Sick Duke Snuffed out the Truth

NPR has a discussion with Stuart Taylor, who helped write Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Taylor is a columnist for the National Journal. His co-author KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY. While their book predictably excoriates the media for its heard mentality in going after privileged white males who had supposedly abused poor black females, it reserves its most striking condemnation for Duke’s administration and faculty, and for the illiberal pressure to conform that so dominates leading American university campuses.

According to the book:

 many professors were initially swayed by Nifong's public comments and the initial silence from the lacrosse players. All but ignored were the captains' March 16 cooperation with police, their confident March 28 prediction that the DNA would soon clear them, the similar predictions by defense lawyers, and the unlikelihood all would do so unless confident that no rape or sex of any kind had occurred.

 the faculty, resolutely refusing to reconsider their initial presumptions as new facts emerged, served as cheerleaders for Nifong, with whom they had little in common besides their opportunism. For many months not one of the more than five hundred members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty—the professors who teach Duke undergraduates — publicly criticized the district attorney or defended the lacrosse players' rights to fair treatment. Not even after evidence established clearly both the falsity of the rape charge and the outrageousness of Nifong's actions—the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct ever to unfold in plain view.

 Duke's arts and sciences faculty kept quiet as the activists created the impression that Duke professors en masse condemned the lacrosse players. They were afraid to cross the activists—black and female activists especially—lest they be smeared with charges of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, or right-wingism. When a chemistry professor who—months after the team's innocence had become clear—became the first member of the arts and sciences faculty to break ranks with the academic herd, it took less than 24 hours for the head of Duke's women's studies program to accuse him of racism.