Duke's Version of Freeh (Updated)

[Update, 18 July, 8.38am: The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews, among others, John Burness about the Freeh Report. In his remarks, Burness essentially praises Penn State for doing what Duke did not do:

"They wouldn't have been able to put this behind them for the next several years if they hadn't gone about doing this the way they've done it—getting someone like Judge Freeh, whose character is pretty unassailable and who was given carte blanche to see what he found and report it without fear or favor," said John F. Burness, a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University and the university's spokesman during the 2007 lacrosse scandal. 

"There is some very bad news in here for Penn State and Coach Paterno and a lot of the leadership of Penn State," he said. "But this is a really critical inflection point for the institution because it is one of the thresholds they had to get through. As difficult as it will be, it was necessary to restore confidence in the integrity of the institution."]

I have a post over at Minding the Campus examining the Freeh Report—and what the document says about the continuing need for oversight by trustees. In short, at Penn State, the trustees failed in their fiduciary duties, and the university will now pay the price. The report describes a top-to-bottom failure in the Penn State administration—from the former president, to the former AD, to the former football coach, and back up again to current and former trustees.

At the very least, however, Penn State deserves credit for critically examining where and how the administration went wrong, and for trying to change a culture that both enabled and contributed to these administrative failures. And it’s hard to criticize the research behind the Freeh Report, which pored through e-mails, other university documents, transcripts of interviews, and publicly-available information from the criminal investigations. Any university that is attempting to move beyond errors would do well to look at the Freeh Report as a model.

For anyone who closely, or even not-so-closely, followed the lacrosse case, the flip-side of the Freeh Report is obvious. Though Duke steadfastly refused to publish a White Paper or even establish a Coleman Committee-like investigation of why and how the administration and “activist” faculty got the lacrosse case so wrong, there was—technically, at least—a Duke version of the Freeh Committee.

In his guilt-presuming April 5, 2006 letter (the document in which he dropped all reference to a presumption of innocence, and merely asked the Duke community to “wait until the authorities act before reaching any judgment in the criminal case”), President Brodhead announced an “Investigation of [the] Duke Administration Response.” He hoped, in part, “to address the concern that my administration did not respond as quickly as we should have and to learn any lessons this episode can teach.” The rush-to-judgment crowd that needed appeasing were unnamed “faculty, students, community members, and others.” While the identity of the “others” is unclear, it seems the remaining figures were either members of the Group of 88 or their student supporters.

To fulfill the role of Louis Freeh in the Penn State case, Brodhead chose former Princeton president and prominent affirmative action-defender William Bowen and former NCCU chancellor Julius Chambers; the duo added a third member, Danielle Carr Ramdath, who they helpfully  identified as an “African-American woman.” While the three admitted they didn’t have enough time to actually conduct a full-fledged inquiry, they nonetheless claimed that they “gained an understanding of the principal issues.”

Departing from the Freeh investigative approach, the Bowen/Chambers report gave no indication of examining internal Duke e-mails to get a sense of how and why the administration responded as it did. (Bowen and Chambers—Carr Ramdath, for reasons that are not clear, did not sign the report—never explained how they could investigate the “Duke administration response” without examining what would be the most relevant evidence to determine that response.) And the report gave no sign of the massive legal liability that Duke ultimately would face—the reported eight-figure settlement with the falsely-accused players, the legal bills piled up in defending the lawsuit from the unindicted players, the settlement with former coach Mike Pressler. Indeed, a reader of the Bowen/Chambers report—which faulted Duke largely for an insufficient commitment to diversity in its hiring process—would have been utterly mystified to ultimately learn that this “administration response” that the duo supposedly investigated had exposed the university to legal liability.

The Freeh Report is a long and difficult read. But for those with the time, compare it to the Bowen/Chambers report, to which I’ve linked in its totality. Which of the two constitutes an investigation, and which constitutes a whitewash?