Group Members, Hypocrisy, & Karen Owen

I haven’t commented on the Karen Owen affair because Owen’s affront to basic decency seemed so obvious. (Owen, for those unaware, is the Duke graduate who chronicled, through a PowerPoint replete with photos, her sexual exploits with multiple male Duke student-athletes.) The PowerPoint went viral, and even prompted a Today Show segment, which helpfully used Owen’s actions to recall the lacrosse case—insinuating that a false allegation against Duke male students, inflamed by a rogue district attorney, had relevance to an invasion of privacy by a Duke female student, after voluntary sexual intercourse.

It’s not difficult to imagine how the Duke campus would have responded had the genders of the Owen affair been reversed—i.e., if a male Duke student had publicized, sometimes in mocking terms, his sexual interactions with multiple Duke female student-athletes. Doubtless we would have seen jeremiads against Duke sexism, and perhaps even calls for another Campus Culture Initiative. Yet the Group of 88 and their allies on the faculty were silent as the grave.

Until now. Jezebel reports that three Group mermbers—History professors Jocelyn Olcott, Sally Deutsch, and Peter Sigal—used an official Duke list-serv for to invite History majors to an “informal gathering[]” with them. The topic? “Sex and the Student: Historical Perspectives on Karen Owen’s Sex List.”

Olcott (a gender specialist who once team-taught a course with Wahneema Lubiano) articulated a thesis for the gathering that combined an attempt to rationalize Owen’s decision with academic pablum: “The idea simply is that Karen Owen isn’t a person in a vacuum but rather someone within a particular historical context, subject to all the contingencies and forces of her time and place. My hope is that the setting will give faculty and students alike a chance to think through what some of these contingencies and forces are.”

And what of Olcott’s co-facilitators? Perhaps Deutsch can recall the time, just after Mike Nifong began his pre-primary publicity crusade, in which she deviated from her syllabus—in a class that contained several lacrosse players—to deliver a guilt-presuming analysis about how Southern white men had a pattern of assaulting and disrespecting black women. In language that echoes Olcott’s announcement for the Owen affairs, Deutsch asserted that because her course spent “extensive time on [naturally] race and gender relations,” it was appropriate for her to use class time to contextualize the incident, thereby helping to “explain why people were so upset.”

And perhaps Sigal, whose scholarship combines “poststructuralist gender studies and queer theory influences” with use of philology and postcolonial theory to “understand the texts that I read as literary devices which I decode in order to represent the cultural matrix,” can offer his personal perspective—as seen in the photo below, from his Facebook page—about sexually-themed exhibitionism and the internet.

Duke-AIG Settlement?

Bloomberg reports that Duke and AIG might settle the University's lawsuit against the insurance company--a critical development, since such a settlement would avoid continued discovery, and a hearing at which some of this discovery might become public. I wrote about the lawsuit here.

And, as a reminder, the dynamic duo is on tap for tomorrow night, with Duke resident expert in "works in progress" Wahneema Lubiano chatting with Karla Holloway about . . . of course . . . race.

The Dynamic Duo

For those in Durham without anything else to do Thursday, and who are eager for an evening of impenetrable discourse, consider the seminar event below:

Because, if nothing else, Wahneema Lubiano is expert in "works-in-progress."

Business As Usual

Today is "Founder's Day" Convocation at Duke. The featured speaker? Ex-BOT chairman Robert Steel, whose checkered record in leading the institution through the lacrosse case ended in payments to the three falsely accused players and (to date) hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in staving off additional lawsuits. Steel went on from Duke to lead Wachovia as the bank fell into bankruptcy.

The day also features university recognition for some faculty members--including Group of 88 members Laura Edwards and Margaret Greer. And, not to be outdone, the Group's Mark Anthony ("thugniggaintellectual") Neal, named Mark Anthony Neal, who was given the Robert B. Cox Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award.

Updates

In the latest edition of Days of Precious’ Lives, Crystal Mangum’s estranged ex-boyfriend walked into the DA’s office and claimed that he—not the false accuser—had set clothes on fire the nigh police were summoned to their residence. His excuse for his turnabout? “I wasn't on my medication . . . I acted out on the voices I was hearing.”

Whether the ex-boyfriend was hearing voices earlier this year or is hearing voices now, this was quite an environment into which Mangum inserted her children.

Judge Marcia Morey has received a promotion, to chief district judge of Durham County. The move doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the county’s commitment to justice, since this is the same Judge Morey who testified on Mike Nifong’s behalf in the disgraced ex-prosecutor’s criminal contempt trial. On the stand, Judge Morey offered a novel argument. To quote the N&O:

An unusual moment came before Nifong's testimony, when a judge testified that she expected lawyers to be more honest during trial than during pretrial hearings.

A prosecutor asked the judge, Marcia Morey, whether a lawyer would be following his duty to be candid if he assured a judge that a report was complete when the lawyer knew it to be incomplete.

It depended on whether the case had reached trial, Morey said.

“I do think it makes a difference,” Morey said. “Are you are at a trial stage, are you at a pretrial conference.”

Finally, former U.S. Attorney Anna Mills Wagoner has resigned her post to run for a judgeship. She should be pressed on why she refused to conduct a criminal investigation of Nifong and the DPD; and whether she would pursue a policy of cronyism on the bench.

Hat tips: M.L.

Twitter

For those interested: while DIW posts are now rare, as the case lurches forward in the civil system, all of my posts (here, at Minding the Campus, and at Cliopatria) can be accessed through my twitter feed.

Mangum Bail Revoked

ABC-11 is reporting that authorities have revoked the bail of serial fabricator Crystal Mangum. The false accuser violated the terms of her bail, and therefore will be returning to jail.

Another troublesome figure from the lacrosse case in the news: state NAACP head William Barber, whose organization posted a wildly slanted, factually challenged "memorandum of law" and whose case advisors repudiated a host of traditional NAACP positions in a vain attempt to bolster Mike Nifong's case. Barber received an award from Democratic governor Beverly Perdue, who (remarkably) hailed his efforts to "build coalitions to fight for equality."

Perdue's cowardly act should serve as a reminder of the courage displayed in the case by AG Roy Cooper. It's almost impossible in North Carolina for a Democrat--whether Perdue or Cooper--to win statewide without an overwhelming African-American vote. Yet Cooper--even though the state NAACP and sympathetic "journalists" like Cash Michaels were threatening a political price to be paid b not giving False Accuser Mangum her "day in court"--did the right thing, despite the political risk.

The same can't be said of Perdue.

And, following up on a previous post, I highly recommend this offering from Craig Henry.

Brodhead: "Every Allegation Is Not a Truth"

That quote came from today's N&O, regarding allegations of research misconduct against a Duke professor.

Brodhead, of course, was far less clear-cut in defending the due process rights of disfavored students on campus.

The article also noted that Duke has engaged in a round of budget trimming, totaling $100 million from its total operating budget, through elimination of 500 jobs.

Wendy Murphy's Revival

While I rarely watch cable news, I’m fully aware that—in the era of Glenn Beck—the medium is more “entertainment” than “news.”

Nonetheless, FOX, CNN, and MSNBC all claim to have some “news” in their broadcasts. And so it would seem to me that each network would have minimal standards in a guest—perhaps to the extent that a guest who made repeated and verifiably false statements would not continue to be invited.

That standard, alas, seems to be too high for FOX, at least with regard to the decision to give air time to Wendy Murphy. Yes, that Wendy Murphy. Given that Murphy made error after error after error of fact during her on-air commentary about the lacrosse case, I would have thought that she would have disappeared from TV screens in the case’s aftermath. After all, Murphy is either a serial fabricator or a willful ignorant, and I would think that neither qualification would be much desired by a “news” network.

And yet here was Murphy, spouting her usual, factually-challenged nonsense in an appearance with Radley Balko. Balko, astonished at his first-hand taste of Murphy’s ramblings, did some fact-checking on her recent appearances. The result wasn’t pretty.

So what does Murphy’s continued appearances say about the state of cable “news”? I agree with Balko: “Cable news is about lining people up on either side and letting them go at it. There's no room for subtlety. There's certainly no time for fact-checking a guest's claims, even after the segment airs. Murphy is pretty, provocative, and confrontational. She's great TV. That she's inaccurate, slanderous, and hysterical is beside the point . . . At some point you have to wonder, is it even possible to be too shameless for cable news?”

Alex Pareene, of left-leaning Salon, piggy-backed on Balko’s post to (correctly) brand Murphy as Exhibit A of the proposition that “there are, in the mass media, absolutely no consequences for blatant, constant lying.”

Pareene, alas, then fatally undermines his case by comparing Murphy to Peter Beinart and Jeff Goldberg, both of whom supported the war in Iraq, and both of whom (until, in Beinart’s case, recently) have publicly and repeatedly defended Israeli national security policy.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the flaws in this comparison: Murphy repeatedly, shamelessly makes “facts” up to advance her argument. Goldberg, Beinart, and other supporters of the invasion of Iraq made (what I consider) a flawed public policy judgment. But nothing either man has ever written (including Beinart’s recent poorly-argued NYRB essay on Israeli matters) even approaches in journalistic misconduct anything Murphy said about the lacrosse case—or, from Balko’s essay, anything she’s said about sex crimes or immigration policy.

That Pareene considers Murphy’s serial fabrications comparable to the performance of Goldberg or Beinart suggests that he, unlike Balko, doesn’t see just how outrageous Murphy’s behavior has been.

New N&O Series

One fortuitous aspect of the lacrosse case came in that the N&O--perhaps as much as any newspaper of comparable (or even larger) size--had a record of first-class work on issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct. The paper therefore had context through which to interpret Mike Nifong's unethical behavior.

The paper is continuing its exploration of such issues: here's a preview of the N&O's new series, debuting tomorrow.

Linwood Fights the Law

Linwood Wilson—the man specially hired to the DA’s office by Mike Nifong, and the “investigator” who then allegedly pressured witnesses to confirm to the disgraced ex-DA’s version of events—is in more trouble with the law.

Yesterday, a warrant was served on the man who once boasted that “he owned Durham (and) lawyers and judges would do anything he said.” Wilson’s case, fortunately, has been taken out of the hands of the DPD and the Durham DA’s office, which is now headed by Nifong protégé Tracey Cline. In soliciting the warrant, a Durham County Sheriff’s deputy affirmed, "I believe that it has been demonstrated that Mr. Wilson is unpredictable and may harm others.”

Wilson has been charged with cyberstalking his estranged wife, but documents released pertaining to the warrant suggested that the ex-investigator’s aberrant behavior extended to his wife's boss, who told police that he received a June 29, 2010 letter asking him, “Do you really think a small charge will stop me from getting what I want? You lock yourselves behind locked gates and doors and try to hide yourselves. You forget that while you all may hide you leave other members of your family out in the open.”

(For those following the timeline of the case, that letter was sent after a Durham judge and Wilson crony lowered Wilson’s bail, based on an ex parte phone call from the former Nifong henchman.)

According to WRAL, “Authorities seized a booklet labeled ‘Barbara Wilson portfolio,’ 21 pictures of Barbara Wilson, three cell phones, a shotgun and shotgun shells, laptop desktop computers, a mini-disc player, a .38 Special handgun, rifle rounds, VHS tapes and a digital camera.”

This, again, is the man hired by Durham County’s “minister of justice” to serve as his primary investigator.

In addition to his cyberstalking charges, Wilson is also a defendant in the lacrosse case civil suits, for which he has distinguished himself for his fantastical court filings while serving as his own attorney.

Mangum & N. Buchanan

The false accuser Crystal Mangum recently gave an interview with the Tom Joyner Show. Her interviewer, Jacque Reid, wasn’t exactly hard-hitting: Reid never mentioned that AG Cooper had declared the player innocent based on a comprehensive inquiry. Instead, she reported that North Carolina authorities merely “said that they did not have enough evidence” to pursue charges.

In the interview, Mangum maintained her conspiracy theory about her recent domestic violence/arson arrest. She claimed that the “state took it upon itself to come after me” because she had falsely accused people in the past, and that once the Durham Police discovered who she was (Mangum, of course, had initially given to police a false name), they decided to blame the incident on her.

Mangum maintained that she was the “victim” in the incident. Her children, she asserted, had called 911 out of a desire to defend her (that 911 call apparently wasn’t recorded, since the 911 call that actually occurred painted a quite different tale); and that she had “bruises on my face” (which apparently did not appear in any contemporaneous photographs). The false accuser added that she couldn’t understand why anyone would consider her to be prone to violence, since she “didn’t have a prior record.” She’s apparently forgotten her guilty plea to charges stemming from an incident in which she stole a taxicab and then tried to run down a police officer.

The interview’s two most stunning lines, however, came in her discussion of the lacrosse case. First, this textbook example of a false accuser asserted, “I never falsely accused anyone.” Mangum’s approach is, apparently, that her accusations can’t be false as long as she believes them t be true.

Second, in a quite remarkable interpretation of the ethics charges against the disgraced Mike Nifong, Mangum asserted that Nifong lost his law license because defense attorneys said “I was not a credible witness.” Apparently Nifong’s withholding exculpatory evidence, lying to the court, and making unethical inflammatory statements didn’t count.

On another front, news from Durham this morning that Duke decided to tear down the house at 610 N. Buchanan.

This move reverses a 2009 decision by Duke, as reported by the Chronicle:

Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said the University contacted attorneys representing members of the 2005-2006 lacrosse team about tearing down the house to build a new residence as part of the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, but the request was denied.

"610 N. Buchanan remains a piece of evidence, and so it can only be removed with the consent of all the parties," Trask said in an interview with The Chronicle in February. "The lawyers all have to agree that they don't need it. I think actually we might ask them again, but their argument was you have to actually stand in that bathroom to understand how preposterous the claims were, and the pictures just don't do it justice."

In an interview with WRAL, rising Duke senior Emily Fausch probably got at the reason why Duke decided to go forward: "It's a reminder of the past that some people don't want to be reminded of.” Indeed, I can see why the Brodhead administration and its allies among the Group of 88 would seek do everything they can not to be reminded of their 2006 behavior.

Wilson & Mangum (Updated)

Two recent developments from the Wonderland that is Durham (updated below):

First, ex-DA’s investigator Linwood Wilson was issued a new fugitive arrest warrant, after the AG’s office assumed control of his stalking obscenity case. Court papers revealed that Wilson allegedly had boasted to his wife that “he owned Durham (and) lawyers and judges would do anything he said.” Little in the case to date had contradicted this claim—Wilson was released on a laughably low $1000 bond.

Wilson’s case also was removed from the purview of his cronies on the Durham bench; Guilford County District Judge Thomas Foster oversaw the hearing on the new warrant, and released Wilson on a $10,000 bond, coupled with restrictions on his movement and an order not to contact his estranged wife or her family.

Wilson’s attorney defended the justice of the original $1000 bond, and denounced prosecutors for requesting a $100,000 bond: “I just think $100,000 is outrageous for a man who has served the citizens of Durham to uphold the law," the counsel huffed.

And who is Wilson’s attorney? None other than former Nifong campaign contributor Fred Battaglia, who also was one of the last Nifong apologists. In January 2007, Battaglia fantastically suggested that Nifong could continue prosecuting the fraudulent sexual assault case—and that the State Bar should have filed ethics charges against the defense attorneys(!) for publicly rebutting Nifong’s myriad inaccurate and inflammatory statements.

Only someone who considered Nifong an ethical attorney could make the bizarre claim that Linwood Wilson—the man immediately fired as soon as Nifong left the DA’s office—“served the citizens of Durham to uphold the law.”

A curious passage, by the way, in the Herald-Sun article on Wilson’s new bond hearing. Reporter John McCann writes, “According to Wilson's wife, her husband's treatment of her worsened in 2007 after he was fired from his job in Nifong's District Attorney's Office. It has been speculated Wilson's removal had to do with his role in the case involving exotic dancer Crystal Mangum's since-discredited accusation of being sexually assaulted in 2006 by members of Duke University's lacrosse team. In particular, that he crossed swords with Nifong by raising doubts about the Mangum's credibility and suggested she take a lie-detector test, a suggestion Nifong disregarded.”

It’s true that—well after the fact—Wilson claimed he had wanted to give Mangum a lie-detector test. But no connection exists between the DA’s office firing Wilson and his having “crossed swords” with Nifong at a point in December 2006. Indeed, all evidence suggests that Wilson was fired because of his pattern of unethical behavior in attempting to prop up Nifong’s fraudulent case.

Wilson wasn’t the only unethical lacrosse case figure now on the other side of the law—he’s joined in this status as a criminal defendant by the false accuser herself, Crystal Mangum.

It would be hard to top the strange circumstances of Wilson’s case—the disgraced investigator getting his bond lowered by placing a phone call to a friend in the Durham judiciary—but Mangum was able to do so.

After a court appearance yesterday by the false accuser, her defense attorney, Clayton Jones, withdrew from the case. Jones said that Mangum had refused to follow his legal advice. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that a competent defense counsel would have allowed Mangum’s bizarre press conference, at which she suggested that Duke and the DPD were now engaged in a conspiracy to prevent her from having a fair trial.

Jones also suggested that Mangum was now taking legal counsel from a handful of pro-Nifong cranks (a group including former Nifong citizens’ committee chair Victoria Peterson) who hold up the disgraced former prosecutor as a paragon of ethics. These are also about the only people (apart, of course, from the Group of 88) who are still on record as saying something “happened” to Mangum.

Perhaps Battaglia can take Mangum’s case as well?

[Update: Jones says he will remain as Mangum's attorney of record, at least through Monday. By phone today, Jones said Mangum has not been following his legal advice. The N&O reports, "He pulled her aside after the hearing Wednesday when he saw her talking with members of the Committee on Justice for Mike Nifong, who say the public defender's office can't adequately represent her because they work for the state, which they say is out to punish her because of the Duke lacrosse case. '[Committee member] Sidney Harr has absolutely no clue what's going on with this case,' Jones said. 'I have told him a number of times to stay away from my office.'"]

More from Wonderland (Twice Updated)

In what could only be described as a classic case of chutzpah, false accuser Crystal Mangum gave a press conference this morning claiming that the Durham judicial system--the same Durham judicial system that the disgraced Mike Nifong rigged to prop up Mangum's "fantastic lies"--is . . . out to get her.

That's her explanation for her February arrest on a variety of domestic violence charges. It's troubling to see that Mangum continues to live in a fantasy world. Perhaps her next event will be to serve as character witness for the fired, and recently arrested, Linwood Wilson.

To confirm, however, that Durham isn't the only locale where such bizarre behavior occurs, take a look at New York City, which just appointed Bob Steel(!)--whose stints as Duke BOT chairman and as head of Wachovia could charitably be described as failures--to be deputy mayor.

[Three updates: (1) In a statement released to the media, false accuser Mangum affirms that "my past entanglement with Duke reached out to drastically influence the legal problems that I now face." This would be the same "Duke" who had 88 faculty members who publicly declared that something "happened" to the false accuser; or whose president released multiple public statements condemning the character of the group that she falsely accused. Why Duke--heretofore a major Mangum supporter, if for reasons unrelated to the veracity of her tall tales--suddenly has decided to coopt the DPD to go after Mangum remains a mystery.

(2) The spokesperson for the crank committee demanding restoration of Mike Nifong's law license has filed a complaint with the Justice Department, alleging a federal violation of Mangum's civil rights. Mangum and like-minded figures, the complaint alleges, have experienced discrimination because they reject the "widespread, vitriolic propaganda spread by the media against Mike Nifong and the prosecution team in the Duke Lacrosse case."

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I rather doubt that the DOJ will consider Nifong apologists to constitute a protected class.

(3) The North Carolina AG's office has taken over all matters relating to Linwood Wilson, after one judge (Ron Stephens) delayed a protective order, thus allowing Wilson to keep his guns, and another judge (David LaBarre) mysteriously lowered Wilson's bail, based on incomplete information provided by Wilson in a phone call to the judge.

According to a court document filed by Wilson's estranged wife, the ex-Nifong investigator told her that "he owned Durham [and] lawyers and judges would do anything he said."]

Linwood Wilson Arrested (Updated)

Wilson booking photo

Linwood Wilson--whose penchant for unethical behavior was outdone only by the unethical behavior of his disgraced former boss--has been arrested, on a Delaware warrant related to domestic violence and cyberstalking his estranged wife.

Reports WTVD-11:

Warrants state on June 1, Wilson allegedly sent his wife an instant message that said in part, "'til death do we part remember your wedding vows.. you never know the day or the time."

Warrants also reveal Wilson later mailed two DVD's to his estranged wife depicting her engaged in a sexual act with him. Before that he allegedly e-mailed nude photos of his wife to her sister.

Warrants describe about a dozen more e-mail encounters, even after authorities issued a protective order . . .

Wilson and his wife separated in April after 18 years of marriage. Before that his wife says Wilson intimidated her numerous times and threatened to kill her with a gun.

She says after the Duke Lacrosse case, his behavior, "..changed for the worse."

Remember: this is the man (who had already lost his PI's license) that Mike Nifong specifically brought on board as his DA's investigator. But, as Brad Bannon noted, Wilson once did have a badge.

In yet another Durham-in-Wonderland moment, WRAL reports "Judge David Q. LaBarre changed Wilson’s bond [to $1000] over the telephone after Wilson called him asking for help. LaBarre said Wilson told him he was being arrested on a domestic violence charge but that he didn't know about the other charges when he set a bond that would allow Wilson out of custody."

Here's a clip of the ex-DA's investigator, from happier times.

Duke Celebrates Tyson

Said David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications: “Professor Tyson is highly regarded here at Duke for his work as a faculty member."

That's the same Professor Tyson who:

--in his capacity as a teacher, attended a guilt-presuming protest outside the lacrosse captains' house, at about the same time the supposed "victim" was taped pole-dancing at a strip club;

--publicly asserted about Duke students, based solely on evidence supplied by Mike Nifong, “I think the spirit of the lynch mob lived in that house on Buchanan Street, frankly, and I think that we prefer to think of white supremacists as ignorant, pot-bellied, tobacco-chewing sheriffs and Ku Klux Klan members from Mississippi, but here we have the sons of power and privilege, the wealthy and well-educated among us, who are acting out this history.”

--claimed that Duke students not talking to Sgt. Mark Gottlieb outside the presence of their attorneys “may be illegal” and constituted a “terrible moral miscalculation.”

--falsely stated, "The neighbors who have no ax to grind in this, presumably, seem to confirm the charges of the women that there were a lot of racial insults thrown.” [emphasis added]

--ignored any conception of due process by affirming, “I wouldn’t let this team continue to exist until the police get some cooperation from them.”

And then, asked about his inflammatory statements by the Wilmington Star-News after the case to which he had attached his public reputation collapsed, defiantly proclaimed: "I stand by every word of it."

(This is also the same Tim Tyson whose movie project received between $1 million and $5 million in backing from former BOT chairman Robert Steel.)

Said David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications: “Professor Tyson is highly regarded here at Duke for his work as a faculty member."

Professional Protesters' Credibility

[Update, 8.46pm: Joining the Rev. Barber in the protest was none other than Duke's resident professional protester, Tim Tyson--the figure who humiliated himself by participating (as a teacher) in a protest outside the lacrosse captains' house as their false accuser, Crystal Mangum, was caught on videotape pole-dancing at a strip club.]

Few public policy initiatives produced such unfortunate, if unintended, consequences as mandatory school busing to achieve racial diversity.

The idea, on its face, seemed reasonable: Brown dealt only with legalized segregation, but in dozens of northeastern, Midwestern, and Border State cities, de facto racial segregation existed. Policies such as “red-lining” (as well as uglier, more overt instances of hostility in cities like Detroit) had prevented black families from obtaining mortgages in selected neighborhoods, creating overwhelmingly-white or overwhelmingly-black neighborhoods. So assigning students to public schools on the basis of their residences resulted in de facto segregated schools.

Beginning in the 1960s, civil rights groups obtained from sympathetic federal judges rulings that mandated public school busing to achieve racially balanced public schools. The most notorious of these cases occurred in Boston, where federal judge J. Arthur Garrity took control of the city’s public school system, and racist mobs in South Boston greeted the arrival of black children at South Boston High School.

However well-intention in theory, mandatory busing almost always fell short in practice. In policy terms, they precipitated “white flight,” in which most white families either moved from center cities to suburbs (Detroit is a good example of this pattern) or sent their children to private schools rather than busing them out of their neighborhoods. In political terms, these white families—disproportionately middle-class or lower-middle class Catholic ethnics—became ground zero in the backlash against the Democratic Party, opening up the way for their emergence as “Reagan Democrats.”

Busing, then, mostly left behind smaller, though not much more integrated, public school systems; and harmed the political allies of busing advocates. It’s no surprise that most cities (and courts) have abandoned mandatory “diversity” busing in favor of voluntary programs like magnet schools.

In this respect, the decision of North Carolina’s Wake County to move away from mandatory busing is a bit behind the times. But the school board meeting to implement the policy change met with a protest from four “civil rights” activists—led by none other than the Rev. William Barber. Barber and his cohort used a break in the school board’s session to place themselves in board members’ seats before being arrested. The state NAACP head claimed that Wake County’s actions would wipe away “what it took more than a century ‘of tears, sweat and blood to accomplish.’”

That’s the same Rev. Barber whose conception of “justice” in the lacrosse case consisted of abandoning decades’ worth of his organization’s principles on criminal justice matters and posting on his organization’s website a “memorandum of law” riddled with errors that made the defendants appear to be guilty.

That, after such behavior, any politician would consider Rev. Barber credible is beyond belief.

Davidson Does Grading, Ctd.

At the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year, I noted the pedagogical . . . innovations . . . of Group of 88 member Cathy Davidson. Suffering from the travails of a tenured Duke professor—“I loved returning to teaching last year after several years in administration . . . except for the grading”—Davidson developed a scheme to collect her paycheck without doing the work normally expected of a college professor. Students in her classes would “pass judgment” on the work of their peers (the system worked “brilliantly,” she humbly noted), and students would “lead” the class discussion as well. The professor’s job, it seems, is limited to making sure no one’s feelings get hurt.

Other than the obvious (laziness), what was the rationale for Davidson’s scheme? A supporter of the effort, NYU professor Lisa Duggan, explained. Duggan had employed the tactic in her “Race, Gender & Sexuality in US History” course, where, she claimed, it benefited “students without previous educational privilege,” since they didn’t have to be “judged in the usual way” (i.e., writing research papers, taking exams) while turning off “entitled students who try to skate by on a good prose style.” Evidently, college professors shouldn’t be encouraging “good prose style.”

In any event, Davidson’s year of hard work has come to a conclusion, and what was the result? Fifteen of the sixteen students in the class received grades of A. What did the 16^th student do wrong—challenge the ideological preconceptions of his or her peers, rather than following along with the groupthink atmosphere?

Davidson isn’t troubled by the grade inflation. In a bizarre analogy, she mused, “If I were training a basketball team to win the NCAA [tournament], let’s say, my bar would be winning that championship. It would not be creating a bell curve of my best and worst players.” Quite true. But, presumably, part of that effort would be distinguishing between the best and worst players, so that the coach made sure to play the best players. In Davidson’s Group of 88 world, everyone is equally “excellent,” and we need not worry about troublesome things like whether students have “good prose style” or study hard enough to do well on tests.

The Chronicle interviewed two students in the class; both had positive things to say. (They got an easy A, after all.) But such “instruction” hardly serves the long-term interests of the students—or the financial interests of their parents, who are paying $50,000 or so for a student-run class in which students grade themselves.

Put yourself in the position of a graduate school admissions committee, or a prospective employer, reading a letter of recommendation from Davidson for a student in the course:

I strongly recommend Student X, who received an A grade in my 2009-2010 class, “Your Brain on the Internet.” The course featured students running discussions and grading themselves, because, as I have noted elsewhere, “grading and assessment were late 19th- and early 20th-century conventions designed to be as efficient as the assembly line.” While it’s true that you might be a little reluctant to recognize the performance of someone graded not by their professor, but by college students, in a course run not by the professor, but by college students; and while you might be inclined to dismiss the evaluation standard of a course where 93.75 percent of the students received the best grade,“It is important for someone like me, at a superb school like Duke and with my experience as a traditional academic, to push the boundaries of education so we can develop a much better system. Right now, we’re training students for our past, not for their future.”

Davidson told the Chronicle that “I heard positive comments from lots of people in engineering” about her grading schemes. She didn’t reveal any of these colleagues’ names, presumably to spare them from embarrassment among their peers.

ESPN: "Questions Remain"

[Update, II, 6/1, 6.39pm: For an example of how a publication committed to journalistic integrity might have handled the connection between the lacrosse case and the 2010 championship, take a look at this moving article on the Loftus family from the Syosset Patch. Brothers Dan and Chris were members of the 2006 team; brother Eddie was a member of the Duke championship squad. Their father, Brian, is a retired New York fire captain (not exactly the elitist image upon which lacrosse critics want to focus) who was one of the most courageous voices speaking out against the media crusade against the Duke players in spring 2006.]

[Update, 6/1, 12.01am: ESPN's onslaught against the falsely accused players and their teammates continues. In a column ostensibly hailing the 2010 Duke lacrosse national championship victory, ESPN's Dana O'Neil claims that since 2006, the members of the team found it hard to wear their jerseys, since they "knew" that "the words 'Duke lacrosse' were viewed more as scarlet letters than banners of pride," that "Duke lacrosse equated to scandal and shame." Even though the players were exonerated, "the stigma still existed."

Why? Because, since 2006, "there was, after all, nothing else to associate Duke lacrosse with [emphasis added, sentence-ending preposition in original]."

Original post below.]

Via NewsBusters, an extraordinary item from ESPN anchor Steve Weissman. Introducing highlights to the Duke-Virginia national semifinals (won by Duke), Weissman made the following observation:

“Two of the top lacrosse teams in the country, dealing with two of the worst stories college athletes have faced in recent memory. Just three years ago, the Blue Devils were involved in a devastating scandal in which three players were charged with sexual assault. All three were exonerated, but the questions remain.”

First of all, the obvious error: the Duke so-called “devastating scandal” occurred in 2006, not 2007, as Weissman claimed. And, of course, the strained comparison: in the UVA case, a player on the team has admitted—according to police—repeatedly banging a woman's head against a wall, which left her dead. In the Duke case, people unrelated to the team—the prosecutor, the police, the media, the professoriate—engaged in wrongdoing. Yet Weissman lumps the two episodes together, as “two of the worst stories college athletes have faced in recent memory.”

But by far the most troubling aspect of Weissman’s commentary came in his assertion that “questions remain” about the players’ exoneration. Weissman, it appears, is dissatisfied with the comprehensive inquiry by the North Carolina AG’s office.

So what questions, specifically, does the ESPN reporter have? I e-mailed ESPN’s press office to ask; I received no reply.

Perhaps Weissman was referring to Eric Adelson’s April 11, 2006 ESPN column citing an “anonymous” source who “was present at the hospital on the night of the alleged incident,” and who claimed that Crystal Mangum (this Crystal Mangum, from a photo taken two days later) was “beat up . . . pretty banged up”; that “there were bruises on her face, neck, and arms”; and that there “were injuries to the woman’s pelvic area.”

There are a lot of “questions” that “remain” about that column—chiefly, why ESPN never repudiated it. (I e-mailed Adelson in 2008; he said he stood by the story. I also e-mailed ESPN’s then-ombudsman about the seeming misuse of anonymous sources; she never replied.) As the Attorney General's report made clear, no evidence exists to corroborate the claims of Adelson's single anonymous source—which, as a thread in the old Liestoppers convincingly argued, was probably former Duke Police Officer Sara Falcon.

Is Weissman’s screed now suggesting that the Adelson column represents ESPN’s party line on the lacrosse case?

Character, Ctd.

A few more items, from both sides of the question, regarding themes from the post below.

Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty were both named to the 2010 Scholar All-America Team.

Finnerty’s individual awards were listed in the post below; Seligmann received the IMLCA Boston Market Humanitarian Award in 2008; in 2010, he was named first team All-Ivy, All-New England, and a USILA Scholar All-American.

---------------

As to the Group of 88: Emory professor Mark Bauerlein did a post at the Chronicle for Higher Education blog noting how my survey of the Group’s post-case activity—which found that many Group members had either been named to deanships or been hired away from Duke for more lucrative opportunities at other institutions—seemed to conflict with the typical victimization narrative of the academy’s far-left fringe. Indeed, that so many of the Group members have been rewarded despite (or perhaps because of?) their behavior is nothing short of astonishing.

Bauerlein noted, “Johnson doesn't mention any signer of the document who has suffered one bit from its publication. If readers of Brainstorm know of anybody who did sign it and has been called to account for it, please add a comment.”

Several commenters expressed outrage at Bauerlein’s post. Wrote Sandy Thatcher,

Mark conveniently ignores the fact that the Duke lacrosse team had a reputation for bad behavior before the incident occurred that gave rise to the “rush to judgment.” It is not as though all these Duke lacrosse players were paragons of virtue. I recall one particularly scurrilous e-mail that was uncovered during the investigation. The players who were named as defendants by the district attorney may have been innocent of the crimes alleged, but there is a history here that helps explain why so many people did assume the worst when this incident happened. The players were no moral saints.

First of all, of course, the players were innocent, not “may have been innocent.” Second, as Bauerlein appropriately comments, “do you really think that ‘a reputation for bad behavior’ is an excuse for the rush to judgment at Duke?” Apparently Ms. Thatcher does.

Several readers suggested that the Group didn’t or probably didn’t do anything much wrong. Opined one, “The ad was premature and made all sorts of bad assumptions, but the same could be said of nearly every op-ed article ever published. Did newspapers and magazines fire all their political commentators who went along with the Iraq WMD claims? (And no, this isn't a tu quoque argument – it’s an analogy. And I don’t think those commentators should have been fired for being wrong.)”

This argument is a rather peculiar one. Most newspapers—to the best of my knowledge—do not sign contracts with their op-ed writers that contain clauses like this one, from Duke’s Faculty Handbook: “Members of the faculty expect Duke students to meet high standards of performance and behavior. It is only appropriate, therefore, that the faculty adheres to comparably high standards in dealing with students . . . Students are fellow members of the university community, deserving of respect and consideration in their dealings with the faculty.”

But perhaps this Bauerlein reader considers dozens of professors signing a statement asserting unequivocally that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum, falsely asserting that the statement contained endorsements from five academic departments, and thanking protesters who had (among other things) urged castration of the lacrosse captains to constitute treating Duke students with “respect” as “fellow members of the university community.”

Moreover, the Group’s behavior contributed to Duke’s (wise) decision to reach a sizable out-of-court settlement with the falsely accused players. I’m no expert in the newspaper industry, but I suspect that few newspapers would willingly keep on staff an op-ed writer whose columns had exposed the paper to massive legal liability.

Then, there’s the typical taunter: “And where oh where is Mark Bauerlein today? Still stuck in the same old job at Emory, still neglecting his students while he does his daily ‘Dumpster Diving,’ digging and digging ever so deeper to find any and all trash and garbage he can get his hands on - either to discredit someone or something or to vent his own frustration at being seen as not professionally worthy of being elevated in his own career.

The last I looked, the average SAT score of incoming Emory freshmen is about the same as that of Duke freshmen (or, for that matter, as that of freshmen at Williams, where I used to teach). But in the world of this (anonymous) commenter, Bauerlein apparently spends his days consumed with jealousy about colleagues at another institution, because he just can’t take his fate in life: that is, teaching at one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country.

Such ad hominem attacks, it seems to me, are not only rarely logical, but are also revealing of the attacker’s character.

Character

Times of stress can reveal character.

Newsdayhas profiled Collin Finnerty upon his graduation from Loyola. The entire article is here (alas, behind Newsday’s paywall), and is very much worth reading, since it discusses the particular difficulty that Finnerty faced (because of his recognizability) in the case. Two quotes of particular note:

Loyola president Rev. Brian Linnane, commenting on Finnerty’s receipt of the John R. Moller award for achievement in academics, athletics and character: “It is a huge honor. It is a very significant award, and it reflects the way he fit into the team. It’s unimaginable to be accused the way he was, and the way he moved beyond that with great grace and became a leader, it says a lot about him and his family.”

Chaminade High School president Rev. James Williams: “The biggest temptation has been to become angry, which would have been justified . . . Instead he was moved, his family was moved, toward reconciliation. Despite the pain [the accuser] and others were causing, while they were still upset with her they knew she came from a difficult and troubled background and they had compassion for her . . . And the anger never won.”

Contrast those evaluations with the performance, since the case to which they attached their professional reputations imploded, of the Group of 88.

Who showed character in this affair: the falsely accused college student, or dozens of professors at one of the country’s leading universities?

Regarding Dr. Kimmel

[Update below, 6.18pm, 5-20.]

Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook, has a research profile (“Gender, Sexuality, Masculinity, Political and Social Movements”) that would put him at home with the race/class/gender-obsessed Group of 88. Kimmel’s personal website describes him as “among the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today”; his most recent book is Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.

Kimmel is no stranger to the Duke campus. In 2009, he gave a campus lecture on “Adventures in Guyland.” The lecture’s two co-sponsors were the Women’s Center, formerly headed by Prof. Robyn (“Campus Enforcer”) Wiegman and the Kenan Institute of Ethics, formerly headed by Prof. Kathy (“speciesism”) Rudy. Keep those connections in mind.

Yesterday, Kimmel penned an article for the Huffington Post offering the now-familiar meme that the killing of former UVA lacrosse player Yaerdley Love by former men’s lacrosse player George Huguely illustrates “lacrosse and the entitled elite male athlete.” Kimmel argued that “such guys [as Huguely] are the epitome of what I describe in my book Guyland as the ‘culture of entitlement.’ They think they can do anything they want and get away with it, and usually they’re right.”

Kimmel claimed that Huguely benefited from “a culture of protection” typical of lacrosse—“a bubble of class privilege, athletic status and a fraternal wagon-circling when things go wrong. If things go terribly wrong, the culture of protection -- including parents, coaches and alumni boosters -- hire high-priced lawyers who manage to get records expunged and witnesses to forget what they saw. Lacrosse’s bubble of protection is a bit different from that of football: It's a country-club entitlement, based more on class than athletic revenue.”

It’s difficult to generalize about an entire sport based on one incident, so Prof. Kimmel provided some additional examples to strengthen his thesis:

It was a bunch of lacrosse players from Glen Ridge (N.J.) High School who gang-raped a 14-year-old moderately retarded girl in 1989, and it was members of the Duke lacrosse team who were accused of raping a stripper hired for a team party. (Yes, yes, I know: The woman who accused them turned out to be a lying schemer; the guys were exonerated. But it's interesting that their friends and classmates found the story utterly plausible, as they told countless reporters. And the team did, after all, hire strippers for their team party in violation of all team and university rules.)

The paragraph above contains three unambiguous statements of fact:

(1) That the Duke lacrosse captains violated “all team and university rules” when they hired strippers;

(2) That “friends and classmates” [emphasis added] of the Duke lacrosse players told “countless” reporters that they considered at least one version of false accuser Crystal Mangum’s tale “utterly plausible”;

(3) That high school lacrosse players raped a mentally challenged 14-year-old girl in New Jersey.

None of these statements has any basis in reality.

(1) The hiring of strippers for a spring break party was a tasteless and stupid decision. But, like the roughly 20 Duke student groups or teams that apparently hired strippers in the 2005-6 academic year, the lacrosse captains violated no existing Duke rules in their decision.

I e-mailed Prof. Kimmel to ask for a citation to even one “team and university rule” (much less “all” rules) the lacrosse players allegedly violated. He replied, “I remembered reading that the then-president said something of that kind when it happened.” He provided no citation for the article in which he encountered this statement. No record of such an assertion by President Richard Brodhead exists.

(2) It’s quite true that a small minority of Duke students—and a more significant contingent of faculty (about 88 of them, to be precise)—not only found Mangum’s tall tales “utterly plausible” but made public, guilt-presuming statements on the case. Indeed, I’m not at all surprised that upon his invited visits to Duke, Prof. Kimmel discovered that figures such as Profs. Weigman and Rudy presumed guilt. But faulting the lacrosse players for dozens of the Duke professors setting aside the academy’s traditional fealty to due process in a rush to judgment would be a little like officials in the Celtics-Magic series calling a foul on Paul Pierce for getting his head in the way of Dwight Howard’s elbow.

In any event, and more significant: just who were the friends of the lacrosse players who told countless reporters that they found at least one version of Mangum’s fabrications (presumably not the one in which she claimed to have been raped while suspended in mid-air) utterly plausible? I asked Prof. Kimmel to provide me with some citations to corroborate his claim.

He declined to do so, and merely said, “I suspect that I relied on those reports from faculty [emphasis added] and the students I read about in the same media outlets as any other New Yorker, plus a couple of lecture trips to Duke in the past three or four years, during which time I spoke to quite a few students and faculty [emphasis added] who said they weren’t at all surprised.”

Nothing in the above reply, of course, relates to Prof. Kimmel’s remark about “friends” of the lacrosse players doing anything, much less telling “countless” reporters that they had found Mangum’s story “utterly plausible.” His presenting as fact that the players’ friends found Mangum’s story “utterly plausible” is highly misleading at best and unprofessionally inaccurate at worst.

(3) As part of his effort to discuss the particularly unappealing characteristics of lacrosse players, even in comparison to football players, Prof. Kimmel also mentioned a 1989 gang-rape by lacrosse players—of a mentally-challenged 14 year-old-girl—in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

Some might argue that this example was a bit of a stretch—two crimes, committed 20 years apart, hardly confirm the allegedly pernicious culture of a sport.

In any event, and much more significant: the Glen Ridge rape wasn’t committed by lacrosse players. It was committed by football players. (The victim was 17, not 14.) And in 1989, at the time of the rape, Glen Ridge High School didn’t even have a lacrosse program.

In a follow-up e-mail, I asked Prof. Kimmel if there was another 1989 Glen Ridge gang rape, this one committed by lacrosse players, to which he referred. He did not reply.

Doubtless Prof. Kimmel did not write an essay for a high-profile publication intentionally littered with factually inaccurate or wildly misleading statements—statements he based on recollections of unspecified articles that a “New Yorker” might have read four years ago. Indeed, I have little doubt that Prof. Kimmel actually believed that what he wrote was true. In the groupthink atmosphere that dominates so many humanities and social science departments, “facts” that conform to the prevailing narrative, such as those Prof. Kimmel presented in the quoted paragraph, get “remembered” in ideologically convenient ways, to such an extent that a prominent professor could pen an article for one of the highest-trafficked news sites on the internet and not even bother to check his assertions.

For those in the reality-based community, however, such cavalier disregard of facts is nothing short of extraordinary, and is fatal to the credibility of the author.

[Update: Prof. Kimmel e-mails to say that the factual errors have been removed from his item as it was cross-posted, and that these errors will also be removed from the HuffPost item. (As of this writing, the HuffPost item has not been changed.) No notation exists in the cross-posted item that an edit to remove factual inaccuracies has occurred.]

No Shame

Though publicly rebuked by his own ideological comrades, Group of 88 extremist Grant Farred doesn’t appear to have lost any of his pedagogical influence. The homepage of Cornell’s English Department includes an announcement of a new concentration—“cultural studies”—which supposedly allows students to “study different media and forms of culture in terms of historical, social, and political contexts.”

According to the link the department provides, the two departmental specialists in this new concentration are none other than Dr. Farred, along with colleague Jane Juffer.

Farred’s . . . peculiar research interests already have been noted. Juffer, a former director of Penn State’s Latino/a Studies Initiative, is author of At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life. The book offers the only-in-academia thesis of viewing “women’s erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a ‘dangerous’ pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers [sic] how women’s consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals.” NYU Press assures readers that completing Juffer’s work will “transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.”

What sorts of topics will this new concentration enable students to explore? Prof. Debra Fried gave two examples to the Cornell student newspaper: “anything from comparing Ithaca’s coffee shops to how a ‘news anchor’s hairdo and clothing can contribute subtly to how the news is “spun” on a TV news report.’”

And beyond the offerings of Farred and Juffer, the new concentration will offer such courses as “Food, Gender, Culture,” which explores “the way food practices help shape our sense of [of course . . .] gender, race, sexual orientation, and national identity.”

In a comment that must have been made tongue-in-cheek, Cornell Daily Sun reporter Joseph Nickzy affirmed that “English majors are excited by the prospect of a new field of study, particularly one so relevant.”

Cornell’s annual tuition—not counting room and board—is $39,450. For the opportunity to partake of such “relevant” course offerings from such student-friendly professors as Grant Farred, surely any parent would be eager to fork over $160,000 plus room and board for a four-year period.

--------------------------

Farred, it’s worth noting, isn’t the only disgraced figure associated with the lacrosse case recently in the news. John McCann, a due process-unfriendly columnist from the Herald-Sun, last week suddenly decided the time had come to stand up for criminal defendants. His preferred choice? False accuser Crystal Mangum.

In the column, Mangum co-author Vincent Clark wildly charged, according to McCann’s summary, that Mangum’s bond (from criminal charges earlier this year) “is too high,” because of “the woman’s role in the lacrosse case.” Neither McCann nor Clark provided any evidence to corroborate the claim, nor did either man offer a theory (plausible or otherwise) as to why the Durham criminal justice system would operate from such a motive.

Magnum, according to Clark, is an innocent victim in the affair: “It could have been anybody's daughter . . . It could have been my daughter.” Clark didn’t say if his daughter had ever set clothes on fire inside an apartment while screaming at her boyfriend, with her children in the next room.

(The line recalled Duke extremist Timothy Tyson’s justification for being part of the potbangers’ protest weekend: Mangum was “somebody’s daughter and somebody’s sister and somebody’s mother and somebody’s sweetheart.”)

Clark additionally complained about difficulties in his fundraising campaign for Mangum’s bond. Laments McCann: “Problem is, folks are scared to contribute to Mangum's cause out of fear of being linked to her and attracting unwanted attention.” Indeed. The danger of publicity is undoubtedly the only reason why “folks” are not lining up to contribute to a bail fund for a repeat criminal who lied about a high-profile local case.

Perhaps Clark should turn to Farred for donations? After all, the ex-Duke professor did everything he could to prop up Mangum’s case, and the median salary for his current rank is $154,300.

Christine Brennan Offers Insights on the Lacrosse Case

Keep in mind, as outlined in the post below, the enormous differences between the facts of the Duke lacrosse case and what has emerged about the murder charges against former UVA lacrosse player George Huguely, and then ponder the following from USA Today columnist Christine Brennan:

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but there's no escaping the fact that the sport they played is lacrosse, in the news again for all the wrong reasons, again. The Duke story is four years old now, and while the fabricated rape charges have long since been dismissed, sordid details about the evening remain on the record: the drinking, the strippers, the racial epithets.

It’s quite true, as Brennan points out, that “drinking” remains on the record. According to various surveys, the majority of college students drink alcohol. Is Brennan seriously maintaining that such behavior is “sordid”? It’s also quite true, as Brennan points out, that the decision to hire “strippers” for a spring break party remains on the record—although I’m sure a lot of college students wouldn’t want to be judged on the basis of the most tasteless thing they did during spring break. As for “racial epithets”? One player’s racial epithet in response to Kim Roberts’ racial taunt is “on the record.”

But perhaps Brennan has access to additional “on the record” sources, as part of her effort to link the “record” of the Duke lacrosse players to that of an accused murderer? After all, in spring 2006, Brennan opined confidently about the case.

In late March 2006, almost directly mirroring the thesis of the infamous Selena Roberts column that appeared in the same period, Brennan sarcastically noted that the lacrosse players were “giving us all a whole new definition of the word teamwork” by refusing to cooperate with the police investigation. Of course, the captains had voluntarily cooperated to an extraordinary degree, and the supervisor of the police investigation—Mike Nifong—was refusing to hear from the players’ attorneys, who wanted to share with him the exculpatory evidence in their possession. The on-line version of Brennan’s column contains no correction of her factually incorrect information.

Having based her column on a false premise, Brennan continued:

Perhaps if no one is found guilty of any criminal activity in this unseemly affair, the collective silence [sic] of the Blue Devils someday will be seen as admirable. For now, though, the sports world's vaunted concept of team is reaching a frightening extreme . . . Is this really how a team is supposed to behave?

Looking at writings such as the above might prompt another question: “Is this really how a prominent columnist is supposed to behave?”

As evidence of the players’ possible innocence mounted, Brennan shifted gears—in a transformation on the case similar to that exhibited by members of the Group of 88, such as William Chafe. In a mid-May 2006 column, she without explanation dropped all references to the significance of the players’ alleged refusal to cooperate with the inquiry—her initial take on the case—and instead went into a character attack, writing of “the Duke men's lacrosse mess, a raunchy Animal House tale even if the rape charges against the three players prove to be untrue.” For good measure, she added a class angle, deeming the matter “an illuminating window into the world of 21st-century college athletics, a world of privilege, of drinking and of naiveté when it comes to the reach and power of the Internet.”

After Nifong’s criminal case collapsed, Brennan repositioned herself as a media critic of the affair, suggesting to CNN that the early coverage was “an awful performance, an embarrassing time, I think, for journalism . . . I think some people lost their minds in this story.”

She didn’t bring up her own “embarrassing” columns. And now, with her decision to link the behavior of an accused murderer with that of the Duke lacrosse players, she seems to have returned to her May 2006 mindset, but without bothering to mention her previous mockery of the falsely accused players’ due process rights or her initial column’s peddling of a false narrative.

To borrow a phrase, perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Brennan didn’t reference her earlier writings about the lacrosse case in her most recent USA Today commentary.

More Strained Comparisons

Let’s review some facts.

(A) Accused murderer George Huguely had a documented record of violence, seen most clearly when a police officer had to taser him when he resisted arrest. Allegations have emerged of a pattern of violence, allegedly involving not only the woman he’s accused of murdering but even another member of the UVA men’s lacrosse team. In his own words to police, Huguely admitted repeatedly slamming his former girlfriend’s head into a wall. Huguely’s attorney has claimed the event was an “accident” but hasn’t denied his client’s culpability; the strongest character witness in public on Huguely’s behalf has been his former nanny. And, to my knowledge, no one has accused either the Charlottesville police or DA’s office of behaving in anything other than a professional manner.

(B) In the Duke case, no crime occurred (except possibly a conspiracy to obstruct justice by the police and prosecutor). There never was any evidence that a crime occurred (except with the above caveat). The lacrosse players and their attorneys repeatedly denied committing any crime, and produced massive evidence of their innocence. The prosecutor’s behavior provided the highest-profile instance of prosecutorial misconduct in modern American history. Hundreds of their current friends and acquaintances—including the women’s lacrosse coach and many women’s lacrosse players—publicly testified to the good character of the three falsely accused Duke students. And the men’s lacrosse captains hosted a tasteless spring break party—hardly an abnormal event for college students, despite insinuations from the neo-Puritans of the media and academic left.

Suggesting that comparing (A) with (B) is “strained” is generous. And yet the comparisons continue apace.

This morning, a featured story on the AOL homepage recommends that the University of Virginia “shut down” its men’s lacrosse season. That strikes me as a case of punishing a group for the sins of one member, an unusual approach in a society that correctly frowns upon the principle of collective punishment.

Author Kevin Blackistone speaks warmly of Duke’s dismissal of coach Mike Pressler (a decision that led to a lawsuit that Duke settled out of court). He adds that “UVA officials would be smart to review the Report of the Lacrosse Ad Hoc Review Committee at Duke that investigated the Duke lacrosse team’s scandal four years ago,” which he claims shows that the Duke lacrosse players were “miscreants.”

Actually, the Coleman Committee report showed that some of the lacrosse players drank too much—on a campus where the same could be said of a significant minority of the student body, and, perhaps more troublingly, on a campus where the city had adopted a “separate-but-equal” justice policy of prosecuting Duke students and only Duke students for crimes for which other Durham residents received a pass.

That report, of course, also revealed that the Duke men’s lacrosse players were on the whole very strong students (stronger, it’s worth noting, than UVA lacrosse players); that they had strong records of community service; that they had exemplary records of dealing with Duke staff members; and that they had no documented record of unacceptable behavior on grounds of race or gender.

Those are the findings that Blackistone believes would justify terminating UVA’s program? His column represents little more than an attempt to use the UVA killing to smear the character of 2006 Duke men’s lacrosse team.

Then there’s Ruth Marcus, a rare voice of sanity at the Washington Post during the criminal case. She recently penned a column wondering, “[Is it] something about lacrosse?” She then asserted that “It's impossible to read the Huguely story without thinking back to the Duke lacrosse case,” since—despite the weakness of the allegations—"These don't sound like young men you'd want your daughter to date."

Refer, above, to cases (A) and (B), and wonder, “Is it something about left-of-center opinion columnists?”

Or take this piece in the Baltimore Sun from Peter Prowitt, who is cryptically described as “with the Vienna Liaison Office of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly.” Prowitt linked Huguely’s arrest with the Duke lacrosse case as illustrating a “culture of sexual misconduct and off-the-field troubles in men's lacrosse.” Well, no “sexual misconduct” occurred in the Duke lacrosse case. And the “off-the-field troubles” resulted from the wildly unethical behavior of a local prosecutor.

Prowitt adds that even though they were “cleared of the allegations”—a parsimonious description—it’s “clear” that Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty “exercised poor judgment in this incident.” How, precisely, it is “clear”? By attending a party they played no role in organizing and probably drinking some beer? That’s behavior that Prowitt can link to the conduct of an accused murderer?

Or, even, take this article in yesterday’s Daily News from Kevin Armstrong and Michael O’Keeffe. In an otherwise very well-reported article, the reporters offer the following peculiar lede: “University of Virginia lacrosse players adhered to the code of silence that permeates locker rooms and dorm rooms Thursday, refusing to comment [on the record] on former teammate George Huguely, who was been charged in the slaying of his former girlfriend Yeardley Love, or on reports that he had a history of aggressive behavior.”

The allegation brought to mind the pernicious claims of figures such as Mike Nifong and Selena Roberts in the Duke case, that the players had constructed a “wall of silence” to frustrate the case. Yet readers of the Armstrong/O’Keeffe article would discover that the UVA players had been fully cooperative with the police investigation, and had been willing to speak with reporters on a not-for-attribution basis.

Refusing to give on-the-record quotes to members of the media when reporters demand those quotes constitutes a “code of silence”? By that standard, all of Washington, DC functions under such a code.

And, just to provide a reminder of the . . . lax . . . standards that too often permeate the mainstream media, take a look at who the Today show invited on as an “expert” on this morning’s broadcast.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Does accountability even exist in the media world? Having adjunct law professor Murphy on to discuss a sex crimes case is a little like—as we also recently saw—having former FEMA director Michael Brown on to discuss disaster response policy.

Today Slanders the Lacrosse Players

[Update, 2.41pm, below:}

On this morning's broadcast of Today, host Meredith Viera interviewed "criminal profiler" Pat Brown, on the topic of whether the Virginia killing could have been prevented.

Out of the blue--in a discussion, again, of an accused murderer--"criminal profiler" Brown offered the following insight: "Look at the Duke situation. All these boys did all these things, but were they thrown off the team? No."

Viera offered no correction, but merely thanked Brown for her insights. The item comes at 8.49 of the clip below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On another front, I have an op-ed this morning in Inside Higher Ed on the flawed comparisons between the Duke and UVA cases.

[Via Mediate, the phony comparisons continue--this time from CNN's Don Lemon, who referenced the Duke "sex scandal." As Steve Krakauer notes, "Is a sex scandal a sex scandal if it’s proven there was no sex scandal at all?"]

Linkage

[Update, 4.13pm, below]:

[Update, II, 4.27pm, below]:

[Update III, 11.31pm: The Washington Post, admirably, has now modified its language, noting that the falsely accused lacrosse players were "exonerated," that the case itself was "controversial," and omitting the incorrect inference that the falsely accused of racist behavior.]

[Update IV, 12.22pm, 5/4: An important point from the comment thread: "Stories about this case are constantly linking it with the Duke case; and these comparisons are evidence of how those false accusations continue to damage the reputations of the Duke lacrosse team members."]

[Update V, 5.39pm, 5/4: A most unfortunate item from Emily Friedman of ABC: "The prep school is no stranger to controversy. Several of the Duke lacrosse players who were implicated in the 2006 rape scandal were also alumni." No mention that the charges were false. How can a "rape scandal" exist in a case in which no rape occurred?]

Original Post:

A horrifying story from Charlottesville, where a member of the UVA men's lacrosse team has been charged with murdering a member of the women's lacrosse team.

The Washington Post has linked the matter back to the lacrosse case. Here's how the Post describes the case: " . . . shortly after allegations of sexual assault and racist behavior were made against members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team . . . All charges against Duke's team members were dropped." [emphases added]

The charges were "dropped"? Actually, of course, the players were declared innocent--a rather significant difference. And the wording of the Post's passage conveys the impression that "allegations" of "racist behavior" were directed against the three falsely accused players.

[Update: The Post formulation has appeared--essentially verbatim--in the New York Daily News. In what appears to be a case of journalistic plagiarism, the News' Teri Thompson writes, "Huguely attended the Landon School in Bethesda, where he also played lacrosse. He was interviewed by the Washington Post in 2006, shortly after allegations of sexual assault and racist behavior were made against members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team. Five of Duke's players that year had graduated from Landon. All charges against Duke's team members were dropped."

Here, again, is the item from the Post: "Huguely attended the Landon School in Bethesda, where he also played lacrosse. He was interviewed by the Post in 2006, shortly after allegations of sexual assault and racist behavior were made against members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team. Five of Duke's players that year had graduated from Landon. All charges against Duke's team members were dropped."

The two passages are identical, with the sole exception that Thompson inserted a "Washington" ahead of the "Post."]

[Update, II: ESPN has the charges being "dismissed"--no mention of innocence, but at least a slightly more accurate formulation than the Post. The ESPN article also wildly claims that the accused Virginia player attended the same high school as did Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty (who, it's worth noting, didn't even attend the same high school themselves, and neither attended Huguely's high school): "By coincidence, Huguely attended the same prep school as the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a team party. The charges later were dismissed."

ESPN has now modified its article; below is the screenshot.

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