The Group as Great Teachers?

Critics of the campus see the Group of 88 as a threat to learning—even as [Lee] Baker notes that the faculty members under attack attract large enrollments (including athletes) and earn positive evaluations from students.

---Robert Bliwise, Duke Magazine

Many reasons exist why college courses have large enrollments beyond the quality of instruction. An introductory course required for the major will always enroll well, regardless of the instructor. The topic—i.e., the modern civil rights movement—could be intrinsically interesting. A course might have an extremely attractive time slot, or the professor might be a very easy grader.

On the flip side, a low enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean a low-quality course. The class could be very difficult, or meet at an inconvenient time, or require too many prerequisites.

Baker’s suggestion, however, that the Group of 88 attract large enrollments appears to be the latest defense of the Group contradicted by the record. Over the last two academic years, some Group members—including Baker himself—have consistently attracted robust enrollments. Other such figures include Pete Sigal, Mark Anthony Neal, and David Wong. (Class evaluations are not publicly available; there is no way to independently verify Baker’s claim about them.)

Yet many other Group members have attracted low or in some cases very low enrollments. This pattern comes despite the fact that of the Group members who are full-time faculty, almost none have taught more than two undergraduate courses annually in either 2005-2006 or 2006-2007. So it cannot be said that they oversaturated their potential market.

Perhaps if more Group members had more regular contact with more undergraduates, they would have been less likely last spring to advance their ideological, pedagogical, and personal agendas at the expense of their own institution’s students.

Enrollment figures are below, with the number of students who took the course listed first, followed by the number of available slots in the class.

Spring 2007

Wahneema Lubiano and Jocelyn Olcott (Introduction to Critical U.S. Studies): 7 of 40 [Based on what people heard of Lubiano’s lecturing style during the Group of 88 Rehab Tour, it’s little surprise that her course failed to enroll well.]

Diane Nelson (Theories of Cultural Anthropology): 9 of 17

Karla Holloway (African-American Literary Genres): 18 of 30 [Amazingly, given her attack on the law in the lacrosse case, Holloway’s spring term topic was “the novel and the law.”]

Maurice Wallace (African-American Literature): 16 of 40 [It would seem that most Duke students do not respond to the pedagogical approach preferred by Wallace: “I have a responsibility to all of my students—every single one of them—to disabuse them of all of the national, racial, middle-class, gender and sexual myths they’ve been taught to comfort or flatter themselves and, of course, the people who, perhaps unknowingly, miseducated them.”

Kim Curtis (Ecological Crisis and Political Theory): 18 of 30 [The class explores the “ethical, political, economic, aesthetic, social, and technological approaches to contemporary ecological crisis,” though how Kim Curtis, of all people, can teach others about “ethics” is not clear.]

Stanley Abe (Chinese Buddhist Art): 16 of 40

Paula (“no to due process”) McClain (Race in Comparative Perspective): 8 of 15

Alice Kaplan (French Literature in the Modern Era): 21 of 35

Fall 2006

Antonio Viego (Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies): 4 of 15

Michaelene Crichlow (Caribbean Migration): 8 of 16

Raymond Gavins (African-American History, I): 9 of 40

Paula McClain (Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics): 15 of 30

Leo Ching (East Asian Cultural Studies): 14 of 20

Kathy Rudy (Ethics, Rights, and the Subject): 14 of 30 [As with Kim Curtis, imagine the irony of a Group of 88 member teaching “ethics.”]

miriam cooke (Topics in Arabic): 6 of 15 [cooke does not capitalize either her first or last names.]

Jocelyn Olcott (Introduction to Contemporary Latin America): 24 of 40

Spring 2006

Michaelene Crichlow (Popular Culture in the Americas): 7 of 15

Sally Deutsch (US History, 1870-1940): 26 of 40. [Lacrosse players, therefore, formed nearly 20 percent of her enrollment for the class in which Deutsch deviated from the syllabus to deliver a guilt-presuming lecture when the charges went public.]

Wahneema Lubiano (Social Facts and Narrative: “Story telling as it establishes, relies on, and transforms socially recognized categories of [naturally] gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and region): 13 of 18

Stanley Abe (Art History & Representation): 3 of 15

Susan Thorne (Modern Britain): 15 of 35 [Ironically, this course included several lacrosse players, though Thorne had no problem putting them in harm’s way by signing the Group’s statement and then by repeating her no-apology approach by signing the "clarifying" statement.]

Paula McClain (Seminar in Government and Politics): 7 of 15

Charlotte Pierce-Baker (Trauma, Violence, and Women Writing): 11 of 18

Diane Nelson (Fieldwork Methods): 18 of 30

Jan Radway (History of Literary Institutions): 7 of 15

Kathy Rudy (Feminism and Reproductive Ethics): 26 of 50

Fall 2005

Raymond Gavins (African-American History): 17 of 40

Bayo Holsey (African Modernities): 8 of 15

Antonio Viego (Cuban America): 9 of 18

The enrollment figures do not reveal how many students in each class were student-athletes. Baker’s suggestion, however, that student-athletes flock to the Group’s classes (mirroring an earlier claim by Charlie Piot) doesn’t pass the laugh test.

How many of the seven students who enrolled in the Lubiano/Olcott spring 2007 offering were student-athletes? How many student-athletes would want to take classes from Karla Holloway, knowing that she impugned the character of dozens of female athletes at Duke?

In short, despite Baker’s hints, there is no evidence that Duke students are beating down the doors to take classes from most of the Group; or that Group members are somehow better teachers than other Duke professors.

Pressler Settlement Announced

Another scoop for the AP's Aaron Beard: Duke spokesperson John Burness has formally confirmed that the institution reached what Burness termed "an amicable, fair financial settlement" with Pressler. The settlement was reached previously, but had not been publicly announced before today.

No details were released, but following on the heels of the Dowd settlement, this suggests a pattern in Duke's behavior: it 's hard to see how the institution would be well-served by attempting to contest civil suits.

Burness' statement strongly praised Pressler, while using the let's-move-forward mantra in recent days:

Coach Pressler is an excellent coach and did a great job building the Duke men's lacrosse program. Unfortunately last spring it was essential for the team to have a change of leadership in order to move forward.

Catotti Strikes Again

City Councilwoman Diane Catotti—who has thus far displayed a preference for shielding the police from outside scrutiny, retrying the rape case, and ensuring hard quotas on any investigative committee—has made a panel selection that fits all three elements of her agenda. Catotti has nominated Aurelia Sands Belle to serve on the police inquiry board.

This is the same Aurelia Sands Belle who penned a guilt-presuming April 11, 2007 press release about the decision of “Attorney General Roy Copper[sic]” to dismiss all charges and declare the players innocent.

No mention of innocence in Belle’s release—merely a grudging statement that “it is always the prosecutor’s perogative [sic] whether or not to move forward with a case.” She then asserted:

The circumstances from which these charges arose – a party where women were hired to gratify young men – only served to denigrate men and women and further reinforce harmful stereotypes. The fact that underage drinking took place at this party highlights the reality that alcohol is a well-known aggravating factor in sexual assault, especially on college campuses. Rape is not sex; it is an act of violence and it dehumanizes all involved. This dehumanization is further emphasized by the differences in race, gender, and class. [emphasis added]

This latter comment suggests that Belle still believes that a rape actually occurred. (Catotti obviously does, as well.)

Belle has apparently not offered a statement on whether groups of women hiring male strippers is a “well-known aggravating factor” in crimes. There were victims in the case, according to Belle—but not the three falsely accused Duke students. Rather, she asserted, “our concern is that this situation has made it more difficult for other victims to come forward for the help they need and the justice they deserve . . . The publicity around these events has served to re-traumatize some.”

Along with the fact that Belle’s organization receives more than $160,000 from the organization she is supposed to investigate, the statements above raise grave doubts about Belle’s fitness to serve. The City Council should block Catotti’s attempt to render the inquiry stillborn, and reject Belle’s nomination.

[Update, 7.21pm: To give a sense of the intellectual circles in which Belle travels, this site, by a Duke graduate student in English, has a hagiographic poem about Belle--just before a comparable poem hailing . . . Wahneema Lubiano(!).]

Brodhead and the Group

President Brodhead held the latest of his “Duke Conversation” events this week; the venue was Philadelphia. According to a poster on the Liestoppers forum who attended the event, “Brodhead referred to the Group of 88 statement and said people should read it, because it doesn’t say what people have been told it says.”

The “Duke Conversation” events aren’t designed to allow follow-up questions—unfortunately. It’s not hard to imagine a few obvious ones for Brodhead:

1.) “Upon reading the Group of 88 statement, it says that the Departments of Romance Studies; Psychology: Social and Health Sciences; Art, Art History, and Visual Studies; Classical Studies; and Asian & African Languages & Literature all formally signed onto the ad. Yet at least three of these departments and perhaps all five never did endorse the statement. Is this what you meant when you stated that the ad ‘doesn’t say what people have been told it says’”?

2.) “Upon reading the Group of 88 statement, it says that something ‘happened to that young woman [Crystal Mangum].’ Not allegedly happened. Not might have happened. Just happened—an unequivocal assertion. What do you think 88 Duke faculty members were saying with this statement?”

3.) “Upon reading the Group of 88 statement, it says, ‘To the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.’ Is there any reason why readers should not have believed that the signatories were referring to the ‘protesters making collective noise’ who had received extensive media coverage in the days before the ad appeared?”

In a January interview with the Chronicle, Brodhead asserted, “The president of a university has to exercise great care when commenting on the individual utterances of faculty members. Faculty members do not, and should not, speak for my pleasure or my approval.” Yet in adopting Cathy Davidson’s factually unsustainable interepretation of the statement’s origins and intents, Brodhead is commenting unfavorably “on the individual utterances of faculty members.”

More than 20 Duke faculty members—Steve Baldwin, Michael Gustafson, Michael Munger, the Economics professors—have publicly criticized the Group’s statement. In his Philadelphia remarks, when Brodhead stated that the ad “doesn’t say what people have been told it says,” was he referring to the critiques of the statement by own professors?

It seems, in short, in his defense of the Group’s statement, and his implicit criticism of those on his own faculty who have questioned the statement, Brodhead is suggesting that he can comment on the statements of his faculty.

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A 24-year-old Duke graduate did manage to get three follow-up questions for Brodhead in an impromptu discussion at the Philadelphia event. The results were depressing:

Q: He personally wrote to the president of Armenia in support of jailed graduate student Yekatan Turkyilmaz. Why show that level of support to him while doing absolutely nothing for the lacrosse players.

A: An obviously exasperated Brodhead condescendingly answered that the lacrosse just don’t understand how difficult the situation was for him. He emphasized to me that if Duke had done anything to support the students, everyone would have believed that Duke University was buying the freedom of its students. He also mentioned NC law that only allows the DA to remove himself from the case. He seemed to think that his absolute non-intervention was somehow critical to Nifong removing himself from the case.

Q: It was clear from early on that due process and the rights of the students were violated. Could you not have spoken out in support of their civil rights without involving innocence or guilt?

A: He reiterated (as he has many times before) that it is easy to look back with the benefit of hindsight. He seemed to believe that he DID speak out as soon as the procedural injustices were brought to light. Of course, he must have thought that I was not aware of numerous the procedural and civil rights violations revealed to the world well before December by KC Johnson and Liestoppers. Since I wanted to ask another question, and I did not push this matter any further.

At this point, a woman, probably one of Brodhead’s many enablers, interjected herself into the conversation, and spoke somewhat patronizingly of the lacrosse parents as people “just don’t understand” the situation while Brodhead nodded in agreement. To them it seems that the parents are merely people too blinded by love for their children to see the so-called complex realities of the situation. However, even this woman remarked that he could make a public statement to the effect of: I really wish I could have done more, but I am sorry that the realities of the situation prevented me from doing so.

With another couple approaching Brodhead, I politely attempted to ask him another question. In order to soften him up somewhat, I had to say that I understand where he was coming from. He was somewhat annoyed but agreed to one more question.

Q: The Chauncey Nartey situation. Why was the Ryan MacFayden e-mail, essentially a crude, if stupid and untimely, joke sent to a private group of friends deserving of suspension while the far more serious Nartey e-mail, a communication to a stranger about his daughter that could likely be seen as a threat and at the very least constituted harassment, received no official reprimand. I wished to follow-up and ask him to justify Nartey’s position on the CCI as the representative of university fraternities when his fraternity was essentially dissolved (in addition to Nartey’s involvement in ADC Charlotte), but he cut me off.

A: Brodhead seemed somewhat flustered, and again reiterated that people just don’t understand what the situation was like. He added that he could not stand in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and answer every single question about the lacrosse case. I asked him if he was involved in the decision or if this was entirely Larry Moneta’s domain. Instead of answering directly, he said that Larry Moneta was in the building if I wanted to question him.

Since Brodhead probably perceived me as an “unfriendly” entity at this point, I figured that pushing him further would only tarnish the reputations of blog community. So I thanked him for taking time to answer my questions and left for the evening.

Smith Cautions Nifong

One of the most important moments in the case occurred out of the public eye. The first judge assigned to the lacrosse matter, Ron Stephens, acted very much like the figure who would, amazingly, give Mike Nifong a de facto endorsement in the New York Times a few days before the election. Stephens signed off on the absurd March 23 NTO; he allowed Nifong to behave unprofessionally in court; and he showed no interest in ruling on the serious motions filed by Kirk Osborn. Stephen’s successor, Kenneth Titus, proved little more than a pawn for the pro-prosecution state NAACP.

It’s not hard to imagine how the case would have proceeded with the biased Stephens or the timid Titus overseeing affairs. It’s highly unlikely that either man would have allowed the detailed questioning of Dr. Brian Meehan that cracked the DNA conspiracy on December 15.

Titus only lasted one hearing; in the late summer, Nifong and the defense jointly agreed to remove the case from North Carolina’s “case management” system and assign it to only one judge. Under North Carolina procedure, both sides submitted lists with four names. The only name on both lists was W. Osmond Smith. His including Smith was one of the biggest mistakes that Nifong made. Smith proved to be a fair judge committed to upholding the law; Nifong, on the other hand, needed a judge who would look the other way as he carried out the highest-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct in modern American history.

In a 10-page memorandum released yesterday, Smith reminded Nifong that he still could have a major role to play in fallout from the case. Ironically, Nifong himself set the stage for the release of Smith’s document. In his rambling December 28 response to the Bar (the letter in which Nifong suggested a conspiracy against him led by none other than Friends of Duke’s Jason Trumpbour), the district attorney strongly implied that Smith had no problem with his entering into an agreement with Dr. Meehan to intentionally withhold exculpatory DNA evidence. Wrote Nifong,

Let us assume that this allegation [by the Bar] is true. Then my false representation to the Court would have been made at the same hearing where the evidence was received, uncontested and under oath, which revealed its falsity. Judge Smith would then have found himself, as the Court having jurisdiction over the matter in question and having direct knowledge of through testimony of my alleged professional misconduct, with (1) the authority under RPC Rule 8.3 to impose discipline on me directly, or, in the alternative (2) the responsibility to report such misconduct to the North Carolina State Bar . . . His failure to take either of these actions would indicate that he believed either (1) that no such misrepresentation [about the DNA evidence] had been made, or (2) that any misrepresentation that might have been made failed to raise a “substantial question of [my] honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer. Either conclusion would disprove the allegation that I had violated the Rules of Professional Conduct.

Translation: Since Smith didn’t act against him on December 15, Nifong was in the clear ethically on the DNA issue.

Smith’s order of yesterday unequivocally rejected Nifong’s assertion. Wrote the judge,

Significant concerns regarding discovery issues arose from the December 15, 2006 hearing. Since the hearing was recessed without completion . . . these concerns were not addressed by the Court at that time, and due to subsequent developments have not yet been addressed by the Court . . . Certain other of those concerns remain as they pertain to actions of counsel.

Further, since the hearing was recessed without completion and without addressing the concerns mentioned above, it would be incorrect to draw any conclusions as to what the Court believed or disbelieved regarding such concerns.

Translation: Since Smith’s “significant concerns” with Nifong’s behavior have “not yet been addressed by the Court,” the Bar should draw no conclusions from Smith’s decision not to sanction the DA immediately. And, as Smith reminded both the Bar and Nifong, he possesses full authority over all “matters related to disciplinary actions involving attorneys before the Court.”

Smith’s memorandum also laid out other areas where he might potentially act:

(1) Expungement. It is inconceivable to me that the three falsely accused players will not petition the court to expunge from their records the grand jury’s indictments of them. It is equally inconceivable to me that the court will not grant their requests.

Moreover, the 43 unindicted players have very strong grounds to petition the court to expunge the March 23 NTO, thereby removing their DNA from the North Carolina database.

(2) Sealed records. The inclusion of this item on Smith’s list came as something of a surprise. The only sealed records in the case are Crystal Mangum’s medical files. Demand for their release has come from a highly surprising source—Wendy Murphy, who wrote in the Boston Globe, “I was told by a reporter that the defense refused to release more than 1,000 pages of evidence.”

Of course, the defense couldn’t release that evidence because it was under seal. Would Smith be willing to consider a motion from Murphy to unseal Mangum’s files?

(3) Matters “related to applicable investigative and administrative orders.” Given Nifong’s repeated violations of such orders, no doubt he was chilled by this item’s inclusion on Smith’s list.

In the end, Smith performed the role the system demands from the judge—as a neutral arbiter committed to ensuring that both sides played fair. In this case, one side didn’t, and Smith’s memo suggests that he will take appropriate action.

N&O Question for Hodge

From the N&O editors' blog, on Ron Hodge's ludicrous assertion that he couldn't come up with any major DPD errors in the last five years:

Our previous reports can shed light on these [lacrosse case] issues. We've reported about problems with the police department's work, including the flawed photo identification procedure, the conflicting notes filed by the two police detectives who worked the case together, and why police allowed District Attorney Mike Nifong to take control of the case.

The N&O has written hundreds of stories on the case, including our series, Rush to Judgment. Let us know if you think the police department made any mistakes.

Indeed, the "Rush to Judgment" series alone should be enough to disqualify Hodge's candidacy.

The Nifong Enablers Strike Back

Those intent on upholding "Durham justice" made clear yesterday that they will not change their course.

At an open forum for the three finalists for the Police Chief job, Ron Hodge, proclaimed

What I know about the Duke lacrosse case and the need for us to rebuild in the community seems to be a perception that's portrayed by you guys in the media. ... I know that our citizens are tired of the Duke lacrosse case, our officers are not so much tired of the Duke lacrosse case, but are probably getting a little impatient with how it's being covered and played out in the media and probably more importantly how people are asking them questions about it out there in the public.

No doubt Hodge--who attended meetings in which the flawed April 4 lineup was planned out--wants people to stop asking questions about the case.

And Brianne Dopart of the Herald-Sun described the following scene at the hearing:

Laughter erupted when Hodge said he didn't "recall that the Durham Police Department has been involved in something where we made major mistakes in the past five years."

He explained that the recently released in-house report on police handling of the lacrosse case found "some small" errors, but cautioned against rushing to judgment while the "jury remains out."

"I think in the end we'll be okay."

Meanwhile, Ray Gronberg has revealed that the Durham Rape Crisis Center has not one but two major conflicts of interest regarding an appointment to the panel investigating the police handling of the case. First, of course, the group's official position appears still to be that a rape occurred. Second, the group received more than $160,000 from the Durham Police--the very group that it will be helping to investigate.

Does erstwhile Nifong backer Diane Catotti see a problem with these conflicts? Of course not. But then again, since her apparent goal is to use the inquiry to retry the lacrosse case, these conflicts should reassure, not alarm, her,

The Nartey Dilemma

The lacrosse case took an Orwellian turn on January 5, when Cathy Davidson published an impassioned apologia for the Group of 88 statement. The ad, she wrote, “said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house. The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.”

Davidson’s claim, of course, was absurd. Between March 29, when the idea for the ad originated, and April 6, when the ad appeared, almost no one “on the campus quad” was defending the lacrosse players, much less using “pernicious stereotypes” about black women to do so. Indeed, the reverse was true: during that week, the players endured regular harassment from student and community “activists,” as well as some of their professors. And, as protesters carried banners screaming “Castrate” or blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters, what was the response of Davidson and her 87 colleagues? To publish a statement reading in part: “to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”

Yesterday brought a further reminder of the real state of affairs from late last March, as opposed to Davidson’s imagined reality. As revealed in the Liestoppers forum, the Baydoun/Good book made the first public reference to an e-mail sent by Duke student Chauncey Nartey to Coach Mike Pressler last March. The subject line was a menacing: “WHAT IF JANET LYNN WERE NEXT???” (Nartey already had sent an all-caps e-mail to Presser demanding that the coach terminate all practices until the “alleged rapists” were found.) In the atmosphere at the time—where, despite Davidson’s subsequent claim, the lacrosse players, not their tormentors, were beleaguered—the Presslers took seriously the fact that someone had taken the time to ferret out the name of their older daughter, hardly an item that would have been common knowledge to the average Duke student. On March 31, Sue Pressler filed a complaint with the Duke Police over the e-mail.

Nartey never mentioned his e-mail to his colleagues in the Duke Student Government: two days after he referenced “JANET LYNN,” the Duke Student Government spent two hours considering its response to the crisis. At this session, Nartey demanded that the lacrosse team be prevented from practicing until Nifong completed his investigation. More temperate members of the Student Government resisted the move, and his resolution was tabled. Sophomore Matt McNeill spoke for the level-headed majority, urging his colleagues to respect due process: “You need to investigate the entire situation before you make charges against anyone.”

It is unclear whether the Duke Police informed anyone within the administration about Nartey’s e-mail. (Indeed, it is unclear how or to what extent the police investigated Sue Pressler’s complaint at all.) But by early May, the administration was fully aware of the document: Larry Moneta was informed by late April, and Brodhead himself learned of the e-mail no later than May 3, 2006. In a meeting with the lacrosse team, one player asked him about the disparate treatment of Ryan McFadyen and Nartey.

That senior administrators knew about the e-mail makes Duke’s handling of the Nartey issue one of the most inexplicable elements of the case. Nartey is one of just two students (outgoing Student Government president Elliot Wolf was the other) to have been invited both to serve on the Campus Culture Initiative and to join President Brodhead at one of the “Duke Conversation” events.

According to CCI chairman Robert Thompson, the Campus Culture Initiative’s “main thrust was to develop an inclusive social community,” since Duke’s “next challenge is . . . engaging difference.”

Imagine the reverse scenario: a white Duke student sent a menacing e-mail to an African-American Duke coach. Does anyone believe that Duke would respond by appointing this student as one of five students positioned to offer lessons to the school’s more than 6000 undergraduates on “engaging difference” and developing “an inclusive social community”?

On March 23, I asked Thompson when he learned of the Nartey e-mail and why he did not demand Nartey’s resignation from the CCI at that time. His response? “I personally do not know anything about an email from Chauncey Nartey to the Presslers. Your question is the first time I had heard about it.”

Thompson’s statement—which I have every reason to believe is true—casts further doubt on the already dubious nature of the CCI’s proceedings. One of the committee’s five student members had sent a March 27 e-mail that prompted the filing of a police report. The vice-chair of the CCI, Larry Moneta, had known about the e-mail since last April. And yet the first that Thompson heard of the e-mail was in March 2007—a year after Nartey sent it, and 11 months after his own vice-chair learned of its existence? Does that sort of behavior reflect the kind of “inclusive social community” that Thompson and the CCI aimed to achieve?

The decision to invite Nartey to Brodhead’s February 2007 Charlotte event is even stranger. By this point, the fraternity of which Nartey was president had been suspended, at least until all its current members had graduated from Duke, for reasons that remain unclear. Nartey himself bizarrely suggested that jealousy from the national organization played a role in the decision. “Just being,” he told the Chronicle, “a black organization—which thinks of itself as the elite among black males—and then going to Duke, there’s always that dynamic between us and the members of the national organization.”

Surely, it would seem, the combination of his sending the Pressler e-mail and his presiding over a fraternity that was suspended by its national organization would have ensured that Nartey no longer was singled out by the Duke administration as a model student. Yet such behavior appears to have had no effect.

Friends of Duke spokesperson Jason Trumpbour responded with outrage to the Nartey revelation:

The contrast between [Nartey’s] treatment and that of Ryan McFadyen could not be more stark. McFadyen’s message was transparently a joke and was sent to like minded individuals. In case that was not obvious from the message itself, it was clear from the context of the other messages and replies related to it. Yet Ryan was kicked off campus and, not only was Nartey unpunished, he was held out as a model Duke student. Moreover, if actual threats were communicated to a specific individual, that is usually a crime in most states.

When I saw Chauncey Nartey’s name on the list of featured students at the Duke Conversation in Charlotte, I absolutely could not believe it. It is not just the hypocrisy and dishonesty. Did Duke really believe that this information would never come out at some point?

Trumpbour’s question is unanswerable.

John Feinstein, and the Unbearable Lightness of America's Sportswriters

In the legal world, it is difficult to imagine a more complete exoneration than that received by the Duke lacrosse players. North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper publicly said they were innocent—not that there was insufficient evidence to pursue charges, but that they were falsely accused and prosecuted by a “rogue prosecutor.”

Sadly, facts matter in the courtroom more than they do in a newspaper. As the Duke men’s lacrosse team completed its season with a one-goal loss in the national championship game, many leading sports commentators used the occasion to get in one final swipe at the team. Maybe the players were innocent, the storyline went, but the team was filled with bad guys whose personal character should be interpreted solely on the basis of their attending a spring break party with strippers.

Clucked the Baltimore Sun’s Roch Kubato, “The players who attended the infamous party last year might not have done everything they were accused of, but what they were doing was wrong. Very, very wrong.” (Two of the accused players, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, briefly attended a party they played no role in organizing and perhaps drank some beer. That’s “very, very wrong?”) Sports columns in the San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and New York Times made the same argument, almost as if they were written by the same person. So much for the power of the independent press.

It turns out that not one of the journalists who penned these columns ever interviewed a single current or former Duke lacrosse player. Nor did they seem to know the most basic facts about the case or its context.

Some sports reporters, it’s worth noting, covered the story professionally. The AP’s Aaron Beard has done extraordinary work on the lacrosse case for months. In early May 2006, Jason Whitlock wrote one of the first major columns challenging the pro-Nifong media consensus. At the Final Four, cnnsi’s Kevin Armstrong and Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel thoughtfully explored how the case personally affected some of the lacrosse players.

But for the most part, last week’s performance confirmed the worst stereotypes of sports columnists: that they are paid to have strongly expressed opinions, regardless of the quality of the argument they offer, or even their own consistency. When the issue is whether Joe Torre should rebuke Alex Rodriguez for his dalliance with a figure the New York tabloids have termed the buxom blonde, perhaps this standard is acceptable. When facts and research are required, however, the result is, at best, shoddy work.

Take the most famous sportswriter to comment on the case, John Feinstein—someone who, in a never-ending cascade of increasingly panned books and appearances on radio talk shows, has become one of those brands you can’t avoid no matter how much might want to.

On March 30, 2006, Feinstein admitted to Tony Kornheiser that “I don’t know that I know any more than you. I have not been talking to my sources and resources in Durham.” But he offered his advice anyway: the Duke administration should cancel the lacrosse season immediately and revoke the scholarships of every lacrosse player who would not speak with authorities. He imagined himself in the role of the Duke president, lecturing the players:

They can just say, “We know you had this party. We know it got out of hand. None of you is man enough to come forward and say what happened. You were witnesses to a crime. We’re shutting down the program and you’re all gone.”

Prompted by Kornheiser, Feinstein conceded that his negative characterization of the players was not a result of their drinking or the captains inviting strippers. “That happens—but that happens on every school in America,” Kornheiser noted. And Feinstein conceded, “To some degree, you’re right. Unfortunately it does.”

So what justified Feinstein’s condemnation of the players' character? The fact that none of the players had gone to police and incriminated their teammates for the “crime.”

You know, I don’t want to hear any ifs, and, or buts. These kids have acted disgracefully, just by the fact that not one of them—I don’t want to hear about the code, among buddies and among teams. A crime was committed. There were witnesses to the crime. They need to come forward and say what they saw . . .

They won’t, and that’s why I’m saying the hell with them—strip their scholarships.

Since Feinstein had elected to speak without determining the facts, he didn’t know (as had been reported two days before his interview) that the three captains had “come forward and said what happened,” and had even told police they would take a polygraph test. Moreover, as the Raleigh News&Observer has recently revealed, by the day of Feinstein’s interview, D.A. Mike Nifong had told two defense attorneys that he would speak to the players only on condition that they confess, or reveal which of their teammates committed the “crime.”

Feinstein, then, wanted the university to give its students an ultimatum: falsely implicate their teammates in a crime that never occurred or lose the financial wherewithal to attend college.

Much like the Duke faculty who condemned the lacrosse players to advance the professors’ ideological and curricular agendas, Feinstein had a personal angle to the case: he wanted to settle a score with people at Duke. In 1998, he had lobbied aggressively for Duke to name a longtime friend, Tom Mickle, as its new athletic director. The search committee rejected his advice and selected Joe Alleva. Those at Duke with whom I have spoken—some strong defenders of how the university handled the lacrosse case, others who were deeply disappointed by the school’s tepid response—were unanimous on one point: Alleva was easily superior to Feinstein’s candidate, who was merely one of many people considered for the job. But Feinstein took rejection badly. Had Duke hired his preferred choice for A.D., he sniffed a column last May, “this never would have gotten to this point.”

Blinded by this personal animus, Feinstein managed to get virtually every key element about the lacrosse case wrong:

• The only “crime” committed was underage drinking, in which the lacrosse players joined three-quarters of the nation’s college students and which both he and Kornheiser admitted last March was nothing unusual on college campuses.
  

• As Feinstein described the lacrosse team as “immature, idiotic, [and] out-of-control,” a faculty committee’s investigation showed that the players—like many students at Duke—drank too much, but otherwise were unusually good students, with strong records of community service and treating staff well, and no record of sexist or racist behavior.
  

• Despite his insinuation that the “rich, privileged, lawyered-up and white” lacrosse players had engaged in racist acts, we now know that one, and only one, of the team’s 47 players responded to a racial taunt from the second dancer, as the party was breaking up, with a racial slur of his own.

After the dismissal of charges and Duke’s run to the championship game, did Feinstein acknowledge his own rush to judgment? No. Explain or understand the facts of case? No. Admit that personal biases clouded his interpretation? No. Instead, in radio interviews and several newspaper columns over the past month, he lectured morality from some lofty moral high ground known only to him.

Discussing the three falsely accused players in an interview a few weeks ago, he asserted,

I don’t think I’ve been proven wrong, because . . . I said, I think they’re probably guilty of everything but rape.

He offered no evidence to substantiate this sweeping attack on the character of three innocent people.

Were they guilty of sexual assault and kidnapping, the other two charges that they faced? Of having personal characters that resembled Hitler’s, as commentator Wendy Murphy had suggested? Of racist slurs, even though none of them were even on the premises when the racially charged argument occurred between the second dancer and one lacrosse player? Feinstein didn’t say—but obviously all of those offenses would fall under a definition of “everything but rape.”

Following up on his radio screed, Feinstein took to the pages of the Washington Post to declare, “No one at Duke has admitted to a single mistake yet. Until they do so, they don’t deserve forgiveness.”

This was yet another Feinstein factual error: the team captains had apologized, publicly and repeatedly, for holding the party. The same man who last year blasted the Duke administration for not immediately terminating the lacrosse program and later wrote “whether Duke plays lacrosse next year really doesn’t matter” then criticized Duke for not resuming the season after the first round on DNA tests came back negative last April.

The lesson of the case, Feinstein informed Post readers, “isn’t about over-zealous prosecutors or media running amok. It’s a lesson about a society in which no one ever admits they’re wrong (see G.W. Bush and R. Cheney as exhibits 1 and 1A), especially allegedly smart people. Smart people make mistakes too. Mistakes are forgivable—but only after you admit them.”

It’s more than ironic to see repeated character assaults on the players and demands that Duke fire several administrators coming from a sportswriter who has not admitted—much less owned up to—his own serious misjudgments about the case.

Do they give Pulitzers for hypocrisy? If so, consider Feinstein a shoo-in.

Overlooking Brad Ross

When matters turned to the field and not the legacy of Mike Nifong’s misconduct, most of the media attention during Duke’s run to the national championship focused on the team’s two leading scorers, Matt Danowski and Zach Greer. But in both the semi-final win against Cornell and the one-goal loss to Johns Hopkins, junior midfielder Brad Ross stood out. Against Cornell, his goal gave Duke its first lead (4-3); he also netted the team’s first goal in the fourth quarter. Against Johns Hopkins, he scored two goals and was robbed of a third as time expired.

Ross also was a key figure in the lacrosse case. He was the only team member that Crystal Mangum twice remembered, with 100 percent certainty, seeing at the party. Indeed, in the April 4 “witness” lineup, Mangum even described what Ross was doing—standing outside, she said, chatting with Kim Roberts.

There was, of course, a small problem with Mangum’s recollection: Ross not only wasn’t at the party, he wasn’t even in Durham that evening. As Iowa State’s Gary Wells noted, the flawed identification of Ross placed Mangum “in the questionable category of eyewitnesses who [are] capable of being positive and wrong. That’s a red flag.”

The Baker/Chalmers report recently claimed that the indictments of three factually innocent people without probable cause had to go forward because defense attorneys didn’t give the DPD exculpatory evidence. But Ross did just that—to no effect.

In early April, just after President Brodhead canceled the season, Ross assembled cellphone, dorm keycard, and other forms of electronic evidence showing that he was in Raleigh from 3.00pm on March 13 through 1.00am March 14 and establishing (through his dorm keycard) that he returned to Durham only well after the party ended. His attorneys presented this material to authorities—thereby proving, essentially before the legal case even began, that Mangum was an unreliable witness, that the flawed procedures used by Mike Nifong and the DPD had yielded flawed results.

A reader of the Baker/Chalmers report might have believed that authorities would have welcomed Ross’ exculpatory evidence. At the very least, it should have slowed down the rush to indictments. Instead, the Ross evidence was ignored. The DPD, it seems, was far less interested in exculpatory evidence than the Baker/Chalmers apologia claimed.

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Brad Ross is from Darnestown, Maryland; he was an All-American lacrosse player as a senior in high school, and captained the football team as well. At Duke, he played every game as both a freshman and a sophomore, until last spring’s season was canceled.

In the two weeks after the party, Ross assumed that he couldn’t be a suspect—but, as we all have learned, Durham justice works differently than what a logical person might expect. So after the cancellation of the season on April 5, 2006, he and his girlfriend, who attends North Carolina State, tried to track down any security-camera video of him in Raleigh that night. They couldn’t find any, but it turns out they didn’t need it; triangulation technology from his cell-phone calls established his location.

Ross compiled this material; it was presented to authorities, along with that of a few other players (such as Adam Langley) who also were not at the party. But this proof of Mangum’s unreliability as a witness made no difference to the Durham Police or to Nifong. Neither ever followed up with Ross about his exculpatory evidence. Instead, much as they did with Reade Seligmann’s more highly publicized ATM video and cellphone records, the Nifong/DPD team ignored Ross’ unimpeachable electronic evidence, since it contradicted their preferred theory of the “crime.”

Last spring, then, Ross was in an all-but-unique position: while publicly identified by Nifong as a suspect and thus (at least) partygoer, he hadn’t even been in Durham on the night of March 13. Yet on instructions from the defense team, he couldn’t publicly reveal this information. It was, he remembered, a “scary” time; until mid-May, the possibility of his being the third player indicted remained. Seligmann, his best friend on the team (and scheduled 2006-2007 roommate), was suspended from school. And he had to endure the same treatment that all other lacrosse players received: he remembers a fellow student spitting at him as he got off a campus bus, and he walked out of one class after a professor started railing against the team. This, like all allegations of in-class faculty misconduct from last spring, was never investigated by any Duke official.

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With the resumption of school in the fall, Ross was in the public eye for the first time: on October 8, in one of the most important articles of the case, Joe Neff revealed both Ross’ alibi and the fact that Mangum had twice, inaccurately, identified him.

His friends already knew he hadn’t been at the party, so Neff’s scoop wasn’t news to them. With the attitude on campus having grown more supportive, Ross could focus again being a student—he majors in Sociology with a minor in Philosophy—and returning to lacrosse. Moving into the starting lineup, his preseason goals were simple: establish himself as a scoring threat, solidify his position as a starter, and provide leadership from a junior class decimated by the absences of Seligmann and Collin Finnerty.

The highlight of his regular season came on April 16, when the ACC named him Men’s Lacrosse Player of the Week. In the first game after AG Cooper publicly declared the three falsely accused players innocent, Ross scored three goals against Virginia—including the game-winner in overtime—in a contest that clinched the ACC regular season title. Then, in Duke’s NCAA quarterfinal game against UNC, he scored the goal that stopped an early six-goal UNC run, setting the stage for the comeback that transformed a 6-1 deficit into a 19-11 victory.

The team’s co-captains took note of Ross’ impressive performance. Matt Danowski described him as “unbelievable” and the team’s “X-factor,” someone whose “dedication to the game and to improving is what kind of sets him apart from everybody else.” Eddie Douglas added, “A lot of our offense is triggered by guys like Brad.”

Before the Final Four, Ross got a call from Seligmann, who told him to ignore the media hype about the team winning a national championship as redemption for the falsely accused players. They should win it, Seligmann said, for themselves. Ross took the advice, he said, while at the same time sad knowing that Seligmann would never again suit up for Duke.

Ross took the same approach in the run-up to the Final Four as he did throughout the regular season. He expected both Cornell and then Johns Hopkins to overplay Danowski and Greer, and knew that he and the team’s other midfielders would have to step up their performance—as they did.

Just as Ross is a highly inconvenient figure to the Baker/Chalmers argument that the investigators eagerly sought exculpatory evidence, so too does he present an obstacle to critics of the NCAA’s decision to grant this year’s sophomores, juniors, and seniors an extra year of eligibility.

UVA coach Dom Starsia fumed, “You feel like they have suffered, but are they being rewarded for what happened? Even without making any judgments about the players, all of us in lacrosse took a little hit here.” (Starsia took less of a “hit” than most: UVA won the Duke-less 2006 national championship, after Duke had crushed Virginia in their previous meeting.) To the N&O, he again used the “rewarded” theme, suggested that it was appropriate to punish the players for holding the party, and criticized the NCAA for “going back and sort of re-examining the level of punishment.”

Of course, some players were punished—the 2006 seniors did not receive another year of eligibility. And if Starsia is claiming that holding a spring-break party is sufficient to justify losing a season of play, how would he rationalize denying the extra year to someone like Ross, who never attended the party?

So now, with two years of eligibility remaining, there’s a real possibility that Ross could face Seligmann on opposing sides of the field. Asked how he would handle the situation, Ross replied, “The same way that Reade would for Brown—do everything I can to win for my team.”

In the last 15 months, first Nifong, then opposing lacrosse teams, and now the defenders of the Baker/Chalmers report have overlooked Brad Ross. Those who have done so have come to regret their error.

Sunday Roundup

The AP’s Aaron Beard reflected on the past year for Duke lacrosse in a piece published last week—a season that, he noted, “ended in an almost eerie come-full-circle moment: For the second time in three seasons, Duke’s lacrosse team had lost by a single goal to Johns Hopkins in the NCAA championship game.”

Though the defeat was a crushing one, Beard predicted that, with some time to reflect, “it’s a loss that’ll start to look pretty good once the sting subsides.” And, indeed, the transformation is remarkable—from the “wanted” poster, and “castrate” signs, to 88 of their own professors taking out a full-page ad denouncing them, to regular race-baiting attacks from a demagogue prosecutor . . . to a situation where most (apart from a handful of bitter sportswriters) welcomed their march to the championship game.

Beard commented on Collin Finnerty’s reception at Monday’s game against Johns Hopkins, where he “was mobbed by friends and well-wishers as he made his way through the stands.” Finnerty, unencumbered, explained, “They went through a tough time and had a tough year with everything in the case. It’s back where they belong, and I’m happy for them.”

As Coach John Danowski correctly observed, “These kids have done everything and more that’s been demanded of them (since the scandal), and they’ve lived just about a perfect life. They just lost a lacrosse game today.”

Read the full article here; it is, typically, first-rate.

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For those who haven’t seen it yet, Green Eggs and Bacon is an excellent new blog on Durham events. The blog includes recent posts on the police inquiry plan; strategies for pressuring the Duke administration; and the condition of the Duke faculty.

Read more here.

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One impact of the decision of many Duke departments to prioritize the hiring of figures who specialize in the analytic triumvirate of race, class, and gender is to ensure that specialists in more traditional approaches to scholarship are not hired. As a result, courses on more traditional topics are either eliminated from the curriculum or “revisioned” along heavily ideological lines.

A good example comes in a course from the History Department’s fall 2007schedule. This term, Group of 88 member Jocelyn Olcott co-taught a course with Wahneema Lubiano—which gives a sense of her ideological perspective. Olcott describes her research interests as the “feminist history of modern Mexico”; her book “shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship” by examining “how women inhabited the conventionally manly role of citizen by weaving together its quotidian and formal traditions, drawing strategies from local political struggles and competing gender ideologies.” In most circles, such interests would hardly be considered mainstream, although at Duke, that isn’t the case.

What course will this self-described specialist in Mexican feminism, whose most recent journal article is entitled “Miracle Workers: Gender and State Mediation among Textile and Garment Workers in Mexico’s Transition to Industrial Development,” teach in fall 2007?

“Regime Change and U.S. Interventions.” The course description:

This course will examine episodes of U.S. interventions abroad that resulted in the overthrow of democratically elected regimes. While we will focus on Latin America as the primary region of study, we will also consider comparative cases. Readings and research will consider cultural, social, and economic tools of intervention as well as military and diplomatic methods. Students will divide into four research teams and, using documents provided by the instructor as well as those that student find on their own, will research and write histories of U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Chile, Iran, and Congo.

So—for $43,000 in tuition and fees—parents are sending their children to be taught about U.S. foreign policy toward Iran by a specialist in Mexican feminism. Amazing.

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This week’s humor section comes from the Liestoppers forum. First, some proposed suggestions for Durham’s new slogan—of which City Councilwoman Diane Catotti surely would approve:

• Welcome to Durham! We’ve Been Working on the Railroad

• Durham—Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

• Welcome to Durham: We Put the “Lie” in “Liestoppers”

• Welcome to Durham: City of Mendacity

• Durham: Justice for Just Us!

The latter slogan especially reflects the Catotti approach.

The “blog hooligans” also are running a poll asking readers to predict the Nifong defense. Best choices include:

• Insanity
• Cy made me do it
• !@#%# Cheshire

My money is on the third option.

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I haven’t written about the De Anza rape case largely because apart from the superficial (highly publicized rape allegations against college athletes), the differences between it and the Duke case far outweigh any similarities. The issue in the De Anza case is consent; witnesses exist; the acknowledged behavior was far more troubling than anything associated with the Duke case; and the chief prosecutor certainly can’t be faulted for politicizing the inquiry or for any sort of procedural misconduct.

Any hope, however, that the Duke case might have caused journalists to reflect on how they cover rape cases was belied by a column in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. C.W. Nevius eight times described the accuser as the “victim”—not even tossing in the “alleged” qualifier—and stated, again without qualification, that at least one of the partygoers was “assaulting her.”

Moreover, he provided a Nifongian standard for taking tape cases to trial. The district attorney, he declared, “should do the right thing—what the victim wants—take it to trial and let a jury decide.” Durham County learned what happens when a prosecutor abandons prosecutorial discretion and makes the “victim” a de facto district attorney. Hopefully, Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr will have learned from Nifong’s mistakes.

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An intriguing post at JinC at the relationship between the Duke police and the Durham police in the critical days before the April 4 non-lineup “lineup.” The post asks some good questions, and notes that circumstantial evidence suggests that the link was far closer than has been previously realized.

Liestoppers explores the issue as well.

All of this yields a question: What did the Duke Police know about the procedures to be used in the April 4 lineup, and when did they know it?

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Hostility to the NCAA’s correct decision to grant the Duke players an additional year of eligibility seems especially strong in Virginia. UVA coach Dom Starsia has denounced the move to every reporter who will listen, and last week Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Paul Woody criticized it as well.

“The behavior of the Duke players before the night of March 13,” scolds Woody, “hardly was exemplary”: “the two women working as exotic dancers who were present March 13 did not show up by chance. They were hired by a lacrosse team member. One of dancers made the false accusations against the players. Such behavior by the athletes alone was reason enough for the Duke administration to take disciplinary action against the team. Canceling the season should have sent a message to every Duke athlete.”

Is Woody claiming that every sports team some of whose members drank beer or participated in distasteful entertainment over spring break should have its season cancelled? Perhaps he should apply for a job as sports information director at BYU, which would thrive under such a system.

“By taking this case to the NCAA,” Woody claimed, “the school administration essentially condones the players’ behavior.” The Duke administration did no such thing. It said that, because of Mike Nifong’s misconduct and the threat to the players’ safety it caused, there was no way the season could continue.

A good case can be made, of course, that the Brodhead administration did not cancel the season because of safety concerns. But at the heart of Duke’s appeal was a correct premise: that even an administration not cowed by faculty extremists within its midst could not have allowed the games to go on, because in the environment that existed in Durham last spring, there’s no way the school could have guaranteed the players’ safety.

Catotti's Divided Loyalties

As Diane Catotti rebukes her colleagues who have called for the resignation of a DA the Bar said broke three laws and violated the Constitution--and as she proposes various procedures that seem more designed to retry the lacrosse case than to determine how the police sought indictments against three innocent people without probable cause--it's worth considering just where her loyalties lie.

Below is a photo of her from last September. Unlike other backers of Nifong (such as Floyd McKissick), Catotti has never said that she regrets having so publicly backed the disgraced DA. It seems that her loyalty to Nifong's crusades, if not Nifong the person, is very deep indeed.


Hat tip: T.K.

Only in Durham

The Durham City Council voted yesterday to approve an investigation of the police department’s conduct in the lacrosse case. Chairman Willis Whichard will be joined by four police chiefs, three of whom are white males; the fourth is a black female.

The Council members will choose the remaining seven members according to a hard quota system: two white females, two black men, and three black women. The panel makeup automatically prevents any Council member from choosing a white male, seeming to fly in the face of ensuring that the best available people are selected.

[Update, 8.41am: The H-S reports that the hard quota idea came from none other than Councilwoman Diane Catotti, who remarked, "This case raises so many race and gender issues it's important to have that parity." Does it make any sense to have the one member of the Council who opposed any inquiry at all be the guiding force on such an important issue?]

For instance, this inquiry desperately needs to include the perspective of defense lawyers. The North Carolina Bar website does not contain a demographic breakdown of its members, but, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 67 percent of lawyers in the United States are male, and just under 90 percent of the nation’s attorneys are white. Assuming that North Carolina’s breakdown is fairly similar to the national average, that would mean that a majority of the defense lawyers in the state are white males.

An ideal person for this commission, of course, would be Jim Coleman; and North Carolina obviously has many first-rate female or African-American attorneys. But, as City Councilman Mike Woodard noted, “I want us to find the best seven people we can.” With that as a goal, does it really make sense for Durham to eliminate the majority of the state’s attorneys simply because they are white and male?

This hard quota arrangement is disturbing in a number of ways. First, it fails on its own terms. According to Durham’s population figures, more than 11 percent of the city is neither white nor African-American. Under a hard-quota philosophy, that 11 percent total entitles citizens from other races to one member (8 percent) of the 12-person commission of inquiry.

Second, one of Mike Nifong’s critical contributions to the lacrosse case came in his injection of race into the case. The disgraced DA took over personal command of the investigation on March 24, 2006. That’s the same day that Cpl. David Addison began his campaign of public slandering against the lacrosse players. Then, on March 27, when Nifong joined the publicity barrage, he repeatedly played the role of racial demagogue. The police and Nifong even elected to mislead the public to highlight the alleged racial angle of the alleged crime—as when Nifong and Kammie Michael suggested that someone other than Kim Roberts made the first 911 call, thereby creating the public impression that the lacrosse players hurled racial slurs at two innocent black women who just happened to be walking by the house.

By calling for a committee evenly divided along racial lines, the Council has effectively endorsed Nifong’s reasoning that the case should be examined primarily through the prism of race. As Brad Bannon told the H-S, "I always thought race was inappropriately injected into this case from the beginning by the district attorney with his comments. Race didn't need to be the factor it became."

Third, the purpose of this inquiry is not to retry the lacrosse case, although it appears that one Council member, Diane Catotti, is eager to do so. Catotti vehemently opposed even having an inquiry, and also denounced her colleague, Thomas Stith, for demanding that Mike Nifong resign.

At the council meeting, Catotti announced that she would use her selection power to name someone from the Durham rape crisis center, since the lacrosse case itself dealt with race and gender issues. Of course, there isn’t a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the police improperly treated Crystal Mangum because of her race or gender.

What’s the mindset of people who work at the Durham crisis center? On March 16, in an interview with ABC’s Law & Justice Unit, one such figure, Leah Ottinger, spoke out.

Ottinger, who had just left her job at the Durham Crisis Response Center, dismissed the possibility that Mangum’s myriad, mutually contradictory stories suggested that Mangum was lying. Assault victims, she declared, “don’t clearly remember the event right away. It’s not unusual and it doesn’t mean they are lying . . . When people have been through a trauma—a car crash is a good analogy—it can take them time to reconstruct the facts in their minds. Plus, sexual assault is uncomfortable for anyone to talk about.”

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the AG’s inquiry, Oettinger asserted, “that doesn’t mean a crime didn’t happen that night.”

Does Oettinger reflect the general mindset at the Crisis Response Center? It sure appears that way. The lead page on the center’s website contains a press release responding to the announcement of “Attorney General Roy Copper [sic].” Its conclusion?

It is always the prosecutor’s perogative [sic] whether or not to move forward with a case. The circumstances from which these charges arose – a party where women were hired to gratify young men – only served to denigrate men and women and further reinforce harmful stereotypes. The fact that underage drinking took place at this party highlights the reality that alcohol is a well-known aggravating factor in sexual assault, especially on college campuses.

There’s a rather significant problem with that statement: there was no rape. So how does the presence of alcohol at a party where no rape occurred highlight “the reality that alcohol is a well-known aggravating factor in sexual assault, especially on college campuses?”

The Attorney General has publicly stated that no rape occurred. So has City Manager Baker. So has Police Chief Chalmers. So, even, has Mike Nifong. Yet Councilwoman Catotti is determined to appoint a representative of an organization that still appears to believe that a rape took place? Does Catotti understand that the purpose of the inquiry is to determine what the police did wrong in producing the indictments of three innocent people without probable cause—or does she think that the inquiry represents a last-ditch effort for the “something must have happened” crowd?

There is an alternative. In 2004, Darryl Hunt, who was wrongly incarcerated for almost two decades, was freed after DNA tests revealed that another man had raped and killed a 25-year-old woman named Deborah Sykes. In response, the city of Winston-Salem set up a seven-person commission to look into what the Police Department did wrong in handling the case. City Council member Vivian Burke, the driving force behind setting up the inquiry, had a basic criterion for the commission’s membership—according to the Winston-Salem Journal, she wanted “clear-headed individuals with no baggage who are able to evaluate others.”

The City Council should go back to the drawing board, and call for a commission peopled by figures with diverse backgrounds and experiences relevant to investigating the issue of police misconduct. Every effort should be made to make the committee diverse on racial and gender grounds, but hard quotas should be rejected. And every member of the committee should be willing to start from a basic premise: no rape occurred.

Police Inquiry Approved

The Durham City Council voted today to approve an investigation of the police department’s conduct in the lacrosse case. The chairman will be former state Supreme Court justice and state legislator Willis Whichard, a widely respected figure in the state. Four police chiefs will also serve. Three of the police chiefs are white males; the fourth is a black female.*

The Council members will choose the remaining seven members according to a quota system: two white females, two black men, and three black women. The two Council members most skeptical about the inquiry—Thomas Stith and Diane Catotti—celebrated this development. Said Stith, “We need to strive for diversity, but we’re not [eliminating] anyone from serving.” But, of course, the panel makeup automatically prevents any Council member from choosing a white male.

The only Council member to have outright opposed the inquiry, Catotti, appears to have adopted a goal of trying to undermine the investigation from within: she said she would choose a figure from a rape crisis center—the type of organization that was publicly posting Wendy Murphy analysis of the case in January.

The choices of the other five Council members thus become critical: hopefully, they will exercise their task responsibly, unlike Catotti, and refrain from choosing people with preconceived notions on the case.

*--added for clarity

Nifong: I'm Going Down with the Ship

In the last 24 hours, a rumor has been circulating that Mike Nifong would resign today as district attorney.

ABC-11's Tamara Gibbs, however, is reporting this morning that Nifong told her he will not resign before his ethics trial, scheduled for June 12. So, for now, the trial is still on.

Duke's New Party Line

A year ago, Duke Magazine, an official university publication sent to all alumni, published a one-sided review of the lacrosse case entitled “A Spring of Sorrows.” Author Robert Bliwise interviewed only one Duke student—Nick Shungu, an African-American senior who fantastically demanded that the University issue “an acknowledgment of sympathy for the alleged victim.” Bliwise interviewed only four professors—the chairman of the Academic Council and three anti-lacrosse extremists (Houston Baker, Peter Wood, and Orin Starn). The article minimized the largely positive findings of the Coleman Committee report and didn’t mention that the committee had found Wood’s criticisms non-credible. Bliwise didn’t speak to Kerstin Kimel or to any students who had defended the lacrosse players; he went off campus to find a defender of the athletic program, Duke graduate Jay Bilas of ESPN.

One year later, much has changed, and Bliwise is back with another long article. This time, he spoke to both sides: he interviewed Group of 88 author Wahneema Lubiano, plus signatory Lee Baker, but also spoke with a critic of the Group, Michael Gustafson. He featured lengthy quotes from Jim Coleman. Bob Steel and President Brodhead himself rounded out the interviewees. For his 2007 article, Bliwise did not interview any students, although he did quote from a Stephen Miller op-ed. He peculiarly quoted from one blog comment (at this blog) but no blog postings.

With a more balanced group of sources, the article is unsurprisingly more balanced. And also unsurprisingly, as an official publication of the administration, the article places the administration in the most positive light possible.

Examples of Bliwise’s “spin” include:

Critics on Brodhead

Bliwise writes, “In letters and online postings, critics said that university officials should have spoken up for the innocence of the students more forcefully.”

In fact, the key blogs (Liestoppers, Johnsville News, JinC, Lead and Gold, La Shawn Barber, this blog) all adopted the position of Friends of Duke’s summertime open letter: that Brodhead had an obligation not to speak up for the innocence of the players but to demand that all Duke students be treated according to the same procedures as all other Durham residents.

Bliwise quotes Jim Coleman (correctly) noting that a Brodhead declaration of innocence would have been counterproductive. He does not appear to have asked Coleman whether Brodhead had an obligation to advocate fair procedures—as Coleman himself did throughout the case.

Presumption of Innocence

According to Bliwise , “The presumption of innocence was articulated in the first statement, last spring, from President Richard H. Brodhead, and repeated dozens of times.”

This statement is true. Bliwise doesn’t mention, however, that Brodhead minimized or dropped altogether references to the presumption of innocence at a key point in the case—between April 5 and April 20, 2006.

Duke Response

Bliwise concludes, “Steel and Brodhead alike say that lessons can be learned from the past year, but that it's time to move beyond a painful episode.”

Steel has said the same thing in several e-mails sent out this week. In effect, then, the Duke approach is: the lacrosse players should have been investigated; “campus culture” should have been investigated; the student judicial system should have been investigated; but the faculty’s rush to judgment and allegations of improper in-class behavior deserve no inquiry.

Contextualizing Group of 88

Though Bliwise quotes from the Group’s statement, he does not include the two items clearly presuming guilt: the assertion that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; and the signatories’ affirmation “to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.” In the ten days before the ad appeared, of course, the two highest-profile protests had been the potbangers’ “Castrate” rally and the distribution of the wanted posters around campus.

The ad also contained such anonymous guilt-presuming statements from alleged Duke students as the following:

I am only comfortable talking about this event in my room with close friends. I am actually afraid to even bring it up in public. But worse, I wonder now about everything. . . . If something like this happens to me . . . What would be used against me--my clothing? Where I was?

No one is really talking about how to keep the young woman herself [Crystal Mangum] central to this conversation, how to keep her humanity before us . . . she doesn’t seem to be visible in this. Not for the university, not for us.

Bliwise described the statements above as merely “decrying the campus climate,” not commenting on the lacrosse case itself. I suspect most readers would disagree.

Finally, he concluded that “the language in the ad . . . for a long time was largely ignored, until it became fodder for the blogging community.”

It is, of course, convenient for the Group and its defenders to pretend that the Chronicle doesn’t exist. The fact that the paper published an editorial and an op-ed within a week of the ad’s appearance—and, this summer, reported that the lacrosse players and their lawyers noticed the ad with horror as soon as it appeared—calls into question Bliwire’s description.

Group Signatories

Wahneema Lubiano rationalized the ad in the following way: “There are no circumstances under which any community wants to have racism, sexism, sexual violence. They’re horrible things, and nobody wants to talk about them.”

Nobody wants to talk about them? If we have seen nothing else over the past year, it is the dominance of the analytic triumvirate of race, class, and gender among a large swath of the Duke arts and sciences faculty. Indeed, it seems as if many members of the Duke professoriate speak of little else other than racism and sexism.

Steel on the Group

The Bliwise article features the closest item to any rebuke of the Group from the Duke administration, if phrased in the mildest of language. Bob Steel: “My take on the Group of 88 is that they were speaking about issues they feel quite strongly about. I don’t think they purposefully meant to be impairing the students who were affected by the situation. But I think it did have the effect of causing those members of our community to feel unsupported.”

If Steel had read the change-of-venue motion or the summertime Chronicle article, he would know the ad had such an effect.

Unusual claims

“Critics of the campus see the Group of 88 as a threat to learning—even as [Professor Lee] Baker notes that the faculty members under attack attract large enrollments (including athletes) and earn positive evaluations from students.”

Duke’s faculty evaluation figures do not appear to be available on-line. No way exists, therefore, to independently determine the validity of Baker’s claims.*

In the event, it would be fascinating to know statement author Wahneema Lubiano’s average annual enrollment, and how many student-athletes she has taught in the past two years.

“Over the past year, the university has been the target of unrelenting scrutiny and scathing criticism—externally, from media ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Fox News.”

The ideological “range” from the WSJ to Fox News isn’t too far. The implication: only right-wingers (not, say, moderates such as Duke alum Dan Abrams) worried about the faculty’s conduct.

The Unmentionables

Three items relating to the faculty response received no mention at all.

• First, Bliwise failed to deem newsworthy what appears to be a first in American history: defense lawyers formally claiming that the statements and actions of a University’s faculty prevented that University’s students from receiving a fair trial locally.

• Second, Bliwise did not reference the highly public faculty rebuke of the Group of 88—the open letter published by members of the Economics Department.

• Third, Bliwise overlooked the public criticism by Jim Cooney of the “number of people in Durham, some of whom teach for a living, who should have spoken up.”

Unusual Reference Points

Bliwise cited three comparable instances of a media/legal/academic conflagration: an ethics scandal at Stanford; the troubles with the University of Colorado football team; and the “water buffalo” case at Penn.

Stunningly, he portrayed the “water buffalo” case—one of the most embarrassing episodes in contemporary higher education—in terms sympathetic to the then-Penn administration.

After noting that the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz published a column strongly critical of how Duke handled the lacrosse affair, Bliwise obtained a quote from former Penn president Sheldon Hackney about a conversation Hackney had in 1993 with Rabinowitz. (The two talked just before she exposed Penn’s flimsy conduct in the water buffalo affair, helping to mobilize public opinion against Penn's attempt to deny even rudimentary due process.) Rabinowitz, Hackney declared, spoke “in a voice so chilling that I knew immediately that, like Dr. Seuss’ Grinch, she had garlic in her soul.”

It is odd that Duke Magazine would publish such a deeply personal attack on a Pulitzer Prize winner (for her work on bringing to light fraudulent child-abuse allegations) without, apparently, giving her a chance to respond.

To return to the start of this post: the 2007 Bliwise article is far more balanced than its 2006 counterpart. And it is to be expected that it would place the administration’s actions in the most positive light possible. But I don’t think the claim that Duke handled the lacrosse case as well as Penn handled the “water buffalo” case is one that reflects well on Duke.

*--modified