stereotypes of well-to-do white male athletes in order to entice black votes in a re-election campaign. Race-baiting is a time-honored political tactic, although one deployed more frequently decades ago — and then mostly against blacks, of course.
The most remarkable feature of this legal debacle isn’t even the cheerleading for the prosecution that could be found in such major media as The New York Times. As biased and credulous as many reports were, a few were first-rate. For example, the late Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes deftly demolished the prosecution’s case in a report last fall.
No, the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone.
K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College, has followed every twist in the Duke scandal on his Durham-in- Wonderland Web site. He chronicles the faculty’s performance as the hysteria mounted.
“In late March (2006),” Johnson writes, “Houston Baker, a professor of English and Afro-American Studies, issued a public letter denouncing the ‘abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us’ and demanding the ‘immediate dismissals’ of ‘the team itself and its players.’ A week later, on April 6, 88 members of Duke’s arts and sciences faculty signed a public statement saying ‘thank you’ to campus demonstrators who had distributed a ‘wanted’ poster of the lacrosse players and publicly branded the players ‘rapists.’ By contrast, no Duke professor publicly criticized Nifong’s conduct.”
David Evans, one of the accused, told 60 Minutes that he moved out of the house where the rapes of a black stripper allegedly occurred because of menacing mobs. The Duke president, no profile in courage, canceled the lacrosse season and fired the coach. As recently as a few months ago President Richard Brodhead was still defending the 88 professors who trampled on the presumption of innocence, going so far as to describe some of them as victims, too.
A few Duke professors did acquit themselves well or eventually locate some semblance of a spine. Law professor James Coleman denounced Nifong’s handling of police lineups. Seventeen members of the Duke economics department signed a letter in January criticizing Nifong and assuring student athletes they were welcome in their classrooms.
But for the most part the faculty either supported the branding of three athletes as racists and rapists, didn’t care enough about their plight to speak out, or were cowed into suppressing any call of conscience.
Would those athletes, facing a similarly dubious claim of rape, have fared any better at America’s other elite universities? The idealist yearns to answer yes. The realist, sad to say, knows better.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountain
News.com.
Ellie