More Depressing News from Duke

For insight into
the corruption of the modern academy, look no further than Heather MacDonald’s extraordinary article on the
recent controversy at Duke. Two Duke professors, Peter
Arcidiacono and Ken Spenner, and a graduate student, Esteban Aucejo, produced a paper showing that
African-American students at Duke disproportionately migrate from science and
engineering majors to less challenging majors in the humanities. (Now that the
Supreme Court has granted cert to the Fisher
case, evidence that racial preferences in admissions harms even those who
receive the preferential slots will likely be receiving much more attention.)
The reaction was sadly predictable: outraged “activist” students rallied around
identity politics; race-baiting faculty members displayed their indifference to
the truth; and cowardly administrators seemed terrified of being labeled a
racist. Also unsurprising was the fact that none of these critics challenged
the accuracy of the data that the paper presented.

The campus
crusade was led by two of the most extreme faculty members from the lacrosse
case, Karla Holloway and Tim Tyson; that such figures
could have any credibility left after being so wrong so often in their
lacrosse case commentary speaks volumes about the low standards for truth on
contemporary campuses. (The duo’s continued elevated status also highlights
Duke’s strategy of refusing to critically self-examine the institution’s
mishandling of the lacrosse case.) But the low point in the affair came when
several Duke academic administrators published an open letter in the campus
newspaper, the Chronicle. After empty
language about academic freedom, the letter lamented how the “conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted
in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.” A Duke spokesperson refused to
tell MacDonald exactly to which “negative stereotypes” the letter referred.

The list of
signatories included Dean Lee Baker, one of three members of the Group of 88
(the faculty who took out an April 2006 newspaper ad to proclaim something
“happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum) to be promoted to a Duke deanship
since the start of the lacrosse case. (A fourth Group of 88 member was elected
chair of Duke’s faculty senate.) But the letter’s most surprising signatory was
Duke provost Peter Lange.

During the
lacrosse case, Lange was the only senior member of Duke president Richard
Brodhead’s administration to behave in a consistently honorable manner. He
stood up to “potbanger” protesters who rallied outside his house. And he took
action to bring to a halt the most egregious instances of faculty
misconduct–in-class harassment of the lacrosse players; false claims that whole
departments had endorse the Group of 88 ad, when no department had even voted
on the matter–although he didn’t punish any of the faculty wrongdoers. (Some
things are simply not possible in the current academy.) And, it appears, Lange
made a similar political calculation when he elected to sign onto the recent Chronicle letter.

Ironically,
thanks to filings in the unindicted lacrosse players’ lawsuits against Duke,
the controversy over the research paper coincided with the first revelations of the
administration’s internal deliberations at the height of the lacrosse case.
Perhaps most significant was an April 24, 2006 e-mail exchange between
Brodhead, Lange, and a third senior administrator, Larry Moneta, discussing how
the administration should frame its public response to events. The e-mails were
penned a few days after Brodhead had traveled to the Durham Chamber of Commerce
for his first public remarks after the arrests of Reade Seligmann and Collin
Finnerty; even if the students were innocent, the Duke president declared to
rousing applause, “whatever they did was bad enough.” What Seligmann and
Finnerty had done was to attend a party they played no role in organizing and
drink some beer.

In the e-mails,
Brodhead implied that the movie Primal
Fear represented a possible prism through which to view the lacrosse case.
(In the film, Ed Norton plays a sociopath who commits a murder but fools his
attorneys about his guilt.) But the e-mails’ most striking aspect came in the
limited range of options about the case that administrators were willing to
consider. Two weeks before the e-mails, defense attorneys had announced that
none of the DNA from Mangum’s rape kit matched any lacrosse player. Given that
Mangum had described a 30-minute gang rape in which her attackers didn’t use
condoms, the DNA results seemed to suggest that she wasn’t telling the truth.

Yet none of the
administrators appear to have considered, if only for the purposes of
contingency planning, the possibility that a rape didn’t occur. Brodhead noted
that he was not “confident that the players are innocent though certainly a
large number of them are of criminal charges.” By this point, even Mike Nifong
was conceding that “a large number” of the lacrosse players were innocent of
criminal charges.

That Duke’s upper
administration seemed unable or unwilling to consider inconvenient evidence (by
this point, the university’s overheated response had been based on an
unquestioned assumption that a crime occurred, and so the case’s implosion
threatened to blow back on Duke) helps explain how the university so badly
botched its response to the case. And the administration’s appeasement of the Arcidiacono et al. paper’s critics suggests
that this closed-mindedness remains firmly in place at Duke.

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KC Johnson is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of the blog Durham-in-Wonderland. He is co-author, with Stuart Taylor Jr., of “Until Proven Innocent.“