Open Letter to Brodhead

Today's Duke Chronicle features an open letter to President Richard Brodhead and Duke's Board of Trustees. Sponsored by Friends of Duke University, a grassroots organization, the letter urges the Brodhead administration to do more to speak up for Duke students, in part by "formally demand[ing] that Mr. Nifong immediately correct, to the extent now possible, the grave errors that he has committed to date." The letter also notes that beyond acknowledging bad conduct by the lacrosse team, as he has repeatedly done, Brodhead needs to "call attention to the larger, more positive, context the [Coleman] committee found” about the team. In general, the letter advocates a more robust response by Duke to the crisis, asking the institution to use its formal but especially informal powers on behalf of both itself and its students.

The letter concludes by reminding Brodhead:

One of our university's finest moments occurred 100 years ago during the Bassett Affair. When a member of the university community unfairly came under attack, the President and Board of Trustees refused to cave into momentary expediency. Instead, Duke's leaders spoke out for what was right. In the end, rather than suffer for it, Duke's reputation was greatly enhanced by the courage of the President and Board. Can we now say the same about the Lacrosse Affair?

(Disclosure: I'm a strong supporter of this organization, and the FODU website has posted links to my writings on the case.)

The open letter comes almost exactly 100 days after another full-page Duke Chronicle ad: the so-called "listening" statement, signed by the Group of 88. Even now, there seems to be no recognition on the signatories' part as to how a large group of professors issuing a public, denunciatory statement about their own school's students would have facilitated D.A. Mike Nifong's witch-hunt. Yet there are some positive developments about the campus climate regarding the statement. In a recent discussion thread at John in Carolina's blog, a commenter incorrectly identified as a Group of 88 member Professor Orin Starn, who has criticized the lacrosse team as part of his campaign to transform Duke into an athletic version of Haverford. Within an hour, Starn requested a retraction. When even Orin Starn wants to avoid association with the Group of 88, a sea change in attitudes has occurred.

The group's collective profile is revealing. To begin with, only 69 of the 88 are tenured or tenure-track faculty: seven were visitors (it's understandable why they would care little about the fate of Duke students); seven teach in the University Writing Program; and one each was a program registrar, graduate student, program administrator, clinical nurse, and "affiliate" to an unspecified Duke program. Statement sponsors haven’t explained how they determined who was eligible to sign the document.

The 69 permanent faculty signatories included only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. (It would have been difficult indeed for a law professor to have signed a statement deeming irrelevant "the results of the police investigation.") Of the permanent signatories, 58—an astonishing 84.1 percent—describe their research interests as related to race, class, or gender (or all three), in some cases to an extent bordering on caricature. One Group of 88 member stated that his current project "argues that unless we attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical." Another reasoned that "it was not merely military mobilization . . . that paved the path to war [in Iraq] but a highly gendered war talk." An example? Laura Bush’s late 2001 comments about the plight of Afghan women, which “furthered the [U.S.] imperial project in her highly gendered appeal to a world conscience.” A third signatory, after beginning her career exploring "postmodernist theory about the individual and the body," is now " working on a new project critiquing animal rights from speciesist perspective."

Some Group of 88 members, as I've noted before, have started to re-invent themselves as neo-temperance activists. But most remain mired in a classic example of what Mark Bauerlein, in his 2004 essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, described as academic "groupthink." Under increasing criticism from Duke alums (I've been forwarded a couple dozen such emails), many seem genuinely puzzled that their actions have attracted outside attention. After all, in one respect, the statement represented a not uncommon event on campus: race/class/gender professors wielding their collective muscle, with little or no public opposition from professors who fear being branded as insensitive to the contemporary academy's Trinity. One signatory responded emphatically to whether she would consider signing a public statement urging due process for the lacrosse players: "NO." There's no need: as another signatory recently claimed, the Group of 88's statement "has nothing to do with the LAX case."

It's remarkable that anyone could argue, in good faith, that a statement asserting something "happened" to the accuser and publicly thanking protesters who distributed wanted posters and banged pots and pans while calling the players "rapists" had "nothing to do with the LAX case." After all, the issue was hardly being ignored by faculty at the time. Houston Baker's public demand for the immediate expulsion of the "team and its members" was well known; a lacrosse parent recalled a class with History professor Reeve Huston: "The week following the news of the allegations, my son was in class and was subjected to a professor's personal editorial barrage regarding the guilt of the entire team. He left the class rather than be subjected to assertions that he knew were not true."

Recent attempts to rationalize their actions have provided an unintentional, and unpleasant, look inside the Group of 88's mindset. Karla Holloway, for instance, has termed herself a "victim" of the affair—though how, exactly, the holder of an endowed chair is a "victim" of an unethical prosecutor targeting three Duke students remains unclear. Holloway also has claimed that by joining the Group of 88, she was merely expressing her support for "all" Duke students. When asked, however, whether that support extended to the lacrosse players, she declined to respond.

Then there's Hollaway's AAAS colleague, Wahneema Lubiano. Three days after revelations that no DNA evidence implicated team members, she dismissed the news as part of a "demand for perfect evidence on the part of the defenders of the team." (It was actually not team defenders but Nifong, of course, who had first stated that “DNA evidence requested will immediately rule out any innocent persons.”) While History professor Thavolia Glymph fretted that the negative DNA tests could result in the Group of 88's crusade to transform the campus "moving backwards,” Lubiano interpreted campus patterns with more savvy. She was pleased "that the Duke administration is getting the point”: the banging of pots and pans had hammered home that a specific claim to innocence in this case mattered little. "Regardless of the 'truth' established in whatever period of time about the incident at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd.," she mused, "the engine of outcry in this moment has been fueled by the difficult and mundane reality that pre-existed this incident." To Lubiano, the "members of the team are almost perfect offenders in the sense that [critical race theorist Kimberle] Crenshaw writes about," since they are "the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus."

"Perfect offenders," however, can't be innocent, as perhaps even Lubiano would concede privately. As a recent article in the New York Times noted, "It's easier to spin the narrative of race, class and [gender] when it's not attached to a real person." One such person, Reade Seligmann, seems to be a combination of demonstrably innocent and of high character. So in Lubiano's "truth," the Group of 88's statement has come to represent not an attempt by faculty to exploit the crisis to further their on-campus aims, but instead an effort to defend "students who were being told to shut up.” Who were these students? Who was telling them to "shut up"? Who even possessed such authority? These questions are irrelevant. In a groupthink world, it's obvious that students who champion a race/class/gender worldview would have to "shut up." After all, how else could one explain the apparent ideological chasm between the faculty and student body on most campuses?

The comments of figures such as Lubiano and Holloway exemplify elements that Bauerlein identified as common to a "groupthink" faculty. "Apart from the ill-mannered righteousness," he noted, "academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom"; questionable assertions—like those in the Group of 88's statement—are "put forward not for discussion but for approval." The process, Bauerlein recognized, produces comments whose "tendentiousness is striking to everyone except those involved." As a result, "Instead of uniting academics with a broader public," groupthink "isolates them as a ritualized club."

Ironically, the most extreme manifestation of groupthink has come from one of the few Group of 88 members whose research eschews race/class/gender issues. Philosophy's Alex Rosenberg is the only signatory to have had Reade Seligmann in class. I e-mailed Rosenberg, said that I had blogged about the case, and asked whether the fact that he had taught Seligmann altered his perspective on the statement. Channeling the spirit of Ivan Tribble, Rosenberg dignified me with a reply even though, he revealed, in his opinion bloggers are cranks with too much free time on their hands. The sole defenders of the lacrosse players in this case, the professor suggested, are extreme advocates of the economic status quo—a revelation that no doubt will come as news to, among others, Jeralyn Merritt, a liberal trial attorney whose blog has provided the most incisive legal critique of Nifong's behavior. An article from Sunday's Times featured several of Seligmann's high school teachers issuing what could only be termed glowing descriptions of his character; a recent Duke graduate, Katie Fisher, recalled, "When I heard it was Reade, I knew 100 percent in my heart this was a completely false allegation." Rosenberg, instead, recommends the novel public relations strategy of those who know Seligmann remaining silent amidst Nifong’s deceptive publicity barrage. Perhaps the professor might want to offer his services to the second dancer—who remains without representation after being rejected as a client by a New York p.r. firm, to whom she e-mailed, "I'm worried about letting this opportunity pass me by without making the best of it and was wondering if you had any advice as to how to spin this to my advantage."

Most stunningly, Rosenberg claimed that every member of the Group of 88 believed that Nifong was motivated not by the pursuit of justice but by the looming Democratic primary for D.A. If true, this breathtaking assertion means that the Duke faculty, despite recognizing that a local prosecutor was abusing his office to railroad their own institution's students, chose to go public instead with a mass statement denouncing the students targeted by that very same prosecutor.

Duke's admissions home page promises, "Our faculty members are committed to giving students the individual attention that nurtures ideas and pushes them to excel." Ironically, two of the professors profiled on that page (Ariel Dorfman and Arlie Petters) belong to the Group of 88. If the behavior of Rosenberg, Lubiano, and other Group of 88 members typifies "the individual attention that nurtures ideas and pushes [students] to excel," Duke needs to go back to the drawing board. Following the advice of the Friends of Duke University's open letter would be a good place to start.

Update, 3.45pm: La Shawn Barber has an excellent analysis of the unsavory media aspect of this case--a point that's been nicely explicated by John in Carolina as well. With the exception of N&O reporter Joseph Neff, the local press coverage of this affair hasn't been impressive. The Duke Chronicle, however, continues its fine work, with a lengthy article of what things were like for lacrosse players this spring. The item that caught my eye:

"This is a social disaster."

That was the tagline of a paid advertisement signed by 88 members of the Duke faculty that appeared in the April 6 issue of The Chronicle.

"I think that all of us kind of checked over our teachers to make sure they weren't on that list," Carrington said.

[Originally published in Cliopatria.]

North Carolina Norms

One month ago, Duke law professor James Coleman expressed his concern about the circumstances under which the lacrosse case accuser identified the three defendants. “According to the police account of the identification,” he noted, “the police officer who presided over the proceedings told the alleged victim at the outset that he wanted her to look at people the police had reason to believe attended the party. Thus, the police not only failed to include people they knew were not suspects among the photographs shown the woman, they told the witness in effect that there would be no such ‘fillers’ among the photographs she would see. This strongly suggests that the purpose of the identification process was to give the alleged victim an opportunity to pick three members of the lacrosse team who could be charged. Any three students would do; there could be no wrong choice.”

To what extent did this behavior typify law enforcement in North Carolina? Are procedures in the state normally applied in an arbitrary and capricious fashion? Did the reforms growing out of a major state initiative, the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission, have much of an impact? Quite apart from this case, these questions seemed like interesting ones for an academic project, and I’m going to spin an article out of this for Criminology and Public Policy.

The recommended guidelines laid down by the Actual Innocence Commission (AIC) (on which, it should be noted, Professor Coleman served) grew out of a late 2002 initiative from former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly Lake. Declining confidence in the integrity of the system motivated Lake: as one of his former law partners noted, “He is really conscientious about the public perception of the judicial branch.” Barely two weeks after Lake’s initial gathering met, a highly publicized, intensively researched, series in the N&O uncovered an extreme case of prosecutorial misconduct, which ended in a death sentence (subsequently overturned) against a man named Alan Gell.

With political cover provided by Lake, a conservative Republican, and a somewhat favorable local climate, in 2003 the AIC voted 25-0 in favor of a variety of recommendations regarding eyewitness photo IDs. The commission urged, among other items:

• The individual conducting the photo or live lineup should not know the identity of the actual suspect. This is called a double-blind procedure and addresses misidentifications resulting from unintentional influences from those conducting the identification procedure.
• Witnesses should be instructed that the suspect may or may not be in the lineup.
• A minimum of eight photos should be used in photo identification procedures.

At the time, Iowa State psychology professor Gary Wells, an expert in misidentification by crime witnesses, hailed North Carolina as “out there in front, way ahead of the curve on these changes.” He added that down the line, innocent people would benefit, though “they'll never know that they perhaps were one of the people saved from a hellacious experience by these procedures." In 2004, police from around the state attended a daylong conference in Cary, where they heard from New Jersey officers who had embraced a similar set of policies. One supervisor from New Jersey’s Union County admitted, "I thought, why do we need new procedures? But it works out very well. And it really makes a difference.” By adopting transparent, standardized procedures, AIC backers hoped to eliminate situations in which courts had to make difficult calls to exclude procedurally dubious IDs. As the AIC’s executive director noted in 2004, the change was “something that should come from basic law enforcement.”

Since Nifong himself ordered the Durham Police to confine the photo ID session to pictures of the lacrosse team, I assumed this degree of D.A. involvement was standard practice for North Carolina. So I e-mailed every district attorney in the state, asking if they used AIC guidelines in photo ID lineups that they oversaw. I noted that my interest had been sparked by the revelations in the lacrosse case. In one-line replies, two refused to answer my questions; several others didn’t respond. But from the rest (with one exception, to be noted below), I received what was for me a surprising consensus, for which this note was typical: “In North Carolina, DAs have little power to dictate to local law enforcement what investigative techniques should be used.” Most (though not all) said that they encouraged police departments in their jurisdiction to use AIC guidelines.

One D.A. told me, “In North Carolina to be a law enforcement officer, one must complete 488 hours of instruction at a host of community colleges or at the central North Carolina Justice Academy and pass a state board examination. The course of instruction includes proper identification procedures—proper meaning consistent with Constitutional and statutory requirement (i.e. not unduly suggestive).” He suggested that I contact the Justice Academy for more details.

The Justice Academy’s representative reported that the “Basic Law Enforcement Training and Mandated In-Service Training curricula . . . differ from the Actual Innocence Commission in that the CJ [Criminal Justice] Commission recommends the use of six photographs in a photographic identification process rather than the eight recommended by the AI Commission.“ Like those of the AIC, the CJ guidelines require that “witnesses should be instructed that the suspect may or may not be in the lineup.” The CJ guidelines are slightly more permissive on who should conduct the session: they urge the “double-blind” approach, but note that departments who lack available personnel can waive this requirement—though they “should be prepared to articulate in court why.”

That said, the representative informed me, “The Justice Academy does not train officers to follow the guidelines, but the Academy does train officers on the use of the guidelines.” Police departments themselves, in consultation with local district attorneys, decide whether to follow the AIC guidelines, the CJ guidelines, or no guidelines at all.

Accordingly, I got in touch with North Carolina police departments. I contacted departments from five cities of more than 100,000 people in the 2000 census (Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem); five cities with populations of between 50,000 and 100,000 (Cary, Gastonia, Jacksonville, Rocky Mount, and Wilmington); and five cities of less than 50,000 people (Burlington, Chapel Hill, Hickory, Spencer, and Tarboro). I e-mailed each department to ask if it adhered to the AIC guidelines; and, if not, which, if any, procedure it employed. Follow-up calls went to departments that didn’t respond to my e-mail request. Every law enforcement officer to whom I spoke communicated a genuine desire to ensure that the procedure followed was fair, and answered every question I had. For those whose primary exposure to the North Carolina criminal justice system has come through watching Nifong’s behavior, this finding is reassuring.

Of the 15 departments, eight follow the AIC guidelines in their entirety. (A ninth, Winston-Salem, is currently revising its guidelines along the lines recommended by the AIC, after some local controversy over whether to follow the commission's recommendations.) Typical e-mail responses to my question of whether the department followed the AIC recommendations: “Yes—and every member of the agency was trained in (early) 2005 on the protocol.” Another: “Yes we do, and we do not steer from what the guidelines are.” And a third: “YES!”

A representative from Burlington’s department described for me its procedures, which seem to provide a model for conforming to all AIC guidelines. In the central North Carolina city, which is around one-quarter Durham’s size, all witnesses are shown arrays of eight photos—one of a suspect, seven of which are computer-generated from the department’s pre-existing database to resemble the suspect’s basic parameters. The person conducting the session, who might even be a department secretary, has no idea of which of the eight photos contains the suspect. Witnesses can ask to look again at a photo, but not until all eight photos have been shown; and if they re-check, the witness has to re-examine at all eight photos.

Similarly, Chapel Hill’s procedure rigorously follows AIC guidelines, even in cases with many possible suspects. According to its official document on eyewitness investigations,

1.) Line-ups shall consist of one known suspect and seven filler photos/images.

2.) If there are multiple suspects in a case, a different line-up shall be created for each suspect. Filler photos/images can not be used in more than one line-up.

3.) Filler photos/images are selected based upon shared characteristics with the suspect photo . . .

In displaying the line-up,

1.) Verbal instructions [which include the following statement: “The person who committed the crime may or may not be included”] shall be given to the witness by the person conducting the line-up.

2.) The photos/images will be shown to the witness sequentially and in a predetermined order. No more than one photo at a time should be seen by the witness. If the witness wishes to see the line-up a second time, the photos will be presented in the same order as in the first presentation.

. . . 4.) Whenever possible, the individual presenting the line-up should not be aware of the suspect’s identity.

5.) The witness should receive no feedback from the person conducting the line-up.

Four other departments conform to the CJ guidelines. In Gastonia, Greensboro, Fayetteville, and Jacksonville, the official policy calls for five "filler” photos for every suspect shown. (The departments vary on whether an uninvolved person will conduct the photo session, and also on whether the photos will be shown sequentially or all on one page; all have either formal or informal policies in which the person conducting the session opens with a statement that the lineup might or might not include the suspect.) Rocky Mount’s department, meanwhile, uses only five fillers rather than seven, but in all other respects conforms to the AIC guidelines.

The southeastern corner of the state features a unique hybrid structure. The largest city in this area, Wilmington, uses a “six pack,” which contains five “filler” photos and one of a suspect. Its police department—along with all others in North Carolina’s 5th Judicial District—runs its sessions according to a detailed form prepared by District Attorney Benjamin David.

To begin each interview, the officer informs the witness, “In a moment, I am going to show you a group of photographs. This group of photographs may or may not contain a picture of the person who committed a crime now being investigated.” The report produced from the ID session contains not only the specific results but considerable contextual material. Of the five areas in which officers record items, three deal with the background to the session: the witness’s opportunity to view the suspect during the crime itself; the witness’s degree of attention (i.e., the nature of the crime; the witness’s occupation, training, prior experience as victim; and the witness’s prior relationship, if any, to the defendant); and the accuracy of the witness’s principal description of the alleged assailants (i.e., when and to whom the description was first given; whether the witness identified an accent or distinctive marks, tattoos, limp, or other such feature on the suspect). During the photo array process, officers are required to observe the level of certainty (i.e., the time the witness viewed the lineup before making an identification; what the witness said or did when making an identification). Finally, the officer must record the length of time between the crime and the photo lineup. Obviously, a session that occurs a day or two after the crime will yield a far more reliable identification than one that takes place, say, three weeks after the incident.

Of all the procedures in the state—including those of the Actual Innocence Commission—that structured by D.A. David seems the most comprehensive. It combines the spirit of the AIC’s desired procedural protections for suspects with common-sense efficiency measures and the guaranteed recording of useful contextual information for law enforcement. Mistaken ID’s, of course, always can occur, but in the David system, they would seem highly unlikely; and proper ID’s would be more likely to yield convictions.

On the question of eyewitness IDs, then, North Carolina features an overwhelming consensus. And in the aftermath of the Gell case and the work of the AIC, that consensus is moving in favor of more, not less, fairness and transparency in the eyewitness ID process.

This procedures employed in the lacrosse case contradict from this pattern in almost every respect. As an N&O story observed, the policy followed in Durham before April 4, General Order 4077, reflected CJ guidelines. But in the first paragraph of Sergeant M.D. Gottlieb’s report of the lacrosse ID session, he wrote:

Mr. Nifong suggested we put together the mug shot type photographs [of the lacrosse players] into a group since we are under impression the players at the party are members of the Duke Lacrosse team and instead of doing a line up or a photographic array, we would merely ask the [alleged] victim to look at each picture and see if she recalled seeing the individuals at the party.

Gottlieb himself conducted the session—beginning, as Coleman noted, by informing the accuser that she would only be seeing “people we had reason to believe attended the party.” The accuser identified one person (Collin Finnerty) who she claimed attacked her in a variety of ways. Three others, she said, “looked” like people who might have attacked her. For reasons that remain unclear, Gottlieb treated each of these three partial IDs in very different ways—confirming the wisdom of policies like Burlington’s, where people who have no involvement with the case oversee the viewing and therefore are consistent throughout the process.

Gottlieb passed over the first partial ID quickly and without explanation. The second partial ID—of Dave Evans—led to the accuser saying Evans resembled her attacker, but the person who attacked her had a mustache (which Evans does not). Gottlieb then asked the accuser to give a “percentage-wise” estimate, something that he hadn’t asked of the previous partial ID. (The accuser said she was 90% sure.) The third partial ID—of Reade Seligmann—began with the accuser saying “he looked like one of the guys who assaulted me.” Then, under follow-up questioning from Gottlieb, the accuser claimed that she was 100% sure. As far as we know, this one statement is the only evidence against Seligmann, who was video-taped at a Wachovia ATM a mile away at the time of the alleged crime.

The conclusions?

For the state: The AIC seems to have had a significant, and constructive, influence on fairness in eyewitness IDs—even though its guidelines are only recommendations. Many small departments have adopted the recommendations en toto. Among large departments, one (Winston-Salem) is moving in that direction, another (Raleigh) follows the basics of the AIC approach, and a third (Charlotte-Mecklenburg) is headed by a police chief who was himself a member of the AIC. Two of the smaller departments noted that the apparent preference of the North Carolina courts for AIC identifications had facilitated their decisions. All non-AIC departments surveyed adhere to CJ guidelines, except those in southeastern North Carolina, whose independent approach seems more conducive to the cause of justice than either the AIC or CJ policies.

For the lacrosse case: The manner in which Nifong orchestrated the photo ID deviates wildly from common North Carolina practice, in at least four ways:

1.) The basic debate in the state seems to revolve around following the AIC or CJ guidelines, or developing a hybrid (D.A. David). As far as I could determine, in no North Carolina jurisdiction is it the policy to confine eyewitness ID sessions to suspects in the case.

2.) Every police department that communicated with me has a standard policy—either formal or informal—of telling witnesses that the photo array might or might not include the suspect. As far as I could determine, in no North Carolina jurisdiction is it the practice, as was followed in this case, for the witness to be informed that the photo array would consist only of possible suspects.

3.) As far as I could determine, no North Carolina jurisdiction possesses a third identification procedure, one that can be used, to quote Gottlieb’s description of Nifong’s words, “instead of doing a line up or a photographic array.”

4.) Some district attorneys who communicated with me seemed to like the AIC guidelines; others weren’t particularly enthusiastic about them; others (like David) developed their own systems. But of those who said that they made recommendations to local law enforcement, all did so in favor of departments using fillers in photo ID sessions, not the reverse. And a district attorney setting policy for an eyewitness ID session seems to be unusual in and of itself.

The lacrosse session also departed from the statewide norm (although here no unanimity exists) in having someone intimately involved with the investigation oversee the photo ID session.

A notion to suppress the IDs in this case is pending.

[Originally published in Cliopatria.]

D.A. Fundraising Totals

North Carolina District Attorneys
Percentage of Itemized Contributions from Lawyers with Business before the Court
First Quarter, 2006

Nifong fundraising burst: 83.6% of itemized donations from local lawyers ($12,500 of $14,950 raised)

Nifong personal loan to campaign once fundraising went dry: 1st quarter, $6601; $28,989 total

Name	$ from lawyers	overall fundraising total	% from lawyers	candidate loans
Frank Parrish	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Seth Edwards	9425	19750	47.7	0
Clark Everett	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Scott Thomas	0	223	0.0	0
Dewey Hudson	0	0	0.0	0
Ben David	150	475	31.6	0
Bill Graham	700	3040	23.0	0
Valerie Asbell	1900	5225	36.4	0
Howard Boney	6350	11750	54.0	0
Branny Vickory	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Sam Currin	0	0	0.0	0
Joel Brewer	5750	6750	85.1	0
Colon Willoughby	0	114	0.0	0
Thomas Lock	500	700	71.4	0
Edward Grannis	0	0	0.0	0
Rex Gore	13150	40625	32.4	0
Robert Johnson	0	44258	0.0	0
James Woodall	0	2450	0.0	0
Kristy Newton	0	0	0.0	0
L. Johnson Britt	1000	3000	33.3	0
Belinda Foster	2750	12895	21.3	0
Ricky Bowman	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Doug Henderson	18640	29551	63.0	0
Roxann Vaneekhoven	750	2755	27.2	0
Garland Yates	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
William Kenerly	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Michael Parker	4210	19186	21.9	3000
Thomas Keith	5625	9775	57.6	0
Garry Frank	0	0	0.0	0
Tom Horner	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Jerry Wilson	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
James Gaither	500	13408	3.7	0
Peter Gilchrist	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Michael Lands	300	1400	21.4	0
William Young	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Ronald Moore	150	150	100	0
Jeff Hunt	1750	20160	8.7	0
Mike Bonfoey	0	2751	0.0	1053

n/a=candidates whose fundraising threshold didn't meet minimum required to file an itemized report
0=nothing raised in the quarter, but cash-on-hand exceeds minimum required to file an itemized report

Rosenberg e-mail

On 7/8/06, KC Johnson wrote:

Professor Rosenberg:

My name is KC Johnson; I'm a professor of history at Brooklyn College.

I write for a historians' blog called Cliopatria, where I've commented fairly often about the lacrosse case. I've been distressed by the silence of the Duke arts and sciences faculty regarding the unusual procedures employed by the local authorities. Indeed, to my knowledge, not one member of the arts and sciences faculty has criticized the authorities' conduct, much less spoken in a positive fashion about the Duke students caught in the crossfire.

I noticed that you signed the so-called "listening" statement; I also noticed, in looking through a recent motion, that you taught Reade Seligmann, who, it seems to me, is the one indisputable victim in this whole mess. I'm curious as to why you haven't spoken out on Seligmann's behalf; and whether, now that you've seen the way the investigation has proceeded, you have reconsidered your endorsement of the "listening" statement.

KC Johnson

Shameless

With Houston Baker having officially departed Duke for Vanderbilt, the lacrosse team’s two most outspoken critics on the Duke faculty are Orin Starn and Peter Wood. The duo have something else in common: they both taught Reade Seligmann, one of the three targets of Mike Nifong’s quixotic crusade. In the last week, Starn and Wood again went public about lacrosse matters. But disappointment awaits anyone hoping the professors might find time to ask how, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Durham “justice,” charges could still be pending against one of their former students who has provided multiple, unimpeachable sources that he is demonstrably innocent. Instead, the Starn/Wood tag-team continued to do some volunteer p.r. work to boost support for Nifong’s viewpoint.

On Sunday, Starn published an op-ed in the Raleigh News&Observer responding to two recent statements by Coach K. In the first, the men’s basketball coach spoke admiringly of former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler, who was forced out this spring, and rebuked professors who had criticized the role of athletics at Duke. He also, quite correctly, dismissed the findings of what he termed the “skewed” Bowen/Chambers report, and noted that, by and large, race relations on campus were good. Then, in a series of more direct comments to Bloomberg News, Coach K admitted that as “there are going to be parties” on campus, this situation just as easily could have happened to his team. He added that the Duke administration hadn’t done enough to protect the rights of Nifong’s targets: “They're your responsibility, whether they're lacrosse players, basketball players or normal students.”

With these remarks, Coach K became just the fifth person in the employ of Duke University (joining women’s lacrosse coach Kerstin Kimel, who was the first to speak out; interim men’s lacrosse coach Kevin Cassese; and law professors James Coleman and Robinson Everett) to speak up in any way for the lacrosse players, either as students or simply in terms of their due process rights.

Orin Starn would not be the sixth. The cultural anthropology professor chastised Coach K for daring to criticize the Bowen/Chambers report—which he, incredibly, deemed “thorough, thoughtful and even-handed.” (He didn’t say how he reached that conclusion.) Here’s how Stuart Taylor, far more perceptively, characterized the efforts of Bowen and Chambers:

They went out of their way to slime the lacrosse players in a report . . . that is a parody of race-obsessed political correctness . . . They especially liked Brodhead's "eloquent" statements implicitly associating the lacrosse players with rape and "dehumanization," with "memories of ... systematic racial oppression," with "inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity ... and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed.” . . . Bowen and Chambers were not asked to evaluate the lacrosse team. That did not stop them from implying that its members did not show "respect for other people.” . . . Or from uncritically parroting unnamed "community" members' views that the lacrosse team is "a manifestation of a white, elitist, arrogant subculture that was both indulged and self-indulgent." This last quotation might be an apt description of, say, William Bowen. As applied to the lacrosse players, it was an ignorant smear. Indeed, it flew in the face of the carefully researched May 1 report of the seven-member faculty committee that Brodhead had appointed to investigate the behavior of lacrosse players over the five years preceding the alleged rape.

Much like Bowen and Chambers, Starn refrained from mentioning the Coleman Committee—which, under procedures almost wholly unfavorable to the lacrosse team, found no pattern of sexist or racist behavior on their part and many commendable personal traits. Nonetheless, Starn criticized Coach K for suggesting that one undeniably objectionable remark by a lacrosse player (the “cotton shirt” statement, which, as Taylor has reported, came after an equally vile, racially charged, statement from the second dancer) shouldn’t imply that either all 46 lacrosse players are racists or that Duke has a significant campus problem with race relations.

Starn’s only comment about Nifong’s activities came in a bizarre statement that the district attorney would owe Seligmann and the other indicted players “a major apology” if—as even Starn now concedes appears likely—the case was brought in bad faith. (What would Nifong say: “Oh, by the way, sorry that I abused my powers and ruined a year of your life to further my political self-interest; have a nice day”?) Starn is more concerned with his crusade to turn Duke into a Durham version of Swarthmore or Haverford, elite liberal arts schools with token athletic programs, than with the local authorities’ indefensible treatment of a student he actually taught. That seems to me a very odd conception of a professor’s job.

Distressingly, Starn comes across as temperate compared to History professor Peter Wood, who continues to speak out in ways directly contradicted by evidence publicly available to others. Wood’s distaste for the lacrosse team dates from 2004, when he complained to the Duke administration about a practice being scheduled during one of his Friday classes. (Wood was a former college lacrosse player, and many members of the team made what clearly was the bad mistake of taking courses from him.) On April 1, the professor told the New York Times that issues of class, not an anti-athlete bias, explained his dislike for the lacrosse team. “The football players here,” he mused, “are often rural white boys with baseball caps or hard-working black students who are proud to be at Duke,” unlike the upper-class lacrosse team. (Three lacrosse players are sons of New York City firefighters. I don’t know if they wear baseball caps.) While avoiding any comment on Wood’s peculiar description of football players, the Coleman Committee noted that the lacrosse team’s high academic performance and solid rate of community service contradicted the professor’s claims. The committee report also made clear that Wood’s new and expanded attacks on the lacrosse players were unsubstantiated by any other professor who had taught significant numbers of players—and that even Wood’s T.A. couldn’t back up his allegations.

Wood resurfaced last week in an interview with Hal Crowther, a writer for the Triangle’s alternative weekly. (After the Coleman Committee’s conclusions about his credibility, neither the Times nor any other mainstream media outlets seem willing to give Wood additional opportunities to attack the lacrosse players.) The Indy article represents a new low in media coverage of this affair. Those who have criticized Nifong’s handling of the case, Crowther states, need to “catch a glimpse of your inner racist in the mirror”; the lacrosse players themselves, he asserts, are “subhuman.”

In the interview, Wood revealed for the first time that he taught two of the indicted players, one of whom was Seligmann. (Seligmann's transcript is on-line; he took Wood’s “Era of the American Revolution.”) Right after the mention that Wood had Seligmann in class, Wood described the lacrosse players’ personal character: “Cynical, arrogant, callous, dismissive—you could almost say openly hostile.” Wood also posed for a photo—in front of the lacrosse field.

As with his remarks before the Coleman Committee, however, Wood’s statements to Crowther appear to lack credibility. Seligmann’s high school headmaster, in a letter dated April 9, 2003, told him:

what a great job you have done as an exemplar and a leader here, in just being your friendly, kind, and righteous self . . . I cannot help but notice the respect and admiration your teammates have for you; no, more than teammates, all the kids here, and maybe especially the younger kids.

In high school, Seligmann participated in a community service project in Kentucky’s Appalachia region; he also worked in a program sponsored by his high school that brought food and clothing to the homeless in New York City. (A high school classmate wrote that Seligmann “has stuck out in my mind as the most caring and honorable individual I have ever met.”) At Duke, Seligmann made the dean’s list, and had a clean personal record. One fellow student noted, “He's the most amazing person I have ever met, with the biggest heart. He is full of love and considers everyone before himself”; a second commented, “Reade is one of the most amazing guys at Duke, and I would bet my life” on his character; a third described herself as “blessed to call him a friend.”

These portrayals of Seligmann seemed irreconcilable with Wood’s description of someone “cynical, arrogant, callous, dismissive.” So, last Wednesday, I emailed Wood to ask him (a) if he had any evidence to back up his attacks; or (b) whether Crowther had misquoted him, and that his remarks hadn’t been meant to apply to Seligmann.

Wood never replied. That a professor would publicly mischaracterize the personal traits of one of his own students—at a time when that student is facing extraordinarily serious, if procedurally dubious, charges—is beyond belief.

The behavior of Wood, Starn, and their colleagues from the Group of 88 (each of whose signature, to date, remains on the so-called “listening” statement) is shameless. Hopefully, at some point, they will be held accountable for their willingness to take actions that aided and abetted Nifong’s campaign against their own students.

Update, 12.14pm: John in Carolina has just posted a comparison of Coach K's actual words to Prof. Starn's "interpretation" of those words. It's hard to disagree with the conclusion that "what Starn told readers Coach K said is the opposite of what the coach actually said," and that Starn should "owe Coach K an apology and N&O readers a correction."

Also, two excellent posts looking at broader aspects of the case: Betsy Newmark on Duke's inappropriate response; and Lead and Gold on the media's inexplicable timidity.

[Originally published in Cliopatria.]