From the CCI Archive: More Documents

A few more documents from the CCI archive.

After Karla Holloway resigned her CCI subcommittee chairmanship via a mass e-mail containing fifth-hand, unsubstantiated gossip about Duke students, the Chronicle asked CCI head Bob Thompson for comment. You’d think that the head of a committee ostensibly devoted to improving “campus culture” would have been outraged by a senior faculty member behaving in such an intemperate fashion. Instead, Thompson produced this email:

In the CCI’s world, some faculty members were more equal than others. Women’s Center head Robin Weigman received a one-on-one meeting with Thompson to impart her wisdom, a few days after she outrageously accused colleague Steve Baldwin of using the “language of lynching.” You’d think that the head of a committee ostensibly devoted to improving “campus culture” would have been outraged by a senior faculty member behaving in such an intemperate fashion. Instead, Thompson produced this jargon-laden meeting summary:

As the CCI neared its conclusion, the hotheaded Kerry Haynie wrote in to express his concerns that the CCI final report might not be extreme enough: Here is the summary of the meeting in which CCI members were reminded that the CCI operated from the premise that “diversity makes a more excellent university”:

Here is the summary of the meeting in which Anne Allison’s gender subcommittee was reminded that the CCI operated from the premise that “Duke’s gendered culture is, in no small part, derived from a fundamental lack of respect, fueled by a mix of insecurity, dis-empowerment, and alcohol”:

And here is the unintentionally hilarious summary of the CCI’s meeting with Counseling and Psychological Services staff:

From the CCI Archive: Documents

It seemed worthwhile to post some of the actual documents from the CCI archive; the first batch will come today, a second batch will appear Thursday.

First, some items from Group of 88’er Anne Allison’s Gender and Sexuality Subcommittee. This summary document from the Allison Subcommittee contains many of the key elements of the Group of 88 approach—from anonymous, random quotes from alleged Duke students to blind acceptance of desired assertions from ideologically preferred groups.

The summary was topped off with the preposterous claim that between 20 and 25 percent of Duke female students are victims of “sexual assault”—which means that the Allison subcommittee maintained that Duke had a rate of sexual assault around 2.5 times higher than the rate of sexual assault, murder, armed robbery, and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate. (FBI figures show that not 20%-25% but instead around .03% of students are victims of rape while in college; Duke’s 2000-2006 figures, which use a much broader reporting standard than the FBI database, indicate that .2% of Duke students, not 20%-25%, “report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.” The Allison Subcommittee never explained why it ignored this data.)

The CCI “surveyed” Duke’s student body to provide insight into cultural attitudes on campus. But the survey was skewed demographically (notice the ratio of women-to-men):

and substantively (notice the topics of the questions, and the manner in which the wording of many of the questions assured the desired result):

Duke professor Joseph Dibona made one of the most outrageous suggestions of the entire case—a call for Crystal Mangum to receive a $1.5 million bribe in exchange for withdrawing her false accusations. In this September 2006 email, he urged more aggressive action from the CCI. The spell-check function appears not to have been Prof. Dibona’s forte.

The CCI was obsessed with changing Duke’s admissions standards to get in more “diversity” students who would be receptive to the Group of 88’s ideology. As part of this agenda, they demanded ending legacy admissions, in the name of raising standards.

Yet the CCI’s own data undermined a central argument of the initiative. Legacy students do, indeed, have slightly lower SAT and admissions scores than non-legacy admittees—and so, under a merit-based admissions process, most, if not all, would not make the cut. Yet, according to the data in this CCI document below, legacy admittees score far more impressively on both the SAT and the admissions tally than do African-American students admitted to Duke (as seen in this recently released data). The CCI never explained why Duke should raise standards to exclude legacy admittees while simultaneously doing the opposite to increase the number of minority students admitted.

The Sociology Department letter, signed by ten faculty members and 27 graduate students deserves to be read in its entirety. This letter, to reiterate, was issued three weeks after the DNA tests Mike Nifong had promised would exonerate the innocent revealed no matches.

As does the document produced by the undergraduate “Concerned Citizens at Duke University.”

From the CCI Archive: Voices of the Extremists

As his committee began to take shape, CCI head Bob Thompson received a number of e-mails reminding him that the coterie of extremists that swarmed the Duke campus in spring 2006 extended beyond the Group of 88.

In early April 2008, Tsahai Tafari, Ph.D.* (who described herself as an African-American woman) told Thompson that “I have been afraid of the young white men on campus at Duke for a very long time, and the racist assault and . . . the rape basically confirmed my fears.” She complained that in her lab, she was forced to listen to people talking about the “lacrosse case” who—“horrific in their lack of humanity”—suggested that the players might be innocent.

Such speech, apparently, needed to be prohibited at Duke.

In mid-April 2006 (several days after DNA tests that Mike Nifong had promised would clear the innocent had shown no matches to any lacrosse player), Denise Jackson, the mother of a Duke female student, complained to Thompson. Mrs. Jackson reported that, while walking to class, her daughter had seen “a group of students who choose to wear T-shirts with the words ‘We Support the Duke Lacrosse Team.’”

Perhaps the students had a right to their viewpoint, Mrs. Jackson conceded, but the administration nonetheless needed “to consider requesting” Duke students to refrain from wearing such T-shirts. Such free speech, she feared, would “inflame tensions”—especially among “African-American” employees of the university.

Mrs. Jackson appeared unaware of how her insinuation that African-American employees might not be able to contain their rage built off negative racial stereotypes of blacks.

And from off campus, a California lawyer named Christopher Wilson offered an astonishing suggestion: that the CCI should “make sure [Duke students] vote in elections for DA Nifong and his ilk.” I e-mailed Wilson to ask if, in hindsight, he stood by his suggestion.

Wilson did not reply.

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The CCI archive also preserved two previously unpublished documents from extremist campus groups. The first, dated March 30, 2006, came from a group calling itself “Concerned Citizens at Duke University,” with whose leaders Brodhead met at the same time he was refusing to meet with parents or any representatives of the lacrosse players. Most of the CCDU members appear to have been African-American, although no list of the organization’s membership survives.

“We are appalled and insulted,” the CCDU missive asserted, “by the university’s denial of the interrelatedness of white privilege, class, racism, and sexism in this issue. We want open and direct recognition of this incident as a hate crime by the University.” (The CCDU actually appeared to be demanding that the University “recognize” that the lacrosse players had committed a “hate crime,” rather than, as they wrote, that unnamed others “recognize” the affair “as a hate crime by the University.”) In either case, for the CCDU, an unsupported allegation by a mentally unstable woman, and denied by the accused, appeared to be enough to establish a “hate crime.”

In a fantastic interpretation of the Brodhead administration’s motives, CCDU members claimed that “the university is cultivating and sustaining a culture of privilege and silence that allows inappropriate behavior to plague the campus.” Even stranger, the missive faulted Brodhead and his advisors for operating under the premise that “the oppressed are always asked to justify their oppression, to put their hurt, trauma, and pain that those who are not oppressed can understand, although those feelings have no rational basis.” How the administration was supposed to predict or respond to “irrational” feelings the CCDU members never said.

What were the University’s specific faults, according to the CCDU?

(1) “President Brodhead has failed to acknowledge of show sympathy for the family of the victim [sic] involved in the case.” (These Duke undergraduate students appeared not to understand that a mentally unstable woman claiming she was raped did not, in and of itself, make her a “victim.”)

(2) “There exists a culture on campus in which male athletes are able to exercise privilege through sexual misconduct.” (The only evidence cited for this preposterous assertion was Samiha Khanna’s “interview” with false accuser Crystal Mangum.)

(3) The lack of “full-credit courses dedicated to foster dialogue about what constitutes harassment and devoted to what constitutes a comfortable environment in which students can discuss the intricacies of social identifiers (Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation, Class, Age, Ability, Ethnicity).” (This was an early version of the Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative.)

Incredibly, the CCDU framed these ruminations as consistent with “respect of the legal institutions of due process.”

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To place the most favorable possible spin on their actions, the undergraduate students in the CCDU responded emotionally and temporarily lost their intellectual bearings; their letter appeared five days after the Khanna interview with false accuser Mangum. Thirty-two days later, however, no such excuse existed.

On May 1, 2006, members of the Duke Sociology Department produced one of the most troubling documents that appeared at any point in the case. A five-page letter from Group of 88 radical Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, nine other professors in the Sociology Department, and 27 Sociology Ph.D. students was coordinated by Serena Sebring, the Sociology graduate student who joined Wahneema Lubiano on an April 12, 2006 panel lamenting that “since the [negative] DNA results were returned Monday, we [have been] moving backwards.”

The Sociology letter approvingly cited three of the most pernicious documents produced by Duke: Houston Baker’s March 29, 2006 racist screed, which mentioned, in a negative fashion, the race of the lacrosse players ten times; Brodhead’s guilt-presuming April 5, 2006 letter; and the Group of 88’s April 6, 2006 statement. The 37 Sociology Signatories expressed their “deep concern about local manifestations of racism, sexual coercion, and assault,” and demanded “lasting institutional change” that would recognize how “recent events involving the lacrosse team are embedded within a broader culture.” The Sociology Signatories did not acknowledge the wide dispute as to what these “recent events” actually were: they had already made up their minds as to what occurred—and why it did.

Unsurprisingly, the Signatories praised the politically correct Bowen/Chambers report, and maintained that the lacrosse case exposed problems in “issues of gender, masculinity, privilege, wealth, race and ethnicity, and inequality.” The letter called for Duke to adopt a combination of hate-crimes legislation and thought control. The Signatories demanded that the administration rewrite the Judicial Code to recognize “actions that inflict, threaten, or cause injuries that may be corporal, psychological, material, or social, in which victims are presumed representatives of a bias-related classification (i.e., race, gender and sexuality).”

What, exactly, is a “social” injury to a “presumed representative[] of a bias-related classification (i.e., race, gender and sexuality)”? This Orwellian conception of a student judicial system would subject white male students to charges for thinking the wrong way on issues such as “diversity” or affirmative action.

The CCI, declared the Sociology Signatories, needed to create a culture that was “proactively anti-racist, anti-sexist, non-homophobic, non-heteronormative, and anti-classist.” How does this jargon translate into plain English? Duke recognizing that the “myth of the meritocratic ideal . . . allows individuals to justify the continuation of racial and gender equality.” This belief was part of the “oppression” that existed on the Duke campus, and could only be overcome with—as expected—new “admissions and hiring” practices to favor minorities and those who thought appropriately on “diversity” issues.

As had the Group of 88, the Sociology Signatories both presumed guilt and showed indifference to Anglo-American legal norms. “An exclusive focus on whether the administrative response operated within the scope of the law would ignore the important responsibilities the Administration has to students, faculty, and staff, as well as the citizens of Durham. The entire Durham community is directly affected by this situation, in particular, and the culture of Duke more generally. The events that transpired on March 13^th [and, again, at the time this letter was written, grave doubts existed as to exactly what “the events that transpired on March 13^th” were] call for an immediate response and decisive leadership to ensure that everyone affected can be certain that the administration of Duke will never tolerate any form of racial, sexual, or gender violence from any individual of the Duke community regardless of their race, class, and privilege status.”

This passage, which reads almost as a parody of political correctness, makes no sense unless the Signatories assumed that an incident of “racial, sexual, or gender violence” actually occurred.

The problem was a national one, the sociologists exclaimed, since “at Duke and many campuses, sexual assault is endemic.” The evidence that “sexual assault” is more common at “Duke and many campuses” than anyplace else in society? The Sociology Signatories didn’t say. Why allow facts to interfere with the metanarrative?

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The Sociology letter is of interest in one additional respect. Written before the backlash against the Group of 88’s rush to judgment occurred, the Sociology document celebrated the connection between the case and the Group of 88’s ad--in sharp contrast to the later efforts of Group apologists Charlie Piot and Robert Zimmerman to distance the Group of 88 statement from the lacrosse case. The Signatories proudly explained that “the term ‘social disaster’ was used to describe the lacrosse incident [emphasis added] in an ad sponsored by Duke’s African and African-American Studies Department in the April 6, 2006 issue of the Chronicle.”

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The documents produced by the CCDU and the Sociology Signatories showed that, indeed, a profound problem of campus culture existed at Duke in spring 2006. But the CCI, of course, had no interest in exploring how and why these faculty members, graduate students, and Duke undergraduates so willingly interpreted campus events through an extremist version of the race/class/gender prism, and so willingly disregarded Anglo-American legal norms.

On Monday, I’ll post some of the documents from the CCI archive.

*--corrected item

The CCI: Closing Months

(This post is the third in a series using documents from the CCI's own archive, which I recently read.)

By the time the CCI took up its work in fall 2006, the case to which President Brodhead had inextricably linked its mission had all but collapsed. Mike Nifong had become a national laughingstock; the Group of 88 was busy revising history; and Duke students were registering to vote in unprecedented numbers to try and effect change through the system.

But for the CCI, it was as if time had stopped on April 6, 2006, the date the Group of 88 issued its statement: Directors Robert Thompson and Larry Moneta and subcommittee chairs Karla Holloway, Anne Allison, and Peter Wood moved along as if nothing had changed.

Throughout the fall, CCI members held both formal and informal meetings with various student groups, operating under what the committee described as data collection objectives. But, in fact, these “objectives” showed how the CCI already had the answers to their questions, before even going through the motions of compiling the data. Data Collection Objective #1, for instance, was to “confirm [emphasis added] the existence of a dominant culture among Duke undergraduates.” And that “dominant culture” seemed to be bad, given the wording of Data Collection Objective #4: “Identify and validate the consequences of the existence of a dominant culture.”

The CCI clung ferociously to the race/class/gender ideology from which it sprang. At its September 4, 2006 meeting, Thompson reminded members of the CCI’s Orwellian basic principle: “Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

This statement, as written, was nonsensical. To take the most extreme example: Duke could eliminate grades and SAT scores as admissions requirements, and instead admit students solely on a quota basis according to the percentage of their race or ethnicity in the population. Such a student body would satisfy a requirement of “diversity,” but does anyone think that this approach would make “a more excellent university”?

What Thompson believed, I presume, is that “appropriate diversity makes a more excellent university.” But even here, comprehensive “diversity” was not desired. Neither Thompson, nor Moneta, nor any of the CCI’s subcommittee chairs displayed any interest in promoting intellectual or pedagogical diversity on campus. Some types of “diversity,” it appeared, did not make “a more excellent university.”

Reminding members to focus on “a few key levers that have the potential to impact campus culture”— admissions, curriculum, faculty personnel policy—the CCI leadership summoned Duke dean of admissions Christoph Guttentag for a 30-minute meeting at its first fall 2006 session. Continuing the summer 2006 crusade against admitting “well-rounded” students begun by the Allison and Holloway subcommittees, the CCI produced a draft report blasting the Admissions Department for admitting students with a “general lack of intellectual vitality and engagement” (i.e., most admitted students were not sufficiently receptive to the worldview of the Group of 88).

CCI members conceded that the existing admissions scoring system “predicts reasonably GPA at graduation.” To those in the reality-based community, such a finding would be a good thing. But not to the CCI majority. The system used to rate applicants needed to be changed “to be predictive for individuals with different high school backgrounds.” And just in case Guttentag didn’t get the message, the CCI spelled it out for him: his office needed to focus on “increasing the yield” of minority students.

“Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

Given that, on average, Duke minority students tend to receive lower scores in standardized tests, it might have been expected that the CCI, as part of its “diversity” crusade, would not have simultaneously demanded increased standards in admissions. But, impervious to the contradiction, CCI members plowed forward, demanding that Duke decrease legacy and athletic admittees in name of improving standards, citing an insufficiency in “the range of academic preparation of admitted students, particularly of athletes and legacies.”

How would that criteria exist side-by-side with a demand that the admissions department increase the number of admitted minority students—students who, according to figures presented to the CCI, were clearly less prepared than, at the least, legacy students? No evidence exists that the CCI even considered the dilemma.

“Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

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Throughout the fall, the CCI spent a good deal of time on Duke students’ social lives. The leadership of both the overall initiative and each of the subcommittee chairs expressed support for eliminating housing for all selective learning groups and fraternities. According to CCI minutes, the committee believed that the current system simply “supports our community of divides.” Fraternities would still be allowed, but would only receive common space somewhere on campus to meet. How this proposal would overcome expected massive resistance from both students and alumni the CCI never seems to have explored.

Thompson and Moneta even managed to place a politically correct spin on—of all things—excessive alcohol consumption by students.

In internal deliberations, the CCI pointed to Duke statistics suggesting that white and Asian-American students, more often males, consumed alcohol at a greater level than did African-American students. The committee (correctly) argued that this finding was a legitimate concern for any academic institution, since the CCI also had encountered data unsurprisingly revealing that “time spent partying and drinking had a strongly negative impact on academic performance.”

(This data, perhaps, provides the first convincing explanation of why race/class/gender extremists like William Chafe suddenly started demanding that students be teetotalers as a rationalization for the Group of 88’s race/class/gender agenda.)

There was, however, a small problem in justifying a crackdown on drinking in the name of an ostensible CCI interest in improving the academic performance of Duke students. Even if white and Asian-American students drank more, Duke’s own figures showed that these students nonetheless had higher GPAs than did African-American students. How to explain this data? The CCI discovered that “in comparison to Asian and Caucasian students, African-American students were less likely to spend time studying but more in recreational activities.”

To summarize: CCI data found:

(1) Asian-American and white students drank more than did black students;

(2) Drinking and partying had a negative impact on grades and study time; but

(3) Asian-American and white students nonetheless studied more and received higher grades than African-American students.

Wouldn’t such a finding be considered a problem of “campus culture” for African-American students; or at the least, wouldn’t such a finding indicate that the CCI needed to simultaneously address excessive drinking by Asian-American/white students and excessive time “in recreational activities” by African-American students? No record exists of CCI touching either issue.

“Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

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CCI members also spent fall 2006 conducting “outreach” sessions—formal meetings with established student groups; and informal “small group sessions,” which consisted of seemingly random office hours held by some of the CCI’s most extreme members, such as Anne Allison. These “small group sessions” occurred for the race and gender subcommittees, but not for the athletics subcommittee. Both of its sessions were canceled; presumably, Thompson and Moneta understood that the information students were likely to offer wouldn’t conform to the CCI’s preconceived agenda.

And how representative were these “small group sessions”? Take Allison’s September 13, 2006 session. A grand total of one student showed up. Allison described Natt as a “male, gay-identified, undergraduate.” In what must have been music to Allison’s ears, Natt complained that “those who party hard” and “conformist females” dominated campus social life, as opposed to the “majority” of the student population, which included the “better students and alternative types such as artists.” Natt further fumed about the “sense of entitlement” in Greek life on a campus overrun by a “sense of conformity.”

Doubtless Natt’s impressions about Duke life derived from his personal experiences on campus. But how representative was he of Duke undergraduates overall? He certainly was representative of the undergraduates who participated in the CCI’s “small group sessions.” Four of the fourteen students were identified as gay males; a fifth, “Jeremy,” was charmingly described by Anne Allison as “sexuality-unclear (gay or straight?).” Allison complained that Jeremy’s “whole demeanor remained off” in their 35-minute session. Perhaps his recognition that the professor to whom he was speaking was speculating about his sexual orientation caused this unease?

Given that gay males probably total 2 or 3 percent of the overall Duke student body, did the CCI see anything problematic with a setup in which gay males (not counting the “sexuality-unclear” Jeremy) formed 29 percent of the participants? Notes from committee discussion sessions indicate no concern with this issue.

Moneta, meanwhile, went through the motions of sitting down with five groups representing more than 120 students, including representatives of Greek Honor Society—but then summarized the gathering in a perfunctory five-paragraph report (a mere two paragraphs more than Allison devoted to her meeting with Jeremy) that essentially said nothing. Clearly some student voices the CCI had no interest in hearing.

Occasionally, these meetings bordered on the (unintentionally) hilarious. On November 29, 2006, CCI representatives met with members of the Counseling and Psychological Services (CPS) staff. In line with the CCI’s preconceived agenda, the CPS staffers expressed concern about the “struggle with dominant culture.” But, they assured Moneta & Co., “some optimistic evidence” about campus culture existed. Such as? “Students holding hands(!).”

The CPS staffers gave the CCI some parting advice—the committee, they maintained, needed to “redefine what is cool” on campus. The idea of Larry Moneta, Karla Holloway, and Peter Wood telling 20-year-old college students what’s “cool” is comical.

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The records of the CCI show that one professor did write in to express concern about the key problem in Duke’s campus culture exposed by the lacrosse case—what the professor termed the “McCarthyesque” Group of 88 statement and its effects. The professor noted that “he was concerned that faculty would endorse a statement indicating that no matter what the eventual outcome of guilt or innocence of the students involved that they should be punished anyway,” and lamented that many people he knew on the faculty seemed to lump all the students together based on their race.

Bob Thompson’s response? He refused to discuss the Group, and instead insisted that such “views about stereotype provided a good framework to talk about other issues that had been of concern to the Campus Culture Initiative” (because, of course, anything that might have criticized the Group of 88 was off-limits to the CCI). Thompson then moved the meeting to such matters as student self-segregation and creating a more “inclusive” (student) community. Faculty groupthink, apparently, was OK.

Since the professor remains on the Duke faculty and therefore is subject to retaliation from the Group of 88, I have withheld his name.

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Shortly before the CCI issued its report, its linkage to the lacrosse case was confirmed one last time. In early January 2007, Brodhead announced that Duke had lifted the suspensions of Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty. (Neither, unsurprisingly, returned to the University.)

Brodhead's move triggered a ferocious protest from Karla Holloway, who resigned her position as CCI race subcommittee chair. “The decision by the university to readmit the students, especially just before a critical judicial decision on the case, is a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship,” said she. “I could no longer work in good faith with this breach of common trust.”

Holloway then sent out a mass email containing fourth-hand, unsubstantiated, negative gossip about Duke students. Despite the requirement in the Faculty Handbook that Duke professors treat students with respect as fellow members of the academic community, no record exists of any disciplinary action taken against Holloway.

Imagine the reaction of the CCI, on the other hand, had a white, male professor sent out a mass email containing fourth-hand, unsubstantiated, negative gossip about African-American, female Duke students.

“Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

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As the Chronicle presciently noted at the time, “Stacking the CCI with critics of ‘white male privilege’ suggests that the initiative was created to pacify countercultural professors, rather than to shape a new and improved campus culture.” The CCI’s recommendations—the Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative, more “diversity” emphasis, a de facto withdrawal from the ACC—could have been written by Thompson, Moneta, Holloway, Allison, and Wood at the start of the process.

Wood’s extremism ultimately caused the CCI report to be shelved—even Brodhead couldn’t tolerate undoing Duke’s athletics program. And no indication exists that Wood’s desire to see Duke withdraw from the ACC will ever reach fruition.

But in the three other areas that interested the CCI—curriculum, faculty hiring policies, and admissions—every reason exists to believe that the CCI agenda will eventually take hold, if more gradually than figures such as Allison or Holloway would have preferred. With the Group of 88 exercising real or de facto control over a wide swath of Duke’s humanities and social sciences departments, the CCI’s curricular designs and personnel agenda are already being implemented. Meanwhile, the recommendations regarding admissions criteria already seem to have made their way into practice.

“Diversity makes a more excellent university.”

The CCI: Summer 2006

During summer 2006, the CCI’s four subcommittees went to work. The initiative’s directors, Bob Thompson and Larry Moneta, made no pretense of balance in selecting subcommittee chairs, instead handing three of the four over to figures on the extremist fringe of discourse about the lacrosse case:

• Karla Holloway chaired the race subcommittee, just as she was analyzing the case through a take-no-prisoners lens: “White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt.”
  

• Anne Allison, partner of Charlie Piot and co-chair of the gender/sexuality committee, had a long record as a campus “activist” and was in the process of developing a course that essentially called for Duke students to dig up dirt on athletes and fraternity members.
  

• Peter Wood, who chaired the athletics subcommittee, already had been discredited by the Coleman Committee report, and during the summer preposterously asserted to the New Yorker that a lacrosse player had advocated genocide against Native Americans. (When pressed for evidence, Wood could only supply an anonymous student evaluation form from a class in which 55 of the 65 students weren’t lacrosse players.) No record exists of his being disciplined for making such an accusation against specific Duke students.

With such a lineup, it was little surprise that the three subcommittees explored the fringes of campus thought. The Wood Subcommittee appears to have been a disaster. Wood proposed draft topics that sounded as if they were built for Swarthmore rather than Duke. For instance, he wanted the CCI to explore “how do we balance varsity sports, club sports, and general community fitness(!).”

When his subcommittee members (which included a token representative from the Athletic Department) refused to support his agenda, Wood simply ignored them, and tried to present his ideas as consensus ones to the CCI as a whole. The resulting fiasco led to a change in reporting procedure to avoid putting on the spot any of Wood's fellow subcommittee chairs.

The refusal of Thompson and Moneta to replace Wood ultimately would backfire, although that wouldn’t become clear until much later.

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While Wood was busy trying to use the CCI to transform Duke into a Division III liberal arts college, the other two subcommittees focused on pushing through an extreme version of the race/class/gender agenda that animated the Group of 88.

Holloway’s race subcommittee began “with the presumption that issues associated with race, color, and culture on this campus do not extend from minority groups, but from the ethos represented in the larger campus community regarding race and culture.” In other words, those who believed that problems in campus culture didn’t come from the racist or sexist behavior of white students in general and white male students in particular had no place in the CCI.

At the subcommittee’s first meeting, on June 22, 2006 (subcommittee members were assigned Nikki Giovanni’s Racism 101 by their chairwoman), Holloway identified four key subissues that she wanted to influence: Duke’s admission policy, the University’s curriculum, regulations regarding student behavior, and the composition of the faculty. In each, she championed an extremist agenda.

On admissions, Holloway framed the issue bluntly: “Can we influence admissions decisions on the types of students Duke recruits and admits, and how readers are reviewing applicants?”

In other words, the Duke student body didn’t seem terribly receptive to the Group of 88’s race/class/gender agenda. But, in Holloway’s mind, the problem wasn’t the unpersuasiveness of the Group’s ideas, it was the composition of the student body. As deliberations proceeded throughout the summer, the Holloway cohort became especially concerned with the admissions office’s tendency to look for “well-rounded” students. Such admittees didn’t fit the Group of 88’s desired profile.

On the curriculum, the Holloway subcommittee desired a “focused course” on diversity that would require all students at Duke to take a course in U.S. diversity. This idea would appear in the CCI’s final report, where it amounted to a Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative.

On student regulations, Holloway was at her most Orwellian. She wanted a “change in a student code of conduct with penalties for conduct that is racially denigrating.” This proposal—which was extreme even for the extremists on the CCI—would have chilled free speech on campus. For instance, an affirmative action bake sale (a common method of student groups to protest racial preferences in the admissions process) is doubtless an event that Holloway and other members of the Group of 88 would interpret as “racially denigrating.” Under her proposal, then, participants in such a protest—a protest addressing a very controversial political issue on which both sides have sincerely held opinions—would have been punished by a student code of conduct.

The Holloway subcommittee also expressed a concern about what it called the “growing problem of cultural ignorance of white students and submerged, silent racism.” The suggestion that ignorance about racial issues is a “growing problem” among college students is belied by virtually every public opinion poll on the subject; the remark only showed that Holloway and her cohort were living in a fantasy world.

Holloway framed the issue in an extraordinarily condescending fashion. The subcommittee needed to address the question of “what does culture mean to someone who is white? Do white students spend time thinking about culture, identity?” Imagine the (appropriate) condemnation if a committee with prominent faculty at an elite university pondered as an agenda item, “Do black students spend time thinking about culture?”

On the faculty, internal deliberations of the Holloway Subcommittee showed a keen interest in exploiting the lacrosse crisis to change Duke’s personnel policies. Subcommittee members detected the need for “a particular initiative regarding a racially diverse faculty and administration,” per the recommendations of the Bowen/Chambers Committee. They also detected a need to confront the question, “Does the teaching faculty’s diversity indicate an administrative interest in and respect for diversity?” The answer, clearly, was no.

Despite her work, Holloway complained that “we’re in the business of trying to fix things and then other people [are] saying things that undermine the message.” (That, of course, is what occurs on a campus that actually values academic freedom and diversity of opinion.) She was particularly upset with a late June 2006 Sports Illustrated article that presented Coach Mike Pressler in a somewhat sympathetic light. Such reports, she realized, would weaken any chance to exploit the case to revolutionize Duke along the model preferred by the Group of 88.

Holloway’s initiatives laid a foundation for CCI meetings with various minority student groups, which occurred in September and October 2006. Usually, these hand-picked groups gave the victimization responses that CCI members desired. CCI records have one such group spinning a wild tale that male students at Duke “tend to travel in a mob and throw alcohol on others who are not drunk (!!).” A female student group demanded that Duke hire more female professors, or “people who look like us teaching in the classroom.” Members of a black student organization sneered that the Student Government and the Chronicle were “an excellent example of an institution by and for the majority culture.”

Occasionally, however, minority student groups got off-message. After a meeting with Asian-American students, the CCI notes recorded “some resentment that despite being the largest underrepresented group of color our existence and issues appear to be eliminated from current discussions.” That was something the CCI didn’t seem to want to hear: like the fleeting concern with Jewish students, Asian-Americans--who, after all, had on average the best scores of any group of applicants to Duke, and therefore stood to lose the most from the racial preferences scheme that Holloway championed--were the forgotten minority for the politically correct CCI leaders.

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Like the Holloway panel, Anne Allison’s gender and sexuality subcommittee also operated from a “working hypothesis”: that “Duke’s gendered culture is, in no small part, derived from a fundamental lack of respect, fueled by a mix of insecurity, dis-empowerment, and alcohol.”

Translation: Most male students at Duke are sexists.

And like Holloway, the subcommittee targeted the admissions process, detected the need to “reconsider admissions strategy and focus less on the ‘well-rounded.’” At least in the material preserved in the CCI records, neither Holloway, nor Allison, nor any of their allies ever said explicitly what was wrong with seeking “well-rounded” students.

Nonetheless, Allison understood that she needed to work with the student body as it then existed. To create the fiction that the recommendations on changing admissions standards were responding to widespread beliefs around the campus, the CCI commissioned a poll of the Duke student body. But some students were more equal than others: more than 60% of those surveyed in the CCI poll were women, and nearly three-quarters of the respondents were female.

Wildly skewed questions produced meaningless data that nonetheless conformed to the desired results. For instance, the CCI asked questions such as “How important is it to you that there are Black [cap. in original] faculty at Duke?” and “How important is it for the curriculum to offer courses on race and ethnicity?” Unsurprisingly, huge majorities deemed both to be “very important.”

Allison’s beliefs received a strong endorsement from Robyn Wiegman, head of the Duke Women’s Center (and best-known in the lacrosse case for her savage, misleading attack on Steve Baldwin after he criticized the Group of 88). Wiegman, one of the few faculty members to receive an individual meeting with the CCI, demanded that the initiative work to “bring interrogation of social world into the curriculum.”

Even as the case that spawned the CCI collapsed, the race/class/gender ideology that Wiegman, Holloway, Allison and their allies so ardently championed remained unaffected. Monday’s post will examine the CCI’s final months.

The CCI: Spring 2006

The Campus Culture Initiative was among the most outrageous examples of the Duke administration’s response to the lacrosse case. Launched in the same message in which President Brodhead canceled the 2006 season (and on the same day in which he sent his guilt-presuming “letter” to the Duke community), the CCI functioned as a caricature of what’s wrong with higher education today.

To head up the initiative, President Brodhead turned to a politically correct administrator, Robert Thompson, and the member of his senior leadership most hostile to the lacrosse players, Larry Moneta. (Moneta already had remarked on tape that he didn’t believe the players were innocent, and his record of indifference to student rights he brought with him to Duke from Penn.) To chair three of the CCI’s four subcommittees, Thompson and Moneta then named figures who had distinguished themselves for their extremism in response to the case—Karla Holloway, Anne Allison, and Peter Wood.

Wood’s extremism ultimately proved too much even for Brodhead. The combination of intense opposition from students and alumni to the CCI’s agenda, coupled with the recommendation of Wood’s subcommittee for scheduling changes that would have forced Duke to withdraw from the ACC, led to Brodhead postpone implementation of the CCI’s proposals. That said, te internal record of the CCI reveals a committee whose leadership began with a preconceived agenda, excluded information that contradicted that agenda, and engaged in phony “outreach” whose sole goal was to develop “data” that would confirm the desired ends of the CCI’s leadership.

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The opening line of Brodhead’s initial charge to the CCI, dated April 18, 2006, linked the initiative to the lacrosse case: “Allegations springing from the party held by the men’s lacrosse team have prompted strong feelings and much discussion about issues of race and gender, class and privilege, difference and respect, and campus and community”; therefore, the president continued, “we must use this occasion to take the measure of our campus culture.”

The next week, in two 90-minute sessions, the CCI task force got down to work.

Peter Wood set the tone. The History professor, who spent much of spring 2006 giving bash-the-lacrosse-players interviews to every media outlet in sight, rejoiced that the University had placed him “in a position to tip the balance for groups that are slightly disappointed in Duke, particularly those groups in the Humanities and the Social Sciences [i.e., the Group of 88 and their allies], and build up a strong center so that they are restored and empowered.”

Fellow CCI member Marie-Lynn Miranda got the message: “We fail to highlight the unique opportunities available at Duke (to study race, class, gender, culture, for example) because we’re too busy apologizing for being in the South.” Wood shared Miranda’s vision but didn’t like her tactics, sourly noting that “the South is also characterized by its hyper sports culture.”

Thompson agreed that the committee had a clear curricular charge. Building off the statement made a few days before by Mark Anthony (“Thugniggaintellectual”) Neal that faculty “activists” needed to exploit the case to push through a “progressive” curriculum, Thompson cited a need to “look at things such as course evaluations on courses . . . that deal with race, or ask how many courses we have that deal with issues like racism.”

In other words: Duke’s curriculum would be set not by academic standards, but to accommodate the CCI’s preferred ideological agenda.

Thompson also reminded his fellow CCI members that “events surrounding [the] lacrosse team activated a series of issues that shocked us in terms of our reactions and responses. How could we promote such a climate?” Moneta chimed in that “date rape has been and continues to be a big issue.” Of course, if no rape had occurred, no connection could exist between “date rape” and “events surrounding the lacrosse team.” But even as of this meeting (April 25, 2006), Moneta appears not to have considered such a possibility.

On another front, it was clear, even at this early stage, that the student body’s basically positive attitude toward Duke athletics would be a problem for the CCI.

The committee members conceded that “sports are recognized as one element of the campus community that bring people together.” How could this data be reconciled with the desire of a committee majority to downplay athletics? The CCI never really developed an answer to this question, although Moneta offered one possibility to achieve student solidarity without promoting athletics: more campus jazz concerts! Even the politically correct CCI majority didn’t seriously consider this suggestion.

As the first CCI meeting came to a close, a question hung over the room: “How counter-cultural are we willing to be”?

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The CCI next met on May 4, 2006. The intervening nine days had been unkind to the group’s agenda. First, Reade Seligmann’s attorney had released his client’s unimpeachable alibi, showing that even if the rape of which Moneta was so certain had occurred, Durham police had arrested an innocent Duke student. Second, that alibi filing included the statement of Kim Roberts, who admitted that she had made the 911 call from outside the captains’ house. And so it turned out that the conventional wisdom of the lacrosse players hurling racial epithets at two black women who had no connection to the party but just happened to be strolling down Buchanan Street was false. Perhaps, despite Brodhead’s previous apology to the “woman and her friend,” the lacrosse players weren’t all racists after all? Then, the Coleman Committee released its report, finding that the players drank much too much, but that they also were good students, with good records of community service, who most of their professors liked, and who had shown no tendencies toward sexist or racist behavior to Duke students or staff.

This clearly wasn’t the sort of information that most CCI members wanted to hear. So they simply chose not to listen to it. Wood, whose credibility had been destroyed by the Coleman Committee report (which found that even Wood’s TA couldn’t corroborate his after-the-fact remembrances of alleged misconduct by lacrosse players in his class) fumed that the committee’s “conclusions” were “premature.” He predicted that new evidence would emerge, since “other issues [were] buried in the report or missing.” The History professor told the CCI that an East Campus Residential Life person would demonstrate the fundamental indecency of the lacrosse players, and that this unnamed figure was ignored, for reasons unknown, by Coleman.

Wood’s scowling set the tone for the meeting. After a long and basically fruitless discussion of the problem posed by alcohol on campus, the CCI adjourned.

Most CCI members appeared to be sincere at least in assuming that they had an accurate picture of the Duke student body (most white male students were sexists and racists; African-American students were oppressed, etc.). And so, for its May 18, 2006 meeting, the CCI invited David Jamieson-Drake to report on surveys of first-year Duke students, which they obviously expected would confirm their preconceptions.

Instead, Jamieson-Drake reported that, in general, white, Asian-American, and Hispanic students were happy with their experiences at Duke, while satisfaction was lower for black students. The CCI ignored the obvious questions from these findings—namely, if the “dominant” university culture was a hotbed of discrimination against students of color, why didn’t Asian-American or Hispanic students seem to notice it?

Jamieson-Drake also addressed other student attitudes. He noted a widespread concern among undergraduates with security in and around campus. An unintentionally hilarious discussion ensued, showing just how out of touch most CCI members were with the day-to-day experiences of Duke undergraduates.

At a time when the local DA was breaking myriad rules to prosecute innocent Duke students, the local police department had established a “separate-but-equal” justice system in which Duke students were punished differently and more severely for various offenses than all other Durham residents, and even Moneta had sent around a campus-wide notice telling Duke students to be more on guard than usual, it would seem that any normal person would have found unsurprising Jamieson-Drake’s revelation that Duke students worried about security matters.

Not so the CCI. “These trends don’t make sense,” the minutes record CCI members exclaiming. Why? “Because Duke is not in a huge urban setting (or near any big metropolitan center) like a lot of top tier universities, so why would students be more anxious and concerned about security?”

In other words: data that failed to fit the predisposed outcome was dismissed. This pattern would occur again and again over the course of the CCI’s existence.

The meeting also spent a good deal of time on the various categories of students that Jamieson-Drake’s survey had detected. Lots of discussion ensued about the negative effects of a group Jamieson-Drake designated “hedonists”—“primarily white and Asian-American men” who liked to drink and party and were only average or below-average students. (Several committee members were confused: who, they wondered, would label themselves a “hedonist” in a student survey? Jamieson-Drake had to remind them about how he had already noted that the labels, including such obviously derogatory ones as “hedonist,” came from him, not from the students on the surveys.)

The Jamieson-Drake presentation prompted a CCI musing: “Why don’t we use this data to determine what type of students we want to admit?” The time had come, according to the CCI majority, to start exploring “what % of our students are unqualified because they are either athletes or legacies?” There was, of course, a third category of statistically unqualified or less qualified students (“diversity” admittees). But the CCI showed no interest in exploring their performance: some unqualified students, it seems, were perfectly acceptable. In the event, the CCI would turn much more attention to the admissions process in fall 2006.

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Brodhead’s personal appearance before the CCI came on May 12, 2006. Conditions had changed dramatically in the 37 days since he decided to—as the Chronicle later noted—stack “the CCI with critics of ‘white male privilege’” so as “to pacify countercultural professors.” The backlash against the Group of 88 had begun; student opinion had turned decisively in favor of the falsely accused players; and some alumni and donors had started to ask why the administration hadn’t demanded that local authorities respect the due process rights of Duke students. Brodhead told CCI members that he didn’t want to dictate their actions, but he cautioned against their employing “polarizing” language. The “activists” on the committee disagreed, since the “lack of explicit language, such as race, will be seen as a superficial attempt to discuss culture.”

Instead, in this, their final meeting of the spring 2006 term, the CCI membership considered the possibility of going more extreme. Thompson and Moneta already had decided to create four subcommittees (race; gender/sexuality; alcohol/student judicial system; and athletics). But the committee considered the possibility of a fifth subcommittee, focused on the issue of “prejudice.”

Committee members wondered whether “‘prejudice’ [should] be taken out of the Race category and be established as a separate one or not included at all.” For instance, “where do Jewish people fit in?” (Needless to say, the CCI never considered the disturbing problem of anti-Israel attitudes among the academic far left, including many members of the Group of 88.) The committee also wondered whether separate subcommittees were needed to address “LGBT folks,” or “religious minorities,” or “issues of class/affluence/privilege.” In the end, the CCI decided that it “may be OK to put ethnicities [except, it seems, Jews] under one umbrella for logistical purposes as long as everyone [except, again, Jews] is accounted for in the actual fieldwork.”

Over summer 2006, the CCI’s four subcommittees took center stage. Thursday’s post will explore their work.

Butler's Latest

In this morning’s Chronicle, the always astute Kristin Butler provides a bureaucratic-politics analysis to discover that “President Richard Brodhead’s first major decision after the release of the Campus Culture Initiative report was… not recommended by the CCI at all.”

Indeed, as Butler notes, Brodhead’s proposal for a new dean for undergraduate education “effectively demotes both the CCI’s chair and vice chair, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Bob Thompson and Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta.”

Coupled with Brodhead’s tepid reception for the CCI, the message here seems to be clear.

Meanwhile, Butler provides critical insight into the heretofore backroom dealings of the Board of Trustees. Four of the ten members of the Executive Council must retire in June, their replacements to be selected by the remaining members. The significance?

For those of us who have wondered aloud why Chairman Bob Steel-whose high-profile job in the Treasury Department prevents him from fulfilling his ex-officio role on the board of the Duke Management Company-has stubbornly refused to resign his chairmanship, we may now have our answer. Steel, who headed the committee that hired President Brodhead and who has been Brodhead’s most vocal supporter over these past 12 months, will soon be poised to stack with enough pro-Brodhead members to consolidate the president’s power base for good.

A fascinating theory.

The CCI's Impending Train Wreck

Last week, North Carolina’s public radio station, WUNC, had an hour-long discussion of the Campus Culture Initiative. Though stacked in favor of CCI proponents, the program actually featured a devastating critique of the CCI’s agenda.

Host Frank Stasio opened with CCI chairman Robert Thompson giving the party line: the CCI’s “main thrust was to develop an inclusive social community,” since Duke’s “next challenge is . . . engaging difference.”

Of course, it’s clear that the CCI intended to engage only certain types of difference; after all, CCI subgroup chairs Peter Wood, Karla Holloway, and Anne Allison seemed to have no problem with denouncing students when doing so advanced their personal, ideological, or pedagogical agendas. Those students, it appears, must be sacrificed in the name of the Group of 88’s vision of an “inclusive social community.”

Thompson made clear that the CCI’s goal was weakening the campus position of fraternities and athletes. Why—in the name of inclusiveness—did he not ensure that at least one student-athlete was on the CCI? Stasio didn’t ask, and Thompson didn’t tell.

And why—in the name of common sense—did the dean not demand the resignation of the only fraternity representative on the CCI, senior Chauncey Nartey, after the frat of which Nartey was president was suspended in November? Surely, it would seem, Nartey should not be in a position to tell anyone else how to behave. Could Nartey's retention on the committee have flowed from his having sponsored a late March 2006 resolution demanding that the lacrosse players be forbidden from practicing until Mike Nifong completed his investigation?

Stasio did, however, offer a surprise question. He noted that the report had uncovered evidence that some students and professors engaged in anti-athletic stereotypes. Thompson’s response: “We want to address that situation in its entirety.” How? He didn’t say, and the committee apparently had no interest in pursuing it. For the CCI, it looks like some stereotypes are not a pressing problem.

Thompson, appropriately, called for treating excessive drinking on campus as a “public health problem.” The dean added that the administration needed to “communicate and have clear policies” regarding alcohol use by students. But the CCI head ignored the elephant in the room—the apparent abuse by Durham police of the separate-but-equal policy in which Duke students received disproportionate punishment solely on the basis of their identity as Duke students.

Stasio then discussed the CCI’s “enterprising” recommendations with two Duke students. Student Government president and CCI member Elliot Wolf has publicly criticized the CCI’s flawed procedure. Chronicle columnist Kristin Butler penned an eviscerating review of the CCI. The Chronicle editorial board has penned several articles critiquing the CCI. So, if Stasio wanted, he easily could have found a student to present a critical view of the report. It seems he didn’t want to do so. Both invited students warmly endorsed the CCI.

The program’s most interesting section came in a roundtable discussion featuring Duke grad Steven Roy Goodman, a college counselor with TopColleges.com; Duke law professor Paul Haagen; and anti-lacrosse extremist Orin Starn.

Goodman was a voice of realism in a debate too often characterized by outlandish thinking. “Duke,” he stated, “is playing with fire here.” It “competes in the educational marketplace” with schools like Georgetown, Stanford, and Northwestern (which combine academic with athletic excellence) or lower-tier Ivies such as Cornell and Dartmouth.

Tinkering with its image, Goodman noted, threatens to leave Duke adrift. The CCI’s anti-sports, nanny-state agenda “would dramatically change the way the university is looked at around the country.” And “universities don’t exist in a vacuum.” Students attracted to the current version of Duke would just go elsewhere; students who want to go to anti-sports universities where the administration tells them how to behave wouldn’t necessarily choose Duke anyway.

Goodman astutely analyzed the problem: “The students who are applying to Duke are attracted to Duke precisely because of the athletic/academic combination. And the faculty who are attracted to Duke are attracted to Duke for their own reasons, but those two trains are colliding. That’s what I think we’re seeing now, in the responses to the lacrosse controversy and the responses to this report.” It’s “almost like a house divided—it can’t stand.”

Haagen similarly asked people to live in the reality-based community. While athletes as a whole perform less well in undergraduate institutions, athletes who attend elite institutions like Duke, it seems, “are extraordinarily successful when they go out into the world.” The preparation that they receive, Haagen noted, is highly socially valued.

Speaking, he claimed, on behalf of “many” (unnamed) professors and firmly in support of “our excellent president,” Starn hailed the CCI’s “positive recommendations.” In a comment oozing with condescension, he stated that athletes are “lovely people,” but they were “just getting by in their schoolwork.” (He produced no evidence for this claim.) His support for the CCI’s anti-athletics agenda, Starn fantastically continued, came from talking to (anonymous, of course) student-athletes.

Fifteen years ago, according to Starn, the aura around the Duke athletic program might have helped the institution. But Duke is now a “fabulous university in every respect,” so “we shouldn’t be trying to attract students because of the opportunity they’ll have to be basketball fans.” What should Duke seek? Students attracted by their institution’s “social activism opportunities.”

After a few minutes of listening to Starn, Goodman figured things out: “The issue really is whether Duke is going to be a small school like Swarthmore and promote the kind of social activism that Professor Starn is talking about.” He doubted that it was desirable, or even “possible to have a school like Duke become a school like Swarthmore or Bowdoin.” Duke could be like Harvard or Yale, Starn responded, prompting Goodman to gently remind him, “They have very different historical traditions than Duke does.”

What Starn “is really saying,” Goodman concluded, “is that [athletics] has too much of a place in all of America, and therefore we ought to change America. That may be, but if you’re attracting students from America, something doesn’t make sense here.” But “making sense” was never the CCI’s central goal. As the Chronicle editorialized in January, “Stacking the CCI with critics of ‘white male privilege’ suggests that the initiative was created to pacify countercultural professors, rather than to shape a new and improved campus culture.”

In the end, Goodman reasoned, student-athletes make choices in how they spend their time—just like other students are asked to make choices. “What we see here,” he recognized, “is a campus culture report that’s trying to force Duke to move in a direction of giving students effectively fewer choices.” Figures such as Holloway, Starn, and Thompson want to restrict choices and force-feed Duke students a Group of 88-sanctioned “diversity” agenda. But, to borrow Goodman’s words, the more likely outcome of adopting the CCI recommendations is to set in motion a “train wreck.”

[Update, 11.23am: A reader noted that President Brodhead invited Nartey to be one of two Duke students to accompany him to the Feb. 8 "A Duke Conversation" event in Charlotte. The write-up for the event celebrates, among other items, Nartey's work with his fraternity (which by that point had been suspended). Obviously Nartey is a student who represents the kind of Duke that the administration would like to see in future.]

Today's News

The incomparable Kristin Butler takes aim at the Campus Culture Initiative in her column today. As she notes, the CCI process “has been an unmitigated disaster.” Indeed, she notes, the “CCI has become a caricature of University governance, populated by agenda-driven individuals, operating under cover of secrecy and lacking meaningful student input or support.”

Its problems?

1) The initial announcement of the CCI, by President Brodhead on April 5, was intimately linked to the lacrosse case.

2) The “committee's highly controversial membership was . . . poorly considered”—i.e., putting the CCI in the hands of Group of 88 leaders and Peter Wood ensured an “agenda-driven” result.

3) Student opinion appeared to be deliberately excluded—as seen in SG president Elliot Wolf’s public dissent.

4) The CCI operated in secrecy, and relied on secret data to justify its conclusions.

Butler presents an argument that has also crossed my mind: “It is hard not to wonder whether President Brodhead intentionally stocked the committee with voices sure to be considered illegitimate by many in the Duke community.” And, as Butler points out, the University community has lost out on the much-needed “frank discussion that Brodhead promised us all last spring—a discussion that risked presidential credibility and challenged false illusions in the hope of making this campus stronger.”

Two other items in papers today: Jackie MacMullen has a sympathetic portrait of former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler, now at Bryant. She laments, “A respected university rushed to judgment, and shattered the world of a group of student-athletes and a respected coach in the process.”

And the BG News (the campus newspaper at Bowling Green) has a major scoop: “Prosecutor is Cleared in Duke Rape Case.” The headline misinterprets the brief filed by Mike Nifong’s lawyers for a judgment of the Disciplinary Hearing Commission.

The Group's Continued Delusions

The unintentionally revealing comments keep coming from the Group of 88.

Here is Group member Lee Baker, on the suffering Group members have endured:

Our syllabi are getting scrutinized. There are a couple Web sites that instruct people to go to ratemyprofessor.com and give negative comments. The white supremacists sites have our names and e-mails.

It’s unclear precisely what sites Baker is talking about in his second and third sentences; I certainly haven’t run across such examples.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that what he says is true. A college professor has compared having fraudulent evaluations and being targeted by hate groups to having his syllabi “scrutinized.”

Most professors do not consider their syllabi to be secret documents, to be shielded from public view. (I put all of mine on line, and have for years.) Can Baker seriously maintain that having outsiders examine what, exactly, Duke professors teach is out of bounds?

A quick glance through Baker’s list of offerings suggests that he would be a prime beneficiary of the proposed Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative.

Take, for instance, his “Life in America”—an offering that focuses on . . . race. (Who could have guessed—a Group of 88 class oriented around race, class, and gender?) [Note: After this post appeared, the syllabus vanished from the Duke University website. A cached version of the syllabus is, however, still available.]

Assignments include such readings as,

• “We’re Here, We’re Queer—And We’re Better Than You: Representational Superiority of Gay Men to Heterosexuals on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”;

• “The Politics of Labeling: Latino/a Cultural Identities of Self and Other”;

• “The Great American Football Ritual: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Inequity”;

• “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian-Americans and Critical Transformation of Whiteness”;
  

• “Cyborg Violence: Busting Bodies and Borders with Queer Machines.”
  

This is the sort of class that the Campus Culture Initiative wants to require for all Duke students.

[Update, 11.41am: Prof. Baker e-mailed to provide a link to a white supremacist site called stormfront.org. In a 51-page comment thread, the site had one (anonymous) comment listing the membership of the Group of 88, with links to their webpages (but not e-mails) and to their ratemyprofessors.com site. The same site had one (anonymous) comment in the same 51 pages attacking Reade Seligmann's Jewish ancestry.

I should point out, as a caveat, that ratemyprofessors.com is a site of little usefulness. In my experience, after I took a position on a campus issue relating to the Brooklyn Education Department, I noticed that I had a number of quite negative ratings from students, complaining about the in-class bias I exhibited in my classes in Political Science and Core 9. There was only one problem: I'm a History professor, and so don't teach any Political Science classes, nor have I ever taught Core 9. The moral: anyone can post on ratemyprofessors.com, and the site has no vetting process to determine whether the poster actually is a student who took a class from the professor. So anything in the site about the Group of 88 is of little value.]

[Update, II, 12.26pm: An excellent response in the comment thread:

Here is the obvious perspective on the whole "white supremacists have my email address"/"people have made death threats against the G88"/"somebody, somewhere has been discriminated against".

What does that have to do with rational criticism of your position and actions?

I'm sure that the President of the United States gets death threats from all manner of nutjobs and enemies. That doesn't mean that we should allow him/her to implement whatever economic or social policies he/she wishes without scrutiny.

No reasonable person wants anyone to feel physically intimidated or in mortal danger. However, rational analysis of a person or position necessitates a level of compartmentalization that allows for heavy criticism of one element of a situation as well as deep sympathy for another element.]

The H-S Keeps to the Party Line

In one of the least surprising events of recent weeks, today's Herald-Sun features a glowing editorial on the Campus Culture Initiative:

It bravely addresses the disparity between Duke's lofty ideals and the day-to-day reality . . . It's an excellent place for a discussion to begin . . . We hope the ensuing discussion on these recommendations will be as bold as the report itself.

Does the CCI have any critics? Not according to the H-S. In an 18-paragraph editorial, it mentions none. Not the skewed membership, or the peculiarities of the Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative, or the decision to ignore the negative aspects of campus culture (such as the faculty's rush to judgment) to which CCI members contributed.

This decision, of course, is unsurprising. Like the potbangers and the Group of 88 (except for Arlie Petters), the H-S editorial page acts as if it is intellectually frozen in time on or about April 6, unable or unwilling to process anything that occurred after that date. The rest of the world, however, has moved on.

More on the CCI

Having gone through the full report of the Campus Culture Initiative, it’s easy to see why it received such a tepid reception from President Brodhead. The report combines a series of unobjectionable, even laudable, recommendations with persistent references to “last spring’s lacrosse event” that act as if time stopped on March 31^st, when the potbangers, Group of 88, and Mike Nifong were still riding high.

The theme of the lacrosse case has been flawed procedures beget flawed results. The CCI’s record conforms to the pattern. With three of the committee’s four subgroups chaired or co-chaired by among the campus’ most extreme critics of the lacrosse team, is it any wonder that the CCI produced a report that validated the worldview of . . . the campus’ most extreme critics of the lacrosse team?

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The two workable recommendations:

(1) create more physical space for student social activity around campus;

(2) streamline the faculty administrative structure to increase faculty-student interaction.

It’s hard to see how anyone could object to either of these goals, and Brodhead should allow these two and only these two items to form the legacy of the CCI.

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Three minor items give a sense of the report’s quality and biases:

(1) The report’s first line: “Duke University is a university of the 21^st century, emboldened and challenged by the dynamics of a changing world.” Is there any university in the country to which this statement would not apply?

(2) The 25-page report—a product of months-long inquiry by prestigious academics—cited a grand total of two (2) publications. The chosen duo? William Bowen’s screed against Division I athletics; and Janet Reitman’s widely disparaged Rolling Stone article—which, perhaps because it places the Duke student body in the worst possible light, is assigned reading in Anne Allison's spring semester class. Apparently, CCI members decided not even to try to conceal the membership’s biases.

(3) The report listed four and only four campus groups and offices with which CCI members “connected”: the Women’s Center; the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life; the Council on Civic Engagement; and the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. Some might suggest that this quartet would provide a rather one-sided view of campus culture.

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The Alcohol subgroup was the only subgroup not chaired by an extreme critic of the lacrosse program. The recommendations of the CCI’s alcohol subgroup recognize the difficulty of alcohol on contemporary college campuses, but do not single out athletes as any worse (or better) than all Duke students on this question. This section, no doubt, will pose problems for the latter-day neo-prohibitionists among the Group of 88.

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Other items in the report are unintentionally revealing.

(1) “There are often pressures for conformity which work against our institutional vision as an inclusive academic community.” (p. i) “The Committee came to better understand problems that exist—ranging from simple acts of uncivil speech and intolerance to what some have called a ‘culture of excess.’” (p. 4) “Last spring’s events revealed that Duke must do better in learning how to engage difference constructively.” (p. 8)

Some might think that these statements describe the potbangers or the Group of 88. In fact, the report’s implication is that those who opposed the potbangers or the Group of 88 were guilty of exercising “pressures for conformity” or engaging in “uncivil speech and intolerance” or of failing “to engage difference constructively.”

(2) “Last spring’s lacrosse event and its ensuing controversies evoked strong emotions and discussions about issues of race and gender, class and privilege, difference and respect, athletics and academics, and town and gown.” (p. 1)

It appears as if CCI members suffered from a form of Durham Rip van Winkle disease, having gone to sleep on or about April 6 and missed “strong emotions and discussions” about issues of faculty groupthink, prosecutorial misconduct, a rush-to-judgment mentality, or professors who fail to respect all their students, regardless of race, gender, or athletic status.

Those “ensuing controversies” the CCI members were bound and determined to ignore. I wonder why?

(3) “In their first year at Duke, about 15% of Black students reported that Duke instructors treated them badly because of their race/ethnicity,” as opposed to much smaller percentages for other groups. (p. 6)

This claim is a shocking one: the CCI has suggested, without any hard investigation, that a considerable portion of Duke faculty members engage in racist behavior.

(4) [update, 1.12am]: A commenter notes, “I was astonished to read in the CCI report that the Duke Class of 2010 includes 41 percent students of color. Yet, the next paragraph calls for additional consideration for admissions from 'under-represented groups.' What groups could remain under-represented?”

A good question, to which the CCI offered no answer.

(5) “Analyses conducted over the last four years indicate that this decision has increased the number of students who are not adequately prepared to benefit from, or contribute to, the work of the academic community, event with enhanced academic support services. This places Duke’s admirable graduation rates at risk, reinforces negative stereotypes, and does not serve the best interests of these students themselves, their peers, or their faculty.” (p. 22)

Reread the statement above. Some might think it came from an ultra-conservative critic of “diversity” college admissions policies.

But it came from the CCI. For those who guessed that it refers not to African-American students with poor SAT scores and pre-Duke academic preparation, but instead refers to a class of Duke students consistently targeted by the Group of 88 and figures such as Peter Wood and Orin Starn, a free guest pass to the next “Shut Up and Teach” event is yours for the taking.

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In the end, there never was any doubt about what the CCI would produce, with Peter Wood and Group of 88 members Karla Holloway and Anne Allison chairing or co-chairing three of its four subgroups. As a Chronicle editorial noted a few weeks back, “The composition of the CCI’s steering committee has hurt its credibility . . . Stacking the CCI with critics of ‘white male privilege’ suggests that the initiative was created to pacify countercultural professors, rather than to shape a new and improved campus culture.”

The most chilling provision of the CCI report is the Group of 88 Enrollment Initiative, with the Group seeking to use the lacrosse case to force all Duke students to take their classes. The report urges a requirement that all Duke students take a class that engages “the reality of difference in American society and culture. The vast majority of these offerings are taught by . . . the Group of 88.

Over the past 10 months, most Group of 88 members have made clear their belief that the Faculty Handbook provisions requiring Duke professors to treat all students with respect do not apply to them. The idea that all Duke students should be forced to take a class from a Group of 88 professor or a handful of the Group’s ideological allies in the name of “improving campus culture” is Orwellian.