Selena on the Faculty

In her screed against the lacrosse team in Sunday’s New York Times, Selena Roberts lashed out at those who criticized the rush to judgment:

Some of them have expressed their anger with threatening e-mail messages to Duke staff members who had voiced opinions on the scandal.

Fresh from her appearance in Durham alongside Group of 88 stalwart Grant Farred and anti-lacrosse extremist Orin Starn, Roberts happily accepted the Group of 88’s e-mail canard. Even though she was in town, she gave no evidence of acting like a reporter and actually checking with either the Durham or Duke Police to determine whether an investigation had begun into these “threatening” actions.

What “opinion on the scandal,” by the way, have such “Duke staff members” voiced? Roberts doesn’t say.

Perhaps she was referring to William Chafe’s suggesting that the whites who lynched Emmett Till provided the appropriate context through which to interpret the behavior of the lacrosse players.

Or Houston Baker’s describing the players as “farm animals.”

Or Karla Holloway—in the name of upholding a university’s basic principles—passing along fifth-hand, unsubstantiated, slanderous gossip about her own school’s students.

Or her co-panelist Grand Farred’s accusing hundreds of Duke students of harboring a “secret racism.”

Roberts describes such items as the above with the bland clause “voiced opinions on the scandal.” I wonder why she was so eager to withhold from her readers exactly what opinions her ideological comrades among the faculty have expressed?