At least Duke University has basketball

From http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/09/018598.php

September 28, 2007

A perfect storm of disgrace

Yesterday, Stuart Taylor spoke to the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Federalist Society about the Duke lacrosse "rape" case. In my view, Taylor is probably the pre-eminent reporter of legal/political matters, an enterprise to which he brings to bear great intelligence, strong knowledge of the law, and stubborn fair-mindedness.

Along with K.C. Johnson, he has written Until Proven Innocent, Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Today, he provided an overview of this wretched affair which, in essence, was the product of three rotten forces -- a corrupt prosecutor, a rotten academic institution, and the liberal MSM.

The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, brought charges after a woman who was about to be committed to a mental institution claimed she had been raped. In the hours immediately after making this claim, she changed her story often enough that the police officer in attendance was certain no charges would be brought. Nor would they have been, but for the fact that Nifong was facing an election he was almost certain to lose to an opponent he had once fired and who probably would have fired him, thus costing him his pension. Nifong brought the charges because he believed that pursuing a rape case, however baseless, involving a black woman and white defendants would enable him to win enough black votes in Durham to maintain office. As the accuser's story unraveled, Nifong persisted, suppressing evidence and launching an all-out media assault on the wrongfully accused Duke student-athletes. The suppression kept the case alive; the media assault furthered Nifong's political aims.

The academic institution, Duke University, contains two sets of villains -- (1) the 88 faculty members (about one-fourth of the arts and sciences faculty) who, without regard to the evidence, publicly adjudged as guilty the three accused Duke students, the entire Duke lacrosse team, and white America in general and (2) university president Richard Brodhead, who "enabled" this rabid portion of the faculty and did nothing to defend Duke's students even as their innocence became clear.

The execrable behavior of the professors is exemplified by one Houston Baker (now at Vanderbilt). The demagogic Baker excoriated the lacrosse team for their "silent whiteness" and their "white, male, athletic privilege." He called for the "immediate dismissals" by Duke of "the team itself and its players," to combat the "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." After the innocence of the accused players had become clear, Baker received an email from the mother of a member of the lacrosse team (who hadn't been accused) asking if he would reconsider his earlier statements. Baker responded, by typing "LIES" and indicating that his correspondent was the mother of a "farm animal." Eventually Baker, a post-modernist if nothing else, fell back to arguing that it didn't matter whether the rape allegations were true.

But Brodhead's villainy (the below account of which goes beyond what Taylor said yesterday) arguably exceeds that of Houston Baker and the rest of the gang of 88. While, the faculty members were blinded by hatred and a dopey ideology, Brodhead saw things clearly. His actions, like Nifong's, were the result of cynicism and opportunism.

At the outset of his tenure as president of Duke, Brodhead had given Duke's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski a new multi-million dollar deal. Brodhead thus incurred the ire of many faculty members who were jealous of Coach K's deal and the status of athletics on campus that it represented. When the rape charges arose, Brodhead's options were to appease Duke's leftist faculty or to grant Duke students the presumption of innocence. The faculty made it clear to Brodhead that he could not do both. At an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006, Brodhead urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come out. But the assembled professors, around 10 percent of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team.

Knowing that Harvard president Larry Summers had recently lost a faculty no-confidence vote at Harvard, Brodhead made his choice. Shortly after the March 30 meeting with the faculty "lynch mob," Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season and appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative” to explore issues raised by the case. Three of the four subcommittees were chaired by gang of 88 members. And one of the four student members had sent a nasty and arguably threatening email to the Duke lacrosse coach, a fact known to Brodhead. Thus, Brodhead "got out of jail" with his faculty by, in effect, throwing overboard three student athletes who faced the possibility of 30 years in jail, along with the rest of the lacrosse team and its coach.

The third key player in this scandal is the liberal MSM. Like the gang of 88, it viewed the case through a far leftist ideological prism and refused to let the facts stand in the way. It thereby played into the hands of the dishonest opportunist Nifong and the cynical enabler Brodhead.
Initially, the MSM arguably had an excuse. One doesn't expect a prosecutor to come on this strong with a bogus case, or a college president to throw students to the wolves. The MSMs real sins occurred after its members learned, as they quickly did, that this was just what the prosecutor and college president had done.

The New York Times, for which Stuart Taylor once worked, was (along with the Durham Herald Sun) probably the chief culprit. The Times sent sports reporter Joe Drape to investigate. Drape quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players, but the Times refused to print his material. Soon, Drape was back covering horse races, replaced by Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.

In addition, to Nifong, Duke, and the MSM, black civil rights leaders also merit dishonorable mention. Al Sharpton and company quickly piled on the innocent students, playing the race card for all it wasn't worth. That's why it's almost comical to hear Sharpton railing against prosecutorial abuse in the Jena case. Sharpton wouldn't grant the presumption of innocence to innocent white students victimized by a rogue prosecutor, yet thinks its the scandal of the century that thuggish black students were overcharged in Jena. As Taylor said yesterday, prosecutorial abuse looks like it may be a major problem in this country, so it's too bad that Sharpton and his ilk forfeited an opportunity to form a coalition with moderates and conservatives to combat it.

Out-of-control political correctness in academia and the desire to placate rabid campus race-baiters like Duke's gang of 88 has also become a serious problem. Although this story occurred at Duke, how confident can we be that the administration at Columbia (led by Lee Bollinger), at Harvard (now that the leftist faculty has ousted Larry Summers), or at other similar institutions would act differently under similar circumstances? Taylor didn't seem very confident, and I'm not confident at all.

UPDATE: A friend who has read Until Proven Innocent, and who raves about it, writes:
It seems to me that the NAACP's corrupt conduct in this case might be worthy of a blog post, as well as that of Jesse Jackson, Nancy Grace, and Wendy Murphy. Murphy and Grace came up with the ludicrous theory that the absence of DNA was inculpatory because the defendants must've conspired to withhold their DNA from the "victim" -- this despite the fact that none of the the alleged victim's multiple versions of events ever asserted that the defendants used condoms and that all her versions made much more graphic claims that would result in a positive DNA result.

This was an example of Jesse Jackson's contribution.