Duke Faculty the Worst Offenders in Rape Case

This is an interesting piece on the Duke Rape Case, one that I like, taking the position that although Mike Nifong used race-baiting tactics to win an election, the media used the story to promote a "white-people are evil" meme, and the lenght of the case on such flimsy charges were all reprehensible, there was an even greater travesty committed by the Duke faculty.

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.”

[snip]

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.

I wonder if the effort to get Duke to foot some of the legal bills of these three young men and their teammates will occur. Probably not, but it is the least the university could do.

Update: 2:45 pm Noticed that the link to original story was missing. It is now added.